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You asked me once, on our way back from the midmorning trip to the spring: “What do you hate, and who do you love?” And I answered, from behind the eyelashes of my surprise, my blood rushing like the shadow cast by a cloud of starlings: “I hate departure . . . I love the spring and the path to the spring, and I worship the middle hours of morning.” And you laughed . . . and the almond tree blossomed and the thicket grew loud with nightingales. . . . A question now four decades old: I salute that question’s answer; and an answer as old as your departure; I salute that answer’s question . . . And today, it’s preposterous, here we are at a friendly airport by the slimmest of chances, and we meet. Ah, Lord! we meet. And here you are asking—again, it’s absolutely preposterous— I recognized you but you didn’t recognize me. “Is it you?!” But you wouldn’t believe it. And suddenly you burst out and asked: “If you’re really you, What do you hate and who do you love?!” And I answered— my blood fleeing the hall, rushing in me like the shadow cast by a cloud of starlings: “I hate departure, and I love the spring, and the path to the spring, and I worship the middle hours of morning.” And you wept, and flowers bowed their heads, and doves in the silk of their sorrow stumbled.

I The grey sea and the long black land; And the yellow half-moon large and low; And the startled little waves that leap In fiery ringlets from their sleep, As I gain the cove with pushing prow, And quench its speed i' the slushy sand. II Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach; Three fields to cross till a farm appears; A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch And blue spurt of a lighted match, And a voice less loud, thro' its joys and fears, Than the two hearts beating each to each!

Time was away and somewhere else, There were two glasses and two chairs And two people with the one pulse (Somebody stopped the moving stairs): Time was away and somewhere else. And they were neither up nor down; The stream’s music did not stop Flowing through heather, limpid brown, Although they sat in a coffee shop And they were neither up nor down. The bell was silent in the air Holding its inverted poise— Between the clang and clang a flower, A brazen calyx of no noise: The bell was silent in the air. The camels crossed the miles of sand That stretched around the cups and plates; The desert was their own, they planned To portion out the stars and dates: The camels crossed the miles of sand. Time was away and somewhere else. The waiter did not come, the clock Forgot them and the radio waltz Came out like water from a rock: Time was away and somewhere else. Her fingers flicked away the ash That bloomed again in tropic trees: Not caring if the markets crash When they had forests such as these, Her fingers flicked away the ash. God or whatever means the Good Be praised that time can stop like this, That what the heart has understood Can verify in the body’s peace God or whatever means the Good. Time was away and she was here And life no longer what it was, The bell was silent in the air And all the room one glow because Time was away and she was here.

He crawls to the edge of the foaming creek He backs up the slab ledge He puts a finger in the water He turns to a trapped pool Puts both hands in the water Puts one foot in the pool Drops pebbles in the pool He slaps the water surface with both hands He cries out, rises up and stands Facing toward the torrent and the mountain Raises up both hands and shouts three times! VI 69, Kai at Sawmill Lake

Old Meg she was a Gipsy, And liv'd upon the Moors: Her bed it was the brown heath turf, And her house was out of doors. Her apples were swart blackberries, Her currants pods o' broom; Her wine was dew of the wild white rose, Her book a churchyard tomb. Her Brothers were the craggy hills, Her Sisters larchen trees— Alone with her great family She liv'd as she did please. No breakfast had she many a morn, No dinner many a noon, And 'stead of supper she would stare Full hard against the Moon. But every morn of woodbine fresh She made her garlanding, And every night the dark glen Yew She wove, and she would sing. And with her fingers old and brown She plaited Mats o' Rushes, And gave them to the Cottagers She met among the Bushes. Old Meg was brave as Margaret Queen And tall as Amazon: An old red blanket cloak she wore; A chip hat had she on. God rest her aged bones somewhere— She died full long agone!

She arrived at the country mansion in a silver limousine. She’d sent out invitations and everything: her name written twice with “&” in the middle, the calligraphy of coupling. She strode down the aisle to “At Last” by Etta James, faced the celebrant like a keen soldier reporting for duty, her voice shaky yet sure. I do. I do. “You may now kiss the mirror.” Applause. Confetti. Every single one of the hundred and forty guests deemed the service “unimprovable.” Especially the vows. So “from the heart.” Her wedding gown was ivory; pointedly off-white, “After all, we’ve shared a bed for thirty-two years,” she quipped in her first speech, “I’m hardly virginal if you know what I mean.” (No one knew exactly what she meant.) Not a soul questioned their devotion. You only had to look at them. Hand cupped in hand. Smiling out of the same eyes. You could sense their secret language, bone-deep, blended blood. Toasts were frequent, tearful. One guest eyed his wife — hovering harmlessly at the bar — and imagined what his life might’ve been if he’d responded, years ago, to that offer in his head: “I’m the only one who will ever truly understand you. Marry me, Derek. I love you. Marry me.”

were the last words of Goethe on his deathbed as the darkness closed around him. But Mayor Licht was also the chief executive of Providence, Rhode Island in the early Eighties. I’m dreaming of the best political commercial of all time— Weimar in the

Humbling of Bhutto in Mecca, Bhutto kissing Hajar-e-Aswad, half the Bhutto cabinet in Ihram, kneeling. These were the first scenes, in the rolling newsreel of half-closed doors, of the doorjamb in the way of the twentieth century’s upstarts. A nationalization, by Bhutto, of religious piety? No, but a headlong scram into obeisance of all and everybody and everything to the stately rise of Islam in the neighboring, overbearing Arabia. That year Bhutto had appointed my father Hajj secretary, and we, the seven children and the ayah, were present at Melody Cinema in full regalia to see, to our amazement, on the screen, our father in Ihram like Bhutto, and in a tent in Mina, sitting on the ground in an ablution scene, the humbling of our mysophobic mother, who before her pilgrimage would have drunk water only from a glass washed three times by a servant and who wouldn't sit on the drawing-room sofa unless it was draped by a freshly laundered sheet.

There was a melon fresh from the garden So ripe the knife slurped As it cut it into six slices. The children were going back to school. Their mother, passing out paper plates, Would not live to see the leaves fall. I remember a hornet, too, that flew in Through the open window Mad to taste the sweet fruit While we ducked and screamed, Covered our heads and faces, And sat laughing after it was gone.

“Who are you to tell us how to live or why, et cetera?”   No Man, of course, and not so tall as is the current fashion, nor smart enough in the acceptable modern way, to enthrall the crowd with stories of my life among the savages where I was home and growing baffled day by day, raging through the night as if it were new music I made, groaing. It came to me today at lunch, the sound of women in the next booth, a voice like Aunt Odile’s—whom I never knew well nor did I like her, but not her spite but her voice like home-grown fame, a touch gravelly, a considerable groan itself, it seemed. They spoke outmoded French around me, never to me, except to taunt, I thought.   She leaned above me, on those visits, speaking to Mother in their private French, laughing.   A boy surrounded by the sound of foreign tongues knowing what wasn’t meant for him:   toy temptations, suggestive coils of syllables. I learned Latin, for Mass, and did love its terrific laddered randomness: The Blessed hovering Virgin above every station of a boy’s new path, hormonal disharmonies, her praises sung into hundreds the first Tuesday of every month: and yet Latin could not expose such shreds of glittering flesh as I found in French, not like the living tongue whose tip twined into an Uncle’s mustache as he leered at the wrong Aunt and winked and a fine distance crystallized loud there, then gone. Crashing like German. Father’s family spoke clear English among the bayous, boys and girls of immigrants accentless happily German through two wars, not counting Civil.   I had the tongue for arithmetic and spoke it beautifully.   I loved to count: precision’s a tempting career, clicking into a future like an abacus ignoring all those accents around. I never learned the luck of any but English, bland and bound. But only yesterday I heard a word the mechanic said in Czech to his cousin—shop rag—clearly centered in a welter of incomprehension, the wreck of my car at their wretched mercies:   shop rag.   And he wiped his hands and cried for me, shrugging like a cousin would. I wrote a check. I drove home, or tried. So does it count?   Am I a man of passion or child of comprehension?   “Father of little lusts driving myself home who thinks:   Buy some sentiment, a little like love and she must speak French this time. She longs for you, you know; it isn’t just the money. America loves you for yourself alone” and so I go for professional help, honey- blond hair and a disposition like a happy banker, whose French for dear sounds like dog; the cost of living is going up, loving her here.