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What half-blind is like: like two microscopes in my head each with differently stuck objectives. They enable the small and the very small and reduce everything else to blur and shade. Yet you can train even this. Train it to spot the shape of sharks’ teeth, of which there are many samples and many shapes but not as many as flecks of sand, pieces of shell. I have hundreds plucked from the shore. But in the same beach I buried a toy and never found it again. A tiny toy: articulate, a translucent man, a smallness to whom the world was an unbounded wonder. Blemished and damaged I would hold him up and say He is broken and anyone who could see would say He looks fine to me. But they can see well, not finely. Look at his face, etched and serrated by that gargantuan saw. The cracked shell of his translucent skin, buried in rubble now, and those teeth, all that remain of terrible and invisible jaws.

Everything’s happening on the cusp of tragedy, the tip of comedy, the pivot of event. You want a placid life, find another planet. This one is occupied with the story’s arc: About to happen, on the verge, horizontal. You want another planet, try the moon. Try any of the eight, try Planet X. It’s out there somewhere, black with serenity. How interesting will our times become? How much more interesting can they become? A crow with something dangling from its beak flaps onto a telephone pole top, daintily, And croaks its victory to other crows and tries to keep its morsel to itself. A limp shape, leggy, stunned, drops from the black beak’s scissors like a rag. We drive past, commenting, and looking upward. A sunny morning, too cold to be nesting, Unless that is a nest the crow has seized, against the coming spring. We’ve been at this historical site before, but not in any history we remember. The present has been cloaked in cloud before, and not on any holy mountaintop. To know the stars will one day fly apart so far they can’t be seen Is almost a relief. For the future flies in one direction—toward us. And the only way to sidestep it—the only way—is headed this way, too. So, look. That woman’s got a child by the hand. She’s dragging him across the street. He’s crying and she’s shouting, but we see only dumbshow. Their breath is smoke. Will she give in and comfort him? Will he concede at last? We do not know. Their words are smoke. In a minute they’ll be somewhere else entirely. Everyone in a minute will be somewhere else entirely. As the crow flies.

Always just one demon in the attic. Always just one death in the village. And the dogs howling in that direction. And from the other end the new-born child arrives, the only one to fill the empty space in that wide air. Likewise also cells infected by a virus send out a signal all around them and defences are mobilised so that no other virus has any hope just then of taking root or changing fate. This phenomenon is known as interference. And when a poet dies in the depth of night a single black bird wakens in the thicket and sings for all it is worth while from the sky a black rain trickles down like sperm or something, the song is spattered and the choking bird sings sitting on an empty rib-cage in which an imaginary heart awakes to its forever interfering futility. And in the morning the sky is clear, the bird is weary and the soil is fertilised. The poet is no more. In Klatovy Street, in Pilsen, by the railway bridge, there was a shop with quilted bedcovers. In times when there’s a greater need for a steel cover over our continent business in quilted bedcovers is slack. The shopkeeper was hard up. Practical men when hard up usually turn to art. In his shopwindow, open to the interior of his shop, its owner built a gingerbread house of quilts and every evening staged a performance about a quilted gingerbread house and a red-quilted Little Red Riding Hood, while his wife in this quilted masquerade was alternately the wolf or the witch, and he himself a padded-out Hansel, or Gretel, Red Riding Hood or grandmother. The sight of the two old people crawling about in swollen billows of textiles round the chubby cottage was not unambiguous. It was a little like the life of sea cucumbers in the mud under a reef. Outside thundered the approaching surf of war and they conducted their quilted pantomime outside time and action. For a while children would stand outside but soon they would go home. Nothing was sold. But it was the only pantomime at that time. The black bird sang and rain poured into a rib-cage wearing the Star of David. But in the actors under those quilted covers l'anima allegra must have just then awoken and so, sweating and rapt, they acted their undersea commedia dell’arte, thinking there was a backstage until a scene was finished, jerkily they moved from shopwindow to gingerbread house and back, with the exuberance of Columbines stricken by polio, while the music of fifes and drums did not reach them. Or else they thought that such a deep humiliation of the customary dignity of age interfered with the steps of gentlemen in leather coats and with the departure of trains to human slaughterhouses. It did. The black bird sang and the ruined sclerotic hearts leapt in their breasts, and then one morning when they didn’t play and had not even raised the blind - the sky was clear, the soil was fertilised - the quilted bedcovers were confiscated for the eastern front and the actors transferred to the backstage of the world, called Bergen-Belsen. No trace is left of the shop today: it’s now a greengrocer’s with woody parsnips. Always just one death in the village. Always just one demon. Great is the power of the theatre, even if it always does get knocked down in the end and flung backstage. The dogs howl in that direction. And the butterfly pursues the man who stole the flowers. When we did autopsies at the psychiatric hospital in Bohnice, filled with the urban exudations of relative futility, the car would tip us out amidst the ward blocks whose inmates waved from windows with some kind of May Day pennants, and then one went, hugely alone, beyond a spinney to the solitary morgue, where the naked bodies of ancient schizophrenics awaited us, along with two live inmates; one of them would pull the corpses up from underground with a rope hoist and place them upon the tables as a mother might an infant for baptism, while the other was lurking, pen ready poised, in a dark corner to write up the Latin protocol, and he wrote faultlessly. Neither of them uttered the slightest sound, only the hoist shaft moaned...and the knife drawn over skin and dermis made a sound of satin tearing...and they were always enormous and unprecedented pneumonias and tumours big as dragons’ eggs, it rained into the open thorax - and in that roaring silence one had to break the line of an angel’s fall and dictate the logical verdict on a long-sentenced demon... and the schizophrenic’s pen in the corner busily scraped across the paper like an eager mouse. We need no prompters said the puppets haughtily. The air of that anatomical theatre was filled with interferon, it was a great personal demonstration against malignant growth, it was a general amnesty for the walls, entropy was abjured for the moment because there are no bubbles at the bottom to burst under the breeze. The red balloon outside rose up to an unsuspected sky, its chains strained by the certainty that the nearer the inferno the greater the paradise, the nearer the prison cell the greater the freedom. Cantabit vacuus coran latrone viator. And that is the weird essence of the theatre that an actor stripped of everything mounts to the very top of the conflagration and everything else dies down, falls silent like a long-hunted animal, its muscles still twitching but with endorphines and an infinite peace in the brain. Yes, even a whale will sometimes leave the school, hurl itself into shallow water and perish in the sun like a levelled cathedral, with pushed-out penis, and death is instantly buried in a grain of sand and the sea laughs. Go ask the tree-stumps; in broken language they preach about saplings. And in the jargon of galactic white dwarfs the stars of the main sequence shine forever. In the non-Euclidean curved space, which eludes understanding as much as the interference of the theatre, you ceaselessly hear the voices of children from the primary school of death, children from the puppet tragedies of the kitchen and children from the junketings of war, when skewering them on lances with their wriggling little legs provided spice like curry for the mercenaries, voices of children eluding understanding - But we’ve washed behind our ears, we’ve stopped pulling the cat’s tail, we’ve stopped shoving our fingers into electric sockets - What else is there left in the universe of hominisation, slow as the decay of tritium, than the doctrine of the growing sense of shame of demons: since Aztec times high priests no longer offer up sacrifice while dressed in the skin of a freshly flayed prisoner. We need no prompters, they said - Once on St Nicholas’ Day, the man acting the Devil, dead drunk, fell down some stairs and lay there, and a child, experiencing that embarrassing joy mere inches from terror, ran out after the thump and called: Mummy, come here, there’s a dead devil - And so he was, even though the actor picked himself up after another tot. Maybe the dogs howled, but only by a black mistake. In the sky shone the stars of the main sequence, the bird was getting ready in the thicket, the child shivered a little from the chill of three million years, in that wide air, but they prompted him, poetically, you’re only imagining all this, look, the butterfly’s already bringing the flowers back...and there’s no other devil left...and the nearer paradise... He believed, and yet he didn’t.

(Lord Egremont speaks) It was a way of punishing the house, setting it ablaze in ruddy, golden flames; smoke in billows up the front stairs; walls cringing like leaves. I say, I am afraid in my own house. Do not believe I started this, it was that man, who was to portray the park alone, mind you, but then became enamored of the music room. And now what have we: floods of fire rolling from room to room, furniture wrecked in seethe, my wife Lady Amelia turned wraith, God knows what fish and drowning slaves cast up in the tide along with pocket Bibles, snuffboxes, antimacassars, the familiar bric-a-brac of the well-kept house. Where are Edward, Lavinia, Jane? Why is no one crying, “Fire! Fire!”? Am I alone? The man has no sense of proportion. He had himself lashed to the mast, once, it is said, on a steamboat off the harbor mouth in full blizzard: sailors blinded by snow, the boat crippled, led by the lead, they damn near died to a man, and he— he was observing “the light at sea,” he said. The painting? “Soapsuds and whitewash,” the critics described it so. But here, in our house, it is catastrophe of flame, not weather, he loosed. He is a man in love with last things, clearly, the last things, but never understood the first, it seems to me, and certainly not the genial medias res of decorous, daily life. What tea-times we’ve known in these chambers, what sonatinas, lieder of an evening, whist, Emmeline embroidering, the hounds calm at the hearth, now all dissolved. Perhaps there are no flames. A bloody haze arises, it could be my own eyes that fail. I hear nothing, but fear the upstairs rooms, cramped rooms I have not entered in ages, only remember the draughts, creakings, grime in closet corners, windows too tight to lean from, the smell of antique damp. And now, who knows what acts unroll on narrow beds, on floorboards warped askew? As steam is rising, rising? As heat buoys the house up into an atmosphere all of its own creation? Who are the participants? Where has Amelia gone? Why, in this furnace, can I hear no sound, or feel my own skin begin to peel?

When I have baked white cakes And grated green almonds to spread upon them; When I have picked the green crowns from the strawberries And piled them, cone-pointed, in a blue and yellow platter; When I have smoothed the seam of the linen I have been working; What then? To-morrow it will be the same: Cakes and strawberries, And needles in and out of cloth. If the sun is beautiful on bricks and pewter, How much more beautiful is the moon, Slanting down the gauffered branches of a plum-tree; The moon, Wavering across a bed of tulips; The moon, Still, Upon your face. You shine, Beloved, You and the moon. But which is the reflection? The clock is striking eleven. I think, when we have shut and barred the door, The night will be dark Outside.

Noon, March 6, 1997 From morning’s mouth the bones emerge, a prayer is whispered over rounded horns; the prairie is beyond the quivering hump and holy smoke sparkles released in the breath. Braided sweetgrass, be about their hooves; although the grip of hunger lies heavy on the land, let endless native grasses grow among the yellow stones and between the stars. Even if only one man had begun to sing, actually it was thousands, She who came to Wisconsin farmers and transformed their lives, She who brought her blessing in the form of being newborn, She whom they named the Miracle, White Buffalo Calf Maiden must return amid the fast firing of bullets, along the most perilous of paths. Rock stars, millionaires, they all offered millions of dollars to struggling white farmers but she had begun her transformation and her prophecy by touching them and they came to understand if not the actual words to the prayers at least the reverence, the need to protect, to keep the doors open. Like it was a hundred years ago bounties are gathered from death; trains, buses, cars, planes carry the segmented body of the terrible worm across the land and the screams of the hunted split the sun awake. It is time to restore the stolen beads and shards, the bones and knives to every grave. And the graves are graves no longer but wombs; the bounties burn their hands and bones come flowing from museum shelves to dance in the rippling grass, rebuilding lungs, starting hearts. There must be a hundred men and a hundred men’s worth of heartlessness; wished they could find Indians to kill but now that is illegal so they make up some excuse to raise their rifles and take aim, not hearing the rumble of buffalo prayer, not feeling tomorrow tremble or the prophecy of Miracle, and smile as they see the legs give way, the horns gouge open the prairie ground, Earth betrayed again.

Missing from the National Museum, Baghdad, April 2003 No light can gild the sun god’s cheek but strains through burlap now, Phoibos the refugee, his head a marble cabbage in a sack jouncing east by pickup down a dirt track across Seleucid wastes, Parthian plains, once more fortune’s tourist, bobbing free. Or not—just stashed behind a rubbish mound where bare-boned goats might crop a scraggy meal, scant miles from the museum’s shattered room. Stripped of laurels, his oracles, his loom of sacred strings, no Horai here spin round, just pacing men who wait to close the deal. A goatherd sings, slings a Kalashnikov: the godhead mute since looters hacked it off.

A young black girl stopped by the woods, so young she knew only one man: Jim Crow but she wasn’t allowed to call him Mister. The woods were his and she respected his boundaries even in the absence of fence. Of course she delighted in the filling up of his woods, she so accustomed to emptiness, to being taken at face value. This face, her face eternally the brown of declining autumn, watches snow inter the grass, cling to bark making it seem indecisive about race preference, a fast-to-melt idealism. With the grass covered, black and white are the only options, polarity is the only reality; corners aren’t neutral but are on edge. She shakes off snow, defiance wasted on the limited audience of horse. The snow does not hypnotize her as it wants to, as the blond sun does in making too many prefer daylight. She has promises to keep, the promise that she bear Jim no bastards, the promise that she ride the horse only as long as it is willing to accept riders, the promise that she bear Jim no bastards, the promise to her face that it not be mistaken as shadow, and miles to go, more than the distance from Africa to Andover, more than the distance from black to white before she sleeps with Jim.

1. Falmouth, Massachusetts, 1972 Oak table, knotted legs, the chirp And scrape of tines to mouth. Four children, four engines Of want. That music. What did your hand mean to smooth Across the casket of your belly? What echoed there, if not me—tiny body Afloat, akimbo, awake or at rest? Every night you fed the others Bread leavened with the grains Of your own want. How Could you stand me near you, In you, jump and kick tricking The heart, when what you prayed for Was my father’s shadow, your name In his dangerous script, an envelope Smelling of gun-powder, bay rum, Someone to wrestle, sing to, question, Climb? 2. Interstate 101 South, California, 1981 Remember the radio, the Coca-Cola sign Phosphorescent to the left, bridge After bridge, as though our lives were Engineered simply to go? And so we went Into those few quiet hours Alone together in the dark, my arm On the rest beside yours, our lights Pricking at fog, tugging us patiently Forward like a needle through gauze. Night held us like a house. Sometimes an old song Would fill the car like a ghost. 3. Leroy, Alabama, 2005 There’s still a pond behind your mother’s old house, Still a stable with horses, a tractor rusted and stuck Like a trophy in mud. And the red house you might Have thrown stones at still stands on stilts up the dirt road. A girl from the next town over rides in to lend us Her colt, cries when one of us kicks it with spurs. Her father wants to buy her a trailer, let her try her luck In the shows. They stay for dinner under the tent Your brother put up for the Fourth. Firebugs flare And vanish. I am trying to let go of something. My heart cluttered with names that mean nothing. Our racket races out to the darkest part of the night. The woods catch it and send it back. 4. But let’s say you’re alive again— Your hands are long and tell your age. You hold them there, twirling a bent straw, And my reflection watches, hollow-faced, Not trying to hide. The waiters make it seem Like Cairo. Back and forth shouting That sharp language. And for the first time I tell you everything. No shame In my secrets, shoddy as laundry. I have praised your God For the blessing of the body, snuck From pleasure to pleasure, lying for it, Holding it like a coin or a key in my fist. I know now you’ve known all along. I won’t change. I want to give Everything away. To wander forever. Here is a pot of tea. Let’s share it Slowly, like sisters.

Little green involute fronds of fern at creekside. And the sinewy clear water rushing over creekstone of the palest amber, veined with a darker gold, thinnest lines of gold rivering through the amber like—ah, now we come to it.We were not put on earth, the old man said, he was hacking into the crust of a sourdough half loaf in his vehement, impatient way with an old horn-handled knife,to express ourselves. I knew he had seen whole cities leveled: also that there had been a time of shame for him, outskirts of a ruined town, half Baroque, half Greek Revival, pediments of Flora and Hygeia from a brief eighteenth-century health spa boom lying on the streets in broken chunks and dogs scavenging among them. His one act of courage then had been to drop pieces of bread or chocolate, as others did, where a fugitive family of Jews was rumored to be hiding.I never raised my voice, of course, none of us did.