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The floor, moonlit, the moon behind you, is not enclosed by walls; a patch of sky is hidden by distant trees. But a patch of floor is 
itself hidden by the sky’s legs, standing on it, and this cannot be the 
opportunity for useless thoughts. Translated from the French

The insane devotee throbs with his small legs, I don’t dare more. The insane devotee throbs with his small legs, I cannot do more. Bricks are yellow, made of polyvinyl, fattish. We people die.Lemme aks you, no l’s no r’s from the Japanese and Chinese, only the white mushroom, a cataract. Animals are prolific. You come from the valley, from your spine. From something more? From the risen sun. To smoke oneself on the roof. To change clothes and dry one’s hair in water lily.

— After Catullus My house disgusted me, so I slept in a tent. My tent disgusted me, so I slept in the grass. The grass disgusted me, so I slept in my body, which I strung like a hammock from two ropes. My body disgusted me, so I carved myself out of it. My use of knives disgusted me because it was an act of violence. My weakness disgusted me because “Hannah” means “hammer.” The meaning of my name disgusted me because I’d rather be known as beautiful. My vanity disgusted me because I am a scholar. My scholarship disgusted me because knowledge is empty. My emptiness disgusted me because I wanted to be whole. My wholeness would have disgusted me because to be whole is to be smug. Still, I tried to understand wholeness as the inclusiveness of all activities: I walked out into the yard, trying to vomit and drink milk simultaneously. I tried to sleep while smoking a cigar. I have enough regrets to crack all the plumbing. I’m whole only in that I’ve built my person from every thought I’ve ever loved.

the deep male growl of the sea-lashed headland —Sophocles, Philoctetes August long ago, the summer Lemnian (not like the deeds of those who killed their men), the self a glowing bead, like Hephaestus falling daylong out of heaven in the old story, the island's interior a forge, a glory hole, the odor of wild thyme borne offshore steadily, the Aegean Sea purple, wine-dark, without epithet; and as I walked on the beach, my mother not long dead, the perfect crystal of my self-regard so lately flawed, and landscape made to echo my own low cry in the island's empty places, I found a pure white bone that wind and salt had scoured of every grief and all self-pity: and so I came to the love of others.

What is so pure as grief? A wreck set sail just to be wrecked again. To lose what’s lost–it’s all born lost and we just fetch it for a little while, a dandelion span, a quarter-note. Each day an envelope gummed shut with honey and mud. Foolish to think you can build a house from suffering. Even the hinges will be bitter. There will be no books in that house, only transfusions. And all the lemon and cedar in the world won't rid the walls of that hospital smell.

A tree that grew in the Garden of Eden a tree of innocence called the Tree of Good and Evil. It was harmless as opposites are in balance. It was also tasteless, the taste of innocence before it is betrayed. When God removed the wall he gave the lemon thorns and bitterness because it had no hostility. It is a taste we want most to subdue. It asks to be left alone. We use it with fish and tea. We sugar it. Look out the window. It stands with a donkey’s stance, hoping the day will pass. Its scent through the curtains cuts through mustiness, sharp with sweet blossoms. It hides the smell of new babies.

New houses relax on the fields. Garage doors open soundlessly to admit the monster. Tires stretched over forty pounds of air pressure float across gravel. The boy closes the last storm door on the last evening paper and runs to the car where his mother waits. She does not answer him; the door slam freezes her dreams. It is January. A dog chained to a barn door keeps barking. Somebody’s angry, scared to let him go. On the other side of a forest past these fields, wolves sniff the hard snow of the tundra. I lay beside the only tree for warmth, there where the pack might find me. The house takes care of us now. Look at the meat browning under the light. The refrigerator switches on; ice crashes into the tray. Here are locks in case someone wants to do us harm. Remember how the police had to pound and pound to wake us that night a white Cadillac leapt from the icy road into the arms of our maple! It hung there, empty, doors flung wide— it was a great white petal of a car, breathing under the gas-lights, opening and opening.

(In Lenox Hill Hospital, after surgery, my mother said the sirens sounded like the elephants of Mihiragula when his men drove them off cliffs in the Pir Panjal Range.) The Hun so loved the cry, one falling elephant’s, he wished to hear it again. At dawn, my mother heard, in her hospital-dream of elephants, sirens wail through Manhattan like elephants forced off Pir Panjal’s rock cliffs in Kashmir: the soldiers, so ruled, had rushed the elephant, The greatest of all footprints is the elephant’s, said the Buddha. But not lifted from the universe, those prints vanished forever into the universe, though nomads still break news of those elephants as if it were just yesterday the air spread the dye (“War’s annals will fade into night / Ere their story die”), the punishing khaki whereby the world sees us die out, mourning you, O massacred elephants! Months later, in Amherst, she dreamt: She was, with dia- monds, being stoned to death. I prayed: If she must die, let it only be some dream. But there were times, Mother, while you slept, that I prayed, "Saints, let her die." Not, I swear by you, that I wished you to die but to save you as you were, young, in song in Kashmir, and I, one festival, crowned Krishna by you, Kashmir listening to my flute. You never let gods die. Thus I swear, here and now, not to forgive the universe that would let me get used to a universe without you. She, she alone, was the universe as she earned, like a galaxy, her right not to die, defying the Merciful of the Universe, Master of Disease, “in the circle of her traverse” of drug-bound time. And where was the god of elephants, plump with Fate, when tusk to tusk, the universe, dyed green, became ivory? Then let the universe, like Paradise, be considered a tomb. Mother, they asked me,So how’s the writing? I answered My mother is my poem. What did they expect? For no verse sufficed except the promise, fading, of Kashmir and the cries that reached you from the cliffs of Kashmir (across fifteen centuries) in the hospital.Kashmir, she’s dying! How her breathing drowns out the universe as she sleeps in Amherst. Windows open on Kashmir: There, the fragile wood-shrines—so far away—of Kashmir! O Destroyer, let her return there, if just to die. Save the right she gave its earth to cover her, Kashmir has no rights. When the windows close on Kashmir, I see the blizzard-fall of ghost-elephants. I hold back—she couldn’t bear it—one elephant’s story: his return (in a country far from Kashmir) to the jungle where each year, on the day his mother died, he touches with his trunk the bones of his mother. "As you sit here by me, you’re just like my mother," she tells me. I imagine her: a bride in Kashmir, she’s watching, at the Regal, her first film with Father. If only I could gather you in my arms, Mother, I’d save you—now my daughter—from God. The universe opens its ledger. I write: How helpless was God’s mother! Each page is turned to enter grief’s accounts. Mother, I see a hand.Tell me it’s not God’s. Let it die. I see it. It’s filling with diamonds. Please let it die. Are you somewhere alive, somewhere alive, Mother? Do you hear what I once held back: in one elephant’s cry, by his mother’s bones, the cries of those elephants that stunned the abyss? Ivory blots out the elephants. I enter this:The Beloved leaves one behind to die. For compared to my grief for you, what are those of Kashmir, and what (I close the ledger) are the griefs of the universe when I remember you—beyond all accounting—O my mother?

That the dead are real to us Cannot be denied, That the living are more real When they are dead Terrifies, that the dead can rise As the living do is possible Is possible to surmise, But all the stars cannot come near All we meet in an eye. Flee from me, fear, as soot Flies in a breeze, do not burn Or settle in my sight, I’ve tasted you long enough, Let me savor Something otherwise. Who wakes beside me now Suits my soul, so I turn to words Only to say he changes Into his robe, rustles a page, He raises the lid of the piano To release what’s born in its cage. If   words come back To say they compromise Or swear again they have died, There’s no news in that, I reply, But a music without notes These notes comprise, still As spring beneath us lies, Already something otherwise.

for David Trinidad I was seventeen in Orlando, heading toward Orange Blossom Trail, where the porn was. Fairvilla Video, its fried, freshened air. I was terrified but also thrilled, on the edge. Can anyone even remember how hard- won a little corner of sex was then, no internet, no hope, no combination? I can’t; I can. In an elaborate bid to convince myself and the clerk I was bisexual, I bought a bisexual video that I can’t recall, and a box that made my heart stop: Leo & Lance. (VHS wasn’t cheap: I spent all my allowance.) I can measure this adventure in increments of shame: tape loop, checkout, the run-walk to my red Buick (no one could miss me), the peel out. And the drive home, anticipation, cruel cellophane . . . Leo Ford, born Leo John Hilgeford, looked like California by way of Dayton. There was his tender love of Divine, that rumored three-way on Fire Island with Calvin Klein. Late in his career he raised rare birds, volunteered at Project Angel Food. He was versatile: so much to give. And Lance, David Alan Reis, from Santa Barbara, or maybe Oklahoma. Poor orphan, the stints in jail, IV drugs, and conversion. Leo and Lance had the chance to work together twice on film— Leo & Lance and Blonds Do It Best— and more than once on the corner. Where have all the hustlers gone, anyway? They died weeks apart, in 1991. Lance first, in May, in San Jose, of AIDS complications. On the death certificate, his job is listed as “model of clothing.” That July, Leo on his motorcycle was struck by a truck on Sunset. “Chillingly, Leo had played a motorcycle accident victim in Games,” says IMDB, so those who knew his oeuvre might have seen it coming. After the wake at Josie’s, his ashes were scattered by the Golden Gate Bridge. A tree in India— IMDB again, as if the truth matters— was planted in his name . . . As I try to get this right, I pull up my cache of scanned porn. Leo & Lance: it begins in synth, Cali melancholy canyon light, and here’s Leo, shirtless, running up a hill in tight denim, letterman jacket thrown over his shoulder— now the tinkling piano; now’s a good time to jerk off by the last of the snow. God, bottle-blond Leo. But wait, who is that loping up the hill, gawky, rugged, also blond, a dumbfounded wow uttered as he watches Leo shoot? Of course: it’s Lance. Before they formally meet, before they go back to the lodge and do what they do better than life, they have a little snowball fight, brief, unexpectedly sweet— like children in the street.