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The man who told me about war said, it's the only thing that keeps us busy. I thought of your fingers on my back counting the vertebrae one by one. The only thing?

We boys, the neighborhood’s barefoot We boys, the neighborhood’s naked We boys of stomachs bloated from eating mud We boys of teeth porous from eating dates and pumpkin rind We boys will line up from Hassan al-Basri’s mausoleum to the Ashar River’s source to meet you in the morning waving green palm fronds We will cry out: Long Live We will cry out: Live to Eternity And we will hear the music of Scottish bagpipes, gladly Sometimes we will laugh at an Indian soldier’s beard but fear will merge with our laughs, and dispute them We cry out: Long Live We cry out: Live to Eternity and reach our hands toward you: Give us bread We the hungry, starving since our birth in this village Give us meat, chewing gum, cans, and fish Give us, so no mother expels her child so that we do not eat mud and sleep We boys, the neighborhood’s barefoot do not know from where you had come or why you had come or why we cry out: Long Live ............................... And now we ask: will you stay long? And will we go on reaching our hands toward you? London, December 3, 2002

Alice's first strike gets a pat on the back, her second a cheer from Betty Woszinski who's just back from knee surgery.   Her third— "A turkey!" Molly calls out—raises everyone's eyes. They clap.   Teresa looks up from the bar. At the fourth the girls stop seeing their own pins wobble. They watch the little X's fill the row on Alice's screen— That's five.   That's six.   There's a holy space around her like a saint come down to bowl with the Tuesday Ladies in Thorp, Wisconsin. Teresa runs to get Al, and Fran calls Billy at the Exxon.   The bar crowds with silent men. No one's cheering.   No one's bowling now except Alice's team, rolling their balls to advance the screen around to Alice, who's stopped even her nervous laugh, her face blank and smooth with concentration.   It can't go on and then it does go on, the white bar reading "Silver Dollar Chicken" lowering and clearing nothing, then lowering and clearing nothing again.

Along Ocean Highway, apartments rise up to ten and twenty stories, white, hallucinatory, defying the shifting sand, the storm moving in off the Atlantic that drives the rain, needlelike, across the windshield so that we can’t see, so that we stop in Ocean City to wait the storm out at the Dutch, the only bar on the boardwalk open this time of year, all the concessions boarded up, weather-beaten, closed against the season. Last summer in violet light, kites spiraled downward in loops, then up, dragons and birds flying high above the boardwalk. Ocean City. Haven of the lost and aimless, with a ten-foot sand sculpture of Christ illuminated by neon lights. People on their way to Ripley’s BELIEVE IT OR NOT looked on in apathy, then wandered off, their children begging for another ride on the Avalanche or Safari. Out, far out, at the end of a pier, silhouetted against gray sky, gray water, Morbid Manor rose up, Gothic and dreamy, as children ran screaming from the exit door chased by a ghost with a chain saw. One child ignored it all; she lay with her face pressed close to a knothole in the pier, looking down, down, to the boiling black water. “What do you see?” I asked, but she didn’t move or answer me. Long, narrow, and dark, the Dutch, with its shifting clientele— from summer weekend pickups to Ocean City regulars— allows for strangers. We order Irish coffee, then two more, and use our change to play an arcade game. Aliens, half an inch high, in green armor, drop out of a glowing sky and quickly multiply. Our backs to the storm, we play out old anxieties, losing each game to time and starting over: we must save what’s being threatened and not ask why.

After Kenji Takezo fell from a wave, The turbulence of whitewash confused His sense of direction. He breathed in When he should have Held tight. By accident, he swallowed The Pacific. The water poured down his throat, A blue cascade he could not see. He felt in his stomach The heavy life of the ocean. It wasn’t funny, but he giggled When a school of fish tickled his ribs. He went home, the surf not rideable, It was no longer there, The water weighted in his belly. That night, while he slept, the tide moved. The long arms of the moon Reached inside him pulling the Pacific free. When he woke the next morning, He lay in a puddle of ocean that was his.

Far, far out lie the white sails all at rest; Like spectral arms they seem to touch and cling Unto the wide horizon. Not a wing Of truant bird glides down the purpling west; No breeze dares to intrude, e’en on a quest To fan a lover’s brow; the waves to sing Have quite forgotten till the deep shall fling A bow across its vibrant chords. Then, lest One moment of the sea’s repose we lose, Nor furnish Fancy with a thousand themes Of unimagined sweetness, let us gaze On this serenity, for as we muse, Lo! all is restless motion: life’s best dreams Give changing moods to even halcyon days.

To G. de Chirico I have built a house in the middle of the Ocean Its windows are the rivers flowing from my eyes Octopi are crawling all over where the walls are Hear their triple hearts beat and their beaks peck against 
the windowpanes House of dampness House of burning Season’s fastness Season singing The airplanes are laying eggs Watch out for the dropping of the anchor Watch out for the shooting black ichor It would be good if you were to come from the sky The sky’s honeysuckle is climbing The earthly octopi are throbbing And so very many of us have become our own gravediggers Pale octopi of the chalky waves O octopi with pale beaks Around the house is this ocean that you know well And is never still Translated from the French

What I remember is a carhop on Pico hurrying Toward a blue Chevy, A crucifix dangling from its rearview mirror That jiggled as the driver brushed A revolver against it, in passing, before tucking it Behind his back & beginning to joke with her. What I remember Is the smooth arc the gun made & the way Jesus shimmied to the rhythm. • Someday I’ll go back to the place depicted By the painting, boarded over by the layers of paint And abandoned, And beneath the pastel yellows I’ll find The Bayside Motel & the little room With the thin, rumpled coverlet, And sit down, drinking nothing but the night air By the window, & wait for her to finish Dressing, one earring, then another, And wait until the objects in the room take back Their shapes in the dawn, And wait until Each rumpled crease in the sheets & pillowcase Is as clear as a gift again, & wait — At a certain moment, that room, then all the rooms Of the empty Bayside, Will turn completely into light. • I place a cup on the sill & listen for the faint Tock of china on wood, & ... That moment of light is already this one — Sweet, fickle, oblivious, & gone: My hand hurrying across the page to get there On time, that place Of  undoing — • Where the shriek of  the carhop’s laugh, And the complete faith of the martyr, as he spins & shimmies in the light, And the inextricable candor of doubt by which Diebenkorn, One afternoon, made his presence known In the yellow pastels, then wiped his knuckles with a rag — Are one — are the salt, the nowhere & the cold — The entwined limbs of  lovers & the cold wave’s sprawl.

I. The worker’s pants on a spider-filament line, strung waist to waist to waist to dry. The neat green wedge of park, always empty; the length of concrete paced by convalescents. The lead impastos of interesting weather, though mostly the shadowless blue of long days. The sprawl of water beyond the band of beach, copper or tinfoil depending on the sun coming down, the moon rising. The storefront and the thumb of hydrant in front of it, in all kinds of light solidly composed and unspeculative. The garage’s brick side facing a warehouse wall; between them, the alley’s cold black aisle. The swells of a scalloped awning; the sheetlike descent of streetwise birds. Tubercular with rust, the flue leaking steam. And behind the blind-eye panes, the figure who must have chosen to be here. II. At a window someone watches for daybreak, which begins for him with a spar of sun lighting a stringcourse on the opposite building, its tendrils and blooms freshly chiseled when mornings have an acidly clean brightness, or mildewed, chalky with soot, when the overcast will not pull back from the day. Hobbled now, but still ardent, wandering, he looks at the postcards showing the city and its lit grids, touches mangoes going soft in crates, and listens always for the murmurings:An object, after all, is what makes infinity private. Spare a dollar for a lobotomy? Everything taken up, pocketed, added to an accrual having less to do with weight than with lightness: the plane of a wall, say, with pink stucco rough as emery, and the little fish, green as muscat grapes, selling out at a dime a dozen. III. Fender-chrome, gravel molars, brittle sepals holding up the dead rose, the bottle collecting rain—a precise light found for each like the faded brown for leaves, ground-down crystal for frost. The formless moil of paint, spread into surface, depicts the day exact. So with the persimmons almost forgotten into ordinariness, the moons of candle-wax on the table—things clearer somehow for entering the orange, brown, and white I make use of. Rising, I am elated by the light on cold red leaves and on successive clouds, each one edge-lit, its heart incinerate. And the light makes use of me in ways only line, curve, and shadow can describe, drawn toward what pity or love that the day, emptied but unsubdued, gives in to: Every day he poured himself into it, as water might pour from a flask.

The Ocean has its silent caves, Deep, quiet, and alone; Though there be fury on the waves, Beneath them there is none.