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Other than that, all was still — a quiet so quiet that, as if silence were a kind of spell, and words the way to break it, they began speaking. They spoke of many things: sunset as a raft leaving the water in braids behind it; detachment, the soul, obedience; swans rowing at nightfall across a sky filled with snow; what did they wish they could see, that they used to see; to mean no harm, or to not especially, just now, be looking for it; what would they wish not to see, could they stop seeing; courage mattering so much less than not spooking easily — maybe all nerve is; the search-and-rescue map wildflowers make of a field in summer; deserving it, versus asking for it, versus having asked, and been softly turned from. They said it would hurt, and it does.

V. A. There are no doors between the rooms. The archways bore through the house like a tunnel through a mountain. The room one falls into after my parents’ is the largest and serves as two bedrooms divided by an invisible wall. Half of it is my brother’s and the other half my sister and I share, but not at first. Earlier, I have a bed to myself on the side of the room nearest the kitchen. My bed is low and on one side a wooden rail can be dragged up noisily and clicked into place. It is here my little goat wakes me, grabbing the covers off me with her teeth. We play in the empty pig shelter at the far end of the patio while my mother washes clothes in a palangana and throws the soapy water across the concrete, where it steams. But my father is a butcher by profession, and my family has other plans for my goat: a Sunday picnic at the zoo in Havana. The day is huge and blue and breezy. My sister teases me for not eating and says my goat is delicious. I stray away to watch the monkeys. I give one of the monkeys near the fence my banana. As it finishes peeling it meticulously, another monkey appears behind it and shoves the banana into its own mouth. The first monkey turns around, slaps it in the face with the empty peel, but that monkey isn’t sorry and starts jumping and screeching and showing its yellow teeth. For many years, those monkeys are all I can remember about the picnic at the zoo. B. Later, when my sister and I share a bed on the other side of the room, I can see the tall narrow cabinet right inside my parents’ room. My father always puts his hat on top of it as he walks in. And at night, through the mosquito netting, it is a tall thin man wearing a straw hat, lurking just outside the door, watching me in a sinister way. The dead weight of my sister’s habitual leg thrown across my body is no talisman. I have to keep waking myself up, sweaty and tense, to make sure he hasn’t moved any closer.

And then at night, when old, we start having vague pointless scraps of dreams that lead us to this place or that, since even our failing senses insist on outings: and lost friends reappear, sleepwalking through the stupor of surrendered existence. But here too there’s something that’s not unconscious, as when the boatman stops his old ferry along the banks of the Arno, plunges his wooden bailer into the bottom of the boat, and dumps that stale water, gone to grime between the staves, overboard into the river, where it flows again, though the boat is held fast amid the mud and rushes.

for Thomas Edwards Wanning Think of the storm roaming the sky uneasily like a dog looking for a place to sleep in, listen to it growling. Think how they must look now, the mangrove keys lying out there unresponsive to the lightning in dark, coarse-fibred families, where occasionally a heron may undo his head, shake up his feathers, make an uncertain comment when the surrounding water shines. Think of the boulevard and the little palm trees all stuck in rows, suddenly revealed as fistfuls of limp fish-skeletons. It is raining there. The boulevard and its broken sidewalks with weeds in every crack are relieved to be wet, the sea to be freshened. Now the storm goes away again in a series of small, badly lit battle-scenes, each in "Another part of the field." Think of someone sleeping in the bottom of a row-boat tied to a mangrove root or the pile of a bridge; think of him as uninjured, barely disturbed.

I buried my father in the sky. Since then, the birds clean and comb him every morning and pull the blanket up to his chin every night. I buried my father underground. Since then, my ladders only climb down, and all the earth has become a house whose rooms are the hours, whose doors stand open at evening, receiving guest after guest. Sometimes I see past them to the tables spread for a wedding feast. I buried my father in my heart. Now he grows in me, my strange son, my little root who won’t drink milk, little pale foot sunk in unheard-of night, little clock spring newly wet in the fire, little grape, parent to the future wine, a son the fruit of his own son, little father I ransom with my life.

An apple paring curled from the knife wetly down my thumb— and what I had failed to do rightly touching that life next to mine, wearing late afternoon’s numb luminosity, impaled me. A hunter knee-deep in salt marsh, whom Anton Chekov might have set there and then left, back to doctoring, or choked off as too dark, wanton, met the steep flailing of teal, trailed their shrill lift, but stood only, hearing them. Pouring the last tea of an evening, dark amber alive, breathing in quintessence of India, I felt limber bark sheathing the shrub of my life’s tree with root good, but dense, dark, local, raw there, and so in dark woke, the seeing doctor, two simple profiles of linked characters in his air, cruel, good, a pair ample, true across that split yoke, true to its splayed force— simple so rare, though.

—Once more the poem woke me up, the dark poem. I was ready for it; he was sleeping, and across the cabin, the small furnace lit and re-lit itself—the flame a yellow “tongue” again, the metal benignly hard again; and a thousand insects outside called and made me nothing; moonlight streamed inside as if it had been ... I looked around, I thought of the lower wisdom, spirit held by matter: Mary, white as a sand dollar, and Christ, his sticky halo tilted— oh, to get behind it! The world had been created to comprehend itself as matter: table, the torn veils of spiders ... Even consciousness— missing my love— was matter, the metal box of a furnace. As the obligated flame, so burned my life ... What is the meaning of this suffering I asked and the voice—not Christ but between us— said you are the meaning. No no, I replied, That is the shape, what is the meaning. You are the meaning, it said—

She’s with Grandma in front of Grandma’s house, backed by a willow tree, gladiola and roses. Who did she ever want to please? But Grandma seems half-pleased and annoyed. No doubt Mother frowns behind the lens, wants to straighten this sassy face. Maybe laughs, too. Little girl with her mouth wide, tongue out, yelling at the camera. See her little white purse full of treasure, her white sandals? She has things to do, you can tell. Places to explore beyond the frame, and these women picking flowers and taking pictures. Why won’t they let her go?

God is not light upon light, no more than goat is need upon need although there, where it grazes, it is sun upon coat within which ticks and stray-blown feed burrow into the pocked skin of such foul scent covering the underflesh heart that could eat this farmer's grain or the barren mountain's bark high in the solitude of sheer animal peace laid over sheer animal terror. We ask the animal afflicted by its time, its impoverished American meadow that drove it to find birch from which to strip its easy feed to abide with us. It does not need us. We think it needs us. We must forgive God God's story.

The number of corners in the soul can't compare with the universe's dimensions folded neatly into swans. In the soul's space, one word on a thousand pieces of paper the size of cookie fortunes falls from the heavens. At last, the oracular answer, you cry, pawing at the scraps that twirl like seed-pod helicopters. Alas, the window to your soul needs a good scrubbing, so the letters doodle into indecipherables just like every answer that has rained down through history, and you realize, in your little smog of thought that death will simply be the cessation of asking, a thousand cranes unfolding themselves and returning to the trees.