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My eyes catch ruddy necks Sturdily pressed back. All a red-brick moving glint. Like flaming pendulums, hands Swing across the khaki— Mustard coloured khaki— To the automatic feet. We husband the ancient glory In these bared necks and hands. Not broke is the forge of Mars; But a subtler brain beats iron To shoe the hoofs of death. Who pays dynamic air now?— Blind fingers loose an iron cloud To rain immortal darkness On strong eyes.

Under the level winter sky I saw a thousand Christs go by. They sang an idle song and free As they went up to calvary. Careless of eye and coarse of lip, They marched in holiest fellowship. That heaven might heal the world, they gave Their earth-born dreams to deck the grave. With souls unpurged and steadfast breath They supped the sacrament of death. And for each one, far off, apart, Seven swords have rent a woman's heart.

For R. L. B. For all the far-flung continents he'd crossed, Revealing lands they found beyond belief; For all the roads that lay behind him, lost In caverns of some atavistic grief He'd carried with him since he was a boy; For all the years, he should be weary now. How then could he explain this welling joy, A old man on a wintry beach? Or how It seemed the wind bore perfumes of a whole New wilderness, a lush and green Brazil Over the dim horizon of his soul, Farther than memory, beyond his will, Where even now, in vibrant canopies, The twilight songs of bird to hidden bird Rose up in wild, untutored harmonies More lovely for their never being heard.

for Thomas From the five good emperors I have learned that there were five good emperors, From the lemon tree I’ve planted now I know that leaves unpummeled yet will drop, From the clock, the time, it’s five p.m., from the sun the length of day, From Quercus borealis, the queer names of the leaves of all the trees, From burning I’ve learned burning, from the aster family chickory abounds, From hawkweed of the colors bright, from sleeping, of my dreams, From mosquitoes, scratching, from fishes, fishing, from turkeys how to run and how to hop, From erect perennials I’ve learned to reach the shelf, from my cats to lick the dark part of the tin, From the sparrows I’ve learned this and that, from Germanic tribes, to gather thoughts in herds, From the window blinds, from the sun decayed, from the heart, a brimming record braised and turned.

I remember she rented a room on the second floor from Jenny Holtzerman, an Austrian widow. The two women lived on Girard Avenue South, in Kenwood, an elegant suburb of Minneapolis. Any promise of husbands had disappeared long ago. From the kitchen I often remember the jelly smell of a linzer torte. I was in high school and often I eavesdropped. Once, quietly, she said to my mother, “I never knew the love of a man.” She had mentioned having a husband, but during the war they were separated in the chaos of Budapest, and later she lost track of him. Once she showed me her room: the walls were bare with cracks. Her daybed was narrow, barely slept-in. Her room resembled hundreds of scant little rooms around the world, the way it accepted blue and purple-violet detail—on her bureau, no family photographs, instead, playbills autographed by cast members, a calendar tattered, crossed, marked, no jewelry, some coins. Her window sashes warped, her wires shorted and the paint around her doorframe kept chipping off—“like in The Cherry Orchard,” she said, “by Chekhov.” She told a joke in Hungarian to Hannah Tamasek and even I, not knowing a word, laughed. She bowed gently in a mannerism distinctly Viennese and spoke on occasion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She loved the Guthrie Theater, where curtains rose on miniature worlds, preferring memorized dialogue and costumes to something truer. Five feet tall in orthopedic shoes, she limped. Time has a way of rearranging things and I could have most details wrong now, but there was this: during the war, she met a man, whom she gave money to, she did not know the man well, but had trusted him to smuggle her father across the border, the man pocketed the money, bought chocolates for his mistress from Belgium, and placed Margaret’s father on a train to Auschwitz. So it makes sense to me now that simple decisions baffled Margaret. It makes sense to me now that when news reached us of Primo Levi’s suicide, Margaret did not blink. It makes sense to me now that when Dr. Sikorski spoke of fighting in the Warsaw sewers, Margaret said, “I do not believe in God.” Those who saw what they saw grow fewer. Margaret has been dead a long time now. But perhaps you will understand why I chose her, why I have smudged the slow waltz of her smile and added only a few modest blue strokes—here and here. As you leave Margaret behind and turn the page, listen as the page falls back and your hand gently buries her. This is what the past sounds like.

I would have been as great as George Eliot But for an untoward fate. For look at the photograph of me made by Peniwit, Chin resting on hand, and deep-set eyes i Gray, too, and far-searching. But there was the old, old problem: Should it be celibacy, matrimony or unchastity? Then John Slack, the rich druggist, wooed me, Luring me with the promise of leisure for my novel, And I married him, giving birth to eight children, And had no time to write. It was all over with me, anyway, When I ran the needle in my hand While washing the baby's things, And died from lock-jaw, an ironical death. Hear me, ambitious souls, Sex is the curse of life!

I’m a frogman. Naked by the water Under a lean of canvas she’d sewn With a thick paraffin thread, She gestured.When we pulled him From the river His left leg was meal. Crayfish in the hair. The river bottom left his shoulder Layered and crocheted— My sister’s pearl knitting needles Clicking in my head. I told The sheriff I wouldn’t do it again. I knew him once. His Chevy threw a rod. I made it with him On the hood of the old truck. It was out at the dump beyond Yuma. It felt like I had bread crumbs All over my mouth. Wacky with the sun, I sure did it with him enough That afternoon. I didn’t Know it was him who’d drowned. They said it was his cousin. He had a three-cornered scar At the small of his back. And a deposit Of calcium on the tailbone. We’re not much, you know? He was tangled in yellow tree roots, He spun in the currents, A fishhook and line running From his thumb. A whole new ball of wax, I thought. I wanted to be an astronaut. But failed the mathematics Twice in one summer. So I raise Nubian goats. My favorite has a purple manure That comes out like steaming packets Of tobacco mulch. He sprays The shack with his seed— It hasn’t needed paint in three years. I just took my shorts off When you two came down the hill. It’s that rubber suit I wear When I dive into the chute and cave. Sometimes I just feel Like old air in a patched tire. Then, I get my Seagram’s and come out here. You two look married. Not that I care. You wouldn’t believe what I was just thinking— Your husband’s the only living man Left in this country Who knows that I bleach my hair.

The first few years she wore them I didn't even notice the leather's soft tan, and the buckskin laces roughly looped. By the time I paid attention, her feet had already curved the shoes inward, weather had toughened the soft leather, and one lace had broken short. Then I asked where she got those shoes and she said from the Indian store down in Mountain View. Some other time, another year, I asked the name of the Indian store that sold handmade shoes like hers, but she said it went out of business and no store sold mocs with vodka splatters and Yosemite dirt ground in with a little tamale pie, so I couldn't buy shoes like hers anyway. Last summer, laughing and crying together, in the campground at Lake Mendocino, on the night before her youngest son's wedding while the men drank beer and talked of politics and sports, I told her how much I really, really liked those old shoes of hers. So she took them off and gave them to me. Those beat-up, raggedy Kaibab moccasins I wear are stained and worn rough by hard years in my friend's life. I wear them when I need her courage.

One and one make two, the literalist said. So far they've made five billion, said the lateralist, or ten times that, if you count the dead.

Finding an old book on a basement shelf— gray, spine bent—and reading it again, I met my former, unfamiliar, self, some of her notes and scrawls so alien that, though I tried, I couldn't get (behind this gloss or that) back to the time she wrote to guess what experiences she had in mind, the living context of some scribbled note; or see the girl beneath the purple ink who chose this phrase or that to underline, the mood, the boy, that lay behind her thinking— but they were thoughts I recognized as mine; and though there were words I couldn't even read, blobs and cross-outs; and though not a jot remained of her old existence—I agreed with the young annotator's every thought: A clever girl. So what would she see fit to comment on—and what would she have to say about the years that she and I have written since—before we put the book away?