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my dad's going to give me a self back. i've made an altar called The Altar for Healing the Father & Child, & asked him what i could do for him so he would do nice for me. he said i should stop saying bad things about him &, since i've said just about everything bad i can think of &, since . . . well, no, i change my mind, i can't promise him that. but even healing is negotiable, so, if he's in heaven (or trying to get in), it wouldn't hurt to be in touch. the first thing i want is to be able to enjoy the little things again—for example, to stop peeling down the list of things i have to do & enjoy this poem, enjoy how, last night, scouring the cupboards, i found a can of sardines that must be five years old &, since i was home after a long trip &, since it was 1 a.m. & i hadn't eaten dinner &, since there was no other protein in the house, i cranked it open & remembered that my dad loved sardines—right before bed—with onions & mustard. i can't get into my dad's old heart, but i remember that look on his face when he would load mustard on a saltine cracker, lay a little fish on top, & tip it with a juicy slice of onion. then he'd look up from his soiled fingers with one eyebrow raised, a rakish grin that said—all for me!—as if he was getting away with murder.

After Herman Melville Glad, on time pennies click hard at your teeth everyone is throwing them Gathered about you in a circle on the deck everyone is catching them a blue flame about their heads cocked back over the railing Glass you think in the middle and wheat stands from which time is made on the upper decks’ passing of the banks That’s not the brittle moment above you On shore, leaves turn their gray sunless sides every which way The riverboat is very small it will never get here

I hold my honey and I store my bread In little jars and cabinets of my will. I label clearly, and each latch and lid I bid, Be firm till I return from hell. I am very hungry. I am incomplete. And none can tell when I may dine again. No man can give me any word but Wait, The puny light. I keep eyes pointed in; Hoping that, when the devil days of my hurt Drag out to their last dregs and I resume On such legs as are left me, in such heart As I can manage, remember to go home, My taste will not have turned insensitive To honey and bread old purity could love.

I arise around survival of the event as worse than the event The whole place surrounds the smell I take one step toward and ten paces back breathless with the mirrors with the fees and meters Feces I fax my demon family weeping on the bridge again My condition was induced as follows Releasing actual sales numbers, trying to mount the policeman or his horse tonguing captains manually strong simultaneous tendencies to approach and avoid appearance and avoidance Men come to my cherry doors to carry on about finance and cricket coaxing a cavernous oath wrestling natives into nestling My part is basically to hatch with regard for human dignity and life In my best foreign automobile stunting the stupor fronting us In order to love my country better I offer monthly meter readings I am filled with rhythm, passion and speed protruding in public popping my collar into a wreck My father sits me down Son, he says, don't let them enter your mouth I wrote a narrative about our collective pain and went shopping

When my grandmother died I thought, “She can’t die again.” Everything in her life happened once and forever: her bed on our roof, the battle of good and evil in her tales, her black clothes, her mourning for her daughter who “was killed by headaches,” the rosary beads and her murmur, “Forgive us our sins,” her empty vase from the Ottoman time, her braid, each hair a history — First were the Sumerians, their dreams inscribed in clay tablets. They drew palms, so dates ripen before their sorrows. They drew an eye to chase evil away from their city. They drew circles and prayed for them: a drop of water a sun a moon a wheel spinning faster than Earth. They begged: “Oh gods, don’t die and leave us alone.” Over the Tower of Babel, light is exile, blurred, its codes crumbs of songs leftover for the birds. More naked emperors passed by the Tigris and more ships . . . The river full of crowns helmets books dead fish, and on the Euphrates, corpse-lilies floating. Every minute a new hole in the body of the ship. The clouds descended on us war by war, picked up our years, our hanging gardens, and flew away like storks. We said there isn’t any worse to come. Then the barbarians came to the mother of two springs. They broke my grandmother’s grave: my clay tablet. They smashed the winged bulls whose eyes were sunflowers widely open watching the fragments of our first dreams for a lifetime. My hand on the map as if on an old scar.

My grandmother puts her feet in the sink of the bathroom at Sears to wash them in the ritual washing for prayer, wudu, because she has to pray in the store or miss the mandatory prayer time for Muslims She does it with great poise, balancing herself with one plump matronly arm against the automated hot-air hand dryer, after having removed her support knee-highs and laid them aside, folded in thirds, and given me her purse and her packages to hold so she can accomplish this august ritual and get back to the ritual of shopping for housewares Respectable Sears matrons shake their heads and frown as they notice what my grandmother is doing, an affront to American porcelain, a contamination of American Standards by something foreign and unhygienic requiring civic action and possible use of disinfectant spray They fluster about and flutter their hands and I can see a clash of civilizations brewing in the Sears bathroom My grandmother, though she speaks no English, catches their meaning and her look in the mirror says, I have washed my feet over Iznik tile in Istanbul with water from the world's ancient irrigation systems I have washed my feet in the bathhouses of Damascus over painted bowls imported from China among the best families of Aleppo And if you Americans knew anything about civilization and cleanliness, you'd make wider washbins, anyway

It’s common to live properly, to pretend you don’t feel heat or grief: wave nightly at Miss Fugue and Mister Goggles before diving into your nightcap, before reading yourself a bedtime story or watching your beloved sink to the bottom of a lake and noting his absence in your log. The next day you drop his clothes off at Goodwill like a sack of mail from a warplane then hobble back to your hovel like a knight moving only in L s. It is comfortable to be alive this way, especially now, but it makes you so vulnerable to shock — you ignore the mortgage and find a falconer’s glove in your yard, whole hand still inside. Or you arrive home after a long day to discover your children have grown suddenly hideous and unlovable. What I’m trying to say is I think it’s okay to accelerate around corners, to grunt back at the mailman and swallow all your laundry quarters. So much of everything is dumb baffle: water puts out fire, my diseases can become your diseases, and two hounds will fight over a feather because feathers are strange. All I want is to finally take off my cowboy hat and show you my jeweled horns. If we slow dance I will ask you not to tug on them but secretly I will want that very much.

Cookies for sale! And cake! One dime! That's what it says on my cardboard sign. I pile cookies on a plate. I eat just one and then, I wait . . . I taste the cake (one tiny slice) I squeeze the lemons and stir the ice; I count and stack the paper cups . . . fresh lemonade is coming up! I count the bruises on my knee . . . won't somebody buy something, please?

I’m folding up my little dreams Within my heart tonight, And praying I may soon forget The torture of their sight. For time’s deft fingers scroll my brow With fell relentless art— I’m folding up my little dreams Tonight, within my heart.

I would try to do it in my way, forgetting Velázquez . . . .  So, little by little, I would paint my Meninas . . . they would be “my” Meninas. — Pablo Picasso My meninas are as changeable as the moon. Black and white and in color. Happy, sad, and how many words there are for red enough and the pallor of skin. Their moments of verisimilitude do not outweigh their flashes of pathos. Whole days go by when they cannot appreciate the humor of which the dog is one manner, the dwarf another. My meninas are not puppets, but puppet theaters. That it is the puppet master who draws the curtain in the stairwell is pure whimsy on my part. A minuet of despair, andante of foolhardiness. How many times have I tried to explain these differences, the sting of  joy, a lilt of crimson, the dark and the light of the moon not the moon, the soul but a sphere predisposed to rotation? The man in the doorway. The dog who lies sleeping. These are my meninas. The sun in the mirror. The sun and the moon and the man behind the easel, mostly invisible, like the pictures on the wall. The moon is not more changeable, however, than they, my meninas, who never stop changing and waiting on the children of the sun and of the moon, for they will always be my meninas, their eyes of every minim on the palette, blue and tragical, white on white against a black ground, until the moon sings every shape and shade of gray from hope to ample. And again.