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What do we need for love—a midnight fire Flinging itself by fistfuls up the chimney In soft bright snatches? Do we need the snow, Gentle as silence, covering the scars Of weeks of hunger, years of shabby having? Summer or winter? A heaven of stars? A room? The smiling mouth, the sadness of desire Are everywhere the same. If lovers go Along an unknown road, they find no less What is familiar. Let them stay at home, And all will still be strange. This they know Who with each heartbeat fight the fear of change.

Always fatal, Tay-Sachs disease affects only Eastern European children. For R.N.B. Over the waves of his chest, you watch the sun go up, again. How accidentally the birds cross it! How seemingly accidental. What random choices led you to him—your darling from the same steppes as Zhivago's, and your own. Then he's dressed, and you're almost. Leaning over, he pulls your slip up to put his hand over that fat part of you, where swims the swimmer. Enter Tay and Sachs, two men good at identifying a certain kind of certain death due to a certain mix of genes of children with certain parents. Today you go to determine your chances, rather, its chances, all euphemism unable to cover the chance red spot on the growing retina. After your doctor has his way, you can see on the screen the little swimmer trying to escape, holding the needle with both hands, just reflex. The verdict takes time to swell and ripen. The doctor offers his only balm, a curse: knowledge without antidote. All you know is that the immortals throw no bones, that you inherit nothing but genes and bravery, both faltering. You trot back to work and your new belly swirls with the fetal pig you took the eyes from, grade ten. To market, to market. You pull your goddamn shrinking coat around you. Nothing like the stir of life that has no chance. You shrug. It’s only the size of your finger, you don’t care— But knowing at the end of ten hours’ pitched screaming, your insides reversing, you get nothing— What goes where with death? You know all about life. You majored in biology, pirouetted through the wedding night. Does it make sounds yet? Choose happiness but accept the truth: the child might die, you tell your husband. Suffer and die. In the three-week wait you type and each hammer moves the days along. Waiting, every word from everyone hurts, every Good day, careless or concerned, every word. The only sympathy you want is the same cruelty shared, all else grates. Inside, it spins—in fear? What you must swallow is the sugar cube of your continuing, the inescapable desire to pee that stirs you mornings, hours before dawn. But if, at the end of these weeks of waiting, the white-masked priests come back bearing no news, which is their best, you will have brushed off death, rimed him bright and acceptable and seen it slant. Either way. That is, what happens doesn’t matter. You eat. You lie down. The sun shrinks. The daily din you’re thankful for rescinds its paper currency that nothing backs up. Your husband puts on a pot to boil, and another. He can’t feel it inside, though he’s eaten the same sour apple, bearing half the genes, those underclothes, the bra, the brief of the body. You are dumb before his helplessness. The cord to belly to cord will not be broken, ripped untimely as it may be. Mama has happened and the rocking horse of your heart heaves on.

Wake to find everything black what was white, all the vice versa—white maids on TV, black sitcoms that star white dwarfs cute as pearl buttons. Black Presidents, Black Houses. White horse candidates. All bleach burns clothes black. Drive roads white as you are, white songs on the radio stolen by black bands like secret pancake recipes, white back-up singers, ball-players & boxers all white as tar. Feathers on chickens dark as everything, boiling in the pot that called the kettle honky. Even whites of the eye turn dark, pupils clear & changing as a cat's. Is this what we've wanted & waited for? to see snow covering everything black as Christmas, dark pages written white upon? All our eclipses bright, dark stars shooting across pale sky, glowing like ash in fire, shower every skin. Only money keeps green, still grows & burns like grass under dark daylight.

Ice on the puddles, in the cups of fallen leaves. I’d walk with Dad and a handful of other men, the setters working the fields, the underbrush. It was my job to carry the birds. I’d have them all plucked by the time we got back to the car. On the walk out I’d look for puddles I’d missed and break them. Though many moonless nights have fallen on the grave like a negative of snow, Dad’s wheelchair sometimes flashes in my mind, and I hear the bleating down the hall, a voice berating its god, his worthless anodynes, and the doctors who were at that very moment increasing his morphine, having failed to note the word alcoholic on his chart, meaning that his damaged liver routed the opiates straight to his brain, his beautiful fragile brain, which I had not yet finished loving. My father, who still had manners, who was a hardwood, a tough tree. That was his first death.

1. I was born on a Tuesday in April. I didn't cry. Not because I was stunned. I wasn't even mad. I was the lucky egg, trained for gratitude inside the belly for nine months straight. Two workers welded bunk beds at the end of the delivery room. One on top of the other. My universe might have been the white lime ceiling, or the embodiment of Einstein's bent space in the aluminum springs of the bed above that curved toward the center. Neither cold, nor warm. "It was a clear day," my mother told me. It's hard to believe there were a few romantic evenings when I was conceived, a buzz in the retina and red-laced magma decadently peeling off a silver candlestick. Infants' cries and milk fever turned to salt from the stench of bleach— abrasive, unequivocal. With a piece of cloth wrapped on the end of a stick, the janitor casually extends the negative space of the black-and-white tiled floor like a mouth of broken teeth, a baleen of darkness sieving out new human destinies. 2. 1968. At the dock, ships arriving from the East dumped punctured rice bags, mice and the delirium of the Cultural Revolution. A couple of men in uniform cleared out the church in the middle of the night. The locals saw the priest in the yard wearing only his underwear, shivering from the cold. Their eyes, disillusioned, questioned one another: "Wasn't he the one who pardoned our sins?" Icons burned in front of their eyes, icons and the holy scriptures. Witnesses stepped farther back, as if looking at love letters nobody dared to claim. Crosses were plucked from graves. And from each mouth spilled irreversible promises: mounds of dirt the rains would smooth down sooner or later. Children dragged church bells by the tongue. (Why didn’t they think of this before?) Overnight, the dome was demolished, instantly revealing a myriad of nameless stars that chased the crowd like flies on a dead horse. And what could replace Sunday mass now? Women brought cauldrons into the yard. Men filled up their pipes; smoke rose into the air, against gravity's pull. Nails in worn out shoes exposed stigmata that bled in the wrong places— a new code of sanctification, of man, by man. 3. "Read!"—I was told. Who said that? Angel Gabriel, or my first-grade teacher who had dark roots underneath her bleached curls? Language arrived fragmentary split in syllables, spasmodic like code in times of war. "Continue where your classmate left off!" A long sentence tied us to one another without connotation as if inside an idiom. Someone would get to read the noun, another the verb, a third one a pronoun. . . I always got the exclamation mark at the end— a mere grimace, a small curse. A tall cast-iron stove below the portrait of the dictator, puffing smoke from its temples, enough heat for everyone. On the blackboard, leftover diphthongs from yesterday or the day before rubbed against one another like kittens. After dusk, I looked for another language outside the window, my eyes glued to a constellation (they call these types "dreamers") my discovery possibly a journey into the past, toward a galaxy already dead, nonexistent, the kind of news that needs millions of years to reach me. "Read!"—the angel shook me for a third time her finger pointing to an arbitrary word a million light years apart from its object. (It didn't matter who was first). Negative space sketched my onomatopoeic profile of body and shadow in an accidental encounter. 4. Language is erosive. It makes us recluses, a wind through the canyons carving our paleontological eras for everyone to read. Under the revised testament of my skin bellows a gold-cast bull, an alluring object, a need for attention. Then comes the unleavened bread and a last supper, which, remarkably, is repeated several times between ice ages. Lower yet, Sodom. I recognize it from the stench of sulfur. I hold my nose. Freud would have done the same. And then Cain, a crow taught him how to bury his own brother. . . And at the bottom, Adam’s gentlemanlike sin under which scientists discover earlier epochs of famine. Between unidentified layers, wanderings in the sand, the search for a new prophet. . . I try to understand my people. Their language is plain. Some words, were actually never uttered, like pages stuck together in a book fresh off the press and long after it sits on a shelf. This, too, lives inside me within insidious bubbles of air, negative spaces where I can find little historical rest, but also where utter ruin may originate. 5. Little left of the snow three days ago. Its blanket ripped away, exposing dog shit and the bruises of routine. Negative space gives form to the woods and to the mad woman—a silhouette of the goddess Athena wearing a pair of flip flops, an owl on her shoulder. It’s minus zero. The factory’s gate gnashes its teeth behind the back of the last worker. Blowing noses, shivering, mucus. . . A virus circulates through the workplace, secretly, intimately touching one person after another, a current of sensuality. It softens the tone. But nothing unites them more than their frailty, The one-sizes-fits-all shoes you must grow accustomed to By filling the extra space with cotton, Or curling your ill-fitting toes. 6. In Halil’s yard, rules were sacrilege. His eight children entertained themselves by carrying famine on their shoulders, recalling St. Bartholomew’s flayed skin. Starving, filthy, hazel-eyed— three qualities that unexpectedly coalesce in the bright light, strung together like sneezes. One’s famine was another’s consolation. “Look at them! It’s a sin for us to complain. They’re even worse off than us!” But even Halil found his own consolation in the old woman Zyra, “barren and paralyzed,” the root origin of despair. This was our highlands landscape, hierarchical, where each family would make out a different expiration date on the roof below their own. Schadenfreude was the only river that could turn mills. But if this hierarchy shifted, and our roof gave signs of ruin, my mother would plant tulips in the garden, white tulips, our false image, a scarecrow to keep predators away. 7. Nearly nothing was mentioned in the letters he sent from prison, just two lines, on top of the page: “I am well. . .” and “If you can, please send me a pair of woolen socks.” From them, I learned to read between the lines: negative spaces, the unsaid, gestures, insomnia that like a hat’s shadow fails to shade your chin and ears. And in the photographs’ white background, acrophobia adds to the color of their eyes: blue, green, gray, and ultimately, chesnut brown, as, earthward, we lower our gaze. I learned to read the empty spaces the dead left behind—a pair of folded glasses after the reading’s done and discourse commences. Or the musical chairs game called "love," where there are less empty seats than people. If you don’t want to be the last one standing you must predict when the music will stop. (Who, though, has really succeeded?) Perhaps a little practice can be useful in this case. I don’t mean squatting, jumping, stretching, but listening to the same music every day from the start, the same miserable vinyl record so that you’ll recognize its cracks before it recognizes yours. 8. Midnight. Snoring, meaningless sounds that stain the side of the wall that belongs to no one. So where are we? What dimension? Who foots the bill at a time like this without lambs or sinners, when even angels record nothing? The street’s clearly visible under the neon 24-hour-service sign above the funeral home. There was a music shop next to it that closed down a few months ago; the shop shared a wall with the funeral home, shared the same water pipes and the same gate to heaven. But the coffins won, the wide-shouldered coffins that narrow down in the shape of a mummy, not a human. Wood of the highest quality, swears the owner, and pure silk inside, pleated like a stomach that can digest even a bulldozer. When asleep we're simply five limbs. Starfish. If you cut one limb, it will grow back. Even a single limb could recreate us from the beginning, a single hope. Negative space is always fertile. 9. No one knows if it was simply a matter of mixed or some other reason why I used to see what I wasn't supposed to see— the ending of things. It wasn’t a mystical gift, but like a blood clot in the darkness of a vein, I held on to reason, as it circulated from the bottom up and not the other way around as we were told. I used to start from the edges and with my left hand or a croupier’s stick gather the balls and dice from the corners and then watch the bettors as neither a winner nor a loser. There's nothing sillier than watching a film in reverse where after the climax, the protagonists are replaced by circumstances, and circumstances replaced by minor characters, their tongues plastered behind a single, fatal smirk Life and my short lunar calendar slipped away like carbon paper sending off as much light as necessary, skipping the details, the contrast and sharp colors. Lunar time is short. Until the actual end, there are years enough, the negative spaces. What to do with them when the verb has already been uttered, a conclusive sentence with Latin syntax, or more than that: didactic.

two divisions. one) knowing. nothing. into. understand. two) something. touched. someone. 1)     sequences outside of the categories labelled ‘telephones’ e.g. the milk arrived. 2)    the things all found a personal vocabulary. every word insulted everyone without looking. 1)    knowing nothing into understand.   and this almost said solemnly was the one that least occurred to me. ii) i sent my heart in the upper pocked or perhaps we made the bed in two seconds after we eliminated the third floor. and nothing else to risk but to hear her drinking.   1) something solemn touched something in the upper pocket. 2) knowing something touched nothing without drinking.  1) (i love onions 2) i told her so one. in one second 2. in two seconds flat the things that change conceal a system of ideas for instance the trains went by to come back on a roll of film they were both standing in the courtyard when i came she was 2)    sitting on the steps in a mans handwriting shutting my eyes to what remains to be said. 1)    an immense silence which had nothing to do with silence. 2)    for a long spell a spell of weeping begins to come.

A man hauling coal in the street is stilled forever. Inside a temple, instead of light a slow shutter lets the darkness in. I see a rat turn a corner running from a man with a chair trying to smash it, see people sleeping at midnight in a Wuhan street on bamboo beds, a dead pig floating, bloated, on water. I see a photograph of a son smiling who two years ago fell off a cliff and his photograph is in each room of the apartment. I meet a woman who had smallpox as a child, was abandoned by her mother but who lived, now has two daughters, a son, a son-in-law; they live in three rooms and watch a color television. I see a man in blue work clothes whose father was a peasant who joined the Communist party early but by the time of the Cultural Revolution had risen in rank and become a target of the Red Guards. I see a woman who tried to kill herself with an acupuncture needle but instead hit a vital point and cured her chronic asthma. A Chinese poet argues that the fundamental difference between East and West is that in the East an individual does not believe himself in control of his fate but yields to it. As a negative reverses light and dark these words are prose accounts of personal tragedy becoming metaphor, an emulsion of silver salts sensitive to light, laughter in the underground bomb shelter converted into a movie theater, lovers in the Summer Palace park.

Back in those days, when he told me about his adventures in sex clubs it wasn't the whys and wherefores but technical details, like going rafting down the Colorado River; and when he wrote about a gay male friend whose first sexual experience was with his stepfather, the friend told him it wasn't weird, but the best possible thing that could have happened . . . I saw then that God, who I never believed in, was dwelling in my heart as a negative: that the negative had been developed into a picture of a man who stares up at the sky on a day so clear he sees through the mountain's shadows to the divinely human-seeming form that climbs it— a neighbor in running shoes and sunglasses jogging up the slope with his dog, tongue panting and slavering, an acute look of happiness in its eyes that could turn at any moment into exhaustion or pain as in a maze of cubicles called Asshole Alley, little pyramids of canvas called Lust of the Pharaohs, different pricing for what you want, depending on the equipment, the air thick with a sour, acidic, head-fogging reek of come. . . . And my pal the poet, who believed in infernal chemistry, in the spirit as a kind of "spooky action at a distance," he communed with this God, this eternally dying father of all matter who made out of our bodies his own maze of cubicles where he hides himself away—his sanctuary Asshole Alley where God's own unholy loves bubble all around him like a cauldron in his ears— and my poet pal heard the bubbling, he stirred the pot, he showed me the holy city, the sexual New Jerusalem that came prepared as a bride adorned for her husband . . . —That was how it was in those days, back when my friend hadn't yet met the coroner who wrote down his cause of death as "polysubstance abuse" that brought on his heart attack while fucking . . . And regardless if I believed, whenever we were together God shone clearer— those were the days when every morning God woke up in a blur of ecstasy and went to bed every night in divine rage. Whoever loved him, he loved. Whoever hated him, he hated back: for who can doubt the vitality of hate or the volatility of love.

NO was a violin, NOT a viola, and NEVER a cello. They were noble instruments, but highly nonconformist. Prickly in personality, if sexy. Wayward. Always went in their own direction. Made odd choices. Loved the difficult. Naysayed the popular. Collectively unified in a single reaction to the mainstream: negative. When they first chanced to come together, they doubted they would ever meld. But the minute they began to make music, they discovered a numinous core to their triangle. They couldn’t see this core, smell it, or touch it—and neither could their slender audience (thirty people on folding chairs in a church). But all felt it was a natural union of sound, nimble and sublime. That night they became the Negativo Trio. Retiring to nestle in the velvet warmth of their cases, they whispered to each other, debriefing and musing in the first of many nightly pajama parties. This very first evening they discovered that what they wanted above all were two things. One was to play their music with the very nacre of its nature, and the other was fame. Night after night they played. Increased their bookings. Recorded. And were downloaded. They raised money to pay off the debt of their obscure choices. On stage they each shone with the patina of centuries: maple, spruce, and willow with an elegant varnish of gum arabic, honey, and the whites of eggs. But they weren’t famous, even though they played a nocturne as if every note were a black pearl. Yet NO, NOT and NEVER did everything everyone advised them to be famous: they networked, they nodded nicely to publicists, they flashed their Negativo news on social media. But the fact was, the trio wasn’t for everybody. “Do you think it’s our name?” NOT the Viola asked. “Would we be more famous as the Nightingale Trio?” “Nope,” said NEVER the Cello. “Negativo has our brio.” And NEVER was right. The three of them played with nerve. The knottier the piece, the better. They made their audiences reach. “We should be sexier,” NO the Violin said. “Naughtier. It’s our propensity for the minor key; we should lighten it up.” But when they played in the minor key, their audiences felt they had arrived at the navel of the universe. The instruments could never give up the minor. Would the Negativos ever learn what the people in the seats knew? The trio wasn’t famous because, well, they kind of unnerved people. You had to have nettle to take them on. Though they certainly wouldn’t have said no to notoriety, eventually they had to admit that they could not surrender their quirks. “We will never be famous,” NEVER said one night after they had nestled in their cases for their midnight debriefing. “I’m nauseous,” said NO extravagantly. “And neglected,” said NOT excessively. “Never,” said NEVER decisively. They would never fill the biggest halls. Or be the first name on the tips of tongues. And with the inverted logic of misplaced dreams, even though they had toured, had notched up review, and had triumphs and fans, and websites and bloggers, and a body of criticism devoted to them, they felt they had reached their nadir. The next morning they couldn’t seem to get up. They lay immobile, as if their velvet-lined cases were coffins. A netherworldly silence descended. The dust of despair drifted through the crack between the case tops and bottoms onto these living dead. Time dragged like a dirty hem. Naught into Nil. Desolation into Dormancy. Dormancy into . . . . . . Rest. Rest into Snoozing. Snoozing into Sleep. Sleep into Healing. The nostrum of sleep lasted until the pinkish light that heralds spring. A noisy nuthatch drilled for insects in a nearby tree. It was a forest sound, yodel-y and ebullient. It awoke the maple and spruce and willow of the Negativo’s constitutions. Their bodies couldn’t help responding to the vernal signal given when spring utters its only word:Nevertheless. If not fame, nevertheless music. “Numbskull nuthatch!” NEVER growled. “Ninny nuthatch,” NO yawned. “Bumptious bird,” NOT shifted, inadvertently jostling the snap to the dusty case. It sprang open. NO unclicked and climbed out, too. And NEVER heaved the lid. They played immediately of course, trying a violin piece by the underrated Nardini. Most thought him a lightweight, but the Negativos gave it their signature interpretation of naked necessity. “Oh it was NOTHING,” they began to say to one another as they did musical favors for themselves, producing scores of synchronicities and the occasional juicy nihilistic dissonance. They buoyed on their notes, as if a midnight Pacific of calm, rich, dark negatives were effused with luminescence. How relieved their listeners were to have them back. Again their audiences were made aware of the noses between their ears. That slight, brief piquancy in the nostrils was the smell of earthly harmony. It came from within the airy column that united the instruments, the nucleus of their refusal to suit. Such accord, though it is as rare as ease, seems like nothing. And so the Negativo Trio was known as a trio’s trio. Not famous, but known. Contrary to the vicissitudes of fame, ease is the path of the known, smooth as the satin of the instruments’ finish. To be recognized, yet not to suffer the disadvantages of fame, is a state so ideal it is the pinnacle of a career. NO, NOT and NEVER had at last woken up to that.

I’ve known rivers: I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I’ve known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.