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The Magic of Numbers—1 How strange it was to hear the furniture being moved around in the apartment upstairs! I was twenty-six, and you were twenty-two. The Magic of Numbers—2 You asked me if I wanted to run, but I said no and walked on. I was nineteen, and you were seven. The Magic of Numbers—3 Yes, but does X really like us? We were both twenty-seven. The Magic of Numbers—4 You look like Jerry Lewis (1950). The Magic of Numbers—5 Grandfather and grandmother want you to go over to their house for dinner. They were sixty-nine, and I was two and a half. The Magic of Numbers—6 One day when I was twenty-nine years old I met you and nothing happened. The Magic of Numbers—7 No, of course it wasn’t I who came to the library! Brown eyes, flushed cheeks, brown hair. I was twenty-nine, and you were sixteen. The Magic of Numbers—8 After we made love one night in Rockport I went outside and kissed the road I felt so carried away. I was twenty-three, and you were nineteen. The Magic of Numbers—9 I was twenty-nine, and so were you. We had a very passionate time. Everything I read turned into a story about you and me, and everything I did was turned into a poem.

Half clown, half Keebler elf, he works a throng of meth heads and young mothers who peruse the storefronts, tugging surly kids along. The pant legs bunch around his wing-tipped shoes. When a couple walks up to his TV tray, he hands them each a tattered business card. Who wants to see a magic trick today? He grins and cuts a deck: His hands are scarred, but seldom shake. The two confer, agree, and fidget as the magician fans an arc of cherubs laced with flips of filigree. The man inspects them for a crease or mark, but they look clean. I’ve watched him do this trick for weeks now, each time to polite surprise: He hams it up; he lays the charm on thick. (As always, haughty jacks materialize.) The woman smiles and nods in mild content. Another trick: He pulls a wrinkled bill from his lapel and folds the president, explaining how a wise investment will turn one buck into ten—et cetera. He taps twice on the bill, a modest “one,” unfolds it square by square, and then voila!— the bust of Alexander Hamilton. They clap as the magician takes a bow. He’s greasy, but he’s on the up-and-up, and magic tricks are good enough for now. The woman floats a dollar to his cup.

After Jim Steinmeyer’s book “Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear” Over the years they hunted, the wayward apprentice watchmakers, the disappointing sons who transformed their surnames, hunted over acres of hinges, cogs, calluses, hidden whiskey, mustaches a breath from feral, poured an ocean of fortune into fabrications of brass and iron, spent entire seasons strumming massive harps of wire into perfect calibrations of invisibility, prayed to the gods of adjustable mirrors, cursed the gods of temperamental gaslights, broke the legs of imitators and thieves, chewed holes in each other’s pockets, harnessed nightmares of giant silver hoops making endless passes over the bodies of the dead, hoisted high a cenotaph for hundreds of sacrificed rabbits, breathed miles of delicate thread into the lost labyrinths of their lungs, all to make a woman float to make a woman float and none of them ever thought of simply asking her.

marc-antonizes. Somehow it organizes the mob—like so much lead—into rank and file. Somehow it stands us rabble up and makes a row of men stiffen or a rose of lead filings arise. A rose is a rose that arose, a magnetic personality very nearly said. She knew how to draw this one painter to her place in Paris and make him something greater. (She knew how to cube him.) But the magnetic can turn on a dime and go all red like a face of a Rubik’s Cube. In fact, its flip side can repel what it once sucked in— all those friends, Romans, countrymen, cubists.

on turning forty They draw me closer like the hands of one grandmother I kissed upon visiting her in the barrio. The magnets make me look at my waist, wondering why the ache is in the street, houses giving off stinking air, a magnetic field collecting old newspapers, broken-down cars, alleys where the drummer cowers before he beats on his bag of beer cans. I visit the irrigation canal that churns green and flows beyond the streets, wait for the alligator to swim by, the one released from the plaza long ago. I feel the pull toward the mongrel dog, the clicking of the magnets in the church, an attraction for open doorways. * I remove the magnet from my neck, a medal of a denied saint. I will never witness the migration of bats again, stand at the entrance of the caverns as bats shoot out of the opening, the evening bristling with their intelligence. The sky bruises against the horizon of yucca plants erect as magnets surrrounding the cavern, miles of yucca encircling the poles to protect them from the wind that pulls me into the hole. * He tells me to believe what I have seen, insists magnetic force comes from the blade, the woman wanting us to keep something for her. He says magnets are missing metals from an underground wound, a husband’s wrist broken by a slammed car hood, loyal dance of an old couple watching the street. He says tortillas and menudo attract flies. He learned red chili kills all life, insists magnets let him sleep fulfilled, delicious food he fixes long after his wife has died. He cries that the magnets get stronger when he peels the pods to find no difference in the seeds of hunger and the seeds of love. * I climb the rocks because the minerals are there, ascend to where I buried the seashell, rusted can, and pencil twenty-eight years ago. I reach the rocks because I am allowed one mountain, climbing to readjust the magnets. Then, I stand and look down. I clear my chest of a fist encountered up here, set my foot on the humming slab. I move to survive when I touch my heart. I climb higher before deciding to bend and dig.

Ripeness was a semitone below the bone clef of the elbow keying the rain-slicked cyclone fence: the firm, saclike rind of a warped minim, golden drupe note for which we longed. Stone fruit are fine tutors. This one unseals a sensual nose hit. At dusk they go lambent like chunks of bent gloam. Sucked, their fibrous pith is birth-pouf — punk oblong pits belonging in a goblin’s pot, infused with rich static and the fresh electric scratchiti of summer lightning. It’s fortune gave us this softer unit, surely. Edgewise the frangipani made a rain-gap fin for heads rife with fire in the shade of the mango belt.

When he had suckled there, he began to grow: first, he was an infant in her arms, but soon, drinking and drinking at the sweet milk she could not keep from filling her, from pouring into his ravenous mouth, and filling again, miraculous pitcher, mercy feeding its own extinction . . . soon he was huge, towering above her, the landscape, his shadow stealing the color from the fields, even the flowers going gray. And they came like ants, one behind the next, to worship him—huge as he was, and hungry; it was his hunger they admired most of all. So they brought him slaughtered beasts: goats, oxen, bulls, and finally, their own kin whose hunger was a kind of shame to them, a shrinkage; even as his was beautiful to them, magnified, magnificent. The day came when they had nothing left to offer him, having denuded themselves of all in order to enlarge him, in whose shadow they dreamed of light: and that is when the thought began to move, small at first, a whisper, then a buzz, and finally, it broke out into words, so loud they thought it must be prophecy: they would kill him, and all they had lost in his name would return, renewed and fresh with the dew of morning. Hope fed their rage, sharpened their weapons. And who is she, hooded figure, mourner now at the fate of what she fed? And the slow rain, which never ends, who is the father of that? And who are we who speak, as if the world were our diorama—its little figures moved by hidden gears, precious in miniature, tin soldiers, spears the size of pins, perfect replicas, history under glass, dusty, old fashioned, a curiosity that no one any longer wants to see, excited as they are by the new giant, who feeds on air, grows daily on radio waves, in cyberspace, who sows darkness like a desert storm, who blows like a wind through the Boardrooms, who touches the hills, and they smoke.

I was enriched, not casting after marvels, But as one walking in a usual place, Without desert but common eyes and ears, No recourse but to hear, power but to see, Got to love you of grace. Subtle musicians, that could body wind, Or contrive strings to anguish, in conceit Random and artless strung a branch with bells, Fixed in one silver whim, which at a touch Shook and were sweet. And you, you lovely and unpurchased note, One run distraught, and vexing hot and cold To give to the heart’s poor confusion tongue, By chance caught you, and henceforth all unlearned Repeats you gold.

She thinks it wants to kill, this wind, the wind with no mind—a transference to everything out there. Because she needs waking, the howling is meant to wake her, a self crying underneath her sleeping self, the stilted house groaning on the edge. For how many days now this dominating sea? Wind so absolute it rides the rain sideways and up, crashing out far beyond her until the anchor breaks away— waves take possession, smash the boat on concrete pilings. But isn’t this what she came for?

No one would burn your name for not seeing the ant’s careful antennae testing the air next to your shoe, six legs almost rowing it along. Who would be upset if you brushed one off-handedly off your arm, undone by the tiny steps:what do they want