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Not your ordinary ice cream, though the glaze of these skeletal figures affects the disposition of those grinning candies one finds in Mexico, say, at the start of November, though here, each face is troublingly familiar, exhibits the style adopted just as one declines any further style—nectar one sips just as he draws his last, dispassionate breath, becomes citizen of a less earnest electorate. One learns in that city finally how to enjoy a confection, even if a genuine taste for this circumstance has yet to be acquired, even if it is oneself whose sugars and oils now avail a composure which promises never to end, nor to alter.

Seen my lady home las' night, Jump back, honey, jump back. Hel' huh han' an' sque'z it tight, Jump back, honey, jump back. Hyeahd huh sigh a little sigh, Seen a light gleam f'om huh eye, An' a smile go flittin' by — Jump back, honey, jump back. Hyeahd de win' blow thoo de pine, Jump back, honey, jump back. Mockin'-bird was singin' fine, Jump back, honey, jump back. An' my hea't was beatin' so, When I reached my lady's do', Dat I could n't ba' to go — Jump back, honey, jump back. Put my ahm aroun' huh wais', Jump back, honey, jump back. Raised huh lips an' took a tase, Jump back, honey, jump back. Love me, honey, love me true? Love me well ez I love you? An' she answe'd, "'Cose I do"— Jump back, honey, jump back.

The equilibrium of any particular aspect of nature rests on the equivalence of its opposites. —Piet Mondrian Some land lives so water can comb it into grids. This is why lowlands tilt still toward the sea. This so we call our canal leaning horse, hat tempting wind, somewhere a tear in linen where the loom bent a heddle. We plant lapis in the middle of begonia boxes hung from our houseboat’s sills. At night the eels snug against our houseboat’s hum, water’s warm hem. We hear them slip itch into our floor. Our houseboat lilts when the bigger boats slide us waves. Our concrete floats. We’re mostly moored to stay. In the damp bank where the ducks hedge weeds, our bikes sleep. We lean toward wind. Our pant legs thin from all the rain on our knees. From here the horizon gauzes above us. We are half hidden by light. We are folds in fog. We stand open on the deck and beckon the silt to settle. We wait for a balance so grand that any flicker of inverse could pull us up to spires.

Although the depiction of living forms was not explicitly forbidden, the only good news about famines was that the station was empty. It was about 2 A.M. The truck drove away. A tropical insect that lives in enormous cities stroked my hair awkwardly, organizing everyone's schedule. She drove me back to my hotel in a misty and allusive style, while the old schools continued the process of devolution. Part of the roof was loose and flapped noisily in the wind, who needed work like that? Poor brethren, do you have any good prose yet? The New Chinese fiction is getting better, I suspect, people walking and thinking and fussing, with a nest to fly out of, with a less intimate footing. Are we responsible for their playtimes? Keep up your music, my dears; there were a lot of people like that, with strange eyes, green fields and orchards. The little house they sat in produced simple people, cars full of blood, all they needed was a hat, extramusical sounds, purging the emotions. Expect no mercy, I said, from the sickbay. And try to imagine Howard Hughes piloting the plane that flew Cary Grant and Barbara Hutton off toward their marriage in 1950. Well, don't bother. The New Chinese fiction shouldn't concern itself with anything other than a stolen turnip and a coldness in the heart, and a lit window, a young man on a horse appearing and then disappearing.

At last I know—it’s on old ivory jars, Glassed with old miniatures and garnered once with musk. I’ve seen those eyes like smouldering April stars As carp might see them behind their bubbled skies In pale green fishponds—they’re as green your eyes, As lakes themselves, changed to green stone at dusk. At last I know—it’s paned in a crystal hoop On powder-boxes from some dead Italian girl, I’ve seen such eyes grow suddenly dark, and droop Their small, pure lids, as if I’d pried too far In finding you snared there on that ivory jar By crusted motes of rose and smoky-pearl.

In different cities, on different forms of transportation, a woman read Daniel Deronda until the year became the arbitrary pink the calendar chose for the middle of winter. And finally she sat in the reference section of the public library finishing Daniel Deronda for days at a slowing pace between pieces of newspapers and foreign language newspapers whose syntax she enjoyed, not understanding. And when she didn't anymore she wrote in the margins of Daniel Deronda for someone who might never see. Thought of that person who might never see, staring equally at the rain, equally thinking of her and of nothing in particular. Outside the news fell apart. If one chooses to be shallow or noble, or one is born so, and if it matters. Translations are appropriate when Nature is dormant, or when one has nothing to say, or does not know what to say. These are three different things but sometimes they are the same. It is not wrong to want nice things, neither is it wrong to want to be good, or to feel that as a physical force of pleasure: Daniel Deronda, who does not know who he is, who thinks he does, and goes away on a boat. But the cover is a picture of a woman gambling. The air warms outside the reference section, and also the rain. Incomprehensible news. Whenever a book ends, silence, as if a stewardship had ceased. A person can feel the bones of one's hands by stretching them. If love comes again, know better than to speak.

Tossing off expletives into the sea of cab lights, I lounge ever more than I work. I wear my silk pants to the middle-of-America themed bar as if white-collar were this Halloween's hottest new costume. It sinks like a stone, this attention to the lives of others. I think I have evolved to respect my social obligations, only complaining to the cell phone's warm illicit glow. I feel drunk on the whole leafy season when you hear me, working ever to avoid work. Sentiment forbidden by custom, industrialization forbidden by nothing. Down the block they have begun restoring the mid-century antique dresser, men shuffling back and forth with gold polish and sand. It's insane that I care to ask towards its progress. We repeat a process of hoping our bodies to the future though for now mine eats cucumbers in bed. I had a dream about a crystal blue pool. I felt stupid when I saw the ocean.

FOR "I'm leaving you," she said, "for you make me sick." But of course she didn't say that. She thought the "for"; she admired its elegant distance, the way it's wedged like an iron strut between result and cause, the way it's almost "far," and dire as a raised eyebrow. She liked the way it sounds like speaking through a cardboard paper towel tube, using it for a megaphone: not loud, but strong, all those compacted years shoving out the other end, as if she were certain she wanted to be alone. OR The first four bars of Beethoven's sixth, the Pastorale , repeat and repeat, always with variation: or , and or , something to violate expectations, not fully antiphonal, only an oar dipped into the measure to make an interior swirl, pulling the craft slightly to the side, yet ahead, still: little cupped trails alongside to mark where the mind turned, questions were asked, and shed, before moving on, nothing that can't be repaired. NOR As a flower sheds petal after petal, as further tests strip away one after another of the last hopes for a cure, as a person shakes into the waste bin all her cigarettes and goes down the street not knowing who she is, the pure air of saints is achieved by abandonment: Jesus in the garden alone, cold moon disappearing, Buddha at the morning star, mind emptied of its snarl of ignorance. Neither to harden against loss, nor to welcome it. To let it be who you are.

I Driving westward near Niagara, that transfiguring of the waters, I was torn—as moon from orbit by a warping of gravitation— From coercion of the freeway to the cataract’s prodigality, Had to stand there, breathe its rapture, inebriety of the precipice . . . Fingers clamped to iron railings in a tremor of earth’s vibration, I look upstream: foam and boulders wail with a biblical desolation, Tree roots, broken oar, a pier end, wrack of the continent dissolving . . . Braced, like tunnel workers hunching from implosion of locomotives, I look down: to ancient chaos, scrawl of the fog for commentary, Misty scripture—Delphic, Jungian—all mythology in gestation, Mists that chill our face in passing, soar to a mushroom luminescence . . . In between, where halos dazzle—as, on a high wire, spangled dancers— On the brink those waters sluice to, in the devil-may-care insouciance Of their roistering to glory, no forewarning of what impends, till Solid earth dissolves beneath them; all they had banked on once, vacuity . . . Kindled in the hollow wind they flare to a greenish incandescence; Channels they defined so smartly in the gusto of their careening All behind them now; before them, blinding haze and the noon’s diffusion . . . II Ten feet over those, our railing perched on a spur where verge and void—there!— Hiss and arc to touch each other, matter and shadow-matter fuming, We stare through the flow to bedrock, flashing its Kodachrome geology. Images swirl by—real, fancied—bits of hallucinated litter: Gold of oak leaf, taffy wrapper, lavender airmail—assignation? Yellow Kodak pack, pied comics, tissue a crimson lip had stippled (Let’s imagine). Some shows vivid, fresh-shellacked in the river’s sepia, All no sooner seen than vanished—on to the brink, its foaming rotos Hoarse as all earth’s turbines turning in a thunder of synchronicity. How deep toward the edge? waist? shoulder? as through a woozy lens we scan its Floor, old temple tesselation— No, terrain of the moon! Medusa’s Ancient face, and we stare frozen: stony glare in its vipers’ tangle . . . Still a thought returns and troubles: “no forewarning of what impends, till—” Shadow of impends—more menace coiled in the word than fact itself has: Fact erodes in action: Athens, in the arroyos of her theater, Leaned to watch the self-destructing of her blinded grandiosities, Willfulness and Will, a crash course; then, too late for it, anagnorisis; Purged of trivia through immersion in the clotted baths of tragedy, Then she knew and was transfigured by contrarious exaltations . . . III Eyes can’t leave the livid seething, its reiterative Memento! Reading, in this bubble chamber, stuff of the world as effervescence, Reading every life as half-life, reading in foam the one prognosis . . . Mac the trucker—checkered mackinaw, sort of a baseball cap with earflaps, Fists to crinkle up his beer cans—here at the falls is philosophical: “Down the tube. That’s life”—he’s waggish, nudging his cozy blonde—“You know, hon?” And she knows. We all know: Nature, making a splendor of our banalities, Lavishes Niagara on us, nudging our knack for the anagogical . . . Meanwhile, earth itself rolls over, nations caught in its tug of traction, From the brink of noon to darkness (but the grandeur of the transition!) Gone, like taffy wrapper, tissue: ferny world of the stegosaurus, Heraclitus, toe in rivers, Coriolanus in Corioli, Dancing T’ang girl, belles of Bali, kings of France with the Roman numerals, Gone, the fripperies and follies glossed in an Architectural Digest, Halls of mortuary marble, dinky glitz of the rare objet, the Aubusson, netsuke, scrimshaw, Tiffany, Tanagra, Bohara, All things au courant, things current—what a word with the gorge before us!— All our bookshelves, facts in folio, paleontology, agronomy, Jewels from that cluttered dump, statistics— many a scuffed Aladdin’s lamp there: As: one cell’s genetic lore’d fill seventy-five Manhattan phone books; As: for each poor soul among us, many a galaxy out there somewhere, Each of us more precious—rarer!—than a glittering island universe . . . We could catalogue forever; there’s no end to the world’s diversity, All that affluence from somewhere, more than a continent behind it; There’s no diminution either from the torrential cornucopia Since that primal burst of fireworks, first explosion from singularity; All the things, their scree, diluvium—go to the malls for confirmation: Lurid brass shop, teak shop, tech shop, patio ’n’ pool shop, campy duds shop . . . IV Most we’re through with soon enough, but some! how they lacerate the heart—not Savage indignation’s gash—but thrilling, with finer blade, pain’s inmost Nerve: the unsigned card I love you kept in a bureau drawer for decades; Sweater she wore once, that autumn, rich with the campfire musk; then letters, Lavish o, impulsive flourish, “When you’re away, in other cities, It’s their weather reports I look for, first thing in the morning papers . . .” So once the Provençal poet, in his rapture about freid’aura: “Winter winds that blow from your land feel like heaven upon my cheek here . . .” They’ve gone too, Provence and poet, off in the jumble-carts of history, Who was she? that rueful beauty, jewel of the court and joy of kings, who Dying murmured, “Je me regrette!”—wistful dear, with her curls disheveled On that last of all her pillows, feeling the dark impend—“I’ll miss me!” Images swirl by: châteaux that dance in the pool’s hallucination, Fêtes and follies effervescing—champagne, glass, and the hand that held them— Last, herself, the self where soul is, world of her lavalieres and lovers. Did she dream, through mists arising, how on the high wire, floodlit dancer, She had lived her brilliant moment? Hear, as the blood ran hushed, sonorous Thunders of the living river, more than a continent its source? And Not divine—so near the brink where verve like hers and the void meet, seething— Wreathed in opulence of sunset, some transfiguring of the waters?

I am doing laps at night, alone In the indoor pool. Outside It is snowing, but I am warm And weightless, suspended and out Of time like a fly in amber. She is thousands of miles From here, and miles above me, Ghosting the stratosphere, Heading from New York to London. Though it is late, even At that height, I know her light Is on, her window a square Of gold as she reads mysteries Above the Atlantic. I watch The line of black tile on the pool’s Floor, leading me down the lane. If she looks down by moonlight, Under a clear sky, she will see Black water. She will see me Swimming distantly, moving far From shore, suspended with her In flight through the wide gulf As we swim toward land together.