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If they'd had writing in time, Cuba could have been Crete, watery source of the Minoans and thus the Greeks. What's lost? A possible us growing like new foliage out of stony ground, emerging? Last voice, first, a whole world calling— awful, inaudible —into the unstoppable loud (roaring!) hurricane-force sea wind.

I open the box of my favorite postcards and turn them over looking for de Chirico because I remember seeing you standing facing a wall no wider than a column where to your left was a hall going straight back into darkness, the floor a ramp sloping down to where you stood alone and where the room opened out on your right to an auditorium full of people who had just heard you read and were now listening to the other poet. I was looking for the de Chirico because of the places, the empty places. The word “boulevard” came to mind. Standing on the side of the fountains in Paris where the water blew onto me when I was fifteen. It was night. It was dark then too and I was alone. Why didn’t you find me? Why didn’t somebody find me all those years? The form of love was purity. An art. An architecture. Maybe a train. Maybe the shadow of a statue and the statue with its front turned away from me. Maybe one young girl playing alone, hearing even small sounds ring off cobblestones and the stone walls. I turn the cards looking for the one and come to Giacometti’s eyes full of caring and something remote. His eyes are loving and empty, but not with nothingness, not for the usual reasons, but because he is working. The Rothko Chapel empty. A cheap statue of Sappho in the modern city of Mytilene and ancient sunlight. David Park’s four men with smudges for mouths, backed by water, each held still by the impossibility of what art can accomplish. A broken river god, only the body. A girl playing with her rabbit in bed. The postcard of a summer lightning storm over Iowa.

When I am grown to man's estate I shall be very proud and great, And tell the other girls and boys Not to meddle with my toys.

I. Five soldiers fixed by Mathew Brady’s eye Stand in a land subdued beyond belief. Belief might lend them life again. I try Like orphaned Hamlet working up his grief To see my spellbound fathers in these men Who, breathless in their amber atmosphere, Show but the postures men affected then And the hermit faces of a finished year. The guns and gear and all are strange until Beyond the tents I glimpse a file of trees Verging a road that struggles up a hill. They’re sycamores. The long-abated breeze Flares in those boughs I know, and hauls the sound Of guns and a great forest in distress. Fathers, I know my cause, and we are bound Beyond that hill to fight at Wilderness. II. But trick your eyes with Birnam Wood, or think How fire-cast shadows of the bankside trees Rode on the back of Simois to sink In the wide waters. Reflect how history’s Changes are like the sea’s, which mauls and mulls Its salvage of the world in shifty waves, Shrouding in evergreen the oldest hulls And yielding views of its confounded graves To the new moon, the sun, or any eye That in its shallow shoreward version sees The pebbles charging with a deathless cry And carageen memorials of trees. III. Now, old man of the sea, I start to understand: The will will find no stillness Back in a stilled land. The dead give no command And shall not find their voice Till they be mustered by Some present fatal choice. Let me now rejoice In all impostures, take The shape of lion or leopard, Boar, or watery snake, Or like the comber break, Yet in the end stand fast And by some fervent fraud Father the waiting past, Resembling at the last The self-established tree That draws all waters toward Its live formality.

The sounds of traffic die over the back lawn to occur again in the low distance. The voices, risen, of the neighborhood cannot maintain that pitch and fail briefly, start up again. Similarly my breathing rises and falls while I look out the window of apartment number three in this slum, hoping for rage, or sorrow. They don’t come to me anymore. How can I lament anything? It is all so proper, so much as it should be, now the nearing cumulus clouds, ominous, shift, they are like the curtains, billowy, veering at the apex of their intrusion on the room. If I am alive now, it is only to be in all this making all possible. I am glad to be finally a part of such machinery. I was after all not so fond of living, and there comes into me, when I see how little I liked being a man, a great joy. Look out our astounding clear windows before evening. It is almost as if the world were blue with some lubricant, it shines so.

For Phil Jackson The gym opened out before us like a vast arena, the bleached floorboards yawned toward a vanishing point, staggered seats high as the Mayan temple I once saw devoured by vines. Each of us was eaten up inside — all citizens of   lost and unmapped cities. Frank hugged the pimply ball over his belly like an unborn child. Claire dressed for daycare in daffodil yellow and jelly shoes. David’s gaze was an emperor’s surveying a desiccated battlefield. Since he viewed everything that way, we all saw him the same. The psych techs in Cloroxed white were giant angels who set us running drills, at which we sucked. The zones we set out to defend were watery at every edge. We missed close chest passes, easy combos. Our metronomes run different tempos, John proclaimed. Then Claire started seeing dashes stutter through the air behind the ball. Then speed lines on our backs, and then her own head went wobbly as a spinning egg. She’d once tracked planetary orbits for NASA and now sat sidelined by her eyes’ projections. Only Bill had game. Catatonic Bill whose normal talent was to schlub days in a tub chair — his pudding face scarred with chicken pox — using his hand for an ashtray, belly for an armrest. Now all that peeled away, and he emerged, clean as an egg. He was a lithe and licorice boy, eeling past all comers, each shot sheer net. He faked both ways, went left. Beneath the orange rim his midair pirouettes defied the gravity that I could barely sludge through. He scored beyond what even Claire could count, then he bent panting, hands on knees as the orderlies held out water cups, and the rest of us reached to pat his back or slap his sweaty hand, no one minding about the stench or his breath like old pennies. Then as quick as that he went. Inside his head some inner winch did reel him back from the front of   his face bones where he’d been ablaze. He went back and back into that shadowed stare. Lucky we were to breathe his air. Breath is God’s intent to keep us living. He was the self   I’d come in wanting to kill, and I left him there.

Listen closely as I sing this. The man standing at the gate tottering on his remaining limb is a kind of metronome, his one leg planted firmly on the earth. Yes, I have made him beautiful because I aim to lay all my cards on the table. In the book review the critic writes, “Barry seeks not to judge but to understand.” Did she want us to let her be, or does she want to be there walking the grounds of the old prison on the hill of the poison tree where comparatively a paltry twenty thousand died? In the first room with the blown up black-and-white of a human body gone abstract someone has to turn and face the wall not because of the human pain represented in the photo but because of her calmness, the tranquility with which she tells us that her father and her sister and her brother were killed. In graduate school a whole workshop devoted to an image of a woman with bleach thrown in the face and the question of whether or not the author could write, “The full moon sat in the window like a calcified eye, the woman’s face aglow with a knowingness.” I felt it come over me and I couldn’t stop. I tried to pull myself together and I couldn’t. They were children. An army of child soldiers. In the room papered with photos of the Khmer Rouge picture after picture of teenagers, children whose parents were killed so that they would be left alone in the world to do the grisly work that precedes paradise. And the photos of the victims, the woman holding her newborn in her arms as her head is positioned in a vise, in this case the vise an instrument not of torture but of documentation, the head held still as the camera captures the image, the thing linking all their faces, the abject fear and total hopelessness as exists in only a handful of places in the history of the visible world. For three $US per person she will guide you through what was Tuol Sleng prison, hill of the strychnine tree. Without any affectation she will tell you the story of how her father and her sister and her brother went among the two million dead. There are seventy-four forms of poetry in this country and each one is still meant to be sung.

Say, when we woke those icy spring mornings they were still there. The upper portion of their faces long ruined but you could still see the meaning in their hands, palms once covered in gold. We knew better than to call them by their names, Light that Shines Throughout the Universe and His consort, but there were stories of  travelers lost  in the foothills of  the Hindu  Kush and a distant brilliance that led them home. The way a candle physically enters your body after it has been snuffed out. The pearly smoke suffused in the air. In one school hundreds  of  miles  away  all  the   girls  my age  were  poisoned, and last week outside the capital a woman like my  sister was shot dead  in front of a crowd by two men who forced their bodies into her body and then judged her an infidel so they could kill her and be done with it.  After the  visitors were blasted I had a dream. I saw a human man standing by a lake and no one was looking at him directly. His image on the surface of the water cleaner than anything in this world. In   my   dream  the  man   said,  “Thousands   of  lifetimes  ago when my body was cut into pieces by an evil king, I was not caught up in the idea of the self.” Then  in  my   dream  someone   picked  up  a rock  and  I  woke  up. It took almost a month, the  great  heads  drilled with holes,  then anti-aircraft  tanks rolled in. Each hundred-foot niche now empty but each cavity left shaped like us, like a person. Before it happened we talked about it. Grandfather said don’t they have a share in heaven? Second Aunt said it was more realistic this way. God not in heaven but in exile.

Somebody says draw a map. Populate it with the incidents of your childhood. Mark the spot where the lake receded after a winter of light snow. The stairs on which someone slapped you. The place where the family dog hung itself by jumping over the back fence while still on the dog run, hours later its body like a limp flag on a windless day. Draw a map, someone says. Let yourself remember. In the refugee camp a hundred thousand strong draw the stony outcrop from which you could no longer see the plume of smoke that was your village. Draw a square for the bathroom stall where Grandpa hid each day in order to eat his one egg free from the starving eyes of his classmates, an X for the courthouse where you and he were naturalized, a broken line for the journey. Draw a map, Jon says. Let it be your way into the poem. Here is where that plane filled with babies crashed that I was not on. Here is where I was ashamed. On the second floor at Pranash University the people wait their turn. Have you drawn your map, Jon asks. He has rolled up his sleeves. Forty-five minutes to noon the Prince stands up and says that the monks must be excused. We watch them file out, saffron robes as if their bodies have burst into blossom. Draw a map. Fly halfway around the globe. Here is the room next to the library where you realize how poor your tradition is, the local people with poetic forms still in use that date back to the time of Christ. Tell us about your map. Explain how these wavy lines represent the river, this rectangle the school-turned-prison where only seven escaped with their lives. This is my map. This star the place where I sat in a roomful of people among whom not one was not touched by genocide. Every last map resplendent with death though nobody knows where their loved ones lie buried. How many times can I appropriate a story that is not mine to tell? The woman stands up and says she is not a poet, that she doesn’t have the words. She points to a triangle on a piece of paper. Here is the spot where she found human bones in the well of her childhood home, and how her mother told her don’t be afraid because it was not the work of wild animals.

all my desire is here before you, whether or not I speak of it: I'd seek your favor, for an instant, then die— if only you would grant my wish. I'd place my spirit in your hand, then sleep—and in that sleep find sweetness. I wander from you—and die alive; the closer I cling—I live to die. How to approach I still don't know, nor on what words I might rely. Instruct me, Lord: advise and guide me. Free me from my prison of lies. Teach me while I can bear the affliction— do not, Lord, despise my plea; before I've become my own burden and the little I am weighs on me, and against my will, I give in as worms eat bones that weary of me. I'll come to the place my forefathers reached, and by their place of rest find rest. Earth's back to me is foreign; my one true home is in its dust. Till now my youth has done what it would: When will I provide for myself? The world He placed in my heart has kept me from tending to my end and after. How could I come to serve my Lord, when I am still desire's prisoner? How could I ask for a place on high, when I know the worm will be my sister? How at that end could my heart be glad, when I do not know what death will bring? Day after day and night after night reduce the flesh upon me to nothing. Into the winds they'll scatter my spirit. To dust they'll return the little remaining. What can I say—with desire my enemy, from boyhood till now pursuing me: What is Time to me but your Will? If you're not with me, what will I be? I stand bereft of any virtue: only your justice and mercy shield me. But why should I speak, or even aspire? Lord, before you is all my desire.