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After death, my father practices meticulously until the Bach is seamless, spun glass in a dream, you can no longer tell where the modulations are, or the pedal shifts or the split fingerings . . . if he rests it’s to wind the metronome or sip his cup of ice . . . but who is the other old man in the identical flannel gown, head cocked, listening ever more critically, deeper in the empty room?

My mother—preferring the strange to the tame: Dove-note, bone marrow, deer dung, Frog’s belly distended with finny young, Leaf-mold wilderness, harebell, toadstool, Odd, small snakes roving through the leaves, Metallic beetles rambling over stones: all Wild and natural!—flashed out her instinctive love, and quick, she Picked up the fluttering, bleeding bat the cat laid at her feet, And held the little horror to the mirror, where He gazed on himself, and shrieked like an old screen door far off. Depended from her pinched thumb, each wing Came clattering down like a small black shutter. Still tranquil, she began, “It’s rather sweet ...” The soft mouse body, the hard feral glint In the caught eyes. Then we saw, And recoiled: lice, pallid, yellow, Nested within the wing-pits, cozily sucked and snoozed. The thing dropped from her hands, and with its thud, Swiftly, the cat, with a clean careful mouth Closed on the soiled webs, growling, took them out to the back stoop. But still, dark blood, a sticky puddle on the floor Remained, of all my mother’s tender, wounding passion For a whole wild, lost, betrayed, and secret life Among its dens and burrows, its clean stones, Whose denizens can turn upon the world With spitting tongue, an odor, talon, claw, To sting or soil benevolence, alien As our clumsy traps, our random scatter of shot. She swept to the kitchen. Turning on the tap, She washed and washed the pity from her hands.

after Jean Follain In the evenings they listen to the same tunes nobody could call happy somebody turns up at the edge of town the roses bloom and an old dinner bell rings once more under the thunder clouds In front of the porch posts of the store a man seated on a soda water case turns around and spits and says to everybody in his new set of clothes holding up his hands as long as I live nobody touches my dogs my friends

After I had cut off my hands and grown new ones something my former hands had longed for came and asked to be rocked. After my plucked out eyes had withered, and new ones grown something my former eyes had wept for came asking to be pitied.

Inventing a horse is not easy. One must not only think of the horse. One must dig fence posts around him. One must include a place where horses like to live; or do when they live with humans like you. Slowly, you must walk him in the cold; feed him bran mash, apples; accustom him to the harness; holding in mind even when you are tired harnesses and tack cloths and saddle oil to keep the saddle clean as a face in the sun; one must imagine teaching him to run among the knuckles of tree roots, not to be skittish at first sight of timber wolves, and not to grow thin in the city, where at some point you will have to live; and one must imagine the absence of money. Most of all, though: the living weight, the sound of his feet on the needles, and, since he is heavy, and real, and sometimes tired after a run down the river with a light whip at his side, one must imagine love in the mind that does not know love, an animal mind, a love that does not depend on your image of it, your understanding of it; indifferent to all that it lacks: a muzzle and two black eyes looking the day away, a field empty of everything but witchgrass, fluent trees, and some piles of hay.

On an island, an open road where an animal has been crushed by something larger than itself. It is mangled by four o'clock light, soul sour-sweet, intestines flattened and raked by the sun, eyes still watchful, savage. This landscape of Taiwan looks like a body black and blue. On its coastline mussels have cracked their faces on rocks, clouds are collapsing onto tiny houses. And just now a monsoon has begun. It reminds me of a story my father told me: He once made the earth not in seven days but in one. His steely joints wielded lava and water and mercy in great ionic perfection. He began the world, hammering the length of trees, trees like a war of families, trees which fumbled for grand gesture. The world began in an explosion of fever and rain. He said, Tina, your body came out floating. I was born in the middle of monsoon season, palm trees tearing the tin roofs. Now as I wander to the center of the island no one will speak to me. My dialect left somewhere in his pocket, in a nursery book, a language of childsplay. Everything unfurls in pictures: soil is washed from the soles of feet, a woman runs toward her weeping son, chicken bones float in a pot full of dirty water. I return to the animal on the road. When I stoop to look at it it smells of trash, rotting vegetation, the pitiful tongue. Its claws are curled tight to its heart; eyes open eyes open. When the world began in the small factory of my father's imagination he never spoke of this gnarled concoction of bone and blood that is nothing like wonder but just the opposite, something simply ravaged. He too would die soon after the making of the world. I would go on waking, sexing, mimicking enemies. I would go on coaxed by gravity and hard science.

Imagine for a moment the still life of our meals, meat followed by yellow cheese, grapes pale against the blue armor of fish. Imagine a thin woman before bread was invented, playing a harp of wheat in the field. There is a stone, and behind her the bones of the last killed, the black bird on her shoulder that a century later will fly with trained and murderous intent. They are not very hungry because cuisine has not yet been invented. Nor has falconry, nor the science of imagination. All they have is the pure impulse to eat, which is not enough to keep them alive and this little moment before the woman redeems the sprouted seeds at her feet and gathers the olives falling from the trees for her recipes. Imagine. Out in the fields this very moment they are rolling the apples to press, the lamb turns in a regular aura of smoke. See, the woman looks once behind her before picking up the stone, looks back once at the beasts, the trees, that sky above the white stream where small creatures live and die looking upon each other as food.

Come our one great bushfire pigs, sty-released, declined to quit their pavements of gravel and shit. Other beasts ran headlong, whipping off with genitals pinched high. Human mothers taught their infants creek-dipping. Fathers galloped, gale-blown blaze stripping grass at their heels and on by too swift to ignite any houses. One horse baked in a tin shed, naked poultry lay about dead having been plucked in mid flight but where pigs had huddled only fuzzy white hoofprints led upwind over black, B B B and none stayed feral in our region.

noctes illustratas (the night has houses) and the shadow of the fabulous broken into handfuls—these can be placed at regular intervals, candles walking down the streets at times eclipsed by trees. Certain cells, it’s said, can generate light on their own. There are organisms that could fit on the head of a pin and light entire rooms. Throughout the Middle Ages, you could hire a man on any corner with a torch to light you home were lamps made of horn and from above a loom of moving flares, we watched Notre Dame seem small. Now the streets and stand still. By 1890, it took a pound of powdered magnesium to photograph a midnight ball. While as early as 50 BCE, riotous soldiers leaving a Roman bath sliced through the ropes that hung the lamps from tree to tree and aloft us this new and larger room Flambeaux the arboreal was the wife of Julius Caesar in whose streets in which a single step could be heard. We opened all our windows and looked out on a listening world laced here and there with points of light, Notre Dame of the Unfinished Sky, oil slicks burning on the river; someone down on the corner striking a match to read by. Some claim Paris was the first modern city to light its streets. The inhabitants were ordered in 1524 to place a taper in every window in the dark there were 912 streets walked into this arc until by stars makes steps sharp, you are and are not alone by public decree October 1558: the lanterns were similar to those used in mines: “Once we were kings” and down into the spiral of our riches still reign:falots or great vases of pitch lit at the crossroads —and thus were we followed through a city of thieves—which, but a few weeks later, were replaced by chandeliers. While others claim all London was alight by 1414. There it was worded: Out of every window, come a wrist with a lanthorn and were told hold it there and be on time and not before and watched below the faces lit, and watched the faces pass.         And turned back in (the face goes on) and watched the lights go out. Here the numbers are instructive: In the early 18th century, London hung some 15,000 lamps. And now we find (1786) they’ve turned to crystal, placed precisely, each its own distance, small in islands, large in the time it would take to run. And Venice started in 1687 with a bell upon the hearing of which, we all in unison exit, match in hand, and together strike them against an upper tooth and touch the tiny flame to anything, and when times get rough (crime up, etc.) all we have to do is throw oil out upon the canals to make the lighting uncommonly extensive. Sometimes we do it just to shock the rest of Europe, and at other times because we find it beautiful. Says Libanius Night differs us Without us noctes illustratas Though in time of public grief when the streets were left unlit, on we went, just dark marks in the markets and voices in the cafes, in the crowded squares, a single touch, the living, a lantern swinging above the door any time a child is born, be it Antioch, Syria, or Edessa— and then there were the festivals, the festum encaeniorum, and others in which they call idolatrous, these torches half a city wide be your houses.

The jay streaks through the lilacs in color clash. I note down: Invent outdoor birdswing so birds drunk on berries fall off in plaid in front of my window. I file it.  After all, the pussy willow’s barely tufted— I have time. At the drain, lifting its feet, a Modigliani bird—another invention? The brook agrees so brookishly, gulping at runoff like a bear in spring, like my husband. He didn’t trust my patents: the squirrel-free gutter chain the collapsing arthritic’s cane a lever for pulling old stumps in heavy rain. But every act harbors a corresponding gadget. It is that way with God: adjusting the acorn, locking the tree. With the womb, He was clearly Italianate, the bulbous lines, the excess. I often think of Him humming Beatles songs like me, over six Mason jars of pickling— my offspring? The dog laughs. You heard it: a choke, then black gums, a frothing irony. He’s all wet from rescuing bones from the brook. He drops them in, then goes in after. The brook’s rising with bones and I’m afraid the electricity will fail. Will the dog save me with his laughing? That’s what this invention’s for: the automatic rosebush waterer, hooked to the sun and this wheel, in perpetuity. Once a pirate working on my outboard told me, Betty, better sand trickling in the hourglass than a shifting dune. Even the Sudanese plant borders of aloe against the drifts. But I like the look of roses. Oh, that’s the husband at the door, scratching. Nights his furry self stands naked before me, until the dog removes his stuffing. O bear! Only by opening the blinds do I see he’s bleeding. It’s him, not me, aching with overdue maternity. A simple drawerful of cobwebs kept for emergency does for him, self-sticking, then together we apprise the chimney, holding hands and chatting about the soot stains. That was in winter before he died, the deft air stealing all we were speaking. Yesterday a patent came for my speech retrieval unit, an unusual event, even for me, because the government usually can’t get past the drawings. And these were intricate: I had the duck by the neck, her feet in food coloring, each step inked in. It all made sense—listen to the ducks now. And just in time for the aspect— ghosts are aspects, aren’t they? Of all but speech I have memory, that one sense shy of mimicry. In the spring, now, in fact, I take the blackfly larvae off rocks in the rapids. On toast, pre-maggot, the very eggs of mortality, eating them I figure I can lure Death itself, a raccoon washing and washing in the dark, and from there, patent the trap. I’ll be rich if its works. Works, go the frogs,works, works.