Anne Winters

1 It opens as a long lamplit evening with Rembrandt, stretched out with the glossy book of his Works on Paper. Brown-petal etchings and drawings: nut-brown, browner, irreclaimable rills of iron-gall ink sucked and feathered into the paper's wan cusps and culverts. The ink...it's as if there's no pulling away from the wet, flowing line to the tiny hedge-village perched on the edge of the cliff and the paper. Here the ink's overwatered and we barely, down in the forested loam, disengage the gentle saint, his rounded hat molding his crown like thatch on low rooftrees...St. Jerome. 2 Hunched, sunk in a deep-toned wash, he cares only for the huge, softleaved book propped on his knees. At nightfall Jerome swallowed up by his Bible misses the wistful look of his lion withdrawn to the forested ridge, the drawing's diagonal. And from there, one can say that landscape exists: prowls and spinnies where a lion might wind a lioness, or his prey... He looks out on tree-clouded peaks, tiny hamlets, two lambs in a wattle-fold. What the lion sees, we see. For Jerome, though, the lion is Judah, his seal and seed— Jesse's stem drops thickset leaves for him to read. 3 Saskia, of course, thrones in painting. Still, tiny sketches tumble from odd cabinets: the dear in a lopsided turban or twilled garden hat, sketched "on my wedding-day"— Saskia. A cluster of lines, a rippled race of curls and cloudsets. And, for a rarity, in Rembrandt, flowers. The simple, surprised, smiling face of Saskia as Flora...After her fourth lying-in (she was dying), he took to long walks on the city's outskirts; his sketchbook came home with mere touches of charcoal, a reed, a waterfowl, estuarial shallows unfolding to the rim. 4 Now life is meaner, chaotic. Rushes of arousal, lawsuits, debts...this print of a kitchen drab, eyes wandering, mouth a vacant, uptilted half-lune, her work-swollen hands on Saskia's velvet shawl, The thighs parted, abdomen pear-pendulant, the pulled-off stocking-stays grooved in the flab to her copse of cross-hatchings—No one wants to see this. But his hand made this stock, of himself the substance and seed. Fine- spun cosmos, brown tangle, soft sign: the old man spares us nothing. The book, the look, the lieu, the end of the Line.

Now the god of rainy August hangs his mask among the city’s spires and balustrades and stone clocktowers half-effaced in clouds. On Park the first reflecting pool dims with a thousand smelted-silver circle-rims, while west on Fifth a modiste scatters leaves in fall vitrines, and felt-browed mannequins resign the world with gestures of disdain. Now in the Cloister’s high parterres the rain floods copper gutterings, boxwood, terraced urns and mottoes. “The weather turns.” Clamped to their pier, the smiling Gaul, the murderer Clotaire, and Isaiah, green-throned, water-cowled, exchange their fine-lit ironies for rotes of pain.

All seas are seas in the moon to these lonely and full of light. High above laundries and rooftops the pinstriped silhouettes speak nightmare as do the faces full of fire and orange peel. Every citizen knows what’s the trouble:America’s longest river is—New York; that’s w

Four-fifty. The palings of Trinity Church Burying Ground, a few inches above the earth, are sunk in green light. The low stones like pale books knocked sideways. The bus so close to the curb that brush-drops of ebony paint stand out wetly, the sunlight seethes with vibrations, the sidewalks on Whitehall shudder with subterranean tremors. Overhead, faint flickers crackle down the window-paths: limpid telegraphy of the late afternoon July thunderstorm unfurling over Manhattan. Its set and luminous velocity, long stalks of stormlight, and then the first drops strike their light civic stripes on the pavement. Between the palings, oat-panicles sift a few bright grains to the stonecourse. Above it, at shoulder height a side door is flung open, fire-exits; streaming from lobbies come girls and women, white girls in shadowy-striped rayon skirts, plastic ear-hoops, black girls in gauzy-toned nylons, ripples of cornrows and plaits, one girl with shocked-back ash hair, lightened eyebrows; one face from Easter Island, mauve and granitic; thigh on thigh, waist by waist; the elbow’s curlicue and the fingers’; elbow-work, heel-work, are suddenly absorbed in the corduroyed black rubber stairs of the bus. Humid sighs, settlings, each face tilts up to the windows’ shadowless yards of mercuric green plate glass. An interspace then, like the slowing of some rural water-mill, a creaking and dipping pause of black-splintered paddles, the irregularly dappled off-lighting—bottle-green—the lucid slim sluice falling back in a stream from the plank edge. It won’t take us altogether, we say, the mill-race—it won’t churn us up altogether. We’ll keep a glib stretch of leisure water, like our self’s self—to reflect the sky. But we won’t (says the bus rider now to herself). Nothing’s left over, really, from labor. They’ve taken it all for the mill-race. In close-ups now, you can see it in every face, despite the roped rain light pouring down the bus-windows— it’s the strain of gravity itself, of life hours cut off and offered to the voice that says “Give me this day your life, that is LABOR, and I’ll give you back one day, then another. For mine are the terms.” It’s gravity, spilling in capillaries, cheek-tissue trembling, despite the make-up, the monograms, the mass-market designer scarves, the army of signs disowning the workplace and longing for night ... But even as the rain slackens, labor lengthens itself along Broadway. The night signs come on, that wit has set up to draw money: O’DONNELL’S, BEIRUT CAFE, YONAH’S KNISH

All middle age invisible to us, all age passed close enough behind to seize our napehairs and whisper in a voice all thatch and smoke some village-elder warning, some rasped-out Remember me. . . Mute and grey in her city uniform (stitch-lettered JUVENILE ), the matron just pointed us to our lockers, and went out. ‘What an old bag!’ ‘Got a butt on you, honey?’ ‘Listen, did I get lost with these streetnames! Spruce Street, Water, or get this, VAN derwater—’ Cautiously, coolly, we lit up, crooking palms for the ashes. All fifteen or under, all from Manhattan, we loitered bare to the waist for the X-rays. In the whorling light from one rainy window, our shapes were mere outlines from floor to wall, opaque as plater, white, or terra-cotta, black . . . ‘Names or numbers,’ a skinny white girl with pale blue eyes shrugged her shoulders. ‘Why come here at all? You think little Susan (thumb mockingly hooked at herself) needs working papers to work in my uncle’s diner? If they’d let me off school at noon now—that’s where the real tips are!’ And she smiled at our objections around her smoking cigarette (I thought) like some museum mummy, amber-fingered, fishhook collar bones— ‘What are you talking? Don’t you know the city keeps like an eye we don’t get overworked?’ ‘Yeah, and your Social Security number, that’s for life, girl, that ain’t worth something to you?’ The skinny girl just cackled, goospimpled arms huddled against her ribs. ‘Whadda you two, work for the mayor? What’s this (swinging her locker key with its scarred wooden number)—the key to the city?’ She meant last week, when they’d offered it to some visiting queen. Even I snickered. I was younger than most of them, homesick among the near- women’s breasts and hair, even the familiar girls’ cloakroom odors: perspiration, powder, decades of menstrual fust—‘Well, I’m coming back in six months.’ This was one of the black girls, elbow swivelled on pelvic sidethrust, finest hair— filaments, finerimmed, sulky mouth. ‘She’ll be sixteen, getting married,’ the girl next over burst in eagerly, ‘He got a store job, still her folks against it, they say stay in school. But every afternoon—’ Distantly, the first girl listened to her own story, only breaking in at the end: ‘I want a real church wedding. Down here is just for the license, see?’ ‘A license,’ said “little Susan,” sourly, ‘like for a job?’ ‘His name is Harold Curtis,’ was all she answered, then ‘It too strong for my parents. They see it too strong for them in the end.’ In our silence, the gutter slurred strangely. And for just one moment, everyone breathless, the atmosphere grew almost tender. But nobody knew what to say except good luck, so we all went on smoking like chimneys except the one murmur, of old and incurable anger, ‘Listen. Listen. They get you coming and going.’ Now each girl tilts her face down, contemplating her own unseen choices, real tips, the solitary and common square foot of imaginary chance . . . Outside, the rain was letting up. The city, like a graph of its own mountainous causes, climbed in a mist across our window. And then the matron came, calling our locker numbers, one by one, for the X-rays. ‘Jesus, it’s late.’ ‘Hey honey, I’m ready!’ ‘Where’d we change at from the D Train?’ Through the clearing air on the far side of City Hall Park, I could see a narrow street and a streetsign: Broadway. Miles to the north my street had a number, and Broadway was really broad. In the concrete prows of islands, the innumerable old women were sitting, lonely as soldiers, silent as . . . ‘What’s up, girl? Goose step on your grave?’ Another number. And now, the room darker, each girl cast about for the cheering word, when ‘Listen,’ I suddenly heard my own voice saying, ‘Guess what I saw coming down? A street called Anne Street.’—‘So what?’—‘So my name is Anne.’ A pause, then ‘Hey kid, that’s really funny!’ They all grinned, and one of the older girls gave my shoulder a tolerant punch. I was one of the youngest, and as far as I can remember, that was all that I said.

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.

Fleeing his clubs, dull honors, wives, the ageing Hardy hunches down in his potting-shed with his thumbtip-fumbled, fine- printed seed catalogue’s inflorescences— peripherally glimpsing the oxygenless blue line of the fleur-de-lys scaling his inner wrist; his chalky knuckles, his forearm’s crisp,lisse, pleated wrinkles; softly brown-spotted as a fox terrier’s belly. Yet this pleases, only this— age-speckled surfaces, sun-galls rose-speckled; puckering petals rugosely leaf-veined: the saturate, flooded stemlines’ mauves and verdures on the backlit catalogue’s tissuelike (nearly self-composting) pages—like his skin, all milliner-ribboned; yet with, barely hooded, things as they are and will be visible beneath it.

Sparrows tapping your shutters louvres? snow owls guano your eaves? Spring rainstorms sway in your gutters; down-cellar a green pipe pearls and roots find its fissures. Matter—outside us, out in le Vrai, matter—un-does;fatiscit; a sort of eternal breakdown and sloughage. Small wonder that Saturday finds you botanizing some mast-high aisle in the Depot. Fazed by stock-names and numbers, distinctions like drip-forged and molly- and carborundum-steel, or, in DIMENSIONAL LUMBER, the trunk chart. Its dotted lines follow core cuts, mere spindles, out to the perimeter or “wane,” a ring of two-by-twelves with moonrim bark ribbons. Yet even sparrows must nest-mend with worldstuff torn out of somewhere. The joinery-bits in the MASTER JOINER blister-pack point to his fast parataxes—copulas, common- alities, ship-lists, figures in carpets or slimmer hex-keys in sets, the eternal angle (Egyptian) or iron plane-handles tuned to the unheard rumor that joins them. The same slits reparied once with tendon- thread in bone needles, bronze pins, the earliest factory-fittings or the long floating line of the bass-baritone Leporello, his catàlogo of continents and couplings ironizing, admiring, down to the final mel- isma on DOES (you know the Don’s doings) voi . . . sapete, voi . . . sapete . . . quel che FA-AHH, ah-ahh, ah-ahh

After three months, Virginia is still a frontier. Late at night, I close the door on my husband practicing Mozart, the dishpan fills and the network affiliates sign off one by one. Now the country stations, tuning up like crickets on radios in scattered valley kitchens: Har yall this evenin folks! (Wanting to say ‘I’m real fine’ I whisper ‘Wow.’) Got your Green Hill chicory perkin’? An army of women, straightened and ironed and blued like Picasso’s ironer—jerking coffeecups back with one gesture, hips pressed to sinks. Their suspendered husbands are reading—the paper? the Bible? And it’s Jesus for you and for me, till midnight—the anthem— and one soaped hand jerks out, and their lighted lives recede to kitchens on the moon’s dark side, Mozart rising . . . Daytimes, in post office, gas station, greasy spoon, I don’t see them anywhere, it makes me nervous. Black faces down here look “colored.” I am afraid of the other, red faces. Take my first job in Boston, the outgoing typist said, ‘You’ve got to know the foms, we use so many foms.’ And I said O why farms? I thought law firms had torts. A tort, I thought, was like vous avez tort. But I was wrong about the farms, and after the Cardinal’s Vietnam speech one of the girls said, ‘Think you’re smat with that accent?’ Still, nothing soothes me, sometimes, like American voices, softened with distance, with nearness, as murmurs in a darkened Greyhound: ‘It sure has been a scorcher.’ ‘Where you folks from?’ I keep yawning, lightworlds off in the dark . . . Sometimes my lonesome standard English sleeps: The varied and ample land, the North and South in the light, and the voices of Earth and Moon swell in my helmet with prairie inflections, soft twangs of outer speech— ‘You’re looking real good,’ says Earth ‘—ain’t that somethin’?’ ‘Roger. No sweat. Out.’

Through the meridian’s fine blue hairlines, the admirals are converging in their fish-hulled ships, with their frogmen and sirens, and tanks with knotted chain flails that beat the ground before them as they crawl. Behind them the cities dim out, on the foredeck the admirals sigh to lean from the curving bows, to trail their fingertips in the water . . . All alone on the landmass, the Ship’s Artist simply draws what he sees: red men with arms like flesh clubs, blue-daubed men with parasol feet and fish with weeping human faces. The sonic boom arrives at his feet in the palest ripples. In the painting, Gloriana rides under arms towards Tilbury Town. Her profile shimmers in the sodium lights that seem to cast no shadows before or behind her. Like compass pencils of light, their fingertips spread out the nervous systems more complex than spiral nebulae. Orchards of mines grow up on the ocean floor. Now under radar they study the green road glowing and add a late-rising moon. The sea so full of maprooms, and the cliffs chalked with weaponry symbols, trailing the phosphorescence of minesquads. Only the grassblown Norman ringmounds go on dreaming of Monet picture hats and streaming scarves, the bunker disguised as a picnic, that went on forever. Now the Cathedral at Bayeux, with its window and views, is rolled up and the Conqueror’s navy on its blue worsted waves and Hengist and Horsa, the Escorial with its green shoals of ships, all are safely rolled up. Behind the Atlantic Wall, that Rommel called “Cloud-Cuckoo-Land,” the white-and-liver-cows moo through the milky light. The human faces carved on Norman beams face out to the sea, which has grown this answering forest of rigging. And very soon, just as soon as the sea can see the land and the land the sea the two of them will go to war.