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Ashen face, wool hat bobbing, the young boy’s eyes dart to me, then up at the man pulling a rolling suitcase, whose hand he holds, then back at me. His legs move as if without gravity. The man asks: Do you know a church on this street that serves free food? I want to say I know. That the names of churches on an Avenue called Americas roll out of me. I want to tell you it is temporary, their condition: suitcase, darting eyes, seeking free food at 9 pm in a big city on a school night. I want to tell you I don’t for a moment wonder if that is really the boy’s father or uncle or legitimate caretaker — something in the handholding and eyes, having watched too many episodes of Law and Order. I want to tell you I take them to a restaurant and pay for a warm meal or empty my wallet not worrying how offensive that might be because in the end hunger is hunger. I want to tell you I call someone who loves them — that there is someone — and say your guys are lost, can you come? I want to tell you I sit down on the sidewalk at the corner of Waverly and pray — that all passing by, anonymous shoes marking the pavement, join in a chorus of prayer humming like cicadas in the Delta. I want to tell you the boy and the man eat food encircled by the warmth of bodies. I want to turn the cold night into a feast. I will tell you I am praying.

when all the golden birds fly home across the blue deep water; On shore I sit rapt in its scattering glitter; departure rustles through the trees. This farewell is vast and separation draws close, but reunion, that also is certain. My head on my arm I fall asleep easily. On my eyes a mother’s breath, from her mouth to my heart: sleep, child, and dream now the sun is gone.—

Now winter nights enlarge The number of their hours; And clouds their storms discharge Upon the airy towers. Let now the chimneys blaze And cups o’erflow with wine, Let well-turned words amaze With harmony divine. Now yellow waxen lights Shall wait on honey love While youthful revels, masques, and courtly sights Sleep’s leaden spells remove. This time doth well dispense With lovers’ long discourse; Much speech hath some defense, Though beauty no remorse. All do not all things well; Some measures comely tread, Some knotted riddles tell, Some poems smoothly read. The summer hath his joys, And winter his delights; Though love and all his pleasures are but toys, They shorten tedious nights.

Toggle me up on one last vanity flight half drunk on a screw-top frizzante. It takes a hell of a lot more to get me here than it did when I had beauty, boys when bedding me was the easy way to know me. Don’t tuck me in so tight. I’m not your grandma. This rough blanket its green red yellow indigo stripes I traded for a perfectly warm beaver pelt. Fly me once more over my disloyal youth and its hangdog slavering over men whom age has de-sexed right along with me. They broadcast impotent outrage from aluminum tablets. I collect speculums with Bakelite handles arranging them by size though it no longer matters.

When the gods you don’t believe In drag you out of your comfortable Life and kick your ass long enough And hard enough to make you Question your serene acceptance Of emptiness as the obligatory tyrant Whose lack of moral concern is Responsible for your largess— It’s time to wake up—take off The bedroom slippers—put on the Mud boots and go clean the stall So the horses’ feet don’t rot— Ride away with a gentle agreement On your tongue that if loosed would Sound like an apology but stuck as it is Between molars is more like a curse Chomped by inaction into an antidote For clarity—the steam of a promise swabbed From the smithy of cold eyes. Be kind—love what you see—or go To sleep and stop dreaming you’re one of us.

If Socrates drank his portion of hemlock willingly, if the Appalachians have endured unending ages of erosion, if the wind can learn to read our minds and moonlight moonlight as a master pickpocket, surely we can contend with contentment as our commission. Deer in a stubble field, small birds dreaming unimaginable dreams in hollow trees, even the icicles, darling, even the icicles shame us with their stoicism, their radiant resolve. Listen to me now: think of something you love but not too dearly, so the night will steal from us only what we can afford to lose.

from Pia Arke's exhibition Arctic Hysteria at Greenland's National Museum & Archives, Nuuk, 2010 i. I am in my body. I am here, in front of you. I am the temperature in this room. I am undressed in my nudity; I am the light and shade you feel. I am more like other people than like you. I have before and after. I am my self, entirely and only. My outside and inside are continuous. I am muscle, organ, fluid, bone. I am monumental. You are the only one who sees me. ii. I am not naked as I am; I am naked as you see me. I am transparent, almost visible. I have a time and a place. I am tribal and exotic. I must always carry objects. You are heroic. I am a complete museum, the story of my own making. I am a mirror to you; you are reflected in the looking at me. At best, I mimic you. You write me. When you leave, I will no longer exist. iii. I am a single conscious point. I am indifferent. I am unself, like a photogram. I am prehistoric, before definition. Your body falls over me. I have depth and luminescence. I am neither here nor there; I have infinite extension. I live inside the lived world, the light and dark inside my head like dream substance. I am camera obscura, the room itself. I both adore and resist.

Like a bowerbird trailing a beakful of weeds Like prize ribbons for the very best The lover, producer Of another’s pleasure He whom her swollen lips await Might wing through any day of the decade A form of health insurance For which it is never too late Titanic, silver brush Hindenburg, of exploding cigars a climax The watery below, the fiery above Ashes of print between—pigment between If the crippled woman were to descend From her bed, her fortress beyond midnight Downstairs (nude/staircase) to the kitchen Naked to sit at the table (writing/thinking) She might hear the washer spin like a full orchestra Complete a cycle like a train crash Before the fiend would stare through the window Step smoothly into the kitchen, stop some clocks. Envy shapes a fig tree in one’s breast, That is, bluntly to say, a cancer, That is to say In a mind, a fertile windy field. A murdered child. Well then, fear, primarily of falling. Ebony surf toils on the beach, a glaze At the same moment I am (from a cliff) falling The kitchen fiend removes his Dior tie Places his hand over the woman’s And softly says: I am the lover. Now if the crippled woman began to dance To pirouette, to rumba Growling for her child Her burning page, the devil would be shamed (Materialism is not for everyone / Religion is The extension of politics by other means

Toe after toe, a snowing flesh, a gold of lemon, root and rind, she sifts in sunlight down the stairs with nothing on. Nor on her mind. We spy beneath the banister a constant thresh of thigh on thigh; her lips imprint the swinging air that parts to let her parts go by. One-woman waterfall, she wears her slow descent like a long cape and pausing on the final stair, collects her motions into shape.

I want no horns to rouse me up to-night, And trumpets make too clamorous a ring To fit my mood, it is so weary white I have no wish for doing any thing. A music coaxed from humming strings would please; Not plucked, but drawn in creeping cadences Across a sunset wall where some Marquise Picks a pale rose amid strange silences. Ghostly and vaporous her gown sweeps by The twilight dusking wall, I hear her feet Delaying on the gravel, and a sigh, Briefly permitted, touches the air like sleet And it is dark, I hear her feet no more. A red moon leers beyond the lily-tank. A drunken moon ogling a sycamore, Running long fingers down its shining flank. A lurching moon, as nimble as a clown, Cuddling the flowers and trees which burn like glass. Red, kissing lips, I feel you on my gown— Kiss me, red lips, and then pass—pass. Music, you are pitiless to-night. And I so old, so cold, so languorously white.