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He strolled from the hill sound of sacred scales. A sheet on his head (arrested for something), they surrounded him, Hera speaking through his mouth kept the lid on his appeal to Caeneus the Lapith, who had been a woman— moon spread on the all edge of standing water, the bleachers where they left the bodies. That was the sedgy day, invisible contagions stretching from our roof on which the fresh trails of spilled pink... to the aquatic plaza, one sandal at a time and the bottom of the room beguiled us, below the carpet covered with sand, where they used to run down the slums. Athena's oak prow, oracular, from the grove at Dodona: the team started the troika. Many leave. One went in. Many Jasons. At some point Orpheus was on that upside-down boat beneath the bridge, but now, through its hull (some planks missing), the ancestral bricks shimmer. Rare is their tide.

Conversations with a Muslim friend 1 So, if you don’t believe in full it means you don’t believe. Words tumble onto the rock. A book happens. Okay then tell me about heaven’s beautiful food and women. Who are these women?

In a drawer I found a map of the world, folded into eighths and then once again and each country bore the wrong name because the map of the world is an orphanage. The edges of the earth had a margin as frayed as the hem of the falling night and a crease moved down toward the center of the earth, halving the identical stars. Every river ran with its thin blue brother out from the heart of a country: there cedars twisted toward the southern sky and reeds plumed eastward like an augur’s pens. No dates on the wrinkles of that broad face, no slow grinding of mountains and sand, for— all at once, like a knife on a whetstone— the map of the world spoke in snakes and tongues. The hard-topped roads of the western suburbs and the distant lights of the capitol each pull away from the yellowed beaches and step into the lost sea of daybreak. The map of the world is a canvas turning away from the painter’s ink-stained hands while the pigments cake in their little glass jars and the brushes grow stiff with forgetting. There is no model, shy and half-undressed, no open window and flickering lamp, yet someone has left this sealed blue letter, this gypsy’s bandana on the darkening Table, each corner held down by a conch shell. What does the body remember at dusk? That the palms of the hands are a map of the world, erased and drawn again and Again, then covered with rivers and earth.

When the sun’s whiteness closes around us Like a noose, It is noon, and Molina squats In the uneven shade of an oleander. He unfolds a map and, with a pencil, Blackens Panama Into a bruise; He dots rain over Bogotá, the city of spiders, And x’s in a mountain range that climbs Like a thermometer Above the stone fence The old never thought to look over. A fog presses over Lima. Brazil is untangled of its rivers. Where there is a smudge, Snow has stitched its cold into the field. Where the river Orinoco cuts east, A new river rises nameless From the open grasses, And Molina calls it his place of birth.

A Schwinn-ride away: Eagledale Plaza. Shopping strip of busted walkways, crooked parking spaces nicked like the lines on the sides of somebody’s mom-barbered head. Anchored by the Piccadilly disco, where a shootout was guaranteed every weekend, those gun claps: coughing stars shot from sideways guns shiny enough to light the way for anyone willing to keep a head up long enough to see. Not me. I bought the Star Map Shirt for 15¢ at the Value Village next to the Piccadilly during the daytime. The shirt was polyester with flyaway collars, outlined in the forgotten astronomies of disco. The shirt’s washed-out points of light: arranged in horse & hero shapes & I rocked it in places neither horse nor hero hung out. Polyester is made from polyethylene & catches fire easily like wings near a thrift store sun. Polyethylene, used in shampoo bottles, gun cases, & those grocery sacks skidding like upended stars across the parking lot. There are more kinds of stars in this universe than salt granules on drive-thru fries. Too many stars, lessening & swelling with each pedal pump away from the Value Village as the electric billboard above flashes first one dui attorney, then another who speaks Spanish so the sky above is constantly chattering, like the biggest disco ball ever.

August, goldenrod blowing. We walk into the graveyard, to find my grandfather’s grave. Ten years ago I came here last, bringing marigolds from the round garden outside the kitchen. I didn’t know you then. We walk among carved names that go with photographs on top of the piano at the farm: Keneston, Wells, Fowler, Batchelder, Buck. We pause at the new grave of Grace Fenton, my grandfather’s sister. Last summer we called on her at the nursing home, eighty-seven, and nodding in a blue housedress. We cannot find my grandfather’s grave. Back at the house where no one lives, we potter and explore the back chamber where everything comes to rest: spinning wheels, pretty boxes, quilts, bottles, books, albums of postcards. Then with a flashlight we descend firm steps to the root cellar—black, cobwebby, huge, with dirt floors and fieldstone walls, and above the walls, holding the hewn sills of the house, enormous granite foundation stones. Past the empty bins for squash, apples, carrots, and potatoes, we discover the shelves for canning, a few pale pints of tomato left, and—what is this?—syrup, maple syrup in a quart jar, syrup my grandfather made twenty-five years ago for the last time. I remember coming to the farm in March in sugaring time, as a small boy. He carried the pails of sap, sixteen-quart buckets, dangling from each end of a wooden yoke that lay across his shoulders, and emptied them into a vat in the saphouse where fire burned day and night for a week. Now the saphouse tilts, nearly to the ground, like someone exhausted to the point of death, and next winter when snow piles three feet thick on the roofs of the cold farm, the saphouse will shudder and slide with the snow to the ground. Today we take my grandfather’s last quart of syrup upstairs, holding it gingerly, and we wash off twenty-five years of dirt, and we pull and pry the lid up, cutting the stiff, dried rubber gasket, and dip our fingers in, you and I both, and taste the sweetness, you for the first time, the sweetness preserved, of a dead man in the kitchen he left when his body slid like anyone’s into the ground.

Geneticist as driver, down the gene codes in, let's say, a topless coupe and you keep expecting bends, real tyre-testers on tight mountain passes, but instead it's dead straight, highway as runway, helix unravelled as vista, as vanishing point. Keep your foot down. This is a finite desert. You move too fast to read it, the order of the rocks, the cacti, roadside weeds, a blur to you. Every hour or so, you pass a shack which passes for a motel here: tidy faded rooms with TVs on for company, the owner pacing out his empty parking lot. And after each motel you hit a sandstorm thick as fog, but agony. Somewhere out there are remnants of our evolution, genes for how to fly south, sense a storm, hunt at night, how to harden your flesh into hide or scales. These are the miles of dead code. Every desert has them. You are on a mission to discover why the human heart still slows when divers break the surface, why mermaids still swim in our dreams.

If I die, you say you will let your hair turn silver, grow long, and you will go into the dark place, for you’ve already begun to forget what Mecca means. Where we come from, you and I, maqam means home, means music; the Qur’an can only be read as a song; a sheikh recites the Fatiha as if he has built a house among the lines, the ayas. We’ve both called our daughters Aya, and when they ask about their name, we play holy verses for them, listen to how the sheikh lingers long enough on each letter, how the audience claps and whistles —Is it Umm Kulthum? our daughters ask. He knows all his maqamat, this sheikh, says God is greater, and Allah, Allah, reply the faithful and the unfaithful alike, for the earth is such a small planet, and look, there is Ithaca, almost always on the horizon — float, my friend. Ithaca —It is rough, but raises good men, says Homer, but oh, the women, the women know how to house the bodies of the drowned. They sing, In the Name of the Cross, of God, the Merciful. A child in Syria has amputated legs because he has ventured into a minefield to eat grass. He still has two eyes, two arms, a mouth.God is greater, is greater, stay with me in the light a little longer. You light two cigarettes at the same time, give me one. Tomorrow you will fly to Lesbos to translate. The refugees will say shai, and you will say tea, home, Mecca, Ithaca, maqam, maqam, maqam.

Petals on a river, a tree in blossom, one pink bud—unopened—falls & is carried downstream & out to sea. From above the other petals seem to carry it. Closer— this is our map, these our footprints, we grew up drinking this water. At the start there was doubt, we lit a torch, no one believed we would make it. Closer— the legs, the heart, the lungs. It's too soon to say we were lucky, it's too soon to say anything until the cloud is pulled back from the sky, until the ringing is pulled back from the bells. Look— everyone we've ever known runs without thinking not away but into the cloud, where we are waiting

it’s a strange time which finds me jogging in early morning the deadness of sleep alive in this world the empty parks filled with unloved strangers buildings grey with solitude now near the end of another decade i am witness to the loss of my twenties a promise invisible i run without purpose far from the north star i run with the sound of barking dogs closing in i have lost count of the miles i am older and nothing much matters or has changed