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Who died and made you Elvis? —Bumper sticker The big rock by my door is a plaster prop, after all. I’m back to hear screams for what I can’t do, couldn’t do forty years ago. Awkward pelvic thrusts fooled the camera and virgins, but I have no more fish- fry tunes left to dress up on brand new plates. This time around, I spend all day singing cracked Mississippi homilies. Why did I want to live forever in the first place? Salvation felt better dead, floating home free while my bones, secret and brown, mingle with old dirt.

It's tough being a guy, having to be gruff and buff, the strong silent type, having to laugh it off—pain, loss, sorrow, betrayal—or leave in a huff and say No big deal, take a ride, listen to enough loud rock and roll that it scours out your head, if not your heart. Or to be called a fag or a poof when you love something or someone, scuffing a shoe across the floor, hiding a smile in a muffler pulled up nose high, an eyebrow raised for the word quaff used in casual conversation—wine, air, oil change at the Jiffy Lube—gulping it down, a joke no one gets. It's rough, yes, the tie around the neck, the starched white cuffs too long, too short, frayed, frilled, rolled up. The self isn't an easy quest for a beast with balls, a cock, proof of something difficult to define or defend. Chief or chef, thief or roofer, serf or sheriff, feet on the earth or aloof. Son, brother, husband, lover, father, they are different from us, except when they fall or stand alone on a wharf.

The ones his age who shook my hand on their way out sent fear along my arm like heroin. These weren’t men mute about their feelings, or what’s a body language for? And I, the glib one, who’d stood with my back to my father’s body and praised the heart that attacked him? I’d made my stab at elegy, the flesh made word: the very spit in my mouth was sour with ruth and eloquence. What could be worse? Silence, the anthem of my father’s new country. And thus this babble, like a dial tone, from our bodies.

Men say they know many things; But lo! they have taken wings, — The arts and sciences, And a thousand appliances; The wind that blows Is all that any body knows.

There's a race of men that don't fit in, A race that can't stay still; So they break the hearts of kith and kin, And they roam the world at will. They range the field and they rove the flood, And they climb the mountain's crest; Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood, And they don't know how to rest. If they just went straight they might go far; They are strong and brave and true; But they're always tired of the things that are, And they want the strange and new. They say: "Could I find my proper groove, What a deep mark I would make!" So they chop and change, and each fresh move Is only a fresh mistake. And each forgets, as he strips and runs With a brilliant, fitful pace, It's the steady, quiet, plodding ones Who win in the lifelong race. And each forgets that his youth has fled, Forgets that his prime is past, Till he stands one day, with a hope that's dead, In the glare of the truth at last. He has failed, he has failed; he has missed his chance; He has just done things by half. Life's been a jolly good joke on him, And now is the time to laugh. Ha, ha! He is one of the Legion Lost; He was never meant to win; He's a rolling stone, and it's bred in the bone; He's a man who won't fit in.

I'm Ramón González Barbagelata from anywhere, from Cucuy, from Paraná, from Rio Turbio, from Oruro, from Maracaibo, from Parral, from Ovalle, from Loconmilla, I'm the poor devil from the poor Third World, I'm the third-class passenger installed, good God! in the lavish whiteness of snow-covered mountains, concealed among orchids of subtle idiosyncrasy. I've arrived at this famous year 2000, and what do I get? With what do I scratch myself? What do I have to do with the three glorious zeros that flaunt themselves over my very own zero, my own non-existence? Pity that brave heart awaiting its call or the man enfolded by warmer love, nothing's left today except my flimsy skeleton, my eyes unhinged, confronting the era's beginning. The era's beginning: are these ruined shacks, these poor schools, these people still in rags and tatters, this cloddish insecurity of my poor families, is all this the day? the century's beginning, the golden door? Well, enough said, I, at least, discreet, as in office, patched and pensive, I proclaim the redundancy of the inaugural: I've arrived here with all my baggage, bad luck and worse jobs, misery always waiting with open arms, the mobilization of people piled up on top of each other, and the manifold geography of hunger.

As a kid sitting in a yellow vinyl booth in the back of Earl’s Tavern, you watch the late-afternoon drunks coming and going, sunlight breaking through the smoky dark as the door opens and closes, and it’s the future flashing ahead like the taillights of a semi as you drop over a rise in the road on your way to Amarillo, bright lights and blonde-haired women, as Billy used to say, slumped over his beer like a snail,make a real man out of you

What of the faith and fire within us Men who march away Ere the barn-cocks say Night is growing gray, Leaving all that here can win us; What of the faith and fire within us Men who march away? Is it a purblind prank, O think you, Friend with the musing eye, Who watch us stepping by With doubt and dolorous sigh? Can much pondering so hoodwink you! Is it a purblind prank, O think you, Friend with the musing eye? Nay. We well see what we are doing, Though some may not see— Dalliers as they be— England's need are we; Her distress would leave us rueing: Nay. We well see what we are doing, Though some may not see! In our heart of hearts believing Victory crowns the just, And that braggarts must Surely bite the dust, Press we to the field ungrieving, In our heart of hearts believing Victory crowns the just. Hence the faith and fire within us Men who march away Ere the barn-cocks say Night is growing gray, Leaving all that here can win us; Hence the faith and fire within us Men who march away.

Up stand six yellow jonquils in a glass/ the stems dark green, paling as they descend into the water/ seen through a thicket of baby’s breath, “a tall herb bearing numerous small, fragrant white flowers.” I have seen snow-drops larger. I bent my face down. To my delight they were convoluted like a rose. They had no smell, their white the grain of Biblical dust, which like the orchid itself is as common as hayseed. Their stems were thin and woody but as tightly compacted as a tree trunk, greenish rubbings showing in spots through the brown; wiry, forked twigs so close, they made an impassable bush which from a distance looked like mist. I could barely escape from that wood of particulars ... the jonquils whose air within was irradiated topaz, silent as in an ear, the stems leaning lightly against the glass, trisecting its inner circle in the water, crossed like reverent hands (ah, the imagination! Benedicite. Enter monks. Oops, sorry! Trespassing on Japanese space. Exit monks and all their lore from grace). I was moved by all this and murmured to my eyes, “Oh, Master!” and became engrossed again in that wood of particulars until I found myself out of character, singing “Tell me why you’ve settled here.” “Because my element is near.” and reflecting, “The eye of man cares. Yes!” But a familiar voice broke into the wood, a shade of mockery in it, and in her smile a fore-knowledge of something playful, something forbidden, something make-believe something saucy, something delicious about to pull me off guard: “Do you want to be my Cupid-o?” In fairness to her it must be said that her freckles are always friendly and that the anticipation of a prank makes them radiate across her face the way dandelions sprout in a field after a summer shower. “What makes you so fresh, my Wife of Bath? What makes you so silly, o bright hen?” “That’s for you to find out, old shoe, old shoe. That’s for you to find out if you can.” “Oh yeah!” (a mock chase and capture). “Commit her into jonquil’s custody. She’ll see a phallus in the pistil. Let her work it off there.” But I was now myself under this stringent force which ended, as real pastorals in time must, in bed, with the great eye of man, rolling.

The fence was down. Out among humid smells and shrill cicadas we walked, the lichened trunks moon-blue, our faces blue and our hands. Led by their bellwether bellies, the sheep had toddled astray. The neighbor farmer's woods or coyotes might have got them, or the far road. I remember the night, the moon-colored grass we waded through to look for them, the oaks tangled and dark, like starting a story midway. We gazed over seed heads to the barn toppled in the homestead orchard. Then we saw the weather of white wool, a cloud in the blue moving without sound as if charmed by the moon beholding them out of bounds. Time has not tightened the wire or righted the barn. The unpruned orchard rots in its meadow and the story unravels, the sunlight creeping back like a song with nobody left to hear it.