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On my birthday A crow guffaws, dirty man throwing the punch of his one joke. And now, nearer, a murder answers, chortling from the pale hill’s brow. From under my lashes’ wings they stretch clawed feet. There the unflappable years perch and stare. When I squint, when I grin, my new old face nearly hops off my old new face. Considering what’s flown, what might yet fly, I lean my chin on the palm where my half-cashed fortune lies.

The girl was known for shitting in her yard. I did so little for her.  She was small, a dandelion orb with ragged hair like an old woman’s burnt from dye. Her face showed little sign of poverty— it was her dusty shoes cut open at the top that told. A bone look she’d mastered young, yet the curve of her face was edible, like a rounded sparrow in hand. She wasn’t mean, but did what she wanted—quietly, with a lift to her chin, while I struggled to teach her anything. I’d like to say I brushed her brittle hair, called her beautiful, coaxed out sight words that dawdled on her tongue. I dream of her spinning like a fairy dervish in my failure. Consider this a prayer, a foolish one.

My grandmother never trusted calculators. She would crunch numbers in a spiral notebook at the kitchen table, watching her news.

I like the generosity of numbers. The way, for example, they are willing to count anything or anyone: two pickles, one door to the room, eight dancers dressed as swans. I like the domesticity of addition— add two cups of milk and stir— the sense of plenty: six plums on the ground, three more falling from the tree. And multiplication’s school of fish times fish, whose silver bodies breed beneath the shadow of a boat. Even subtraction is never loss, just addition somewhere else: five sparrows take away two, the two in someone else’s garden now. There’s an amplitude to long division, as it opens Chinese take-out box by paper box, inside every folded cookie a new fortune. And I never fail to be surprised by the gift of an odd remainder, footloose at the end: forty-seven divided by eleven equals four, with three remaining. Three boys beyond their mother’s call, two Italians off to the sea, one sock that isn't anywhere you look.

Robed in dungeon black, in mourning For themselves they pass, repace The dark linoleum corridors Of humid wards, sure in the grace Of self-denial. Blown by duty, Jet sails borne by a high wind, Only the face and hands creep through The shapeless clothing, to remind One that a woman lives within The wrappings of this strange cocoon. Her hands reach from these veils of death To harvest a child from the raw womb. The metal scales of paradox Tip here then there. What can the nun Think of the butchery of birth, Mastery of the flesh, this one Vigorous mystery? Rude life From the volcano rolls and pours, Tragic, regenerate, wild. Sad, The unborn wait behind closed doors.

Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room; And hermits are contented with their cells; And students with their pensive citadels; Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom, Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom, High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells, Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells: In truth the prison, into which we doom Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me, In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground; Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be) Who have felt the weight of too much liberty, Should find brief solace there, as I have found.

In the valley of the Pegnitz, where across broad meadow-lands Rise the blue Franconian mountains, Nuremberg, the ancient, stands. Quaint old town of toil and traffic, quaint old town of art and song, Memories haunt thy pointed gables, like the rooks that round them throng: Memories of the Middle Ages, when the emperors, rough and bold, Had their dwelling in thy castle, time-defying, centuries old; And thy brave and thrifty burghers boasted, in their uncouth rhyme, That their great imperial city stretched its hand through every clime. In the court-yard of the castle, bound with many an iron band, Stands the mighty linden planted by Queen Cunigunde's hand; On the square the oriel window, where in old heroic days Sat the poet Melchior singing Kaiser Maximilian's praise. Everywhere I see around me rise the wondrous world of Art: Fountains wrought with richest sculpture standing in the common mart; And above cathedral doorways saints and bishops carved in stone, By a former age commissioned as apostles to our own. In the church of sainted Sebald sleeps enshrined his holy dust, And in bronze the Twelve Apostles guard from age to age their trust; In the church of sainted Lawrence stands a pix of sculpture rare, Like the foamy sheaf of fountains, rising through the painted air. Here, when Art was still religion, with a simple, reverent heart, Lived and labored Albrecht Dürer, the Evangelist of Art; Hence in silence and in sorrow, toiling still with busy hand, Like an emigrant he wandered, seeking for the Better Land. Emigravit is the inscription on the tomb-stone where he lies; Dead he is not, but departed, — for the artist never dies. Fairer seems the ancient city, and the sunshine seems more fair, That he once has trod its pavement, that he once has breathed its air! Through these streets so broad and stately, these obscure and dismal lanes, Walked of yore the Mastersingers, chanting rude poetic strains. From remote and sunless suburbs came they to the friendly guild, Building nests in Fame's great temple, as in spouts the swallows build. As the weaver plied the shuttle, wove he too the mystic rhyme, And the smith his iron measures hammered to the anvil's chime; Thanking God, whose boundless wisdom makes the flowers of poesy bloom In the forge's dust and cinders, in the tissues of the loom. Here Hans Sachs, the cobbler-poet, laureate of the gentle craft, Wisest of the Twelve Wise Masters, in huge folios sang and laughed. But his house is now an ale-house, with a nicely sanded floor, And a garland in the window, and his face above the door; Painted by some humble artist, as in Adam Puschman's song, As the old man gray and dove-like, with his great beard white and long. And at night the swart mechanic comes to drown his cark and care, Quaffing ale from pewter tankards, in the master's antique chair. Vanished is the ancient splendor, and before my dreamy eye Wave these mingled shapes and figures, like a faded tapestry. Not thy Councils, not thy Kaisers, win for thee the world's regard; But thy painter, Albrecht Dürer, and Hans Sachs thy cobbler bard. Thus, O Nuremberg, a wanderer from a region far away, As he paced thy streets and court-yards, sang in thought his careless lay: Gathering from the pavement's crevice, as a floweret of the soil, The nobility of labor, — the long pedigree of toil.

Knowledge is Power. That is what the billboard says and I agree. I am an adult, therefore I understand the threat of passengers. The threat to Our Children, who don't understand the threat of these bird-like, twitchy people. They pose two kinds of threat. To begin with, there is the one we all know about, the predatory threat, the hawk-like passengers that prey on children as they sit in front of their computers or televisions. The terrorist threat. That threat is easy to handle. You shoot it. You contain it. You confiscate. You stitch. You bleed from various orifices and sockets, but you survive, you rebuild house and rinse the child. The more serious threat is the diseases passengers carry with them. Internal terrorism. Children love those diseases. It makes them babble like possessed. Their make-up looks like oil in the moonlight. Such children cannot be cleaned off. Kill them. Or turn them into entertainment. Art.

Why waste away in a box when you could be a nurse tree? That’s what they call dead logs: mushroomeries of the woods. Your living room’s a wood of couches, books, and chairs. You’re dead not at all, but could you be preparing for things to grow inside the chest of the log you plan to become: cherished compost heap where heat turns the brown mess of feelings, sorry, that’s peelings, into comp-o- sition? For we who love our hands in dirt, a leaf skirt de composing seems an ideal station between this life and next: I visit your room as on a forest walk. Passing a fallen log — is that you? — I see a scarlet fungus cap pop up from friable bark.

We opened the door to the fairy house & took our tea on matching pebble seats. Somehow we got out of there alive though something crystalline of us remains in that dark, growing its facets. We opened the door to the fairy house at the oak’s black ankle. You asked What could happen? as you disappeared somehow. We got out of there alive the strange tea still warm in our bellies. Inside, our hosts gave damn few answers. Who built that door? Is this a fairy house? They had no faces yet. We spoke into their quince-bud ears. You wept. Somehow we got out of there alive though we didn’t quite return. Our life is different now we’ve drunk the tea. They’re alive somehow. I got us out. Why did you open the door to the fairy house?