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Pardon us for uttering a handful of words in any language, so cut loose are we from homes, and from His name that is still nameless, blessed be He. We raised a prayer house— that is, we broke new wood for one, but some tough burned it, snarling: “Carve only stones for the dead.” Damp ground, no fire, no psalm we all remember. But tall ships anchor here, and at low tide, people with wheat-colored hair look out to sea, just as we’d searched for land. “Pray if you must,” my father said, “and when prayer fails, a story, if it is all you have, will do.” Months past, we left Recife’s forced-worship laws in the year of their Lord sixteen hundred and fifty-four, for our new world, old-country Amsterdam. Leagues seaward, Spanish pirates slaughtered our scant crew, and all that was left of us (friends wheezed their last while they ragged us on) rose up on deck and tossed our bags in the sea. We watched the wake turn silver: kiddish wine cups, hanging bowls, a candelabrum for the promised altar, carved pointers. Books’ pages curled and sank, prayer shawls ballooned and, soaking, spiraled downward. Just as we stared, again we heard swords clank— a French ship, the Ste. Catherine(her prow had shone gold on a gray horizon), came to our port side and rescued us. In that commotion on deck, we crouched below—not out of fear, I swear, but stunned by luminous words that echoed oddly—beautifully—like lightning flickering through palls of thickset clouds. A jaunty captain rasped to us in hiding: “Where are you bound?” “Amsterdam. Old country.” “Where?” “Amsterdam.” “Antilles?” “No, Amsterdam.” “Yes, yes. Nieuw Am sterdam. I’ll see you get there safely.” He meant well, bless him. Ste. Catherine sailed to land at its tip no larger than a meadow, fanned out at its sides: Manhattan Island. Our new master, Stuyvesant, lashed us with phrases,wheffs, guzzads, that stung but were not fathomed, mercifully, when we came on a Sabbath, more than twenty men, women, a baby born at sea. Still cursing, he let us land, and heard our praise, then disappeared among lank citizens with faded skin who stride to the bay and brood on water that we trust and dread, and listen to tales unstamped by laws and never sacred.

(With the usual.) I In winter I get up at night, And dress by an electric light. In summer, autumn, ay, and spring, I have to do the self-same thing. I have to go to bed and hear Pianos pounding in my ear, And hear the janitor cavort With garbage cans within the court. And does it not seem hard to you That I should have these things to do? Is it not hard for us Manhat- Tan children in a stuffy flat? II It is very nice to think The world is full of food and drink; But, oh, my father says to me They cost all of his salaree. III When I am grown to man’s estate I shall be very proud and great; E’en now I have no reverence, ’Cause I read comic supplements. IV New York is so full of a number of kids I’m sure pretty soon we shall be invalids. V A child should always say what’s true, And speak when he is spoken to; And then, when manhood’s age he strikes, He may be boorish as he likes.

(for Monte Holcroft) These unshaped islands, on the sawyer’s bench, Wait for the chisel of the mind, Green canyons to the south, immense and passive, Penetrated rarely, seeded only By the deer-culler’s shot, or else in the north Tribes of the shark and the octopus, Mangroves, black hair on a boxer’s hand. The founding fathers with their guns and bibles, Botanist, whaler, added bones and names To the land, to us a bridle As if the id were a horse: the swampy towns Like dreamers that struggle to wake, Longing for the poets’ truth And the lover’s pride. Something new and old Explores its own pain, hearing The rain’s choir on curtains of grey moss Or fingers of the Tasman pressing On breasts of hardening sand, as actors Find their own solitude in mirrors, As one who has buried his dead, Able at last to give with an open hand.

Read much; the Mind, which never can be still, If not intent on Good, is prone to Ill. And where bright Thoughts, or Reas’nings just you find, Repose them careful in your inmost Mind. To deck his Chloe’s Bosom thus the Swain With pleasing Toil surveys th’enamel’d Plain, With Care selects each fragrant flow’r he meets, And forms one Garland of their mingled sweets.

Save these words for a while because of something they remind you of although you cannot remember what that is a sense that is part dust and part the light of morning you were about to say a name and it is not there I forget them too I am learning to pray to Perdita to whom I said nothing at the time and now she cannot hear me as far as I know but the day goes on looking the names often change more slowly than the meanings whole families grow up in them and then are gone into the anonymous sky oh Perdita does the hope go on after the names are forgotten and is the pain of the past done when the calling has stopped and those betrayals so long repeated that they are taken for granted as the shepherd does with the sheep

She awoke to find her fishtail clean gone but in the bed with her were two long, cold thingammies. You'd have thought they were tangles of kelp or collops of ham. "They're no doubt taking the piss, it being New Year's Eve. Half the staff legless with drink and the other half playing pranks. Still, this is taking it a bit far." And with that she hurled the two thingammies out of the room. But here's the thing she still doesn't get— why she tumbled out after them arse-over-tip... How she was connected to those two thingammies and how they were connected to her. It was the sister who gave her the wink and let her know what was what. "You have one leg attached to you there and another one underneath that. One leg, two legs... A-one and a-two... Now you have to learn what they can do." In the long months that followed, I wonder if her heart fell the way her arches fell, her instep arches.

You are the problem I propose, My dear, the text my musings glose: I call you for convenience love. By definition you’re a cause Inferred by necessary laws— You are so to the saints above. But in this shadowy lower life I sleep with a terrestrial wife And earthy children I beget. Love is a fiction I must use, A privilege I can abuse, And sometimes something I forget. Now, in the heavenly other place Love is in the eternal mind The luminous form whose shade she is, A ghost discarnate, thought defined. She was so to my early bliss, She is so while I comprehend The forms my senses apprehend, And in the end she will be so. Her whom my hands embrace I kiss, Her whom my mind infers I know. The one exists in time and space And as she was she will not be; The other is in her own grace And is She is eternally. Plato! you shall not plague my life. I married a terrestrial wife. And Hume! she is not mere sensation In sequence of observed relation. She has two forms—ah, thank you, Duns!—, I know her in both ways at once. I knew her, yes, before I knew her, And by both means I must construe her, And none among you shall undo her.

I like to think about the monastery as I’m falling asleep, so that it comes and goes in my mind like a screen saver. I conjure the lake of the zendo, rows of dark boats still unless someone coughs or otherwise ripples the calm. I can hear the four AM slipperiness of sleeping bags as people turn over in their bunks. The ancient bells. When I was first falling in love with Zen, I burned incense called Kyonishiki, “Kyoto Autumn Leaves,” made by the Shoyeido Incense Company, Kyoto, Japan. To me it smelled like earnestness and ether, and I tried to imagine a consciousness ignorant of me. I just now lit a stick of it. I had to run downstairs for some rice to hold it upright in its bowl, which had been empty for a while, a raku bowl with two fingerprints in the clay. It calls up the monastery gate, the massive door demanding I recommit myself in the moments of both its opening and its closing, its weight now mine, I wanted to know what I was, and thought I could find the truth where the floor hurts the knee. I understand no one I consider to be religious. I have no idea what’s meant when someone says they’ve been intimate with a higher power. I seem to have been born without a god receptor. I have fervor but seem to lack even the basic instincts of the many seekers, mostly men, I knew in the monastery, sitting zazen all night, wearing their robes to near-rags boy-stitched back together with unmatched thread, smoothed over their laps and tucked under, unmoving in the long silence, the field of grain ripening, heavy tasseled, field of sentient beings turned toward candles, flowers, the Buddha gleaming like a vivid little sports car from his niche. What is the mind that precedes any sense we could possibly have of ourselves, the mind of self-ignorance? I thought that the divestiture of self could be likened to the divestiture of words, but I was wrong. It’s not the same work. One’s a transparency and one’s an emptiness. Kyonishiki.... Today I’m painting what Mom calls no-colors, grays and browns, evergreens: what’s left of the woods when autumn’s come and gone. And though he died, Dad’s here, still forgetting he’s no longer married to Annie, that his own mother is dead, that he no longer owns a car. I told them not to make any trouble or I’d send them both home. Surprise half inch of snow. What good are words? And what about birches in moonlight, Russell handing me the year’s first chanterelle— Shouldn’t God feel like that? I aspire to “a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration,” as Elizabeth Bishop put it. So who shall I say I am? I’m a prism, an expressive temporary sentience, a pinecone falling. I can hear my teacher saying,No. That misses it.

I scarce believe my love to be so pure As I had thought it was, Because it doth endure Vicissitude, and season, as the grass; Methinks I lied all winter, when I swore My love was infinite, if spring make’ it more. But if medicine, love, which cures all sorrow With more, not only be no quintessence, But mixed of all stuffs paining soul or sense, And of the sun his working vigor borrow, Love’s not so pure, and abstract, as they use To say, which have no mistress but their muse, But as all else, being elemented too, Love sometimes would contemplate, sometimes do. And yet no greater, but more eminent, Love by the spring is grown; As, in the firmament, Stars by the sun are not enlarged, but shown, Gentle love deeds, as blossoms on a bough, From love’s awakened root do bud out now. If, as water stirred more circles be Produced by one, love such additions take, Those, like so many spheres, but one heaven make, For they are all concentric unto thee; And though each spring do add to love new heat, As princes do in time of action get New taxes, and remit them not in peace, No winter shall abate the spring’s increase.

You can read almost anything about angels, how they bite off the heads first, copulate with tigers, tortured Miles Davis until he stuck a mute in his trumpet to torture them back. The pornographic magazines ported into the redwoods. The sweetened breath of the starving. The prize livestock rolls over on her larval young, the wooden dwarf turning in the cogs of the clockworks. I would have a black bra hanging from the shower rod. I would have you up against the refrigerator with its magnets for insurance agents and oyster bars. Miracles, ripped thumbnails, everything a piece of something else, archangelic, shadow-clawed, the frolicking despair of repeating decimals because it never comes out even. Mostly the world is lava’s rhythm, the impurities of darkness sometimes called stars. Mostly the world is assignations, divorces conducted between rooftops. Forever and forever the checkbook unbalanced, the beautiful bodies bent back like paper clips, the discharged blandishing cardboard signs by the exits. Coppers and silvers and radiant traces, gold flecks from our last brush, brushfires. Always they’re espousing accuracy when it’s accident, the arrow not in the aimed-for heart but throat that has the say. There are no transitions, only falls.