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Born of the sun, we traveled a short while toward the sun. Where there were seasons and sky. Where there were monuments. Like a single engine plane in a July haze. Or our nights that pile up like shoes in a guest room. I would talk about the weather when I’m in the right weather but when. At the Stanhope Hotel, just hours before, they were people. The Navy divers found them lying under one hundred and sixteen feet of waves. Or a small body of water meeting a new, larger body. Healthy body. Nobody. We just couldn’t decide. Spatial disorientation occurs when you don’t refer to your 
instruments and begin to believe the whatever inside you. When I punished the Austrian roses by forgetting about them I knew that they couldn’t keep beauty and they couldn’t keep time. The day of his father’s funeral: November 25, 1963, was also his third birthday. Then — sometimes: the urge for new windows. A color other than black for the best days. In fourteen seconds plummeting at a rate beyond the safe maximum. The safe maximum at the office, bedroom, or bar. On the way there, somewhere between floors, no velocity could recover us. And again. Sometimes the right music, sometimes lucky to be in good light. Once a week I go into a room and pretend to have similar interests. Every day I wake up and brush to the left. We’re the good people, the bad people, and the people we aren’t. Socialite, journalist, lawyer. Americans. These Americans. They always button their coats when they see luck. Dear Johnny boy, thanks for asking me to be your mother but I’m afraid I could never do her justice. My eyebrows aren’t thick enough, for one.

My grandfather was always sad. Sadly, as a boy, he paddled his canoe along the beautiful Hudson River, which was only then beginning to die. During the first war he was very sad in France because he knew he was having the time of his life. When it was over everyone in American felt like a hero — imagine. Once a year on Armistice Day, he met with all his friends from the war. They got drunk and recounted the stories of the time when they had thought they were men and the world had seemed entirely possible. They placed empty chairs for certain of the dead, and in the center of the table, a bottle of cognac from France, for the last man of them to drink alone, in honor of the others. Year after year they gathered to watch each other and themselves disappear, turn into empty chairs. Sooner or later they were all sad. Some of them must have realized they didn’t need to join a club for this. Finally it came down to my grandfather and a man named Oscar Cooper. Neither of them wanted to outlive anyone. They couldn’t remember what honor was. When they drank the cognac it didn’t taste like anything. They threw the bottle in the river as if they thought it meant that neither of them was alive anymore. When Cooper died the following year, my grandfather took his rifle out into the yard and fired three shots at the sky. Then he went down to the river and drank himself to sleep. After that he was never sad, not even when the river died.

for Vivian Schatz Here, in our familiar streets, the day is brisk with winter’s business. The reassuring rows of brick façades, litter baskets overflowing with the harvest of the streets and, when the light turns, the people move in unison, the cars miraculously slide to a stop, no one is killed, the streets, for some reason, do not show the blood that is pouring like a tide, on other shores. Martinez, the last peasant left alive in his village, refuses to run, hopes that God,El Salvador, will let him get the harvest in. “Can a fish live out of water?” he says for why he stays, and weeds another row, ignoring the fins of sharks that push up through the furrows. Here, it is said, we live in the belly of the beast. Ahab sits forever at the helm, his skin white wax, an effigy. The whale carries him, lashed to its side by the ropes from his own harpoon. His eyes are dead. His ivory leg juts from the flank of Leviathan like a useless tooth. One more time, the distant sail appears, a cloud forms, an old icon for mercy turned up in a dusty corner of the sky, preparing rain for the parched land, Rachel weeping for her children. “Can a fish live out of water?” he asks and the rain answers, in Spanish, manitas de plata little hands of silver on his brow.

No changes of support—only Patches of gray, here where sunlight fell. The house seems heavier Now that they have gone away. In fact it emptied in record time. When the flat table used to result A match recedes, slowly, into the night. The academy of the future is Opening its doors and willing The fruitless sunlight streams into domes, The chairs piled high with books and papers. The sedate one is this month’s skittish one Confirming the property that, A timeless value, has changed hands. And you could have a new automobile Ping pong set and garage, but the thief Stole everything like a miracle. In his book there was a picture of treason only And in the garden, cries and colors.

Saved two children last night. They lay under thin black ice one gone blue, the other grey. I laid them out on grass that snapped under my step wrung their bodies warm and dry gave them the gust of my breath. Then I looked out at the morning that lay lukewarm on the water put on a tank top arranged some grasses in a vase fished two children out of sleep.

It is said that many have been cured of madness by drinking of the spring in the orchard of this convent, but I doubt it, for it is a very pleasant place and a surfeit of pleasantries often leads directly to madness. I do not have much experience of madness (once a sister ran naked down the hall) but I have tasted the water and it is clear and fresh, there is nothing unpleasant about it. The Abbess said of a certain man he is a drink of water—meaning he was a bore— but I want to meet that man, he would be as welcome in my life as Jesus in the orchard here, though the fat old Abbess might shoo him away.  I would be so glad to have him drink, to serve him with a round of little glasses on a painted tray, like the ‘cocktail parties’ in the secular world, and I the hostess, turning her cheek to be kissed in the fray. I would wear white clothes and my headdress, and he might carry a scythe and cut the morning glories, or simply sit and sun his nose. But they have taken my Lord away, lodged Him in the earth somewhere, call Him leaves, vines, breeze, bird. It cannot be true. Looking for Him in these things condemns us to a lifetime of imbecile activity. He has a face, arms, legs, a navel. He is a man, for He is everything I am not. How can it be otherwise? Before I leave the spring, I lean over it and weep. I spit upon the flowers. I stumble up the hill. We are somewhere below the Tserna Gota— meaning the Black Mountain—and when I reach the top I count the villages—there are two—where we are the last on earth to think of Him as having a head. Here, too, is the source of the spring, and crows with lethargic dispositions circle and circle the spot.

“I am playing my oldest tunes,” declared she, “All the old tunes I know,— Those I learnt ever so long ago.” —Why she should think just then she’d play them Silence cloaks like snow. When I returned from the town at nightfall Notes continued to pour As when I had left two hours before: “It’s the very last time,” she said in closing; “From now I play no more.” A few morns onward found her fading, And, as her life outflew, I thought of her playing her tunes right through; And I felt she had known of what was coming, And wondered how she knew.

San José, Costa Rica Tortillas clap against floured palms, steaming bowls of avena, frijoles black as the rumbling sky, arroz con pollo simmers. Against the kitchen window, small clouds rise. Papá dances to the electric beat of the marimba, his cheek bristly against Mamá’s neck; his thick fingers sift through her wispy hair. I am nowhere to be found, neither in the foreground nor background. Today I sit in this chair, in the corner of my house, covered with a poncho of blue flowers, looking out at asphalt roads overflowing with rain, fogging the glass. Along the road, steam rises like blotchy fingerprints.

shambles this way antipodean being come full circle sparks in darkness lightning’s eternal return flipped the ecliptic

Extravagant sweep of clear sky darkening in the big picture window beside the bed, lights here and there already flashing all across the city down below us— Ellen and the girls out somewhere, you and I alone, you with your eyes closed, I with a drink in hand: you suddenly in character, your voice a wraith’s voice, faint, stumbling, slurry with morphine, and yet still artful as ever, even if the art was obvious, the dying brother playing the dying brother— Do you think you have a problem with that?