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I'm sitting here on the old patio beside your absence. It is a black well. We'd be playing, now. . . I can hear Mama yell "Boys! Calm down!" We'd laugh, and off I'd go to hide where you'd never look. . . under the stairs, in the hall, the attic. . . Then you'd do the same. Miguel, we were too good at that game. Everything would always end in tears. No one was laughing on that August night you went to hide away again, so late it was almost dawn. But now your brother's through with this hunting and hunting and never finding you. The shadows crowd him. Miguel, will you hurry and show yourself? Mama will only worry.

Mild is the parting year, and sweet The odour of the falling spray; Life passes on more rudely fleet, And balmless is its closing day. I wait its close, I court its gloom, But mourn that never must there fall Or on my breast or on my tomb The tear that would have soothed it all.

What is flat and nothing but skin, What lolls in a shallow world, What is watched for its surface, Between long episodes of water the color of a dead screen’s 
sea-green glass, What has but a few hairs in the snapshot? A bit of muzzle, No more than a pug’s worth for a rented red kayak, For this sailor swallowed by enormous wax lips, What is gray and aporial, Once mistaken for half girl, Half monster, Disappointingly naked and slipping under the hull. —Lido Beach, Fla., November 2013

Peace is the active presence of Justice. The wrinkles on the brown face of the carrying case conform to the buttocks, on which the streaks of water from a five-gallon can dribble on the tailfront of the borrowed shirt he would wear if he could drain the pus from his swaddling bandages, striations of skin tunneling into the photograph. This is no simple mug shot of a runaway boy in a training film, Soweto's pummeled wire, though the turrets of light glisten in smoke, the soft coal hooding his platform entrance, dull and quiet. His father's miner's shoes stand in puddles of polish, the black soot baked into images of brittle torso, an inferno of bullets laid out in a letter bomb, the frontispiece of one sergeant- major blackening his mustache. On the drive to Evaton a blank pass away from Sharpeville where the freehold morgans were bought by a black bishop from Ontario, Canada, on a trek northward from the Cape in 1908, I speak to myself as the woman riding in the backseat talks of this day, her husband's death, twenty-three years ago, run over by an Afrikaner in the wrong passing lane; the passbook on the shoulder of the road leading to Evaton is not the one I have in my hand, and the photograph is not of my great- grandfather, who set sail for Philadelphia in the war year of 1916. He did not want a reception, his letters embarking on a platform at Queenstown where his eloquence struck two Zulu warriors pledged to die in the homelands because they could not spin their own gold. These threaded heads weigh down the ears in design of the warrior, Shaka, indifferent to the ruthless offerings over the dead bodies of his wives, childless in the campaigns with the British, who sit on the ships of the Indian Ocean each kraal shuddering near the borders; her lips turn in profile to the dust rising over a road where his house once stood; one could think of the women carrying firewood as an etching in remembrance to the silence, commencing at Sharpeville, but this is Evaton, where he would come from across the galleyship of spears turning in his robes to a bookmark; it is a good book, the picture of words in the gloss of a photograph, the burned image of the man who wears this image on the tongue of a child, who might hold my hand as we walk in late afternoon into the predestined sun. The press of wrinkles on the blanketed voice of the man who took the train from Johannesburg is flattened in Cape Town, and the history of this book is on a trestle where Gandhi worshipped in Natal, and the Zulu lullaby I cannot sing in Bantu is this song in the body of a passbook and the book passes into a shirt and the back that wears it.

I wanted to go to military school and march, I wanted to grow up and be composed and expert with a rifle, with tactics and fighting, to be safe and courageous among men in barracks and on the battlefield. I wanted to see my arms hairy and corded with muscle at the end of rolled up khaki sleeves. I wanted to flex my feet in boots and look down at the the dust of battles dimming the leather surfaces, the blood slick on the rim of the soles. I wanted the smell of gunpowder in my nostrils, the grime on my face, the washed-out hollow love for my comrades found in the foxholes, the sad understanding, the requiems of late afternoons walking away from the burial site with the widow as she cradled the triangulated flag like a plowblade in her arms.

His mother came (she said) from salt so fed him salt. Raised to wolf white roots and dirt she fed him dirt.

HE has no gift for friendship, for he is void of all curiosity. Or rather, He’s only interested in matters touching the Lord Hamlet himself. He was born in a lab whose walls were lined with giant, steamy jars Of the milk of the various mammals, from the milk of camels to the milk of men. Pig milk, monkey milk, rat milk. Dog and cat milk, and the milk of whales. The milk of the duck-billed platypus and that | of the platitudinous buck. The thick red milk of the vampire bat. And the black milk of the black bear. —A backlit wall of bottles, ranged from commonplace to rare!— There was stallion milk and rooster, anaconda milk and shark; There was tarantula milk, Venus flytrap, and that | of the barking aardvark lark. And he would have been perfectly normal, would have grown up socially adroit, But he stripped the sheet off a drinking straw, took a blade, and shaped a point;— And he syringed into his body a few drops from every jar, Fell in the floor and spoke languages he had never heard before. He spoke Titmouse. He spoke Miaow. He spoke Moo and Gnu and Ha. He spoke three kinds of Chickenhawk and the thirty dialects of Baa. And from that day to this, MARDUD’s been lost in the zoo: A cautionary tale for whoever knows how to read the clues.

You feed us milkfish stew and long grain rice, make us eat blood soup with chili peppers, and frown at us when we lose our appetite. I remember when I was young and you told me of that monsoon: the Japanese Occupation— stories of a time before you met my father, when you learned the language of an occupied city in order to feed your family. You were the pretty one at seventeen, your skin, white as milkfish. The pretty ones, you said, were always given more food— the Japanese soldiers sentried above the loft where you worked dropped sweet yams, and you caught them by the billow of your skirt. I remember you in sepia-brown photographs as a mestiza who equated liberation with Hershey bars and beige nylons from American GIs— and the season of the monsoon as dark as hunger was not about suffering but what you knew of beauty.

Joy to the bridegroom and the bride That lie by one another’s side! O fie upon the virgin beds, No loss is gain but maidenheads. Love quickly send the time may be When I shall deal my rosemary! I long to simper at a feast, To dance, and kiss, and do the rest. When I shall wed, and bedded be O then the qualm comes over me, And tells the sweetness of a theme That I ne’er knew but in a dream. You ladies have the blessed nights, I pine in hope of such delights. And silly damsel only can Milk the cows’ teats and think on man: And sigh and wish to taste and prove The wholesome sillabub of love. Make haste, at once twin-brothers bear; And leave new matter for a star. Women and ships are never shown So fair as when their sails be blown. Then when the midwife hears your moan, I’ll sigh for grief that I have none. And you, dear knight, whose every kiss Reaps the full crop of Cupid’s bliss, Now you have found, confess and tell That single sheets do make up hell. And then so charitable be To get a man to pity me.

I tell myself softly,this is how love begins— the air alive with something inconceivable, seeds of every imaginable possibility floating across the wet grasses, under the thin arms of ferns. It drifts like snow or old ash, settling on the dust of the roadways as you and I descend into thickets, flanked by the fragrance of honeysuckle and white primrose. I recall how my grandmother imagined these wanderers were living beings, some tiny phylum yet to be classified as life. She would say they reminded her of maidens decked in white dresses, waltzing through air. Even after I showed her the pods from which they sprang, blossoming like tiny spiders, she refused to believe. Now, standing beside you in the crowded autumn haze, I watch them flock, emerge from brittle stalks, bursting upon the world as young lovers do—trysting in the tall grasses, resting fingers lightly in tousled hair. Listen, and you can hear them whisper in the rushes, gazing out at us, wondering— what lives are these?