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Ne Rubeam, Pingui donatus Munere (Horace, Epistles II.i.267) While you, great patron of mankind, sustain The balanc'd world, and open all the main; Your country, chief, in arms abroad defend, At home, with morals, arts, and laws amend; How shall the Muse, from such a monarch steal An hour, and not defraud the public weal? Edward and Henry, now the boast of fame, And virtuous Alfred, a more sacred name, After a life of gen'rous toils endur'd, The Gaul subdu'd, or property secur'd, Ambition humbled, mighty cities storm'd, Or laws establish'd, and the world reform'd; Clos'd their long glories with a sigh, to find Th' unwilling gratitude of base mankind! All human virtue, to its latest breath Finds envy never conquer'd, but by death. The great Alcides, ev'ry labour past, Had still this monster to subdue at last. Sure fate of all, beneath whose rising ray Each star of meaner merit fades away! Oppress'd we feel the beam directly beat, Those suns of glory please not till they set. To thee the world its present homage pays, The harvest early, but mature the praise: Great friend of liberty! in kings a name Above all Greek, above all Roman fame: Whose word is truth, as sacred and rever'd, As Heav'n's own oracles from altars heard. Wonder of kings! like whom, to mortal eyes None e'er has risen, and none e'er shall rise. Just in one instance, be it yet confest Your people, Sir, are partial in the rest: Foes to all living worth except your own, And advocates for folly dead and gone. Authors, like coins, grow dear as they grow old; It is the rust we value, not the gold. Chaucer's worst ribaldry is learn'd by rote, And beastly Skelton heads of houses quote: One likes no language but the Faery Queen; A Scot will fight for Christ's Kirk o' the Green: And each true Briton is to Ben so civil, He swears the Muses met him at the Devil. Though justly Greece her eldest sons admires, Why should not we be wiser than our sires? In ev'ry public virtue we excel: We build, we paint, we sing, we dance as well, And learned Athens to our art must stoop, Could she behold us tumbling through a hoop. If time improve our wit as well as wine, Say at what age a poet grows divine? Shall we, or shall we not, account him so, Who died, perhaps, an hundred years ago? End all dispute; and fix the year precise When British bards begin t'immortalize? "Who lasts a century can have no flaw, I hold that wit a classic, good in law." Suppose he wants a year, will you compound? And shall we deem him ancient, right and sound, Or damn to all eternity at once, At ninety-nine, a modern and a dunce? "We shall not quarrel for a year or two; By courtesy of England, he may do." Then by the rule that made the horsetail bare, I pluck out year by year, as hair by hair, And melt down ancients like a heap of snow: While you, to measure merits, look in Stowe, And estimating authors by the year, Bestow a garland only on a bier. Shakespeare (whom you and ev'ry playhouse bill Style the divine, the matchless, what you will) For gain, not glory, wing'd his roving flight, And grew immortal in his own despite. Ben, old and poor, as little seem'd to heed The life to come, in ev'ry poet's creed. Who now reads Cowley? if he pleases yet, His moral pleases, not his pointed wit; Forgot his epic, nay Pindaric art, But still I love the language of his heart. "Yet surely, surely, these were famous men! What boy but hears the sayings of old Ben? In all debates where critics bear a part, Not one but nods, and talks of Jonson's art, Of Shakespeare's nature, and of Cowley's wit; How Beaumont's judgment check'd what Fletcher writ; How Shadwell hasty, Wycherley was slow; But, for the passions, Southerne sure and Rowe. These, only these, support the crowded stage, From eldest Heywood down to Cibber's age." All this may be; the people's voice is odd, It is, and it is not, the voice of God. To Gammer Gurton if it give the bays, And yet deny the Careless Husband praise, Or say our fathers never broke a rule; Why then, I say, the public is a fool. But let them own, that greater faults than we They had, and greater virtues, I'll agree. Spenser himself affects the obsolete, And Sidney's verse halts ill on Roman feet: Milton's strong pinion now not Heav'n can bound, Now serpent-like, in prose he sweeps the ground, In quibbles, angel and archangel join, And God the Father turns a school divine. Not that I'd lop the beauties from his book, Like slashing Bentley with his desp'rate hook, Or damn all Shakespeare, like th' affected fool At court, who hates whate'er he read at school. But for the wits of either Charles's days, The mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease; Sprat, Carew, Sedley, and a hundred more, (Like twinkling stars the Miscellanies o'er) One simile, that solitary shines In the dry desert of a thousand lines, Or lengthen'd thought that gleams through many a page, Has sanctified whole poems for an age. I lose my patience, and I own it too, When works are censur'd, not as bad, but new; While if our elders break all reason's laws, These fools demand not pardon, but applause. On Avon's bank, where flow'rs eternal blow, If I but ask if any weed can grow? One tragic sentence if I dare deride, Which Betterton's grave action dignified, Or well-mouth'd Booth with emphasis proclaims (Though but, perhaps, a muster-roll of names) How will our fathers rise up in a rage, And swear, all shame is lost in George's age! You'd think no fools disgrac'd the former reign, Did not some grave examples yet remain, Who scorn a lad should teach his father skill, And, having once been wrong, will be so still. He, who to seem more deep than you or I, Extols old bards, or Merlin's Prophecy, Mistake him not; he envies, not admires, And to debase the sons, exalts the sires. Had ancient times conspir'd to disallow What then was new, what had been ancient now? Or what remain'd, so worthy to be read By learned critics, of the mighty dead? In days of ease, when now the weary sword Was sheath'd, and luxury with Charles restor'd; In ev'ry taste of foreign courts improv'd, "All, by the King's example, liv'd and lov'd." Then peers grew proud in horsemanship t'excel, Newmarket's glory rose, as Britain's fell; The soldier breath'd the gallantries of France, And ev'ry flow'ry courtier writ romance. Then marble, soften'd into life, grew warm, And yielding metal flow'd to human form: Lely on animated canvas stole The sleepy eye, that spoke the melting soul. No wonder then, when all was love and sport, The willing Muses were debauch'd at court: On each enervate string they taught the note To pant or tremble through an eunuch's throat. But Britain, changeful as a child at play, Now calls in princes, and now turns away: Now Whig, now Tory, what we lov'd we hate; Now all for pleasure, now for Church and state; Now for prerogative, and now for laws; Effects unhappy! from a noble cause. Time was, a sober Englishman would knock His servants up, and rise by five o'clock, Instruct his family in ev'ry rule, And send his wife to church, his son to school. To worship like his fathers was his care; To teach their frugal virtues to his heir; To prove that luxury could never hold, And place, on good security, his gold. Now times are chang'd, and one poetic itch Has seiz'd the court and city, poor and rich: Sons, sires, and grandsires, all will wear the bays, Our wives read Milton, and our daughters plays, To theatres, and to rehearsals throng, And all our grace at table is a song. I, who so oft renounce the Muses, lie, Not {-}{-}{-}{-}{-}'s self e'er tells more fibs than I; When sick of Muse, our follies we deplore, And promise our best friends to rhyme no more; We wake next morning in a raging fit, And call for pen and ink to show our wit. He serv'd a 'prenticeship who sets up shop; Ward tried on puppies and the poor, his drop; Ev'n Radcliffe's doctors travel first to France, Nor dare to practise till they've learn'd to dance. Who builds a bridge that never drove a pile? (Should Ripley venture, all the world would smile) But those who cannot write, and those who can, All rhyme, and scrawl, and scribble, to a man. Yet, Sir, reflect, the mischief is not great; These madmen never hurt the Church or state: Sometimes the folly benefits mankind; And rarely av'rice taints the tuneful mind. Allow him but his plaything of a pen, He ne'er rebels, or plots, like other men: Flight of cashiers, or mobs, he'll never mind; And knows no losses while the Muse is kind. To cheat a friend, or ward, he leaves to Peter; The good man heaps up nothing but mere metre, Enjoys his garden and his book in quiet; And then—a perfect hermit in his diet. Of little use the man you may suppose, Who says in verse what others say in prose: Yet let me show, a poet's of some weight, And (though no soldier) useful to the state. What will a child learn sooner than a song? What better teach a foreigner the tongue? What's long or short, each accent where to place, And speak in public with some sort of grace. I scarce can think him such a worthless thing, Unless he praise some monster of a king; Or virtue or religion turn to sport, To please a lewd, or unbelieving court. Unhappy Dryden!—In all Charles's days, Roscommon only boasts unspotted bays; And in our own (excuse some courtly stains) No whiter page than Addison remains. He, from the taste obscene reclaims our youth, And sets the passions on the side of truth, Forms the soft bosom with the gentlest art, And pours each human virtue in the heart. Let Ireland tell, how wit upheld her cause, Her trade supported, and supplied her laws; And leave on Swift this grateful verse engrav'd, "The rights a court attack'd, a poet sav'd." Behold the hand that wrought a nation's cure, Stretch'd to relieve the idiot and the poor, Proud vice to brand, or injur'd worth adorn, And stretch the ray to ages yet unborn. Not but there are, who merit other palms; Hopkins and Sternhold glad the heart with psalms: The boys and girls whom charity maintains, Implore your help in these pathetic strains: How could devotion touch the country pews, Unless the gods bestow'd a proper Muse? Verse cheers their leisure, verse assists their work, Verse prays for peace, or sings down Pope and Turk. The silenc'd preacher yields to potent strain, And feels that grace his pray'r besought in vain; The blessing thrills through all the lab'ring throng, And Heav'n is won by violence of song. Our rural ancestors, with little blest, Patient of labour when the end was rest, Indulg'd the day that hous'd their annual grain, With feasts, and off'rings, and a thankful strain: The joy their wives, their sons, and servants share, Ease of their toil, and part'ners of their care: The laugh, the jest, attendants on the bowl, Smooth'd ev'ry brow, and open'd ev'ry soul: With growing years the pleasing licence grew, And taunts alternate innocently flew. But times corrupt, and nature, ill-inclin'd, Produc'd the point that left a sting behind; Till friend with friend, and families at strife, Triumphant malice rag'd through private life. Who felt the wrong, or fear'd it, took th' alarm, Appeal'd to law, and justice lent her arm. At length, by wholesome dread of statutes bound, The poets learn'd to please, and not to wound: Most warp'd to flatt'ry's side; but some, more nice, Preserv'd the freedom, and forbore the vice. Hence satire rose, that just the medium hit, And heals with morals what it hurts with wit. We conquer'd France, but felt our captive's charms; Her arts victorious triumph'd o'er our arms; Britain to soft refinements less a foe, Wit grew polite, and numbers learn'd to flow. Waller was smooth; but Dryden taught to join The varying verse, the full-resounding line, The long majestic march, and energy divine. Though still some traces of our rustic vein And splayfoot verse remain'd, and will remain. Late, very late, correctness grew our care, When the tir'd nation breath'd from civil war. Exact Racine, and Corneille's noble fire Show'd us that France had something to admire. Not but the tragic spirit was our own, And full in Shakespeare, fair in Otway shone: But Otway fail'd to polish or refine, And fluent Shakespeare scarce effac'd a line. Ev'n copious Dryden wanted, or forgot, The last and greatest art, the art to blot. Some doubt, if equal pains, or equal fire The humbler Muse of comedy require. But in known images of life, I guess The labour greater, as th' indulgence less. Observe how seldom ev'n the best succeed: Tell me if Congreve's fools are fools indeed? What pert, low dialogue has Farqu'ar writ! How Van wants grace, who never wanted wit! The stage how loosely does Astr{ae}ea tread, Who fairly puts all characters to bed! And idle Cibber, how he breaks the laws, To make poor Pinky eat with vast applause! But fill their purse, our poet's work is done, Alike to them, by pathos or by pun. O you! whom vanity's light bark conveys On fame's mad voyage by the wind of praise, With what a shifting gale your course you ply, For ever sunk too low, or borne too high! Who pants for glory finds but short repose, A breath revives him, or a breath o'erthrows. Farewell the stage! if just as thrives the play, The silly bard grows fat, or falls away. There still remains, to mortify a wit, The many-headed monster of the pit: A senseless, worthless, and unhonour'd crowd; Who, to disturb their betters mighty proud, Clatt'ring their sticks before ten lines are spoke, Call for the farce, the bear, or the black-joke. What dear delight to Britons farce affords! Farce once the taste of mobs, but now of lords; (For taste, eternal wanderer, now flies From heads to ears, and now from ears to eyes.) The play stands still; damn action and discourse, Back fly the scenes, and enter foot and horse; Pageants on pageants, in long order drawn, Peers, heralds, bishops, ermine, gold, and lawn; The champion too! and, to complete the jest, Old Edward's armour beams on Cibber's breast. With laughter sure Democritus had died, Had he beheld an audience gape so wide. Let bear or elephant be e'er so white, The people, sure, the people are the sight! Ah luckless poet! stretch thy lungs and roar, That bear or elephant shall heed thee more; While all its throats the gallery extends, And all the thunder of the pit ascends! Loud as the wolves on Orcas' stormy steep, Howl to the roarings of the Northern deep. Such is the shout, the long-applauding note, At Quin's high plume, or Oldfield's petticoat, Or when from Court a birthday suit bestow'd Sinks the lost actor in the tawdry load. Booth enters—hark! the universal peal! "But has he spoken?" Not a syllable. "What shook the stage, and made the people stare?" Cato's long wig, flow'r'd gown, and lacquer'd chair. Yet lest you think I rally more than teach, Or praise malignly arts I cannot reach, Let me for once presume t'instruct the times, To know the poet from the man of rhymes: 'Tis he, who gives my breast a thousand pains, Can make me feel each passion that he feigns; Enrage, compose, with more than magic art, With pity and with terror tear my heart; And snatch me o'er the earth or thro' the air, To Thebes, to Athens, when he will, and where. But not this part of the poetic state Alone, deserves the favour of the great: Think of those authors, Sir, who would rely More on a reader's sense, than gazer's eye. Or who shall wander where the Muses sing? Who climb their mountain, or who taste their spring? How shall we fill a library with wit, When Merlin's Cave is half unfurnish'd yet? My Liege! why writers little claim your thought, I guess: and, with their leave, will tell the fault: We poets are (upon a poet's word) Of all mankind, the creatures most absurd: The season, when to come, and when to go, To sing, or cease to sing, we never know; And if we will recite nine hours in ten, You lose your patience, just like other men. Then too we hurt ourselves, when to defend A single verse, we quarrel with a friend; Repeat unask'd; lament, the wit's too fine For vulgar eyes, and point out ev'ry line. But most, when straining with too weak a wing, We needs will write epistles to the king; And from the moment we oblige the town, Expect a place, or pension from the Crown; Or dubb'd historians by express command, T'enroll your triumphs o'er the seas and land, Be call'd to court to plan some work divine, As once for Louis, Boileau and Racine. Yet think, great Sir! (so many virtues shown) Ah think, what poet best may make them known? Or choose at least some minister of grace, Fit to bestow the laureate's weighty place. Charles, to late times to be transmitted fair, Assign'd his figure to Bernini's care; And great Nassau to Kneller's hand decreed To fix him graceful on the bounding steed; So well in paint and stone they judg'd of merit: But kings in wit may want discerning spirit. The hero William, and the martyr Charles, One knighted Blackmore, and one pension'd Quarles; Which made old Ben, and surly Dennis swear, "No Lord's anointed, but a Russian bear." Not with such majesty, such bold relief, The forms august, of king, or conqu'ring chief, E'er swell'd on marble; as in verse have shin'd (In polish'd verse) the manners and the mind. Oh! could I mount on the M{ae}onian wing, Your arms, your actions, your repose to sing! What seas you travers'd! and what fields you fought! Your country's peace, how oft, how dearly bought! How barb'rous rage subsided at your word, And nations wonder'd while they dropp'd the sword! How, when you nodded, o'er the land and deep, Peace stole her wing, and wrapp'd the world in sleep; Till earth's extremes your mediation own, And Asia's tyrants tremble at your throne— But verse, alas! your Majesty disdains; And I'm not us'd to panegyric strains: The zeal of fools offends at any time, But most of all, the zeal of fools in rhyme, Besides, a fate attends on all I write, That when I aim at praise, they say I bite. A vile encomium doubly ridicules: There's nothing blackens like the ink of fools; If true, a woeful likeness; and if lies, "Praise undeserv'd is scandal in disguise." Well may he blush, who gives it, or receives; And when I flatter, let my dirty leaves (Like journals, odes, and such forgotten things As Eusden, Philips, Settle, writ of kings) Clothe spice, line trunks, or flutt'ring in a row, Befringe the rails of Bedlam and Soho.

People have been trying to kill me since I was born, a man tells his son, trying to explain the wisdom of learning a second tongue. It’s an old story from the previous century about my father and me. The same old story from yesterday morning about me and my son. It’s called “Survival Strategies and the Melancholy of Racial Assimilation.” It’s called “Psychological Paradigms of Displaced Persons,” called “The Child Who’d Rather Play than Study.” Practice until you feel the language inside you,

Let us not speak of those days when coffee beans filled the morning with hope, when our mothers' headscarves hung like white flags on washing lines. Let us not speak of the long arms of sky that used to cradle us at dusk. And the baobabs—let us not trace the shape of their leaves in our dreams, or yearn for the noise of those nameless birds that sang and died in the church's eaves. Let us not speak of men, stolen from their beds at night. Let us not say the word disappeared. Let us not remember the first smell of rain. Instead, let us speak of our lives now— the gates and bridges and stores. And when we break bread in caf é s and at kitchen tables with our new brothers, let us not burden them with stories of war or abandonment. Let us not name our old friends who are unravelling like fairy tales in the forests of the dead. Naming them will not bring them back. Let us stay here, and wait for the future to arrive, for grandchildren to speak in forked tongues about the country we once came from. Tell us about it, they might ask. And you might consider telling them of the sky and the coffee beans, the small white houses and dusty streets. You might set your memory afloat like a paper boat down a river. You might pray that the paper whispers your story to the water, that the water sings it to the trees, that the trees howl and howl it to the leaves. If you keep still and do not speak, you might hear your whole life fill the world until the wind is the only word.

All birds—even those that do not fly —have wings A constant confession Admission of omission This is your punctuated equilibrium And everything in between Slow it down The moment of extinction The death of the last individual of a species (Let’s put it aside for now) Stay with it This is our gene flow How do you like our genetic drift A riff, a rift, a raft… Too rough for the second half Take us under, take us downhill Paint pangenesis all over your dancing body The new party god Keep the beat going, don’t stop, you can’t stop Crick & Watson Evo-devo This is your mother’s local phenomenon If this is racial hygiene Why do I feel so dirty? Microcosmic soul It’s an involutionary wonderland This living matter A modern synthesis 4.6 billion years of biology Can’t stop the ideology Graduate from meet/mate To fitness landscape of sexual selection From land over sea It’s a hard lyric The impression of a key in a bar of soap A transitional fossil Keep camping Plant the flag Bury the burial mound Put the pop in popular And the sigh in science

PART ONE I Slip-pilings on the Brooklyn littoral —the poles still tarry, flimsy; the ferry terminus with its walledup doors wan doorshapes on eroded sills. Downstream, the strutwork of the Williamsburg cable tower threw its cool shadow half a mile inland over tarpaper seams, gantried water butts, and splintery tenement cornices milled with acanthus and classical grasses of nineteenth-century dream-slum fantasy. We could see, from our rooftops, the endspan floating its ant-threads of traffic to the granite salients of the anchorage, and through its strands on the west the Financial District’s watery silhouettes. But it was our own foundations, crumbling in the sandy soil, that made us protest the drill rigs sounding for a wider bridge ramp to funnel the airport traffic over us into Manhattan. “Construction tremors will weaken our buildings”: from the over-roosted tenements clinging near the anchorage flew manuscript lists of signatures, block-groups’ painfully Englished petitions. But City Hall adoze, sleep-feeding, just flooded us II with chimerical figures and blueprints, wearing us down. Our own “block-leader,” Luz, a Guatemalan law student at NYU where I studied classics, distracted us more easily with her “pure language” or anti-Puerto Rican tirades. “Call that Spanish? Take my sitter— muy indio, still speaks some Maya mountain-language BUT the beautiful Spanish!” And so one evening this sitter, Pilar, came over—forty, perhaps, with a long fawn-tinted oval face, and read in low tones an archaic poem to the Madonna. “My daughter knows it in Quiché and English—” and she passed around, wistfully, a First Communion photo—flat cheekbones like her mother’s, long black braids, straight look. Luz told us Pilar had lost husband and son to the Violence; a machine-gunned death heap in the center of their village— “They killed all the men. But when my family came here, she came with her girl, we helped with the green card, and she’s a hotel maid now near the UN ...” Much realer, this, than our own bridge-inflicted, some-day disaster. And who knew but our bridge might metamorphose, as the City said (“Global cities draw capital”), into a river of money (“We’ll all sell cuchifritos on the ramp”), and anyway, mainly, summer III was running out, with its open evenings and windows. One Saturday, turning onto my block from the subway, I heard my name, crossed the street where twin buildings had area-ways. and saw you waving, the same, Pilar, from a window below the swag-bellied area railings. “Come have some coffee—go around in back.” I walked down the building-side, and turned in a trash-littered airwell by a door with multiple doorbells. You opened from a wooden hallway, unpainted, with padlocked doors. “See, the super’s cut up his flat for illegals. They took out an inside wall, so our room has a window—we all share the bath.” I entered a lime-walled room—chairs and table, sofa-bed. Your front wall was the building front, the three others drywall. On the bureau, a black-shawled prie-dieu : two photos; two candles in translucent, white-waxed sacks, and a polychrome Madonna with meeting brows. Through your window, car wheels, railings; and, above, my own second-story windows. “We saw you reading there,” you said from behind me, “when we moved in.” You sat me on the sofa, and formally presented your daughter (she moved her schoolbooks all to one end.) Near her, a shallow, linoleumed-over trench and a bathroom sink. You said: “I’m a widow from the mountains near Morache, very near the home-town of Señora Luz. My real work is hotel maid, and I’ve got a nice job, at a place called the Tricontinental.” Then you paused, and I felt how clearly you’d presented yourself, as Americans do, with your job, your état civil, and I said: “I’m a graduate student at NYU, where Luz studies, no, not married, no children ...” I tried to add something else at once, to leave this less ... definitive, but nothing came, so we ran through bridge-rumors, and soon we were hardly listening, waiting for our own next word, and laughing at our gabble. Pequita told us what the priest had said about the drilling; you spoke of Pequita’s First Communion, and none of us could stop finding striking things to say. Next day you came over to see my plants, and I came back for soup-supper, looking up at my windows, which in the easy half-yellow light of autumn looked oddly beckoning. As we ate, you leaned forward, with a sudden rogue’s smile, and mockingly proposed that we three walk across the bridge, “There’s a path up there. If the bridge is bad, we’ll tell off the Mayor—” (In what spirit, I wondered, had you listened to our committee?) And when I got home I looked down, and through your sheer curtains saw you cleaning up, and Pequita, at the table, reading. IV But next week, instead of the plank stair that zigzags up the anchorage-side, we wandered the riverside shipping alleys. From below, we could see overhead the under-arch of the bridge, and feel the resonant top-thrum of westbound subways and trucks. Then the riverside—I loved this part. A sort of post-industrial fenworld, with tiny terrace houses, big dredger-parts laid aside from the drillings, and abandoned wreckers’ lots filled with sea-floor light and trembling, long-awned panicles of switchgrass. Its timelessness soothed me—though ephemeral. Even that day, one freshly tuckpointed facade, and a pair of brandnew bronze Edwardian mermaid doorknockers. I could see our quarter five years from now, say—the withering discount chains, tentative boutiques, and mother and daughter figuring, to the upscale “pioneers,” as neighborhood indigenes, living on with strange literalness among them, supplying their just-permissible quantum of urban grit. You were ahead, and Pequita trailed us, rattling weed stalks with a stray lath. As we progressed in and out of the endspan’s slatted shadows, you turned and called me into a side-lot—sunken concrete, flask- green puddles, to a broken-off building wall. It had been interior, once—rows of soiled roomsized plaster squares trailing sawn pipes, with one high trembling toilet, like a pearl. In a lower square, fringed with ailanthus and barbs of gang graffiti, was a mural. Muy latino: the mountain dreaming the city: a terrace cafe with palm trees and a dancer shawled in black lace, with inward-angled castanets. And you lifted yourself on tiptoe, Pilar, to touch the lace, as you might have grazed Pequita’s cheek. I felt a pang, as if I already needed you sturdy inside your sturdy body, not this gesture as if, exiled within, you reached out— We stepped back, museum-wise, to contemplate, and you said: “Luz likes to say I’m some mountain-woman, but when my mother died, I lived with my aunt in the City—I only went back when I married.” I told her I’d lived in this city, with a stepmother, who’d divorced my uncle to marry my father; and beat me. “A stepmother’s a curse of God,” you said gently. And on the walk back, pointed out more wall palms, beaches, until New York seemed a dot in a belt of capitals high on the globe: world-cities, packed with immigrants, refugees, Gastarbeiter: a snowy latitude suffused with tropical nostalgia. V We were a threesome. Coffee, suppers, TV, Pequita at my computer—you’d asked me to teach her— or sleeping on my sofa, one bad month they moved you to night shift. Yet only that summer, I’d worked in my window like a scholar in a lamplit bay, the night filled with myriad noises, like Roman Juvenal, to whose ears “came ever the sounds of buildings collapsing.” Across, the two tenement-faces, florid, all bucrania, meanders, dusky trails of fire-escape bedding. And everything underlit by the sinister, slow-stopping car lights of our street. But now it was the dailiness of two from another hemisphere. Through snow-fissures, winds fluting on railings and building-flaws, Pilar in her low frame paced with armfuls of laundry, washed in the sink and hung to dry everywhere. The thousand stratagems of those who simply must not spend; and the tiny mother-decisions: though you preferred periphery, housekeeping around her, you’d make yourself interrupt her, to mop behind your sweeping. And Pequita—I saw her wrap you up on the sofa when you had flu, and bring you orange juice, as they’d taught her in school, for she loved you, she was the person who loved you— I saw too, that of what I wanted the university to be for me—a tiny model of the city with its own rules and subsets: “Tell me each day who I am”—you’d found your part in Pequita; I followed the shape of your day touching center as it funneled into her hand and moving pencil-point. VI For everything seemed natural to Pequita: the Credo, her photocopied choir music piled beside the tidy prie-dieu, our neighborhood of syringe-filled gutters, drug-stoops and pimps, her school’s turkey cutouts, metal detectors, backed-up toilets ... Our human wilderness, half-urban, half-surreal to her was a matter-of-fact Eden, like the picturesque ruins and laughably rococo grottoes imagined by the seicento as the Golden Age. —And I, I thought her whole world, it comes back— touching, as if her child’s paradisial will were there for my affectionate recreation, like our still faithfully, occasionally, typed-up and dispatched protests from the Ramp Committee to the Mayor. Slight effects of perspective, tiny human gestures giving point to the city’s vast, ironic beauty. PART TWO VII At a moment when no one was thinking about her, Pequita awoke. Perhaps she enjoyed the solitude, Pilar asleep, me asleep across the street. She got up and stood on the cheap oval bathroom rug before the sink. At seven the drills started, deeper-toned than ever before (they woke me)— and part of your ceiling fell in; a beam splintered, plummeting straight to the oval rug— The person screaming over the phone was Pilar. I thought it must be really all right, or she’d be crying not screaming, but when I’d called 911 and run over, Pequita was barely alive. Then the hospital corridors, me trying to close my winter coat (the buttons were off) on my nightgown, you on a bench, staring straight ahead. When they said Pequita was “gone,” you were utterly silent. I brought you to my place (though our street was a tangle of police lights and yellow tape), terrified of your fixed inner focus, as if you had a plan ... Next night I had Luz stay over, I slept at her place; the third I was back. You, thank God (I thought), were crying, and Luz had set up the service. She propelled us downstairs and to a tiny brick church I must often have passed without seeing it, two blocks inland. Egg-blue inside, it was, with a little green and gilt altar, dark Stations on the walls, and the statue of the Virgin of Guadeloupe placed oddly below the altar stairs, so that Pilar, after the death-mass, could kneel before her, praying straight into her face, while I on a kneeler buried mine in my hands. What would the mother live for now, the hotel, me, or Luz, already writing more endless mad letters? Yet only these had from the City real answers: they’d brace the drill site with vibration-absorbing piers; and they wanted her and her friend Mrs. Citrin to know “that no one else had been more than lightly injured.” VIII It was the end of winter, very dark. The building managers, nervy, had moved you to the first floor next door, till you found a new place (I knew you weren’t looking). Each day I saw you arrive from work, answer my call tersely, then pull down your blinds. A shadow showed rarely, flattened, shapeless; you lay on your sofa a lot. “Thanks Anne—I’m better without company,” or “please understand.” But often, later in the evening, you’d come down the stairs and turn inland. Then, one morning as I was passing with early groceries, you were leaving the parish hall in your black winter coat, heavily scarved, and we paused. Approvingly, you tapped one glove on my armload—you’d told me to cook more, dictated recipes. I asked if this had been Pequita’s choir-practice place; the sentence wavered, but you replied with grim joy, “She’s not practicing now. ” It took me a minute. Pequita was singing, this moment, in the Presence. Still what you felt most (it was in your face) was absence, absence, but from something bitter in your eyes, that seemed small and round with the cold, I felt your desire to exclude me and our old collusive ironies. What were such luxuries now, ironies, Anglo friends; and I thought you hated my mind that remembered the brownpapered books, the orange juice. I reached to touch your arm—to get past this, but no, you had to get home: “I fasted for communion”; and your eyes swerved away. All my laughable, my lovely, delusional studies, that I’d seen you sort through for Pequita, were now an affront. And yet I felt you moving behind your own mind, as if with something held in reserve ... IX But then you stopped answering the phone, went less often to church. What I thought was that you were angry (certainly I was). Perhaps I thought you needed to talk, and I’d visit you in Manhattan. So one morning in March, in the black coat I’d got for the funeral, I walked east from the forty-second street Lexington stop to the three-story, fairy-lit jungle atrium of the Tricontinental, and went to the seventh floor, where you started. There was a cart in the hall, a gleaming chrome maid’s cart half-projecting from a bedroom. On its sides were rows of glasses with lace sani-bonnets, gold- stamped mini-soaps and deodorants. It moved out, and you stood in the door with a sheet-load, looking fat in a starchy pink uniform monogrammed PILAR. When you saw me, you dropped the sheets and in pain, pressed both palms to your cheeks, and looked at me looking at you. When I started sobbing, you took my shoulder and backed me to the elevator. Pressed the button, stepped back, and then, to my surprise, gave me a sudden hug before pushing me in. X It had been always this half-connected and tenuous, our friendship. What light on my own isolation and need, that I hadn’t known. But you actually called me, that week, to propose our old joke, a bridge walk—maybe Saturday? Your voice in my ears sounded wobbly with tension, held-backness, so I got in first: a friend had wound up her doctorate and left me a minute Village studio starting June ... After that I could listen, somber, as you poured out your need to leave, Luz’s cousin, the possible hotel job “right in LA.” You added “Anne,” and broke off. “Well, I’ll tell you that later. Look, it may snow on Saturday, OK?” “I don’t care.” And before you hung up, I’d resigned you, given you up. We’d part, on my side in anger, on yours in oblivion. I met you at the foot of the anchorage stair (not the eastern approach, with its easy grade near the ramp site). We climbed through the snow, slowly, pausing at landings for different views of our old alley world. Like a museum of disused urban functions—we noted a bricked-over backyard privy arch, and from higher, roof-huts, inkily distinct, of old-style tenement dumbwaiters. The whole scene thrown out of drawing by one of those giant NYC cable-spools, charred at the bottom where some homeless had tried to burn it. The moist snow was sweeping through the cable tower when we clambered onto the path beneath it. As we moved, hunched slightly, onto the mainspan, the whole city abruptly whited-out to a monochrome geometry of vertical and stooping gray lines. I thought how Pequita would have loved it, and caught her mother’s eye. We went on cautiously, soon pausing to stamp our boots and look over the rail at the traffic lanes below us. “Anne, what I started to say before—this is it: I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you—you understand?” “Of course,” I lied aimlessly. But you, glancing sideways, “But I’m really sorry ...” “No, really ...” You shook your head slightly, then took my arm. “Okay then— what’s this thing?” pointing a snowy boot at a bolt as high as our knees, with a rusted-on octagonal nut: “It’s just a bolt.” You tapped your glove on a strut— “strut,” I provided. And you said, pompously, in Luz’ very intonations (in what spirit had you listened?)—“The tolerances just aren’t there. ” Then, feeling easier, we started naming everything— spikes, spun-wire vertical cables: English, Spanish, and then I heard you speak Quiché (words once for vines, for split trunks over gorges?) But everything on the bridge was shabby, neglected-looking; and you said soberly: “If anyone was supposed to look after this bridge, he’s forgot all about it.” We didn’t link arms again, but started back, pausing to throw a few loose snowballs on the Manhattan traffic below us. We’d go our separate ways—I’d go on delaying, skirting around my burnt-out places; you’d go where you could, forget what you could— some Job-like relinquishment of inquiry or thought; organisms tend to persist ... When we got down to the massive base of the anchorage, we managed a hug that took in our past, at least: one embrace of two black winter coats in the snow.

We are born with dreams in our hearts, looking for better days ahead. At the gates we are given new papers, our old clothes are taken and we are given overalls like mechanics wear. We are given shots and doctors ask questions. Then we gather in another room where counselors orient us to the new land we will now live in. We take tests. Some of us were craftsmen in the old world, good with our hands and proud of our work. Others were good with their heads. They used common sense like scholars use glasses and books to reach the world. But most of us didn’t finish high school. The old men who have lived here stare at us, from deep disturbed eyes, sulking, retreated. We pass them as they stand around idle, leaning on shovels and rakes or against walls. Our expectations are high: in the old world, they talked about rehabilitation, about being able to finish school, and learning an extra good trade. But right away we are sent to work as dishwashers, to work in fields for three cents an hour. The administration says this is temporary So we go about our business, blacks with blacks, poor whites with poor whites, chicanos and indians by themselves. The administration says this is right, no mixing of cultures, let them stay apart, like in the old neighborhoods we came from. We came here to get away from false promises, from dictators in our neighborhoods, who wore blue suits and broke our doors down when they wanted, arrested us when they felt like, swinging clubs and shooting guns as they pleased. But it’s no different here. It’s all concentrated. The doctors don’t care, our bodies decay, our minds deteriorate, we learn nothing of value. Our lives don’t get better, we go down quick. My cell is crisscrossed with laundry lines, my T-shirts, boxer shorts, socks and pants are drying. Just like it used to be in my neighborhood: from all the tenements laundry hung window to window. Across the way Joey is sticking his hands through the bars to hand Felipé a cigarette, men are hollering back and forth cell to cell, saying their sinks don’t work, or somebody downstairs hollers angrily about a toilet overflowing, or that the heaters don’t work. I ask Coyote next door to shoot me over a little more soap to finish my laundry. I look down and see new immigrants coming in, mattresses rolled up and on their shoulders, new haircuts and brogan boots, looking around, each with a dream in their heart, thinking they’ll get a chance to change their lives. But in the end, some will just sit around talking about how good the old world was. Some of the younger ones will become gangsters. Some will die and others will go on living without a soul, a future, or a reason to live. Some will make it out of here with hate in their eyes, but so very few make it out of here as human as they came in, they leave wondering what good they are now as they look at their hands so long away from their tools, as they look at themselves, so long gone from their families, so long gone from life itself, so many things have changed.

I speak this poem now with grave and level voice In praise of autumn, of the far-horn-winding fall. I praise the flower-barren fields, the clouds, the tall Unanswering branches where the wind makes sullen noise. I praise the fall: it is the human season. Now No more the foreign sun does meddle at our earth, Enforce the green and bring the fallow land to birth, Nor winter yet weigh all with silence the pine bough, But now in autumn with the black and outcast crows Share we the spacious world: the whispering year is gone: There is more room to live now: the once secret dawn Comes late by daylight and the dark unguarded goes. Between the mutinous brave burning of the leaves And winter’s covering of our hearts with his deep snow We are alone: there are no evening birds: we know The naked moon: the tame stars circle at our eaves. It is the human season. On this sterile air Do words outcarry breath: the sound goes on and on. I hear a dead man’s cry from autumn long since gone. I cry to you beyond upon this bitter air.

The sniper at work over the street corner acts. Two girls, breathless after the dash across, radiate heat and bouquets, as when ironing silken delicates. With one, in place of a chignon, goosefleshed Christmas wheat. She explodes, rages, curses the sniper; at the window, seemingly, I'm watching a beautiful storm. From the other, words like a sun-umbrella's flutterings, in the morning, on an Adriatic beach. Now and again, she flicks her head back: just for us. As she well knows: flicked hair sweetens the air. Beauty, always forthcoming, never misses a half-smile. As they well know: making us happy costs them nothing. Those half-smiles saying you aren't just one fact among others—not at all, not for them—even banishing the hex of that fact if any other woman's glacial look had magicked it up. The air smelt strongly of my distant youth when every boulevard led to the end of the world, when life was not yet "threadbare as a proverb." Now they're going, leaving such tenderness in me as engulfs you when looking too long at the heavens into which snowflakes are swarming. So they disappeared chattering, not girls but breezes, blown lightly, surprisingly, through the St. John's heat of siege. The St. John's heat of being.

The noise throws down twin shadows, hunting shadows on a black joy ride. They roar up the silver vein of the river and out over the stony peaks, which have been shrunken to a luminous green musculature on the screens. Who are the pilots, too high to see the splayed hearts of deer tracks under the apple trees, or smell the cider in the fallen fruit? Who are the vandals that ransack the wilderness of clouds? Below them, a thin froth of waterfall spills from a rock face. They see its sudden wreckage, its yielding gouts, and the wind tear into the papery leaves of the poplars, roughing them up so the undersides show— a glimpse of paleness like a glimpse of underwear. The pilots are young men, and still immortal. Already in the cold quadrants of their hearts they imagine the whole world flowering beneath them. It feels like love, like being with a woman who flowers beneath them, so that they wonder how it would feel to go on riding the young green world that way, to a climax of spectral light.

Now, in a breath, we’ll burst those gates of gold, And ransack heaven before our moment fails. Now, in a breath, before we, too, grow old, We’ll mount and sing and spread immortal sails. It is not time that makes eternity. Love and an hour may quite out-span the years, And give us more to hear and more to see Than life can wash away with all its tears. Dear, when we part, at last, that sunset sky Shall not be touched with deeper hues than this; But we shall ride the lightning ere we die And seize our brief infinitude of bliss, With time to spare for all that heaven can tell, While eyes meet eyes, and look their last farewell.