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Which reminds me of another knock-on-wood memory. I was cycling with a male friend, through a small midwestern town. We came to a 4-way stop and stopped, chatting. As we started again, a rusty old pick-up truck, ignoring the stop sign, hurricaned past scant inches from our front wheels. My partner called, “Hey, that was a 4-way stop!” The truck driver, stringy blond hair a long fringe under his brand-name beer cap, looked back and yelled, “You fucking niggers!” And sped off. My friend and I looked at each other and shook our heads. We remounted our bikes and headed out of town. We were pedaling through a clear blue afternoon between two fields of almost-ripened wheat bordered by cornflowers and Queen Anne’s lace when we heard an unmuffled motor, a honk-honking. We stopped, closed ranks, made fists. It was the same truck. It pulled over. A tall, very much in shape young white guy slid out: greasy jeans, homemade finger tattoos, probably a Marine Corps boot-camp footlockerful of martial arts techniques. “What did you say back there!” he shouted. My friend said, “I said it was a 4-way stop. You went through it.” “And what did I say?” the white guy asked. “You said: ‘You fucking niggers.’” The afternoon froze. “Well,” said the white guy, shoving his hands into his pockets and pushing dirt around with the pointed toe of his boot, “I just want to say I’m sorry.” He climbed back into his truck and drove away.

His last composed poem, "Over My Head," closes with the evening tide coming in as the light fails over Brighton Beach. In the years of The Great Plague, he lived with his mother and brother and wrote the Elegies that remain unpublished, under the eaves in an unfinished room above his mother's late-night television vigil. He wrote to a ghostly laugh-track in the night. Though he cut out and saved lurid, five-color magazine pictures of The South Pacific, The Aegean; though he hoped for a winter crossing by steamer until his final weakness set in, underneath he was a city boy whose poems drifted like a dinghy in small inlets—Gravesend, Rockaway— out too far for safety, in sight of land.

There’s a crack in this glass so fine we can’t see it, and in the blue eye of the candleflame’s needle there’s a dark fleck, a speck of imperfection that could contain, like a microchip, an epic treatise on beauty, except it’s in the eye of the beheld. And at the base of our glass there’s nothing so big as a tiny puddle, but an ooze, a viscous patina like liquefied tarnish. It’s like a text so short it consists only of the author’s signature, which has to stand, like the future, for what might have been: a novel, let’s say, thick with ambiguous life. Its hero forgets his goal as he nears it, so that it’s like rain evaporating in the very sight of parched Saharans on the desert floor. There, by chance, he meets a thirsty and beautiful woman. What a small world!

Because hairs on their speckled daybeds baffle the little bees, foxgloves come out to advertise for rich bumbling hummers, who crawl into their tunnels-of-delight with drunken ease (see Darwin’s chapters on his foxglove summers) plunging over heckles caked with sex-appealing stuff to sip from every hooker its intoxicating liquor and stop it propagating in a corner with itself. And this is how the foxflower keeps its sex life in order. Two anthers—adolescent, in a hurry to dehisce— let fly too soon, so pollen lies in drifts around the floor. Along swims bumbler bee and makes an undercoat of this, reverses, exits, lets it fall by accident next door. So ripeness climbs the bells of Digitalis, flower by flower, undistracted by a Mind, or a Design, or by desire.

Sit still, and hear the last of our sea-sorrow. —The Tempest The only potion I saw him brew was tea of his own blend, a mash of leaves and bark. Good for whatever ailed you was his claim, as if he could see the leaps and falls he’d named “the heart.” Who knows? For argument, just say he had no need, had made me up: one in his likeness, who wouldn’t touch the stuff. Who tried to see a window where he outlined in air its air of distance, ladylike, a pane designed to cut you off from the world of the dunghill and the worm. Who fashioned a cloak of leaves that aped his cape, mine only as magic as waterproof, a screen against the downpour day after day of sun, unlike the one he wrapped in and became no longer Father but some other, a stranger— the island’s only one—the local god, or was it merely King of Somewhere Else? Or mother country, I his colony? He held forth promise of some other isle, no drier but more “cultivated,” not just with crops but with quotation marks. How he held forth, dutiful silence mine to guard. I borrowed foreign names from the remains of a map that washed ashore, my own worn out through under-use. So, Carolina North, or South? Virginia West? As long as I remembered not to answer to “Miranda!”, the call of parent bird to fledgling ingrate, then I was not the heir apparent but your normal castaway, a little bored with ins and outs of tidepools’ smelly courts. Perhaps not world enough, but I had time to watch a hermit crab align himself and back into a vacant whelk and haul the home he wore from rocky A to B. All that watching—watching for what? A sail blown off its course by my uncalled-for sighs? A gorgeous morning, same as yesterday, I in the same old shirt he’d handed down, divining rightly that if it failed to fit, a scabbard’s belt would cinch it as a dress. To the crab’s new quarters a small limpet clung. What did I want to be? What did I know but him, the man who’d loved his subjects less than his library, who’d lost his kingdom, who couldn’t put down a book he’d yet to finish? How close the air remote upon that isle, the like of which I have not breathed again. How it held water, building up a wall by keeping molecules apart. How close those castles, not to be counted on except to rumble, then to wilt late afternoons, all squandered weakness. Whatever I had sensed about my difference I caught from him or from the books he carried in his head. Such dreams he made on me. I am a leaf torn loose from his drowned book. All men are islands, though they swear otherwise. All islands are alike in their unhappiness.

I. Dusk, thus: a shirt drops, the bellybutton rune showing. Clouds are soaked, the sea now iron, muscle-heavy. The pond begins reflecting on astronomy. The fruit wait. The furniture call back their atoms. The tree asks for its leaves. II. Winter brought into the room is the whisk of holly. The purse is a hare limp on the table, its eye gone amber. The birdcage is the work I am after: bold-barred, so no bird leaves. The celadon throat, the iceberg teeth, the matted grass of an armpit . . . A pear, or maybe a stone, the chilled shoulder shifts under cover, not persuaded into similitude. III. In the snail-tracked sky, the mineral grains, a dozen eyes. You tell me thread is for seam and hem, not the mica bead-stitched on the dark. You refuse to have the shards the broom gathered be the moon, seen as aftermath. But like the thimble, I have no guile. So let your window open to the rain coming down, drumming on the hidden shells. IV. Black cherries. Glass of milk on a tablecloth. An arm of bread. The coins. Green scarab beetle. The compact’s sleeping mirror. The fig branch. The sundial. The harlequin leaves. V. Votive-light evening, cipher ridden. The marsh air, and my finger in places. Among the lesser constellations, the fractured kite, the anemone. The geese thread-pulled into the hard sleep. The clothespin, the gold in your hair. The seeds spread are a flung field. I sleep on stone, you on moss. VI. The red-haired figure in the station, the man selling carnations. The scarecrow landscape, the suitcases getting heavier with every stop. Those served as props. I dreamed we each played a part. One of us was given to say: I wanted your distance whispered down small enough for this room. And one to say: I saw you always just a little out of reach, with white hair. VII. A fish-scale moon: who doesn’t want to be left used windsock-hollow? Now for morning: the lit wick of each grass-blade, the saplings like legs of deer, the four walls verifying the house, and the slip of last night’s chive in your teeth.

‘Thirty years ago. And only yesterday,’ says Balázs, slapping at a fly. We sit beside a bottle underneath his vines and watch the football arc between his sons. ‘Check through the corner one,’ the sergeant says, ‘and make it short and sweet. Take a couple of men.’ (Seventeen-year-olds still nervous with a gun.) It’s an office block like most down the derelict street; he keeps a good five metres ahead, tries the rooms along each corridor and beckons the two boys on. They reach the third floor, breathing easier now. The Council Chamber’s here, empty but for a tangle of chairs at the northern window end (unseemly three-day corpses, wooden legs in the air); dried into the floor – blood-stains; and seeping through the shattered panes the distant dialogue of cross-fire. Directly opposite him – another door. He notes the fact an instant before it opens sharply and his counterpart – the hated AVO uniform of green – levels his gun and time is not. They freeze. Somewhere beyond, the seconds slide away; between their eyes the slender lifeline holds across the mirror of air. ‘Döntetlen barátom azt hiszem’: Stalemate I think, my friend. Each slightly lowers his gun and slowly, eyes still locked, takes one step back. The two doors close together, softly as hands on a prayer. ‘Senki sincs ott,’ each says to his men: Nobody there. ‘In Hungary we used to say Néha a második alkalom jön először– sometimes the second chance comes first.’ He’s silent, years away. The day is insubstantial, seems to float in the dry gum-scented heat. Only the football’s thud, steady as the beat of some huge heart, holds us in time and space. He rouses himself to swear: ‘Az anyád, off the kohlrabi,rossz gyerekek,’ then pours us another beer. The head on each glass whispers small talk; we blow the froth into the air.

Ribs ripple skin Up to the nipples— Noah, equipped, knew Every one has two— This ark I am in Embarks my twin

Pixie-dust infusion shoots steady shock through incline— is that crooked or slyster meat tong, grabbing hold of night so as not to pulse so bright past outcome Pardon the excess—it’s a point to make that out of all this dirt comes glass or shiny sheen meant to gloss over rough spots—let’s moan and breathe At one time, so that anything shattered will sound pretty I need to show how I love—sound and vision if I sing and move to what I hear and feel, just for you Well, let’s see if we can match our limbs to the credible—or maybe the possible let’s play again, so that you know what you’re in for, when you save your last dance for glass How clutterdust of me— and here’s where I lose my head over a star system, a horny section ten thousand years older than me

What do we do when we hate our bodies? A good coat helps. Some know how to pull off a hat. And there are paints, lighting, knives, needles, various kinds of resignation, the laugh in the mirror, the lie of saying it doesn’t matter. There is also the company we keep: surgeons and dermatologists, faith healers and instruction-givers, tailors of cashmere and skin who send their bills for holding our shame-red hands, raw from the slipping rope, the same hands with which we tremble ever so slightly, holding novels in bed, concentrating on the organization of pain and joy we say is another mirror, a depth, a conjure in which we might meet someone who says touch me.