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And the dead man was sick with sorrow and his flesh wasted away and his pale lips ate back from his mouth and his teeth were bared in a base grin. And the man tore from his face the grin and there underneath it rose a chortling.

Shmerl sells to Berl, and Berl buys from Getzl. And inside of them all like a hole inside the bagel is death, also known as Detzl. And the dead man lay in the cart pale with shame and helplessness, and diapered like an infant in his diapers without trousers and without underpants. And his lips taut in a twist of disgrace: I can no longer satisfy a woman.

And one more desire the dead man had left to be taken to his father’s bosom and hide his crumbling face and weep with his arms round the neck of his progenitor that’s rotting. And the laughing gold skull of his father refrained: I too had a father and I too yearned.

And the man said, what has the dead man left if not to be philosophical, I’ve plenty of time here at my disposal to solve the deep meaning of it all. The man peeked in himself and knew in this life there is no riddle.

One stood among the violets listening to a bird. One went to the toilet and was struck by the moon. One felt hopeless until a trumpet crash, and then lo, he became a diamond. I have a shovel. Can I turn it into a poem? On my stove I’m boiling some milk thistle. I hope it will turn into a winged thesis before you stop reading. Look, I’m topless! Listen: approaching hooves! One drowned in a swimming pool. One removed his shoes and yearned off a bridge. One lives with Alzheimer’s in a state facility, spittle in his white beard. It turns out words are no help. But here I am with my shovel digging like a fool beside the spilth and splosh of the ungirdled sea. I can’t stop. The horses are coming, the thieves. I still haven’t found lasting love. I still want to hear viols in the little beach hotel that’s torn down and gone. I want to see again the fish schooling and glittering like a veil where the waves shove against the breakwater. Gone is the girl in her white slip testing the chill with one bare foot. It’s too cold, but she goes in, so carefully, oh.

After the offending bit is popped out these tiny stitches on your neck are exquisite. Lips of the slit don’t speak the way you think they should, break into stupid song, blow kisses at the doctor. Some piece that kept insisting on itself will spend a few weeks in a jar on holiday with strangers, stained and diced and separated neatly from its secrets. You can only wait, reading your book about the sex lives of the saints, the lance that pierced and then pulled slowly out of Saint Teresa’s heart. A slice is venerated in Milan, they say, an arm in Lisbon, a single breast in Rome; but her heart’s enthroned behind the convent walls at Avila. Pink under glass, it wears a tiny crown.

Surely there are teeth so small. I have listened for their turning, this frail swell and fall like old blood yearning upwards through the skin of days. Slowly, I am learning their count, though numbers fray in me, and the loaded instants graft, coming always to the same tangle: the distant cry merging with the song at hand, the rain’s insistent opening in daylong dryness, the plain moon draining into dawn. And below it all, hewn from the pliant light of some Geneva noon, they spin time’s thrum. Stopped, I have bent my ears to them. I have become sound inside their years. Surely I have known the whole of grief and grace in gears.

I had my quiet time early in the morning Eating Almond Joys with Mother. We’d sit on the back porch and talk to God. We really had a good time. Later on, I’d sort baseball cards Or look for bottles. In the afternoon I’d shoot blackbirds. Jimmy would go by the house for ice water And make the truck backfire. Oh, I really liked that. That was the reason he did it. In the evening the cottontails ran across the groves. I shot one and put him in the backseat. He went to the bathroom. Jimmy said I knocked the shit out of him. At night we would listen to the ballgame. Then to the Hoss Man. Jimmy liked “Take Out Some Insurance On Me Baby” by Jimmy Reed.

If this is Wednesday, write Lazartigues, return library books, pick up passport form, cancel the paper. If this is Wednesday, mail B her flyers and K her shirts. Last thing I asked as I walked K to her car, “You sure you have everything?” “Oh yes,” she smiled, as she squalled off. Whole wardrobe in front closet. Go to Morrison’s for paint samples, that’s where housepainter has account (near Pier One), swing by Gano St. for another bunch of hydroponic lettuce. Stop at cleaners if there’s parking. Pap smear at 4. After last month with B’s ear infections, can’t bear sitting in damn doctor’s office. Never a magazine or picture on the wall worth looking at. Pack a book. Ever since B born, nothing comes clear. My mind like a mirror that’s been in a fire. Does this happen to the others. If this is Wednesday, meet Moss at the house at noon. Pick B up first, call sitter about Friday evening. If she prefers, can bring B to her (hope she keeps the apartment warmer this year). Need coat hooks and picture hangers for office. Should take car in for air filter, oil change. F said one of back tires low. Don’t forget car payment, late last two months in a row. If this is Wednesday, there’s a demo on the green at 11. Took B to his first down at Quonset Point in August. Blue skies. Boston collective provided good grub for all. Long column of denims and flannel shirts. Smell of patchouli made me so wistful, wanted to buy a woodstove, prop my feet up, share a J and a pot of Constant Comment with a friend. Maybe some zucchini bread. Meet with honors students from 1 to 4. At the community college I tried to incite them to poetry. Convince them this line of work, beat the bejesus out of a gig as gizzard splitter at the processing plant or cleaning up after a leak at the germ warfare center. Be all you can be, wrap rubber band around your trigger finger until it drops off. Swim at 10:00 before picking up B, before demo on the green, and before meeting moss, if it isn’t too crowded. Only three old women talking about their daughters-in-law last Wednesday at 10:00. Phone hardware to see if radon test arrived. Keep an eye out for a new yellow blanket. Left B’s on the plane, though he seems over it already. Left most recent issue of Z in the seat. That will make a few businessmen boil. I liked the man who sat next to me, he was sweet to B. Hated flying, said he never let all of his weight down. Need to get books in the mail today. Make time pass in line at the P.O. imagining man in front of me butt naked. Fellow in the good-preacher-blue-suit, probably has a cold, hard bottom. Call N for green tomato recipe. Have to get used to the Yankee growing season. If this is Wednesday, N goes in hospital today. Find out how long after marrow transplant before can visit. Mother said she read in paper that Pete was granted a divorce. His third. My highschool boyfriend. Meanest thing I could have done, I did to him, returning a long-saved-for engagement ring in a Band-Aid box, while he was stationed in Da Nang. Meant to tell F this morning about dream of eating grasshoppers, fried but happy. Our love a difficult instrument we are learning to play. Practice, practice. No matter where I call home anymore, feel like a boat under the trees. Living is strange. This week only; bargain on laid paper at East Side Copy Shop. Woman picking her nose at the stoplight. Shouldn’t look, only privacy we have anymore in the car. Isn’t that the woman from the colloquium last fall, who told me she was a stand-up environmentalist. What a wonderful trade, I said, because the evidence of planetary wrongdoing is overwhelming. Because because because of the horrible things we do. If this is Wednesday, meet F at Health Department at 10:45 for AIDS test. If this is Wednesday, it’s trash night.

There is another world, but it is in this one. Paul Eluard First there were those who died before I was born. It was as if they had just left and their shadows would slip out after them under the door so recently closed the air in its path was still swirling to rest. Some of the furniture came from them, I was told, and one day I opened two chests of drawers to learn what the dead kept. But it was when I learned to read that I began always to live among the dead. I remember Rapunzel, the improved animals in the Just-So Stories, and a flock of birds that saved themselves from a hunter by flying in place in the shape of a tree, their wings imitating the whisk of wind in the leaves. My sons and I are like some wine the dead have already bottled. They wish us well, but there is nothing they can do for us. Sebastian cries in his sleep, I bring him into my bed, talk to him, rub his back. To help his sons live easily among the dead is a father’s great work. Now Sebastian drifts, soon he’ll sleep. We can almost hear the dead breathing. They sound like water under a ship at sea. To love the dead is easy. They are final, perfect. But to love a child is sometimes to fail at love while the dead look on with their abstract sorrow. To love a child is to turn away from the patient dead. It is to sleep carefully in case he cries. Later, when my sons are grown among their own dead, I can dive easily into sleep and loll among the coral of my dreams growing on themselves until at the end I almost never dream of anyone, except my sons, who is still alive.