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The cause of death seems to have been starvation—his throat closed & so he was no longer able to swallow. On his deathbed he was editing The Hunger Artist,

My mother has taken me to Paddington Station. We are inside a whale. My father sleeps all day. When he wakes the cloisters come for him. My sister can sit on her hair. At night, a man sits on her bed. Her bed is covered in oak leaves. The sleeves of my mother’s kaftan trail in the dirt. We keep forgetting it’s not her. The telephone bursts from the wall. The wires are a joke. We get it.

The bleached wood massed in bone piles, we pulled it from dark beach and built fire in a fenced clearing. The posts’ blunt stubs sank down, they circled and were roofed by milled lumber dragged at one time to the coast. We slept there. Each morning the minus tide— weeds flowed it like hair swimming. The starfish gripped rock, pastel, rough. Fish bones lay in sun. Each noon the milk fog sank from cloud cover, came in our clothes and held them tighter on us. Sea stacks stood and disappeared. They came back when the sun scrubbed out the inlet. We went down to piles to get mussels, I made my shirt a bowl of mussel stones, carted them to our grate where they smoked apart. I pulled the mussel lip bodies out, chewed their squeak. We went up the path for fresh water, berries. Hardly speaking, thinking. During low tide we crossed to the island, climbed its wet summit. The redfoots and pelicans dropped for fish. Oclets so silent fell toward water with linked feet. Jacynthe said little. Long since we had spoken Nova Scotia, Michigan, and knew beauty in saying nothing. She told me about her mother who would come at them with bread knives then stop herself, her face emptied. I told her about me, never lied. At night at times the moon floated. We sat with arms tight watching flames spit, snap. On stone and sand picking up wood shaped like a body, like a gull. I ran barefoot not only on beach but harsh gravels up through the woods. I shit easy, covered my dropping. Some nights, no fires, we watched sea pucker and get stabbed by the beacon circling on Tatoosh. 2 I stripped and spread on the sea lip, stretched to the slap of the foam and the vast red dulce. Jacynthe gripped the earth in her fists, opened— the boil of the tide shuffled into her. The beach revolved, headlands behind us put their pines in the sun. Gulls turned a strong sky. Their pained wings held, they bit water quick, lifted. Their looping eyes continually measure the distance from us, bare women who do not touch. Rocks drowsed, holes filled with suds from a distance. A deep laugh bounced in my flesh and sprayed her. 3 Flies crawled us, Jacynthe crawled. With her palms she spread my calves, she moved my heels from each other. A woman’s mouth is not different, sand moved wild beneath me, her long hair wiped my legs, with women there is sucking, the water slops our bodies. We come clean, our clits beat like twins to the loons rising up. We are awake. Snails sprinkle our gulps. Fish die in our grips, there is sand in the anus of dancing. Tatoosh Island hardens in the distance. We see its empty stones sticking out of the sea again. Jacynthe holds tinder under fire to cook the night’s wood. If we had men I would make milk in me simply.

Once, in the city of Kalamazoo, The gods went walking, two and two, With the friendly phoenix, the stars of Orion, The speaking pony and singing lion. For in Kalamazoo in a cottage apart Lived the girl with the innocent heart. Thenceforth the city of Kalamazoo Was the envied, intimate chum of the sun. He rose from a cave by the principal street. The lions sang, the dawn-horns blew, And the ponies danced on silver feet. He hurled his clouds of love around; Deathless colors of his old heart Draped the houses and dyed the ground. O shrine of the wide young Yankee land, Incense city of Kalamazoo, That held, in the midnight, the priceless sun As a jeweller holds an opal in hand! From the awkward city of Oshkosh came Love the bully no whip shall tame, Bringing his gang of sinners bold. And I was the least of his Oshkosh men; But none were reticent, none were old. And we joined the singing phoenix then, And shook the lilies of Kalamazoo All for one hidden butterfly. Bulls of glory, in cars of war We charged the boulevards, proud to die For her ribbon sailing there on high. Our blood set gutters all aflame, Where the sun slept without any heat— Cold rock till he must rise again. She made great poets of wolf-eyed men— The dear queen-bee of Kalamazoo, With her crystal wings, and her honey heart. We fought for her favors a year and a day (Oh, the bones of the dead, the Oshkosh dead, That were scattered along her pathway red!) And then, in her harum-scarum way, She left with a passing traveller-man— With a singing Irishman Went to Japan. Why do the lean hyenas glare Where the glory of Artemis had begun— Of Atalanta, Joan of Arc, Cinderella, Becky Thatcher, And Orphant Annie, all in one? Who burned this city of Kalamazoo Till nothing was left but a ribbon or two— One scorched phoenix that mourned in the dew, Acres of ashes, a junk-man's cart, A torn-up letter, a dancing shoe, (And the bones of the dead, the dead)? Who burned this city of Kalamazoo— Love-town, Troy-town Kalamazoo? A harum-scarum innocent heart.

Drepung, Tibet, 1958 So won a name in this place, handing off lath strips to a hammer's measure, seeing the passing girls' slits in roils of timber grain. Mountains, barley, scaffold, dirt. I was sixteen. And hourly from the hoods of faraway bells monks emerging like hairless animals. I was sixteen. What did I know of sovereignty, or the new soldiers by the gate, chinning their shotguns like violins? Nights, a tin roof wind cracked flat; my sister, flushed with child, hushing a child.

1 pavlos looking out to sea explains: son costa, 20, will be coming home went with a sponge caiqui to nearby island a storm came up: the boat was smashed & sunk the boys all got ashore & will be coming home in another caiqui 2 late at night i saw them costa & the others they’d saved the sponges too unloaded them first in burlap bags then hoisted them onto their backs trotted up the stone steps plodded up a steep hill at mid- night mid- night to the store- house 3 at 5 in the morning at the cafeneion the captain described the wreck: the boat had turned over & over in the water churning it like a propell- er 4 costa went by later on his motor- cycle (tall & sombre) riding like an indian 5 spiro (young gypsy) fishes off the dock when he isn’t climbing hills & selling blankets 6 what can you do? i get bored around the house the children crying fighting can’t sit all day in the cafeneion so i fish 7 after an hour he rolls in his lines teaches me two words in the romany tongue for ‘no fish’ (in the plural) 8 pat mos pat mos an gels an gels kaly mnos kaly mnos men kaly mnos kaly mnos men pat mos pat mos an gels an gels kaly mnos kaly mnos men 9 stergo has a tired eye bright but weary when he looks at you he looks into you his eye takes the place of what- ever you were think- ing 10 his café is near the customs house (& the pier) he keeps it open till late at night & opens again at 5 in the morn- ing if ever his cus- tomers find it closed they walk right by (& won’t drink coffee anyplace else) 11 in the endless city the end- less city the beg- gars are in one place the cops in an- other the fine people here & the poor people there (each has his parish each his precinct) in the endless endless endless city

I don’t recall when I first understood why you stiffen at the roar of low flying jets— Did you tell me, Mother, or did I just know? When you refused to show me the caves like eyes in the hills behind Bah-chan’s house— Did I only dream it, how when the sirens began the trains stopped dead in their tracks, unleashing a stream of thousands to rush blind and headlong toward those sheltering hills— The damp press of strange bodies in darkness rank with the stench of war’s leavings, only imagine a young girl’s cries drowned in the tumult, urgent groping of unseen hands— the bombs raining d0wn on Yokohama Harbor all through the night, hothouse blooms crackling in a seething sky, then hissing into a boiling sea— Was it a millennium that passed before the sirens ceased their wailing, only to be taken up again by the dogs and the dying? But you talk of none of this today. We walk slowly, saying little, as if less said will keep the heat at bay. The air is wet, heavy with summer smells carried aloft on the hypnotic drone of cicadas. You show me where as a girl you played in other summers, catching kabuto beetles and dragonflies in bamboo cages. What must go through you when we pass them at a distance, those black maws yawning out of the hillside, exhaling the unspeakable?

Ten years on, I came searching for war signs of the past expecting remnants — magazine debris, unexploded shells, shrapnel that mark bomb wounds. I came looking for ghosts — people past, skeletons charred, abandoned brick-wood-cement that once housed them. I could only find whispers — whispers among the clamour of a small town outpost in full throttle — everyday chores sketching outward signs of normality and life. In that bustle I spot war-lines of a decade ago, though the storylines are kept buried, wrapped in old newsprint. There is order amid uneasiness — the muezzin’s cry, the monk’s chant — baritones merging in their separateness. At the bus station black coughs of exhaust smoke-screens everything. The roads meet and after the crossroad ritual diverge, skating along the undotted lines of control. A porous garland with cracked beads adorns Tiger Hill. Beyond the mountains are dark memories, and beyond them no one knows, and beyond them no one wants to know. Even the flight of birds that wing over their crests don’t know which feathers to down. Chameleon-like they fly, tracing perfect parabolas. I look up and calculate their exact arc and find instead,                                     a flawed theorem.

Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar, Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell? Whom do you lead on Rapture's roadway, far, Before you agonise them in farewell? Oh, pale dispensers of my Joys and Pains, Holding the doors of Heaven and of Hell, How the hot blood rushed wildly through the veins, Beneath your touch, until you waved farewell. Pale hands, pink tipped, like Lotus buds that float On those cool waters where we used to dwell, I would have rather felt you round my throat, Crushing out life, than waving me farewell!

1 Held between wars my lifetime among wars, the big hands of the world of death my lifetime listens to yours. The faces of the sufferers in the street, in dailiness, their lives showing through their bodies a look as of music the revolutionary look that says    I am in the world to change the world my lifetime is to love to endure to suffer the music to set its portrait up as a sheet of the world the most moving the most alive Easter and bone and Faust walking among flowers of the world and the child alive within the living woman, music of man, and death holding my lifetime between great hands the hands of enduring life that suffers the gifts and madness of full life, on earth, in our time, and through my life, through my eyes, through my arms and hands may give the face of this music in portrait waiting for the unknown person held in the two hands, you. 2 Woman as gates, saying: "The process is after all like music, like the development of a piece of music. The fugues come back and again and again interweave. A theme may seem to have been put aside, but it keeps returning— the same thing modulated, somewhat changed in form. Usually richer. And it is very good that this is so." A woman pouring her opposites. "After all there are happy things in life too. Why do you show only the dark side?" "I could not answer this. But I know— in the beginning my impulse to know the working life had little to do with pity or sympathy. I simply felt that the life of the workers was beautiful." She said, "I am groping in the dark." She said, "When the door opens, of sensuality, then you will understand it too. The struggle begins. Never again to be free of it, often you will feel it to be your enemy. Sometimes you will almost suffocate, such joy it brings." Saying of her husband: "My wish is to die after Karl. I know no person who can love as he can, with his whole soul. But often too it has made me so terribly happy." She said: "We rowed over to Carrara at dawn, climbed up to the marble quarries and rowed back at night. The drops of water fell like guttering stars from our oars." She said: "As a matter of fact, I believe that bisexuality is almost    a necessary factor in artistic production; at any rate, the tinge of masculinity within me helped me in my work." She said: "The only technique I can still manage. It's hardly a technique at all, lithography. In it only the essentials count." A tight-lipped man in a restaurant last night saying to me: "Kollwitz?     She's too black-and-white." 3 Held among wars, watching all of them all these people weavers, Carmagnole Looking at all of them death, the children patients in waiting-rooms famine the street A woman seeing the violent, inexorable movement of nakedness and the confession of No the confession of great weakness, war, all streaming to one son killed, Peter; even the son left living; repeated, the father, the mother; the grandson another Peter killed in another war; firestorm; dark, light, as two hands, this pole and that pole as the gates. What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open 4Song : The Calling-Up Rumor, stir of ripeness rising within this girl sensual blossoming of meaning, its light and form. The birth-cry summoning out of the male, the father from the warm woman a mother in response. The word of death calls up the fight with stone wrestle with grief with time from the material make an art harder than bronze. 5 Self-Portrait Mouth looking directly at you eyes in their inwardness looking directly at you half light    half darkness woman, strong, German, young artist flows into wide sensual mouth meditating looking right at you eyes shadowed with brave hand looking deep at you flows into wounded brave mouth grieving and hooded eyes alive, German, in her first War flows into strength of the worn face a skein of lines broods, flows into mothers among the war graves bent over death facing the father stubborn upon the field flows into the marks of her knowing— Nie Wieder Krieg repeated in the eyes flows into "Seedcorn must not be ground" and the grooved cheek lips drawn fine the down-drawn grief face of our age flows into Pieta, mother and between her knees life as her son in death pouring from the sky of one more war flows into face almost obliterated hand over the mouth forever hand over one eye now the other great eye closed