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I had a fascination with your dresses — the greens, brocades, the belted shapes which spoke of you more poignantly than the photos in their careful frames. Your shoes were their own country, the heels, satins, the inexplicable mud — I scraped them with small fingernails, marveling at the gorgeous debris, wishing I had a microscope. I searched your handbags, examined them for signs, evidence — where you were going, where you had been: tickets, lipstick, inked hieroglyphics, a broken comb. I even smelled your stockings, sniffing at the crotches like a dog, frantic for any trace of you, my eyes raking their length, wondering at ladders, searching for clues. My father came upon me once, cross-legged on the floor, his sad smile telling me more than any detection — he took my hand, and closed the door.

My mother sleeps with the Bible open on her pillow; she reads herself to sleep and wakens startled. She listens for her heart: each breath is shallow. For years her hands were quick with thread and needle. She used to sew all night when we were little; now she sleeps with the Bible on her pillow and believes that Jesus understands her sorrow: her children grown, their father frail and brittle; she stitches in her heart, her breathing shallow. Once she even slept fast, rushed tomorrow, mornings full of sunlight, sons and daughters. Now she sleeps alone with the Bible on her pillow and wakes alone and feels the house is hollow, though my father in his blue room stirs and mutters; she listens to him breathe: each breath is shallow. I flutter down the darkened hallway, shadow between their dreams, my mother and my father, asleep in rooms I pass, my breathing shallow. I leave the Bible open on her pillow.

Universe Galaxy Solar System Planet Continent Country State City Me

My mind hovered over my baby, like a raptor, and froze everything it saw. I looked through my own pregnant belly's raw perimeters and found his heart to strike attentive until, helpless with the pound of still more blood, he seemed to settle down. It was my loss to feel like god alone for a new one always listening, to reach inside for his ears to share the flying speech I heard so constantly. Within my grown silence, my sounding, my loud body where the baby turned, my mind learned not to care whether thoughts I felt he noticed with no fear were mine alone—or whether he could hear.

Country people rise early as their distant lights testify. They don’t hold water in common. Each house has a personal source, like a bank account, a stone vault. Some share eggs, some share expertise, and some won’t even wave. A walk for the mail elevates the heart rate. Last November I saw a woman down the road walk out to her mailbox dressed in blaze orange cap to boot, a cautious soul. Bullets can’t read her No Trespassing sign. Strange to think they’re in the air like lead bees with a fatal sting. Our neighbor across the road sits in his kitchen with his rifle handy and the window open. You never know when. Once he shot a trophy with his barrel resting on the sill. He’s in his seventies, born here, joined the Navy, came back. Hard work never hurt a man until suddenly he was another broken tool. His silhouette against the dawn droops as though drought-stricken, each step deliberate, down the driveway to his black mailbox, prying it open. Checking a trap.

Even if you love the racket of ascension, you must know how the power leaves you. And at this pitch who has time for meditation? the sea walled in by buildings. I do miss the quiet, don't you? When I said, "Fuck the deer antlered and hithered in fur," it was because I had seen the faces of presidents balled into a fist. If I were in charge, I would know how to fix the world: free health care or free physicals, at least, and an abiding love for the abstract. When I said, "All of history is saved for us," it was because I scorned the emancipated sky. Does the anthem choke you up? When I asked God if anyone born to slaves would die a slave, He said: "Sure as a rock descending a hillside." That's why I'm not a Christian.

has crawled out of the ocean to carry us from sleep, like sleep, the gray of outer Sunset portending the gray of inner Sunset. And so on. On the N, one should invent intricate fictions for the lives of the passengers: time is a game. Soon we will be underground. But first, the long lush green of Duboce Park, the happiness of dogs! Good-bye now to their owners eyeing one another. Good-bye to the park's locked men's room, where once a man was found dead, his penis shoved into his own mouth. The world continues, the engine of the world the letter N.

To the memory of William Hickey, Esq. Coming out of India with ten thousand a year Exchanged for flesh and temper, a dry Faust Whose devil barters with digestion, has he paid dear For dipping his fingers in the Roc’s valley? Who knows? It’s certain that he owns a rage, A face like shark-skin, full of Yellow Jack, And that unreckoning tyranny of age That calls for turtles’ eggs in Twickenham. Sometimes, by moonlight, in a barge he’ll float Whilst hirelings blow their skulking flageolets, Served by a Rajah in a golden coat With pigeon-pie . . . Madeira . . . and Madeira . . . Or in his Bon de Paris with silver frogs He rolls puff-bellied in an equipage, Elegant chariot, through a gulf of fogs To dine on dolphin-steak with Post-Captains. Who knows? There are worse things than steak, perhaps, Worse things than oyster-sauces and tureens And worlds of provender like painted maps Pricked out with ports of claret and pitchcocked eels, And hubbubs of billiard-matches, burnt champagne, Beautiful ladies ‘of the establishment’ Always in tempers, or melting out again, Bailiffs and Burgundy and writs of judgment— Thus to inhabit huge, lugubrious halls Damp with the steam of entrees, glazed with smoke, Raw drinking, greasy eating, bussing and brawls, Drinking and eating and bursting into bed-chambers. But, in the end, one says farewell to them; And if he’d curse to-day—God damn your blood!— Even his curses I’d not altogether condemn, Not altogether scorn; and if phantoms ate— Hickey, I’d say, sit down, pull up, set to: Here’s knife and fork, there’s wine, and there’s a barmaid. Let us submerge ourselves in onion-soup, Anything but this ‘damned profession of writing.’

The wallful of quoted passages from his work, with the requisite specimens pinned next to their literary cameo appearances, was too good a temptation to resist, and if the curator couldn’t, why should we? The prose dipped and shimmered and the “flies,” as I heard a buff call them, stood at lurid attention on their pins. If you love to read and look, you could be happy a month in that small room. One of the Nabokov photos I’d never seen: he’s writing (left-handed! why did I never trouble to find out?) at his stand-up desk in the hotel apartment in Montreux. The picture’s mostly of his back and the small wedge of face that shows brims with indifference to anything not on the page. The window’s shut. A tiny lamp trails a veil of light over the page, too far away for us to read. We also liked the chest of specimen drawers labeled, as if for apprentice Freudians, “Genitalia,” wherein languished in phials the thousands he examined for his monograph on the Lycaenidae, the silver-studded Blues. And there in the center of the room a carillon of Blues rang mutely out. There must have been three hundred of them. Amanda’s Blue was there, and the Chalk Hill Blue, the Karner Blue (Lycaeides melissa samuelis Nabokov), a Violet-Tinged Copper, the Mourning Cloak, an Echo Azure, the White-Lined Green Hairstreak, the Cretan Argus (known only from Mt. Ida: in the series Nabokov did on this beauty he noted for each specimen the altitude at which it had been taken), and as the ads and lovers say, “and much, much more.” The stilled belle of the tower was a Lycaeides melissa melissa. No doubt it’s an accident Melissa rhymes, sort of, with Lolita, The scant hour we could lavish on the Blues flew by, and we improvised a path through cars and slush and boot-high berms of mud-blurred snow to wherever we went next. I must have been mute, or whatever I said won from silence nothing it mourned to lose. I was back in that small room, vast by love of each flickering detail, each genital dusting to nothing, the turn, like a worm’s or caterpillar’s, of each phrase. I stood up to my ankles in sludge pooled over a stopped sewer grate and thought— wouldn’t you know it—about love and art: you can be ruined (“rurnt,” as we said in south- western Ohio) by a book or improved by a butterfly. You can dodder in the slop, septic with a rage not for order but for the love the senses bear for what they do, for detail that’s never annexed, like a reluctant crumb to a vacuum cleaner, to a coherence. You can be bead after bead on perception’s rosary. This is the sweet ache that hurts most, the way desire burns bluely at its phosphorescent core: just as you’re having what you wanted most, you want it more and more until that’s more than you, or it, or both of you, can bear.

1. Balak in Hebrew (devastator)—King of Moab son of Zippor (sparrow), meaning he who was always running away into the desert as the Israelites were fast on his back. Angry, humiliated, full of vinegar and sap, looking for the diviner. 2. Balak (in Turkish, eccentric variant) meaning baby buffalo— something forging Anatolian rivers, Armenian fossil of the word, flushed downstream. 3. Who drowned wading in the reeds of the Ararat plain? There the sky is cochineal. There the chapel windows open to raw umber and twisted goats. There the obsidian glistens and the hawks eat out your eyes. 4. If you thought of diaspora, you were thinking of emerald stones. If you thought of the marshes of snails and magenta bugs, you were wading in the reeds. Ur: like rolling a good Merlot on the palate till it runnels up the nose. Ah: breath of the unknown. Tu: also, everything, self and side of mountain. The soul sweats. The blue knifes the canyon. In a cave, a man lived on herbs and water; the sky’s grisaille was a visitation; the leaves were out of toot sin Jants; the angels were alpha and omega— 5. This road goes north— no need to ask where you are, sentimental pop songs are stuck in the CD shuffle there’s a valley, a river, a smoking something— if you ask what color is the sky can anyone say—cloudless, clotted, open?