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Where does such sadness in wood come from? How could longing live in these wires? The box looks like the most fragile coffin tuned for sound. And laid across the knees of this woman it looks less like a baby nursed than some symbolic Pietà, and the stretched body on her lap yields modalities of lament and blood, yields sacrifice and sliding chants of grief that dance and dance toward a new measure, a new threshold, a new instant and new year which we always celebrate by remembering the old and by recalling the lost and honoring those no longer here to strike these strings like secrets of the most satisfying harmonies, as voices join in sadness and joy and tell again what we already know, have always known but forget, from way back in the farthest cove, from highest on the peaks of love.

Do not name your daughters Shaymaa, courage will march them into the bullet path of dictators. Do not name them Sundus, the garden of paradise calls out to its marigolds, gathers its green leaves up in its embrace. Do not name your children Malak or Raneem, angels want the companionship of others like them, their silvery wings trailing the filth of jail cells, the trill of their laughter a call to prayer. Do not name your sons Hamza. Do not taunt the torturer’s whip with promises of steadfastness. Do not name your sons Muhammad     Ahed     Zakaria     Ismail, they will become seashells, disappear in the sand. Do not name your children. Let them live nameless, seal their eyelids and sell their voices to the nightingale. Do not name your children and if you must call them by what withstands this endless season of decay. Name them mountains, call them stone.

A peacock on an olive branch looks beyond the grove to the road, beyond the road to the sea, blank-lit, where a sailboat anchors to a cove. As it is morning, below deck a man is pouring water into a cup, listening to the radio-talk of the ships: barges dead in the calms awaiting port call, pleasure boats whose lights hours ago went out, fishermen setting their nets for mullet, as summer tavernas hang octopus to dry on their lines, whisper smoke into wood ovens, sweep the terraces clear of night, putting the music out with morning light, and for the breath of an hour it is possible to consider the waters of this sea wine-dark, to remember that there was no word for blue among the ancients, but there was the whirring sound before the oars of the great triremes sang out of the seam of world, through pine-sieved winds silvered by salt flats until they were light enough to pass for breath from the heavens, troubled enough to fell ships and darken thought — then as now the clouds pass, roosters sleep in their huts, the sea flattens under glass air, but there is nothing to hold us there: not the quiet of marble nor the luff of sail, fields of thyme, a vineyard at harvest, and the sea filled with the bones of those in flight from wars east and south, our wars, their remains scavenged on the seafloor and in its caves, belongings now a flotsam washed to the rocks. Stand here and look into the distant haze, there where the holy mountain with its thousand monks wraps itself in shawls of rain, then look to the west, where the rubber boats tipped into the tough waves. Rest your eyes there, remembering the words of Anacreon, himself a refugee of war, who appears in the writings of Herodotus: I love and do not love, I am mad and I am not mad. Like you he thought himself not better, nor worse than anyone else.

I have studied the tight curls on the back of your neck moving away from me beyond anger or failure your face in the evening schools of longing through mornings of wish and ripen we were always saying goodbye in the blood in the bone over coffee before dashing for elevators going in opposite directions without goodbyes. Do not remember me as a bridge nor a roof as the maker of legends nor as a trap door to that world where black and white clericals hang on the edge of beauty in five oclock elevators twitching their shoulders to avoid other flesh and now there is someone to speak for them moving away from me into tomorrows morning of wish and ripen your goodbye is a promise of lightning in the last angels hand unwelcome and warning the sands have run out against us we were rewarded by journeys away from each other into desire into mornings alone where excuse and endurance mingle conceiving decision. Do not remember me as disaster nor as the keeper of secrets I am a fellow rider in the cattle cars watching you move slowly out of my bed saying we cannot waste time only ourselves.

Had to come in out of the people, they blew me about so. Was told of the life taking place elsewhere. Went to check on that, flying late and low over the west. Saw no house, no shade. Sat down on the damp bank on the far shore at the left edge of the world, against which the sea endlessly lapped. So now there were two of us, who beat the world by day and caressed it by night and the world didn’t say yea and she didn’t say nay.

The style a form of concealment the way style is. His manners seemed a parody, almost, Of manners, a movie star of bygone days; Strangely elaborate, highly stylized manners, Complicit with his fame and with your praise; Looking toward you and then away from you, Star-like, movie-star-like, a dance routine, The walk almost a glide, or elegant shuffle, Always on the verge of veering away, Circling away and over to the other side Of the frozen skating arena that he was on; A dancer’s courtesy, the courtesy, I mean, of the dancer to the audience, Flirtatious and familiar, only for you, And entirely impersonal and withheld. All of the above, though, maybe, misses the point, Because it seems to say he knew about What he was doing or what the style was for, And nothing let one be sure that this was so; A look on his face of amusement, as if he knew A secret that he shared with you and yet Kept to himself, as if it only showed The cryptogram but wouldn’t provide the key To read it with. But could he read the code? One night, late at night, as we were driving Home from having had dinner out, in Boston, We saw him figure skating through Charles Street Circle, Right through and among the circling lights of cars As if with champion skill on thin ice whirling Oblivious to the astonished blaring horns, As a dancer or skater seems, while dancing to The music that we hear, oblivious to The music that we hear and listening to Some other music heard from somewhere else. So Peter moved like a dancer or skater through And among the dangerous outraged cars as if Untouchable and untouched and moving to The sounds of something else from somewhere else— The music maybe of his madness was it? It was as if he skated in solitude And glided whirling on a lonely tarn Far out away from everything there is.

The first act of love in a new house is not private. Loving each other we are half-aware of door and mirror. Our ecstasy includes the bedside chair, the air from the landing. Street-lamp and elm utter leaves on walls as in no room ever. Theirs is the tongue our tongues join in translating. Their message is clear: tonight you cannot ignore the world at the window. So we love in the knowledge of a city at a different angle. And sharing our bed with furniture and tree we claim their perspective, merging our lives here in their established frame.

My aunts mentioned her just once, calling her my aunt, their sister, though she wasn’t. They mentioned the vinyl recliner in the kitchen, the “I Like Ike” poster, the Sacred Heart, cabbage smells, sulfur, and shame. Before jolted by the gift that called through but never really for her, she became unpleasantly calm. Moments later, after she said “I don’t want this please,” God’s love raced down the pulse into her look. It was as if her things spoke back: a table leg scraped the floor, a fork wobbled in a drawer, knickknacks fell. She nearly died each time it happened. They said her mind just wasn’t there, or she wasn’t in it anymore. She sat helpless afterward, papery when they lifted her from vision seat to bed. The might to move what her eye fell upon is the image of her I keep, her iridescent readiness.

Luxurious man, to bring his vice in use, Did after him the world seduce, And from the fields the flowers and plants allure, Where nature was most plain and pure. He first enclosed within the gardens square A dead and standing pool of air, And a more luscious earth for them did knead, Which stupified them while it fed. The pink grew then as double as his mind; The nutriment did change the kind. With strange perfumes he did the roses taint, And flowers themselves were taught to paint. The tulip, white, did for complexion seek, And learned to interline its cheek: Its onion root they then so high did hold, That one was for a meadow sold. Another world was searched, through oceans new, To find the Marvel of Peru.

My mind was once the true survey Of all these meadows fresh and gay, And in the greenness of the grass Did see its hopes as in a glass; When Juliana came, and she What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me. But these, while I with sorrow pine, Grew more luxuriant still and fine, That not one blade of grass you spy’d But had a flower on either side; When Juliana came, and she What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me. Unthankful meadows, could you so A fellowship so true forgo? And in your gaudy May-games meet While I lay trodden under feet? When Juliana came, and she What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me. But what you in compassion ought, Shall now by my revenge be wrought; And flow’rs, and grass, and I and all, Will in one common ruin fall. For Juliana comes, and she What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me. And thus, ye meadows, which have been Companions of my thoughts more green, Shall now the heraldry become With which I shall adorn my tomb; For Juliana comes, and she What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me.