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Escape me? Never— Beloved! While I am I, and you are you, So long as the world contains us both, Me the loving and you the loth, While the one eludes, must the other pursue. My life is a fault at last, I fear: It seems too much like a fate, indeed! Though I do my best I shall scarce succeed. But what if I fail of my purpose here? It is but to keep the nerves at strain, To dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall, And, baffled, get up and begin again,— So the chase takes up one's life, that's all. While, look but once from your farthest bound At me so deep in the dust and dark, No sooner the old hope goes to ground Than a new one, straight to the self-same mark, I shape me— Ever Removed!

Dinner finished, wine in hand, in a vaguely competitive spirit of disclosure, we trail Google Earth's invisible pervert through the streets of our hometowns, but find them shabbier, or grossly contemporized, denuded of childhood's native flora, stuccoed or in some other way hostile to the historical reenactments we expect of our former settings. What sadness in the disused curling rinks, their illegal basement bars imploding, in the seed of a Walmart sprouting in the demographic, in Street View's perpetual noon. With pale and bloated production values, hits of AM radio rise to the surface of a network of social relations long obsolete. We sense a loss of rapport. But how sweet the persistence of angle parking! Would we burn these places rather than see them change, or just happily burn them, the sites of wreckage from which we staggered with our formative injuries into the rest of our lives. They cannot be consigned to the fourfold, though the age we were belongs to someone else. Like our old house. Look what they've done to it. Who thought this would be fun? A concert, then, YouTube from those inconceivable days before YouTube, an era boarded over like a bankrupt country store, cans still on its shelves, so hastily did we leave it. How beautiful they are in their poncey clothes, their youthful higher registers, fullscreen, two of them dead now. Is this eternity? Encore, applause, encore; it's almost like being there.

and remote, and useful, if only to itself. Take the fly, angel of the ordinary house, laying its bright eggs on the trash, pressing each jewel out delicately along a crust of buttered toast. Bagged, the whole mess travels to the nearest dump where other flies have gathered, singing over stained newsprint and reeking fruit. Rapt on air they execute an intricate ballet above the clashing pirouettes of heavy machinery. They hum with life. While inside rumpled sacks pure white maggots writhe and spiral from a rip, a tear-shaped hole that drools and drips a living froth onto the buried earth. The warm days pass, gulls scree and pitch, rats manage the crevices, feral cats abandon their litters for a morsel of torn fur, stranded dogs roam open fields, sniff the fragrant edges, a tossed lacework of bones and shredded flesh. And the maggots tumble at the center, ripening, husks membrane-thin, embryos darkening and shifting within, wings curled and wet, the open air pungent and ready to receive them in their fecund iridescence. And so, of our homely hosts, a bag of jewels is born again into the world. Come, lost children of the sun-drenched kitchen, your parents soundly sleep along the windowsill, content, wings at rest, nestled in against the warm glass. Everywhere the good life oozes from the useless waste we make when we create—our streets teem with human young, rafts of pigeons streaming over the squirrel-burdened trees. If there is a purpose, maybe there are too many of us to see it, though we can, from a distance, hear the dull thrum of generation's industry, feel its fleshly wheel churn the fire inside us, pushing the world forward toward its ragged edge, rushing like a swollen river into multitude and rank disorder. Such abundance. We are gorged, engorging, and gorgeous.

Henry from the island of Jamaica Jamaican digging crews have to sleep eighty men to a room, in huge warehouses like the ones where big wooden crates of dynamite are stored. My hands feel like scorpion claws, clamped on to a hard hard shovel all day, then curled into fists at night. At dawn, the steaming labor trains deliver us by the thousands, down into that snake pit where we dig until my muscles feel as weak as water and my backbone is like shattered glass. But only half the day is over. At lunchtime, we see sunburned American engineers and foremen eating at tables, in shady tents with the flaps left open, so that we have to watch how they sit on nice chairs, looking restful. We also watch the medium-dark Spanish men, relaxing as they sit on their train tracks, grinning as if they know secrets. We have no place to sit. Not even a stool. So we stand, plates in hand, uncomfortable and undignified. Back home, I used to dream of saving enough Panama money to buy a bit of good farmland for Momma and my little brothers and sisters, so that we would all have plenty to eat. Now all I want is a chair. And food with some spice. And fair treatment. Justice.

Ugliest little boy that everyone ever saw. That is what everyone said. Even to his mother it was apparent— when the blue-aproned nurse came into the northeast end of the maternity ward bearing his squeals and plump bottom looped up in a scant receiving blanket, bending, to pass the bundle carefully into the waiting mother-hands—that this was no cute little ugliness, no sly baby waywardness that was going to inch away as would baby fat, baby curl, and baby spot-rash. The pendulous lip, the branching ears, the eyes so wide and wild, the vague unvibrant brown of the skin, and, most disturbing, the great head. These components of That Look bespoke the sure fibre. The deep grain. His father could not bear the sight of him. His mother high-piled her pretty dyed hair and put him among her hairpins and sweethearts, dance slippers, torn paper roses. He was not less than these, he was not more. As the little Lincoln grew, uglily upward and out, he began to understand that something was wrong. His little ways of trying to please his father, the bringing of matches, the jumping aside at warning sound of oh-so-large and rushing stride, the smile that gave and gave and gave—Unsuccessful! Even Christmases and Easters were spoiled. He would be sitting at the family feasting table, really delighting in the displays of mashed potatoes and the rich golden fat-crust of the ham or the festive fowl, when he would look up and find somebody feeling indignant about him. What a pity what a pity. No love for one so loving. The little Lincoln loved Everybody. Ants. The changing caterpillar. His much-missing mother. His kindergarten teacher. His kindergarten teacher—whose concern for him was composed of one part sympathy and two parts repulsion. The others ran up with their little drawings. He ran up with his. She tried to be as pleasant with him as with others, but it was difficult. For she was all pretty! all daintiness, all tiny vanilla, with blue eyes and fluffy sun-hair. One afternoon she saw him in the hall looking bleak against the wall. It was strange because the bell had long since rung and no other child was in sight. Pity flooded her. She buttoned her gloves and suggested cheerfully that she walk him home. She started out bravely, holding him by the hand. But she had not walked far before she regretted it. The little monkey. Must everyone look? And clutching her hand like that. . . . Literally pinching it. . . . At seven, the little Lincoln loved the brother and sister who moved next door. Handsome. Well- dressed. Charitable, often, to him. They enjoyed him because he was resourceful, made up games, told stories. But when their More Acceptable friends came they turned their handsome backs on him. He hated himself for his feeling of well-being when with them despite— Everything. He spent much time looking at himself in mirrors. What could be done? But there was no shrinking his head. There was no binding his ears. “Don’t touch me!” cried the little fairy-like being in the playground. Her name was Nerissa. The many children were playing tag, but when he caught her, she recoiled, jerked free and ran. It was like all the rainbow that ever was, going off forever, all, all the sparklings in the sunset west. One day, while he was yet seven, a thing happened. In the down-town movies with his mother a white man in the seat beside him whispered loudly to a companion, and pointed at the little Linc. “THERE! That’s the kind I’ve been wanting to show you! One of the best examples of the specie. Not like those diluted Negroes you see so much of on the streets these days, but the real thing. Black, ugly, and odd. You can see the savagery. The blunt blankness. That is the real thing.” His mother—her hair had never looked so red around the dark brown velvet of her face—jumped up, shrieked “Go to—” She did not finish. She yanked to his feet the little Lincoln, who was sitting there staring in fascination at his assessor. At the author of his new idea. All the way home he was happy. Of course, he had not liked the word “ugly.” But, after all, should he not be used to that by now? What had struck him, among words and meanings he could little understand, was the phrase “the real thing.” He didn’t know quite why, but he liked that. He liked that very much. When he was hurt, too much stared at— too much left alone—he thought about that. He told himself “After all, I’m the real thing.” It comforted him.

I’ve been excited about him as an individual. I’ve met him as a person, emerging from his own shadow. Indeed it is remarkable. Indeed it is to be remarked of my friend Savage that the desolation of hopes not merely deferred but by impracticability brutalized little marred his genial spirit. How such a one, so circumstanced by parentage— the mother crippled by disappointment; the father by rotgut and Percodan— as to blight his prospects, and blacken with untimely frost the buds of those ambitions justly excited by manifest powers, graces, and propensities, should nonetheless display discrimination not inferior to those we deem wise, sympathy judicious and above reproach, is cause for a wonder neither cynicism can besmirch nor incredulity subvert. In and out of juvie, jacking cars at fifteen, snorting lines of Adderall, his nostrils stained blue, kicked out, taken back, kicked out, busted, paroled, busted again, straining to reach the shiny object fallen through the grate, tantalizing, just beyond his fingers, finding and losing God, thinking as he rakes the leaves of the linden tree outside the sublet bungalow that eating, sleeping, dying are what it’s all about, nothing else, maybe a few sunsets, forget about sex.

Down the street, someone must be praying, and though I don’t Go there anymore, I want to at times, to hear the diction And the tone, though the English pronoun for God is obsolete— What goes on is devotion, which wouldn’t change if I heard: The polished sermon, the upright’s arpeggios of vacant notes. What else could unite widows, bankers, children, and ghosts? And those faces are so good as they tilt their smiles upward To the rostrum that represents law, and the minister who Represents God beams like the white palm of the good hand Of Christ raised behind the baptistry to signal the multitude, Which I am not among, though I feel the abundance of calm And know the beatitude so well I do not have to imagine it, Or the polite old ones who gather after the service to chat, Or the ritual linen of Sunday tables that are already set. More than any other days, Sundays stand in unvarying rows That beg attention: there is that studied verisimilitude Of sanctuary, so even mud and bitten weeds look dressed up For some eye in the distant past, some remote kingdom Where the pastures are crossed by thoroughly symbolic rivers. That is why the syntax of prayers is so often reversed, Aimed toward the dead who clearly have not gone ahead But returned to prior things, a vista of angels and sheep, A desert where men in robes and sandals gather by a tree. Hushed stores, all day that sense a bell is about to ring— I recognized it, waking up, before I weighed the bulk of news Or saw Saturday night’s cars parked randomly along the curb, And though I had no prayer, I wanted to offer something Or ask for something, perhaps out of habit, but as the past Must always be honored unconsciously, formally, and persists On this first and singular day, though I think of it as last.

1 Did I say I was a creature of habit? I meant the opposite. I meant behavior is a pile of clothes I might or might not wear. Before all the sowing and reaping could go on for centuries, before the calendar, I must have been convinced that my movements were both mandated and blessed. 2 I've never been an old woman knitting by a fire but I've played one in images where it meant being foolish or wise, a mistress of distraction's indirection. To rock while entwining is life's work, but I am reckless, restless

After you've been to bed together for the first time, without the advantage or disadvantage of any prior acquaintance, the other party very often says to you, Tell me about yourself, I want to know all about you, what's your story? And you think maybe they really and truly do sincerely want to know your life story, and so you light up a cigarette and begin to tell it to them, the two of you lying together in completely relaxed positions like a pair of rag dolls a bored child dropped on a bed. You tell them your story, or as much of your story as time or a fair degree of prudence allows, and they say, Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, each time a little more faintly, until the oh is just an audible breath, and then of course there's some interruption. Slow room service comes up with a bowl of melting ice cubes, or one of you rises to pee and gaze at himself with the mild astonishment in the bathroom mirror. And then, the first thing you know, before you've had time to pick up where you left off with your enthralling life story, they're telling you their life story, exactly as they'd intended to all along, and you're saying, Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, each time a little more faintly, the vowel at last becoming no more than an audible sigh, as the elevator, halfway down the corridor and a turn to the left, draws one last, long, deep breath of exhaustion and stops breathing forever. Then? Well, one of you falls asleep and the other one does likewise with a lighted cigarette in his mouth, and that's how people burn to death in hotel rooms.

In a stable of boats I lie still, From all sleeping children hidden. The leap of a fish from its shadow Makes the whole lake instantly tremble. With my foot on the water, I feel The moon outside Take on the utmost of its power. I rise and go out through the boats. I set my broad sole upon silver, On the skin of the sky, on the moonlight, Stepping outward from earth onto water In quest of the miracle This village of children believed That I could perform as I dived For one who had sunk from my sight. I saw his cropped haircut go under. I leapt, and my steep body flashed Once, in the sun. Dark drew all the light from my eyes. Like a man who explores his death By the pull of his slow-moving shoulders, I hung head down in the cold, Wide-eyed, contained, and alone Among the weeds, And my fingertips turned into stone From clutching immovable blackness. Time after time I leapt upward Exploding in breath, and fell back From the change in the children’s faces At my defeat. Beneath them I swam to the boathouse With only my life in my arms To wait for the lake to shine back At the risen moon with such power That my steps on the light of the ripples Might be sustained. Beneath me is nothing but brightness Like the ghost of a snowfield in summer. As I move toward the center of the lake, Which is also the center of the moon, I am thinking of how I may be The savior of one Who has already died in my care. The dark trees fade from around me. The moon’s dust hovers together. I call softly out, and the child’s Voice answers through blinding water. Patiently, slowly, He rises, dilating to break The surface of stone with his forehead. He is one I do not remember Having ever seen in his life. The ground I stand on is trembling Upon his smile. I wash the black mud from my hands. On a light given off by the grave I kneel in the quick of the moon At the heart of a distant forest And hold in my arms a child Of water, water, water.