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My body is like a jackfruit swinging on a tree My skin is rough, my pulp is thick Dear prince, if you want me pierce me upon your stick Don't squeeze, I'll ooze and stain your hands

Sometimes after hours of wine I can almost see the night gliding in low off the harbor down the long avenues of shop windows past mannequins, perfect in their gestures. I leave some water steaming on the gas ring and sometimes I can slip from my body, almost find the single word to prevent evenings that absolve nothing, a winter lived alone and cold. Rooms where you somehow marry the losses of strangers that tremble on the walls like the hands of the dancer next door, luminous with Methedrine, she taps walls for hours murmuring about the silver she swears lines the building, the hallways where each night drunks stammer their usual rosary until they come to rest beneath the tarnished numbers, the bulbs that star each ceiling. I must tell you I am afraid to sit here losing myself to the hour’s slow erasure until I know myself only by this cold weight, this hand on my lap, palm up. I want to still the dancer’s hands in mine, to talk about forgiveness and what we leave behind—faces and cities, the small emergencies of nights. I say nothing, but leaning on the sill, I watch her leave at that moment when the first taxis start rolling to the lights of Chinatown, powered by sad and human desire. I watch her fade down the street until she’s a smudge, violent in the circle of my breath. A figure so small I could cup her in my hands.

Because I am not married, I have the skin of an orange that has spent its life in the dark. Inside the orange I am blind. I cannot tell when a hand reaches in and breaks the atoms of the blood. Sometimes a blackbird will bring the wind into my hair. Or the yellow clouds falling on the cold floor are animals fighting each other out of their drifting misery. All the women I have known have been ruined by fog and the deer crossing the field at night.

He dwelt among “apartments let,” About five stories high; A man I thought that none would get, And very few would try. A boulder, by a larger stone Half hidden in the mud, Fair as a man when only one Is in the neighborhood. He lived unknown, and few could tell When Jacob was not free; But he has got a wife,—and O! The difference to me!

Outside the hotel window, unenlightened pigeons weave and dive like Stukas on their prey, apparently some tiny insect brother. (In India, the attainment of nonviolence is considered a proper goal for human beings.) If one of the pigeons should fly into the illusion of my window and survive (the body is no illusion when it’s hurt) he could be taken across town to the bird hospital where Jains, skilled medical men, repair the feathery sick and broken victims. There, in reproof of violence and of nothing else, live Mahavira’s brothers and sisters. To this small, gentle order of monks and nuns it is bright Vishnu and dark Shiva who are illusion. They trust in faith, cognition, and nonviolence to release them from rebirth. They think that birds and animals—like us, some predators, some prey— should be ministered to no less than men and women. The Jains who deal with creatures (and with laymen) wear white, while their more enterprising hermit brothers walk naked and are called the sky-clad . Jains pray to no deity, human kindness being their sole illusion. Mahavira and those twenty-three other airy creatures who turned to saints with him, preached the doctrine of ahimsa , which in our belligerent tongue becomes nonviolence . It’s not a doctrine congenial to snarers and poultrymen, who every day bring to market maimed pheasants. Numbers of these are brought in by the Jain brothers and brought, to grow back wing-tips and illusions, to one of the hospitals succoring such small quarry. When strong and feathered again, the lucky victims get reborn on Sunday mornings to the world’s violence, released from the roofs of these temples to illusion. It is hard for a westerner to speak about men and women like these, who call the birds of the air brothers. We recall the embarrassed fanfare for Francis and his flock. We’re poor forked sky-clad things ourselves and God knows prey to illusion— e.g. , I claim these brothers and sisters in India, stemming a little violence, among birds.

One tenseless moment liquifies to be lost into the stream of static's gray light. A lapse develops him the tape but reveals the reels degaussed, emptied of ghosts. He sifts through the tissue of noise for accusative objects he could once recall as the magnetic arrows of the tape seethe out from their mound to forage. His perfect past a glacier's gray retreat looped back out of phase with itself. It's low-decibel hiss resonates in throbbing waves that mimic the present seen from behind. This present bends into an empty crease where the next phoneme fails to arrive. There, books helped him recover the echo and filter on a model of speech that crashed into twelve thousand darts roaming the field her face turns in shadow. Her face it blurs with gauzy silt of words that used to comprehend her. Their river spools through an oxbow bend above a bird's black wings smooth air.

The popcorn is greasy, and I forgot to bring a Kleenex. A pill that’s a bomb inside the stomach of a man inside The Embassy blows up. Eructations of flame, luxurious cauliflowers giganticize into motion. The entire 29-ft. screen is orange, is crackling flesh and brick bursting, blackening, smithereened. I unwrap a Dentyne and, while jouncing my teeth in rubber tongue-smarting clove, try with the 2-inch-wide paper to blot butter off my fingers. A bubble-bath, room-sized, in which 14 girls, delectable and sexless, twist-topped Creamy Freezes (their blond, red, brown, pinkish, lavendar or silver wiglets all screwed that high, and varnished), scrub-tickle a lone male, whose chest has just the right amount and distribu- tion of curly hair. He’s nervously pretending to defend his modesty. His crotch, below the waterline, is also below the frame—but unsubmerged all 28 slick foamy boobs. Their makeup fails to let the girls look naked. Caterpil- lar lashes, black and thick, lush lips glossed pink like the gum I pop and chew, contact lenses on the eyes that are mostly blue, they’re nose-perfect replicas of each other. I’ve got most of the grease off and onto this little square of paper. I’m folding it now, making creases with my nails.

I went to his sixty-sixth birthday dinner: sixteen years ago this past November. I remember that it was at Chelsea Central (his favorite restaurant: great steaks) on 10th Avenue, and that Ashbery was there, and a few others, including Joe, impeccably dressed and gracious, who picked up what must have been (I thought at the time) an exorbitant bill. I remember him saying more than once, “Joe always picks up the bill,” then smiling a slightly wicked smile. Sitting with him (those excruciating silences!) in his room at the Chelsea, my eyes would wander from his book- shelves (The Portrait of a Lady stood out) to the pan of water on the radiator to the records strewn on the floor to some scraggly plants (ivy? herbs?) in ceramic pots at the base of the French doors that opened to the balcony and balustrade and sound of traffic on 23rd Street six floors below. He read me “White Boat, Blue Boat” shortly after he wrote it, and a poem about Brook Benton singing “Rainy Night in Georgia” that didn’t make it into his Last Poems, though I remember thinking it beautiful. He complained, in a letter to Tom, about how much I smoked, and how emotional I’d get during movies: he must have been referring to Field of Dreams(he had a yen for Kevin Costner). When he took me to see L'Atalante, a film he loved, I was bored. Once, we took the subway (he hadn’t ridden it in years) to the Frick; I remember admiring Romney’s Lady Hamilton. It hurt that he didn’t invite me to the dinner after his Dia reading or to the reception after his reading at the 92nd Street Y, though he did, at the latter, read “Mood Indigo,” dedicated to me. When he said my name from the stage, Joan and Eileen, sitting to my left, turned and stared at me; frozen by the enormity of the moment, I couldn’t look back. When he came to a reading I gave at St. Mark’s, Raymond impressed upon me what an honor it was: Jimmy didn’t go to many poetry readings. What else is there to say? That when I visited him at St. Vincent’s the day before he died Darragh said, “He likes to hear gossip.” So I said, “Eileen and I are talking again.” That at his funeral I sat alone (Ira couldn’t come); that that was the loneliest feeling in the world. That afterwards Doug said “You look so sad.” How should I have looked, Doug! And that a year after he died, I dreamt I saw him in the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel. He was wearing a hospital shift and seemed to have no muscle control over his face—like in inten- sive care after his stroke. He saw me and said, “It’s nice to see some familiar faces.” I approached him, but he disappeared.

Your bow swept over a string, and a long low note quivered to the air. (A mother of Bohemia sobs over a new child perfect learning to suck milk.) Your bow ran fast over all the high strings fluttering and wild. (All the girls in Bohemia are laughing on a Sunday afternoon in the hills with their lovers.)

Beautifully Janet slept Till it was deeply morning. She woke then And thought about her dainty-feathered hen, To see how it had kept. One kiss she gave her mother, Only a small one gave she to her daddy Who would have kissed each curl of his shining baby; No kiss at all for her brother. “Old Chucky, Old Chucky!” she cried, Running across the world upon the grass To Chucky’s house, and listening. But alas, Her Chucky had died. It was a transmogrifying bee Came droning down on Chucky’s old bald head And sat and put the poison. It scarcely bled, But how exceedingly And purply did the knot Swell with the venom and communicate Its rigour! Now the poor comb stood up straight But Chucky did not. So there was Janet Kneeling on the wet grass, crying her brown hen (Translated far beyond the daughters of men) To rise and walk upon it. And weeping fast as she had breath Janet implored us, “Wake her from her sleep!” And would not be instructed in how deep Was the forgetful kingdom of death.