MEMOIRS FROM THE FUTURE

    

     I live on Fifth Avenue, across from Central Park in the Seventies, in the building where the red tailed hawks roost.  There is no shortage of red tailed hawks. There are nations afloat in the sky, and many towers have become aeries, but I chose this one because I think it was the first, where its far-sighted tenants had already looked through us years ago.

     Across the avenue, in Central Park I can pluck a nap from the breeze, and then my airy vacancy is the world as it is, and transparent may lift without sooty residue and wed clouds. Ghosts, do you fault me the lyric city? I knew you bright and shinning. Forgive me my light substance that walks inside your fallen dreams

.    Other things are loose in the ether. They fall through me to take their place in the empty city. These are the private deaths I witnessed. How grotesque they are and terrible, with their tatters of grief, and their black eyes foretelling the empty universe. Blame me for these legions; they’re mine.

     Sometimes I sleep on Sutton Place.  I go there to requisition things.   A coat or hat, a rack of pipes, a tea pot, can contain the genius of civilization-tempering history. At least, they show a way to endure it. Easy to say with it lost that it would have been best to gait the age to coziness rather than splendor, to mute ambition and settle upon harvesting the moment, but then again, the residents of these buildings are extinct as well, slouching off to the sewers to join the erstwhile frenzied nouveau riche from Fifth Avenue.  Old money had its skeletons in the closets, war profits, the spoils of imperialism, not to mention the usual adulteries, incest, and hypocrisies that were enough to target the less well off, perhaps. I try to be careful lest sarcasm or worse should become the last theology.

     I find these things, fleecy with dust; I shear them.  Balanced in them, within their polish from friendly use, the habit and its movement continue. The whole evening in an old briar for example, opening the humidor, forest scent, tamping into the bowl, the match and the flame sucked into the coppery nest with that hushed popping of the lips on the stem waxes custodial over a civil moment still turning, suggesting a sacred calendar that was celebrated in a day.  It’s enough to keep me here over night every once in a while, shuffling about in slippers and evening jacket, pantomiming the philanthropist who funded a park for children. Oedipus has stage enough.

     I found some shoes in one closet, the horns still in them. Who could have imagined leather so soft or that a comfortable shoe might resolve one of civilizations discontents?

     I remember these shoes fondly. A filigree saddle capped the toes. I remember them better than all the wars ever fought, except for the War of The Roses, fought with petals, not thorns, in the Garden of Eden.  First, there was the War of the Roses, then came these wonderful shoes, and that is the history of the world. 

     In the mild seasons, beautiful spring and fall, more beautiful now that the cars and trucks and factories are gone, I walk along the quiet boulevards in white linens or light wools, a Panama hat on my head with a leather satchel across my shoulder that has inside this journal. The seasons flow through the city setting it to its perennial advent calendar. The story begins, new love and sweetening grief, but the players are gone, only I am left to overflow with exiled destinies that once would have been insanity to hear whispering, but now is charity. Crackpot strutting his yellow shoes, I step to the city tuned to lift the tender calf of a girl on its glittering, grey sidewalks.   

     Yes, I’ve done that and may add a walking stick, if it pleases the court that a prance tread your grave and foretell a brighter past.

     I had always liked the Impressionists, and Van Gogh, and Cezanne, and El Greco and Rembrandt, and used the Met and MOMA as lending libraries after the conversion, a practice I’ve mostly abandoned now, except for the superstition that works of art are shields from the cannibals. With the enterprise dead, their bickering and competition, their epiphanies and apostasies, with culture dead or more deeply, with art dead, that generational blood match with the angel and oracle, the contest decided, they flattened out and were finally locked in the cell of the canvas. I didn’t have the shoulders. I don’t remember which one must still be hanging near my bed, a mothball for cannibals and maybe for dreams, both equally dreaded. Never above a whisper for fear of a querulous tone in my voice that should not make the final commentary: beauty bowed us and against obedience we raised empty chambers.

     Quiet enough now the paintings could each be heard decanting a note, quiet enough now to hear the whole chorus of them together, harmonizing, and maybe they are, singing each to each, but they don’t miss our audience if the chorus goes on. Surely, it was always farewell. You have lost us, farewell.

     Maybe there was once a human nature that opened a place for itself here and where it belonged, but sadly, not one holy fool has survived to prove it ever received blessing.   

     This plague-if it is a virus, and there are other explanations better able to explain some phenomena, other religions or lame duck sciences-was so adapted to its hosts, so apt and improvisational, that the banal fury remained suspended until the very end and then collapsed all at once, without leaving enough time for looting and arson to become widespread. The mobs no sooner awoke to panic then consciousness guttered out, leaving the few who are immune with an inexhaustible supply of canned and vacuum goods to eat.

      For water I depend on European mountain springs, Shangri-La’s in vitro that are anathema to the ghouls who drink from the city’s bilge in subway tunnels.  Sardines, canned tuna and salmon, heart of palms, capers, pickled artichoke hearts, olives, dried figs, canned beans, fruit and vegetables, I continue the tradition of a bachelor diet spiced by gourmet offerings from upscale shops that catered to aesthetic consumers. I binged on saffron until I got tired of it. Money had always seemed sublimation to me; I would not try to scale gold’s repression farther than saffron or a maidens’ high color further than tulips.

       I only bathe sporadically, though some variation on neglect of the body, being deaf to its pleas for moral nutriment, may have precipitated the collapse, a theory that occasionally takes its pirouette. The Hudson has flushed itself clean, too brackish from the tide this close to the bay to drink but fine for a wash in season. But, a slip could be a drowning, as could a current, and if I once surrendered myself to the lunar will, would I really struggle against its union with the sea, the ark of clouds moored on the horizon, or a cloak of stars for my shoulders? What else promises a sweet sorrow at parting?

     I have thought of moving to the country, growing fresh vegetables and in September picking wine grapes in the abandoned vineyards, but I don’t have the skills to survive.  All I ever learned was how to maintain a détente with other people, and I am only suited to be a scavenger. The crafts and skills that built this city are as arcane to me as they are to a pigeon that like me can make a small living from what spills out of unthinkable complexity.  That lost cosmos was the result of a never to be repeated weave of chance and favor, a still birth here, a path where a limb did not fall, a park where an apple did, love graciously received, a suitor spurned, a letter lost, a flea that bit, a soldier who ducked the lead volley to nurse a blister, and left those of us remaining unable to work the math or say the prayer that would decide if cannibalism was a blasphemy or a butterfly that had missed a petal because a child had yanked off its wings.

     My fantasies about the countryside issue from a retreating imagination or a maniacal one. Has insanity exhausted me or have I reached the degree of confidence in it that it might with less flourish complete its efforts?  Outside my ken cabs are screeching to a halt as I wander across crowded streets; through some accommodation in the looking glass they have yet to hit me. Cans of Boston baked beans and pears are spooned onto my tray by unseen hands in a commissary. I am a refugee, no I am a stalwart from an age of technologically perfected solipsism. I began crudely, chopping out sentences, but I was outstripped by the internet. What gentling prose styling can accomplish elegizes my lost city.  Mine just another one in a million Apocalypses of lost childhood, loves and secret gardens that had flooded the ether. I abut and sometimes breach those foisted by others who faded in similar ways to my own, ranting and jotting titles for poems, I suspect, those who’s every word extinguished a spot in the world they would have spared forgetting. My words can only summon bereaved spirits.

     Against this possibility, I scout for the inert, the leaden note, the tolerably ugly, things falling short of terror. They are not mine, I hope, these things without echo. This old man couldn’t row them across to his madness; he hasn’t the heart or compunction. But, how far should I test this? A snowfall on Central Park no longer promises a renewal of innocence. The animals leave their script on its white page, and fairy tale shapes emerge.  Once upon a time the snow’s initial chastity, the undisturbed piecing together of flake upon flake, it was like the deep life in an angel’s plumage, the redeeming grief. Now ash seems to fall from the heavens.  A blanketed field up the Hudson and my footprints stamped on the snow and ahead of me the clean slate where I have already been erased? Too late for me to foster myself anew, I’ve already howled into the canyons downtown and a figure was born.  He looked at me for a while and then went off on his own. Sometimes I hear him laughing and I know he’s been following me. I look for him, too. I hear him singing. I can’t leave him here to betray my shades.  I can’t guard against my screams when I’m sleeping, but if an angel is still looking for an honest soul in winter drifts, let me leave the fields open.

     When the first cannibals appeared among us, the first grand ones, the generals and CEOS and politicians, except for their physical disintegration and allergy to light, even when they had lost the power of speech, we hardly noticed the change. There was bitchy dish about their faces falling off and their filthy clothes, but they could discharge their meta-duties as ably as before. The newspapers and TV news remained unchanged in style and content, celebrity tabloids.  Patter had long ago replaced dialogue in ‘marketing’ politics. I remember the incident where the President began banqueting on wounded soldiers at a veterans’ hospital. The commentary was limited to how the spin on this would be handled and that the President-who by that time could only growl and snarl-was showing his Presidential timber, a maturity gained in office, by stonewalling against the chatter of the media.  Underlings conducted the actual duties of office, or not the actual duties, as the grand machinery for pillage and carnage was programmed in realpolitick; it was the eternal window dressing, the blather about freedom or free enterprise that the others handled. And we, the audience, were past being shocked by our decaying expectations.

     The rich gracefully transitioned veiled by their aesthetic of murderous wit. Like all the cannibals they had a taste for rotted meat, and the policies set in motion for their profit insured a harvest of plenty.  Actually, the only product absolutely certain to result from these policies had always been dead bodies; they had been rationalized as collateral damage or unfortunate side effects, but the millennia had proved innocence was an affliction of speech that hamstrung action. Relieved of that encumbrance, we could cut to the chase.  Technology accomplished this disrobing formerly so coyly teasing.   

     I write a memoir. It’s all I will leave. I never built a bridge to mark my time here. All I can do is speak the bridge crossing, the gulls that day or the lily pads, the girl. Of course such a tailor of wafts would suggest the conversion of language into an animated corpse as predicting, even causing, what would follow, though such a view is a religious relic: As the spirit once became word and the word became flesh, when it died, the word was dead, and so went the flesh. For the new nature we were becoming a living word would have stuck in our craws. For years we had been ingesting and spooning out dead ones and by the end what aspects of civilization were composed around utterance, music, art, love, had been converted into offal, and chairs at universities had been endowed to study them. Our salvation romance had been vampires. That cheesy literature became the last sermons to zombies. The rich failed us.

     We all knew ghouls for years, not the big wigs, but intimates. Some attributed these ghoul cross-dressers to a marriage of avian flu, mad cow disease, AIDS and flesh eating staphylococcus. But, the stories, the rumors and legends, what I have seen: You could sleep at the Metropolitan Museum of Art unmolested if you avoided the Egyptian wing and the room with the old armor, and there were stories circulating of living souls-I wish I could credit myself with re-coining that venerable and prophetic term for describing populations, but irony and skepticism continue to wormhole me, and it must have been a less diluted heart that revived it-who had fended off attack from the ghouls with chords from the Ninth Symphony. The Metropolitan Opera House fortified behind its Chagall murals with its acoustical deformations impregnated with transcendent echoes and its sheer seating seemingly designed to accommodate birds was untouched while the Trump Tower and Virgin Records and Barnes and Nobel and Bloomingdale’s had in the beginning been stuffed with ghouls until they ate each other. Ghouls crammed the Police Stations and courthouses, television stations, banks, ad agencies, the stock and commodity exchanges. What virus could explain this? Bad taste as metaphor they share, ghouls who feed on rot drawn to an ester here that ammonia and chemical fragrances only spiced. The magpie will grab the shiny coin, it’s said, a fish is hooked by what sows gleam into shade; what draws the nocturnal ghouls must render light into darkness. Wherever a shim could be wedged between truth and beauty, where its agents could be separated from their source, ghouls emerged. But, can metaphor become metamorphosis?  Can spirit make the leap, as the avian flu could, from airy realms to warrens?  Can it braid itself into a recombinant DNA, and become affliction? If spirit once infested clay, maybe another aspect of it can again, or maybe, it has wearied of being immured, and like a prisoner who bends a spoon into a trawl, has grabbed what means is inherent in flesh itself to dig its way out. 

     But, each converts pointedly. Each time we refuse the heart’s instincts life’s nectar spills a drop. At this moment a ghoul must be sliding along a dank tunnel wall, not remembering the light that forced him back from the last portal. He is blind down there and listening.     

     But, if you hear it, if any of you will ever have the chance, if you ever overhear it in a birdsong echoing in a city canyon or chance upon a sob or chortle, if such things leave you humming a lullaby, you’ll know: only this has ever been mourned. It ends as it began. Nostalgia is the apostasy of beauty we never learned or could doubt. The only sin is early knowledge. The rest is terror and humanity.

     Several friends had killed themselves over the years.  A few saw them as mysteries, icons, martyrs. Most of us saw the deaths as personal acts, an exaggeration of faults. We analyzed them according to our lights. Very few could rest with assault by innocence; though it has proven to be our common condition, conscience keeps it at bay.

   Those who wake in the dream will always be lost.

     Our friendships had been of a time, bright, youthful and deceived. Lately, we had rehearsed as custodians of banal glories in the teeth of disintegration, the transcendent realism of dusting a table top and watering a flower; of god confined in details and the preponderance of the dark matter of futility.    

     Strained mercy is economized love. A governed heart, without ever perceiving it, can suffer anything. The ghouls’ thrift would only have surprised who we once had been. A perilous courtesy remained with us. Each of us converts with the diffidence of others. Each loses the song of sunrise rising from mists into chorusing annunciation. 

     Too few can suffer their brightness. We endure with conviviality. Just to say, the ghouls askance soothed the sword our beauty drove through our hearts. Darkness was so bespoken and homesteaded before them.

     What became of Gretchen?  What buttocks she had.  How could she have lasted towing that larder?  She leaned on the windowsill in her bedroom sticking that butt out.  I’d gotten dressed, this was the morning after a frustrating night sleeping next to her while she remained in a nightgown. She was in the nightgown yet, a blue one, thick cotton, dowdy, convalescent, having pleaded a headache the night before, a headache that followed a teasing, compulsive, rosary-like wrapping and ribbonning of a wee package that had lasted for hours. Finally, I unilaterally went off to bed, where she quickly joined me and had me fetch her sugar coated baby aspirin for her headache.  And that was it, until she leaned against that bedroom windowsill.  It was the coldest day I would ever know in New York; the radio said the chill factor was eighty below.  That’s what I remember, eighty below, sitting in a friend’s kitchen by the open oven with a comforter hung over the doorway, looking out a window covered in ice flowers at a snarl of black smoke spilling from a furnace pipe across the street being immediately whipped off the lip of the pipe as if the wind were a cat attacking a ball of yarn.  It was all so beautiful, the city in a bell jar, sooty, icy, the trip back from her apartment up in Riverdale, stairways in the sidewalks, patchy, weathered sheets of ice on the ground, the trees’ outlines scratched in the pewter sky, the bleak iron on the platform of the el when I got off at 125^th and Broadway, me with a quotidian destination in the city, almost in Harlem, part of the city. A little in love, a bit wiser after a quick poke from a New York girl, anointed again, a blasé, sexually sedated Manhattenite, ignoring and unmoved by the vision of the great city from the high station, deep, deep within the iron, stone and brick verdure of this island state. A guy in a watch cap and blue jeans who had just negotiated the maze of the city, moved through it by self-appointed, arrogated landmarks, who knew a doorway of industrial steel with a little square speak-easy window with chicken wire in it, that opened with a buzz to a bare hallways where two elevators dragging chains and humming a nearly soporific note lifted him to the eleventh floor where out the window he could see salt flats of snow etched by black iron fences and where a Jewish woman with orange-red hair and wiry black hairs springing from her nipples lived with her redhead’s pale, matte white body. Once again after Gretchen literate in the city’s code, a man who could wend his way to the native center of this fortress and who was pleased, even grateful to be driven nuts by the weirdly clunky, sexually vain, physically anomalous-she was slight, maidenly from the waist up, but was attached to a lumbering pedestal of clay below-Jewish women at home here by dint of their sharp tongues, their frangible cynicism and their mushroom-colored, etiolated East Coast skin. Happy to be genuinely frustrated and broken-hearted over this morbid, racial fertility of theirs and the inbred tangles of their minds, loving them, their beautiful eyes, some unrealized motherhood in them or the potential for a redemptive marriage or a familiar one or an incestuous one, but more than all these re-plays of family history, satisfied to be admitted into an indigenous history. To live where his grandparents had first landed and find their ghosts still bumping about within a European resonance, a density of habit and anger and memory that had thawed to absurdity in California, but here continued, explicating and eulogizing the soulful and nightmarish dream of the ghetto. To be joined to it again in the flesh thereby tattering shades from his childhood. Redeemed by loving her near-homely body-more beautiful than an apparition-that slogged heavily through the slushy streets, turning into light this burden of fertility, raising by love this chimera made of parts gathered from historical pain.

     What tales we wove, gone now or else left unholy wandering in this city. I am culpable for never meaning completely well, for the meanings always being selfish, but now responsible for this private hour whose roots dangle from extinct histories.  And if all of them would have protested my uses of them, still these are more tender finishes than most could have had. Some must have been shorn from greater happiness than I ever shared with them, peeled off through disease while children cried. But, those who were trusted with memories of a mother’s comfort after being tossed from bad dreams, they’re gone. Mine will have to serve. What should I do for these immaterial fabrics that contain a city? Let them rest in impregnable peace or disturb them with recall?  

     The owners of these great residential towers along Fifth Avenue were driven from them by the same seraphim light that had once been included in their deeds. They fell from a heaven whose streets they had paved with gold into the sewers and subway tunnels.  The last meeting of the owners must have been a howl.  They had all been infected, probably for years, but had turned cannibalism into a secular form of Episcopalianism.  They bought the sacrament of fetal veal, and over the years insisted the unborn calf be left pinker and pinker, until it was served still veiled in the uterine sac, and they carved it as it was gasping for its first breath, its birth waters paling the virgin blood running into the troughs of the chaffing platter.  Labor in factories around the world fell from the shoulders of children onto those of toddlers, and parents too poor to support their children, having run out of their own organs to sell, sold off their unborn, at first for a harvest of homunculus organs that as yet could be transplanted without inciting an immune reaction in their new host, but with such a surplus of poor and an ever decreasing number of rich, the human fetuses eventually replaced veal, and urbane debate was chuckled around long, walnut tables as to which maternal diet insured the best taste and texture in the “cherub meat” as it was known: the slightly corrupted taint resulting from a fish diet, or was simple starvation preferable, stressing the product as laconic, raspy ground does the grapevine, giving complications to the bouquet?  Some preferred wild caught, others the cultivated product coming from feeding pens where for two weeks before reaping the pods were fed only corn, like snails destined for escargot or geese for pate de foe gras.  I do not think the French lagged much behind we Americans.  Though this virus could not have come from birds, the gentle curve towards cannibalism was joined in Gaul when sparrows that had been netted for years to be baked in clay and candy were supplemented by swallows-those shuttlecocks weaving together the two worlds-because their insect diet gave a nasty zing for calloused palettes.  The Chinese, of course, ate everything including sad-eyed puppies and stranded whales, and all of Asia had been shipping infants to the States for decades, and those foundations and channels that had been set up for the export of orphans-almost exclusively chaff from wars and tyrannies and free enterprise-combined with the transplant hospitals with their connections to refrigerated shipment and surgical technicians, to obtain and ship the “cherub meat” when the source of profits had changed.  This cornucopia vomited its plenty onto Firth Avenue and Sutton Place, and finally when what may have been a form of Crurtzfield-Jacob disease had blossomed beyond assimilation, from the cathedrals where the congregation had gathered in seersuckers, sun bonnets and pastels to hear the good news that a new translation of the parable showed the rich might enter heaven as easily as a rope the eye of a needle and the negotiations were continuing, could perhaps have been heard one last bright Sunday the reedy-voiced choir plunging into pig sty grunts and snorts, before the parishioners blindly stampeded from the nave, their eyes buried in their forearms to shield them from the piercing spectrum in the stained-glass window. Bequeathing me the entire neighborhood, where on 94^th, between Fifth and Madison, I can still see on the stoop of an ornate townhouse, their adolescent children in prep school uniforms smoking cigarettes languidly and expertly, high color in their pale cheeks, their hair silken and fine, eyes deep as amber, already post-coitally bored with life. Mine as well, the pigeons whose plumage I see molting again into the sky colors it had before they threw in with the sooty city, foggy grays and cloudy blues and stellar iridescence. Mine to share with mallards and geese is the miniature yacht basin with its gallant fleet, and the statue of Alice in Wonderland surrounded by the characters of the story, and the statue of Hans Christian Anderson, and of course, since discarded by them, the memories of sunny weekends with children playing, baby carriages, the hill in pink blossom.

     I continue to ship aboard the prow of the Flatiron Building to join the cloudy flotillas. And I will make the circle along the paths in Madison Square, around the children’s playground, the lawn where storytellers and theater groups used to perform for little kids, a ring of perambulators behind them and in an outer circle their young mothers.  This park had been reclaimed for a perfect world.  At lunch the insurance towers that filled to brimming the square city block from Madison to Lexington and Twenty-third to Twenty-fifth and were topped by pagan temples, an Acropolis or Jerusalem, or Gaza meaning perhaps divine right or facsimile thereof, flooded out into the park, and the benches filled with the young workers. The girls’ hair shone in the spring light and they showed their calves in black stockings sitting on the benches, as if this was another time when the sight of an ankle was a treasure illicitly gained.  Free of the cubicles and hush and rote inside the towers, a breeze out here and gleaming sunlight, they shook out their hair and it glowed, and shook their heels out of their shoes and tapped them against their soles, free at last, up from the pall, Persephone unbound, irresistible, triumphant, seditious, flashing leg and eyes and rosy mouths from out the corseting of mournful corporate dress. The possibility for romance, for obsession and longing, for the sight of a calf to last forever compelling poem or serenade-that lunch hour a love’s labor and assault against the adamantine forecast of death and dismemberment read in the actuary tables inside the drear tabernacles.

     Tulips raised red goblets to spring in the bed around the statue of John Madison, but whether working for profiteers in doom and buying shorts on bright futures sealed their fates, whether the guy who had left his coat at his crimped metal desk and loosened his tie to stroll in the sun eating a falafels, glancing over spills of green lettuce, purple onion and red tomato at the girl who rested her outstretched arms on the back of the bench lifting her bosom ended his airy life upon the thirteenth floor feasting on his fellow inmates on a Monday that finally dealt the aces and eights everyone knew all Mondays kept up their sleeves, or whether during the Saturday diaspora he leapt the counter at the fast food restaurant for cashier tartar, or was himself sans butter and pincer, eaten as lobster sushi  at The Four Seasons, or whether bedding one of those Juliettes and mistaking pigeon coo for cocks crow wolfed down the last revered parts of a devouring love, he is gone from this bright park, though at night he may still ascend from the labyrinths, and in his clotted and smeared rags, shoeless shuffle over these same pavers, and even sit for a while on one of the graceful benches pulling his teeth from scurvy gums. 

     I also walk through Washington Square, that former circus and university of the street.  It is here that I am most likely to run across other survivors.  Like me, they are the beneficiaries of unrepeatable eccentricity.  Their biographies careen from pillar to post, as much somnambulists as they were ever horses fleeing a burning barn. In the embrace of a languor or the grasp of a private rapture, while sighting a hummingbird in an alley or a cat on a pink cherry limb, a star at 4 a.m., Venus in a drayage nag, during some unbalanced tumble they grabbed at the golden bough and crossed the Styx still laden with life. We recognize each other without enthusiasm.  There is no love lost between us, and little need be said. Whatever good was in us and that we might consider as a consignment from the extinct species is our own private misery. We confirm to each other a universal though not quite thorough justice.

     I am here to visit the huge elm that grows in the northwest corner.  This had been my habit for a decade before the change, and it may have been that during one of my vacant trances looking up its ancient trunk to its graceful fount of limbs, that the tree received me into its shaft through time. 

     Union Square floats like a barge. The flag pole remains, the statues of Washington and Lincoln, the renovated benches, walkways and rails, but for me I always board this vessel after it has already left shore with its candles and home made altars of written prayers, and I weave my way through crowds of the grieving souls of my city as they were the night of 9/11.  It is surprising to me that those souls so suddenly awakened could ever have been lost or could ever have returned the sanctified city to the misers and bullies.  For New York, for once all together what is usually the epiphany of a single lover, came that critical moment when the celestial city descended into every brick, leaf and face. For a few days we might have restored it to its devout and generous motive.  During those nights by small degrees this park broke off from the rest, like a lifeboat it floated away, and it is still floating while the dark liner follows its separate course down the fathoms. 

     Careful. All the ribbons of heartfelt blood strung through the streets and years of the city will come back, the city as it was emerging from places particular to each of us.  The city as it was before the change, a million different angles and shades of shadow, when we raised walls of unrepeatable patterns every time we turned a corner, and filled its boulevards with our own crowd of fully realized loves playing on a single shinning string of time, this each and separate city porous with our inner light, echoing with chords fingered by each rendezvous and tryst on the harp strung again through the twelve avenues and lifted into the sky.     

     I can choose several routes to walk west and reach the Hudson River.  I can choose to pass the Jewish Cultural Center, then the brownstone that was the residence for the Dahli Lama when he stayed in New York, and Xavier parochial school and its church. Maybe, it will be an antidote.

     When the Jewish Cultural Center had an event, the lobby would fill with woman in furs, gold and diamonds, and their husbands, less bedecked but obviously footing the bill.  The outer lobby was simple.   Large windows looked into it from the street.  Through one set you could see the gleaming objects in the gift shop, through another, the cloakroom with its mechanized racks to hang the pelts of mink, sable, chinchilla, and baby seals.  You could also see a cadre of burly African-American security men in their blazers, but, most prominently on view, closest to the window and entry door, was one of those color view x-ray machines used at airports, here to check bags and purses.  Every month or so,  every time some homeless specter haunting prosperity dropped a garbage bag off his cart or some wag or delinquent left an empty soda can near the door, the police bomb squad would appear with their m-16’s and German Shepherds.  Although the Holocaust Museum-sur-Hudson at Battery Park may have converted first, the cultural Center was not far behind, both having fattened by feasting on lost souls, pre-atoned entitlement, and gorgeously remunerated vicarious martyrdom. 

     As for Xavier, whose heavy Romanesque cathedral had once been a choir’s aviary its dark vaults were filled with ghouls taking advantage of the dim light in the nave and below in the extensive basement where a Sunday meal had once been prepared for vagrants.  Not pederast peccadilloes, its high iron gates did the Church in. These gates barred sanctuary for the poor who had slept on the steps but sprang open to admit parades of rosy checked boys in military uniform into the maw of the Prince of Peace, snare drums pounding.  

     The town house the dahli lama once graced probably has no ghouls left.  The place was only sporadically tenanted, and if their throat singing turned more fiercely guttural on one of their short stops here on their way to London, Paris, Monte Carlo, Aspen, St.Moritz, the Bahamas, or wherever the lamas hung out that was endlessly not a backwater in India, their numbers were few, and they would have eaten themselves within a week.  How they had managed to keep up appearances for a thousand years, more or less, wringing the blood from stone poor serfs as well as requisitioning their children into their sterile numbers, is a mystery spiritualism teaches is divine. So too must be the persuasive ways of the stocky, taciturn monks who were stored here to keep the place dusted and generally habitable for the dahli lama when he should chose to forsake the English peerage with its Wagnerian dream of a Himalayan Valhalla and grope for the long green in the States  After all,  their thuggish, abused-child presence never gainsaid an enlightenment that giving its graduates the ability to travel between worlds and lives had waited until the widespread enjoyment of commercial air travel and the triumph of Western capital to discover lamas incarnated as American and English boys and girls. 

     It is the religious institutions and the justice systems that I am most suspicious had converted almost immediately after their inception.  They were the first to implement ritual and costuming to conceal the change and to justify it away.  All other institutions have followed their lead. 

     But, I will detour around this street. Not for something else here besides the cannibal warehouses but someone not here except when accompanied by Helen. The scene where I may be fuzzily resurrected is of ennui and mild distress, and this is love failing, nothing less. After years of carrying my search for love out of my apartment, scooting down the stairs and cantering down the pavement towards a night ahead with a woman, returning of an early morning with the light salting my eyes, my body sensually waterlogged, besotted by satiation, after years of rushing out to walk in snow storms that will enchant the city,  it is Helen after mid-night taking the street with indignant carriage, breasting the haunted night rather than spend another hour with her tepid lover who rises on the empty block. For all the melancholy and raptures incubated in my single room, it is during this scene of failure that I most closely edged on life and most sufficiently filled what life requires to leave a mark. Helen’s body in her hastily thrown on coat having spoken for some solid rendering of life made imperishable by alliance with the moment as it is lived towing me in her wake, the strong sway of her hips, the prow of those who count pride from the daily effort to make headway against the undertow of self-pity, plowing through the night. Only in the wash and furrow she left do I appear at all, her course forever rutted on the city’s memory so that dead it dreams her irked yet; or she dead, surrendering everything but what pissed off she grabbed for herself without a sniveler’s apology, dreams it here, this one block part of the city she stared down and won as pliant stone beneath her stout legs.  

     I am one of those who never inconvenienced the city. What it demanded even in disobedience pledged itself and was carried off. The rest who failed in passion and gristle and in bleeding stones, who shied from the bone breaking wrestle were forgotten in its fall. No less than mortal love raises a city. Civilization is its disappointment.

     Stripped bass are returning to the Hudson in riffling schools, and shad laying cobblestone streets with their crowded backs surging upriver.  The barks of sea lions careen through the empty canyons in the financial district.  Blue herons stand palace guard on the shores.  Dolphins follow the schools at least as far as the George Washington Bridge.  The grass in the Great Meadow has been seeded with wild rye.  A rustle, a fox leaps over the high tufts to catch a mouse.  Deer feed at dusk; eagles wheel overhead.  I have seen wolves, nothing to curtail their nomadic urge between here and Michigan, and eventually Alaska.  Moose will arrive from Maine and settle in the Jersey meadowlands, hearing about it from the flocks of mallards and geese that are re-claiming old homelands.  The countryside was devastated, perhaps by shopping centers, perhaps by drugs, perhaps by cable TV.  Maybe, by insecticides.   Maybe, NASCAR did them in or alcoholism or bad cooking, broken families, corporate farms, cupidity, but the rifles are silent, and the sand hill cranes left unculled have reached such numbers a few honeymooning couples have chosen New York or Sandy Hook to get a starter’s price on real estate.  How far east will the buffalo roam out of Yellowstone?  They move slower than the birds.

     I took a rod and tackle from the shop at the foot of the Chelsea Hotel on Fourteenth Street selected for me by the owner.  He had not seemed much like a fisherman before; he seemed fed up with swapping tales.  He must have gotten into the business through a brother as a good idea, not out of some scheme to rationalize a passion or feed an addiction. The slide into hand to mouth insulted him, glad-handing a dull lot of customers, scholars of sloth, mild misogyny and grateful impotence.  He dressed neatly, wearing pressed slacks, white shirt with cufflinks, a paisley vest-tired of the joys of entropy.  The disaster changed that.  He had few customers, long talkers and short spenders, it was a mystery in its time to compete with all the new mysteries, as to how he met the rent, but those few customers-shufflers, truants, wrinkled, grizzle-chinned-nearly all survived, and his shop being the only place they had in common, it had become the major hub of the island. And the old tales, like all fisherman stories filled with details, epics unfolding in a minutely parsed five hours of doldrums, those most neglected hours left to idlers, hours untrammeled by heroes or spooked by trumpets where the silent scaffolding of time was still in place, where sun, wind, fog, gull and lapping water raised the hours from the dust, could be heard as recitations of sacred pages.

     Money being worthless, he was free to loan out equipment as instruments of education: reels that held within their form the analogue of tide and the celestial symmetry, fishing filament that was made from the notes in the spectrums of water, and rods-more gallantry appointed than pikes or saber-a tool, weapon, and technology whose terse adherence to beauty, where purple blazon secured silver eyelet, had coalesced from meditation on wonder. 

     To the Hudson I went to cast lures to new generations of fish that already had forgotten fishermen and only passed by the hook out of courtesy for the one was already on it, the sky re-drawn in its original tones dyeing the water a silk kimono or spilling down into a submerged Byzantium, plovers skimmed from froth, and seen only once but the few daylight hours and wide sea whittling chances to a fractional polling of bounty, a blue whale spouting beneath the near side of the Verranzano Bridge.

     Where had the animals been?  Where had the peregrine falcon waited?  What habit of humility had been learned from patient floating in the vault before the bolt was loosed, and had he kitted there for decades above our sight, the sun at his back, or were flurries of exploded feathers dropped under our step on the filthy sidewalks and blamed on cats his nocturnal work, hiding his prints in the silent strokes of owls?  And the blue whale, did that vast chorus that garlands the equator pass council from the sperm whale to his baleen ear, and shift his hunt down to those deep lockers of Davy Jones where ancient sleepers not tossed awake by nightmares of giant squids might dream pastures of krill on the tab of a nap?  And did he inherit from them without dying the wakeless dream that feeds itself and need never surface for a breath and where the passage of chattering monkeys through a green temple is only a song?                                  

     I couldn’t stomach a fish anymore.  The gore spilled when cleaning a large stripped bass echoes the carnage left by the ghouls. They are sloppy feeders, possessed by hunger, but basically dead, they have no feeling to actually crave or be contented; and quitting mid-act leave corpses scalloped by human jaws, crescents picketed by green hedges of teeth, rib cage naves with morsels still clinging, and green slavered organs abandoned as the rave dimmed in moldering brains.  But, to feel the surge of the fish’s being entirely alive through the line, impaled and transfixed conduit of fast light, had me casting, and sea lions surfaced from their underwater corridors and threw a glance my way from their peat-filled eyes, terns and pelicans shirked off their harness of wings and plunged into the bay, cormorants hung their wings from a rack of bone and crucified stood drying, and I held fast to the axis of the planet.

     I threw back the fish I winched from the Hudson.  Pity the fish whose reflex is for the rust-free-quick suddenly informed of space that instinct has never charted. How short their deaths were before our species arrived. This vivid world, solid without our species, as if we were a prism for shadows and we cast them over every color. The slaughter in the animal kingdoms must continue, but none of them include us as their nemesis. Keep still for a few minutes and a bird will roost on a shoulder. Fox kits play hide and seek around me and drop to sleep in my lap.  This must have been our dispensation, and by now whole generations have been born that know us as our form was introduced to them in the original world. Only the few surviving dogs remain fiercely against us, faithful to the wailing anger that cowed and fed them. They bristle at us and trail the ghouls. 

     I joined the anglers in Battery Park where we look for the high rigging of sailfish and the first mermaid’s homecoming from the stables of the sun.

.    When the world remembers the polyglot genus of your hands, to what task do you put them?  The things that have set me in motion are picayune and daffy.  I found knee boots and long-handled shovel, and did some desultory dredging of the miniature yacht harbor.  Pitched the black sludge into a wheelbarrow and trundled up the hill to spread it around the cherry trees. I went to the main library on Fifth at Forty-second, never worrying that in the darkened halls I would meet the ghouls. Libraries are repugnant to them, the specters in these chambers are the same as always, the impassioned and insane philosophers whose lives had been spent boring through pages in search of a hidden key.  They continue unmolested, so thoroughly forgotten decades ago that they were never found, and in their heads are the last cities lit by a religious cosmos where girls with long hair are waiting on balconies. 

     My project was to foster gardens. Card catalogs discarded for the computer and no electricity any more, I had to mine for gardening books. Superfluous.  Knowing how feckless my enthusiasms had become even before the disaster and never more susceptible to despair and absurdity than I was now, I could only hope that my determination might last long enough to collect seed, pot and soil and wheel them to the front of a gutted building when I could then leave the grunt work to the life cached in the seed, and on its own it would construct the city of flowers.  The project withered a short while after I left the library, just another old man trying to grow tresses in his head, but not before I had planted Morning Glory near a building that had soil beds at its foot. Fierce and tenacious roots has Morning Glory and it is left to bear faith in dawn, clarions unfurled. I took a cutting from the Wisteria arbor in the park, a spring shoot. A pretty blossom, a pretty word and the brawn in its vine to champion them against all comers.  

     In Battery Park City I do a labor within my means.  It is a section of town grafted onto the city.  Before the conversion, it was only the rich who could impose themselves on this city, and what a great big, purposely soulless example of failed wit this was.  Still, I liked the anomie of the place, the stupid, hygienic order that let me drift without keeping on urban alert, and frequently walked through it.  It was like any urban renewal project in any boomtown of the Sunbelt, the corporate mind made manifest, but concessions had been forced on the suits, and these included refurbishing the shoreline and building parks.

      I walk near the playground where a children’s city still remains, where scale was refracted into a child’s season-sized second, and for all these victims of parents who thought to run with the foxes and hunt with the hounds, clogging their hearts with treacle while programming their lives to a fare-thee-well, I do my best to again fill the park with them from memory, trying to return here what I had formerly collected and which might in all this vacant space where wobbling bridge and climbing tower are still at the ready, have perhaps more substance than the vacuum and might course here on its own where no ignorant adult will ever again have a chance to blunder.

     I got here too late to save the koi in the pond.  On my conscience, too, are all those other fish and creatures forced to depend on us, those in pet stores and zoos, the race horses in their stalls, and so for them, I lesson my living valence so that what I have collected from them may share equally in life, and from my dissolving sovereignty they may swim and clamber back past the lily pond with its saucer full of sky to the ponds and forests they had kept for themselves.

     I’m wending my way uptown.  I never stopped feeling like an immigrant to New York when I was in the canyons of the lower city, and it was like traveling to a foreign city when I was down there, a feeling of drinking in fresh experiences, that I liked, of a traveler’s found time.  Crimes against humanity and the world for which there was not yet created enough time in Purgatory to atone had been codified here, fortunes made on the slave trade, on genocide of the Indians, on imperialist adventures, profits and advantages gained off the livestock trade in human beings. But the district had been formed around the horse and buggy, essentially an old town, cozily cramped, and still containing a strata of anarchic, carnival commerce, cobblestone lanes, dusky and stocky arches still hanging on to their designated posts across shoulder-wide alleys, a place that continued to exhort a parochial accent over the susurrations of electrified capital, bums grand fathered in as tenants on Wall Street.

     Friday nights brokers, bankers, lawyers and secretaries used to pour out of the buildings and re-convene in a drunken party at the South Street Seaport, an attractive shopping mall with its bow to the seafaring history of the piers, but shopping mall it was. Into this familiar consumer ecology where they had first felt free and touched by divinity, looking for a giggle, a piece of tail, and slushy barracks camaraderie, flooded the children of the empty continent. In Italian shoes or cross-trainers they tramped the re-furbished boards where the steps of slavers and whalers and fishermen and whores had once echoed with that uncanny, foreboding sound of a boot hitting timber over dark waters.

     It was here that the pact they had struck with the computer was executed-each while alone listening to a perfected, baptized ego speaking to them from the machine, an ego that possessed the dark power to exceed mortal judgment. On a night of the original Sabbath, still dressed in the clothes only that morning unsheathed from the cleaner’s plastic they began consuming each other, powdered cheek and mascara framed eye and deododeized underarm and tattooed coccyx one after another. The debauched survivors suffering the effects of lingering good health from such a rapid conversion were caught out in the soft morning glow and in a rage to hide dove into restaurant refrigerators and under the docks to cling to pilings. A lucky few found a subway entrance and so the citadel, while others pried open manholes with sloppily barked femurs-a last gasp of hominid ingenuity-thus beginning the infestation that doused the lights.  

     With electricity gone, with the automobile gone, it was almost true, if you dared the night, that with a mirror you could catch a single breath of light as darkness parsed it from the last gold stalk.

     I walk a route on West fourth between Sixth Avenue and Sheridan Square.  The little shop that sells musical instruments from around the world still remains.  The sullen owner still haunts the cluttered, narrow aisles.  Dark now, its front windows always too cluttered and dusty to admit more than wane light, the few bare bulbs and table lamps useless, only a candle or two balancing tight yolks of light, it would seem ghouls should have holed up here, having forgotten the way back to the subway station at Sheridan Square. Tambourines and mandolins and tambours and bronze bells hang at forehead height from the ceiling, pipes of pan are stored in a wooden trunk, and the till was but a kitchen drawer meant to hold silver ware. A lyre could be purchased here, an umbera, bagpipe, dulcimer and sitar.  While those stores selling electric guitars and synthesizers were reduced to splinters in the last feeding frenzy of the doomed rockers, there was nothing here they wanted, no ticket to celebrity, fortune, sex and dope. By the time they became cannibals they could be held at bay by a chord from an Irish harp, and the owner, a miserable hermit who begrudged his customers the time off from his miserly tallying of grievances and smelled like old tobacco was the man to do it. A man marooned on an island, he might have been, who had found a cave out of the weather where he could chew the gristle of that beauty’s rejection that had sent him out on the waves. In this hermitage where the dust had grown beards longer than the prophets, he sheltered from the passing of time that might have softened his resolve, and into it he brought a particular sort of flotsam, musical instruments it was from around the world. Inside them came the genii of the songs they knew that could be coaxed from their bellies and lungs by the caress of a bow, an inspiring breath, or a searching fingertip. The hermit’s pampered woe drew out that last prayer for discovery left in the sounding box of an autoharp, and so without disturbing him any more than any other fatuous being would, I enter his shop to eavesdrop a grief from Thailand launched when a flute was carved by a lover. 

     Who will it be? Not this Essene; then who will play the pipe that leads the children back?  I suspect the air has long been known from the stops augured by the stars and breathed on moth wings. What makes the ghouls shrink may yet stir a dance. It is abroad in the night that harbors memories and souls.

     Also on west Fourth Street is a Patisserie.  The owner was the best baker in New York, and arguably, the unhappiest.  The quality of his product spared his shop. It was left in tact. He is gone. There is no flour, sugar or butter.  His photos are left. Before leaving he placed them in the display cases that had once held his goods. The door is unlocked. Push it open and enter his archive. 

     The photos he displays could have been peeled from the retinas of a Cassandra. Photos of desert floors, cracked walls, buildings left hollow, even those in color are aimed at colorless places, taken at times of the day or season when the color is leached out. These visions if held long enough would have wounded his eyes until finally they could not distinguish what now remains of every city and the space left untouched by creation that has always been the larger part of existence. 

     Behind the counter, between him and his customers, a dark woman would receive your order.  Not the same woman twice, but always from the same clan: obsidian eyed, stormy haired. A Corsican, a Maltese, imagining them touched as much by Africa as Europe-Egyptian and Moorish Africa-and that he was protected by an ancient cabal, a clan of warrior women that awaited a lunar eclipse to mate once with a coddled prisoner.  Or just women, fierce in historical tragedy and bringing to a pastry shop as others less informed did to every delivery bed in the world the Ark of the Covenant with Death. These women are gone leaving the silence he had photographed. Their absence, as haunting as the presence of shades, makes me think that he had photographed the echoless abyss of orgasm, the regions we pass through in the instant that bequeath us the wars in heaven and that have now broken upon the world. 

     

      Sheridan Square, right turn up the dog-leg in Seventh Avenue, left on Thirteenth Street and a pick-up truck and a Humvee are stopped in the center of the street near the end of the block. Someone is calling my name and waving me along. It’s Mario, omnivorous conversationalist, eye on the horizon for prey. I avoid the boulevards where he has set his traps of café tables and primus stove, and sits coffee cup in hand, another across from him waiting for the hapless stroller. Creature of habit that I remain, I’ve drifted to Yoga Dao, and here is Manaloo and Potluck and a fourth guy all standing by the pick-up truck. The stranger has one foot on the running board. He’s a tall man and he’s in army fatigues and he’s eating something and when he sees me he smiles a boyish grin and his strong teeth are smeared in red and remarkably, it is cherries he has been eating. He mimics my expression on seeing him, which must be dumbfounded. He is filled with good humor, and he moves smoothly, close to a glide, loose in the joints, and suddenly laughs and grabs me in a bear hug. “God, it’s good to see you. We’re alive, boys. We are alive!” Takes a step back, looks me over and laughs again. “Yes, indeed, each as we sees fit. Ok, the last sporty gent. Well, there’s a tradition. Well met. And we got Manaloo decked out in the last shipment from New Delhi, we’ve got our legend going. Manaloo brings wisdom and maybe some magic, and the gent, Jacob is it?, he brings us moral resolve, but Mario, you bring the best of all. Pure promise, and there’s little of that left.”

     A bushel of blond hair, no, once blond hair, the nickel tone in blond hair that’s graying, but still the boyish cowlick, and the oiled joints, broad shoulders, tanned, wears a tank top, a muscular frame, but the skin already leathery and the muscles slackening. At a glance he would look easy inside his life, a natural at things. He had driven out from California. You’re culpable there for no longer being young. Once a dauphine among a multitude of them, so nearly fitted for so many things that have grace attributed to them, and by this unforgiving approximation, destined to become an epigone. The sum of his near misses had left him looking like a cashiered film extra. A pearl handled revolver is holstered at his hip.

     He clapped Potluck on the back. “Sorry, Mario, old Potluck here is the best. He brings the chow. Come on over here, Jacob, and have some of these cherries, the best in the world”, and he offers me some from the back of the pick-up where several crates of fruits and vegetables are laying. Miraculous cherries,  cherries on their candelabra stems, cherries dangling like chimes, incandescent purses filled by arteries of spring, The cherry grows in endless summer and only ages when we pick it.  Innocence and wisdom can be tested against its constancy. They tasted as I remembered them; no telling how sweet they might have been had ordeal purged me, or the deprivation they might have marked if they had been as sweet as the first cherry must once have tasted when the world would have been unbearable to lose. It’s then I noticed his eyes while cherries are in his hand. They are as flat and dull as lead slugs.

      Manaloo has bundles of herbs in his hand.  His calm seems largely unaffected by the conversion.  Meeting others makes me ask for what virtues were they sentenced?  He may be calmer than before the conversion, maybe he’s paying for that. He grows his own herbs and bottles tinctures of them that he distributes from the Yoga Dao pharmacy, but these herbs are something special.  Potluck has driven this shipment to town.  Manaloo wears the same full pantaloons he always has, Indian I would guess them and the shirts as well, and Potluck, a thin, ropey-muscled guy with a narrow face, long ponytail tied into a bun, bright-eyed with laugh crinkles at their corners, is still in his tie dye shirt and blue jeans.  In former days, Potluck would arrive at the produce store to collect the refuse from the juice counter and trimmings from the vegetables for composting.  He was part of a commune; their liturgy was compost. They should have called themselves the Rumpelstitskins, or the philosopher’s stone, and the agents of their alchemy were garnet-colored worms, the Calvinist wing of the worm phylum. They lived to work. If a brief Sabbath of sleep was enforced on their subterranean order, their imageless ruminations were expressed in the continued flow of cauliflower leaf cud into loam.  It was the most friable, atomized compost I ever saw and though Potluck like all true craftsmen would relate the recipe and calendar of transformation, the transcendent message of metamorphosis was left to my conjecture, which I did, thinking of those creatures not cursed with sublimations of Eros and Thantos, like silk worms, who skimming spindrift from the interlaced dream, recover some initial exquisite tuning in silence. 

     It was Potluck who brought the pistol-packing stranger.  From a long way off in the canyons of the city the stranger had heard the pick-up’s engine. A small sound at first, certainly no larger than the trill of a cardinal, a gnawing grind his ear was tuned to, and he had followed it, pruning echo from salient core, nurturing the petty churn of the motor through the throaty roar of his Humvee.  

     “I‘m Kit Carson. I hunt Indians.  But, I might not be Kit Carson for too long, now that I’m here. Maybe I’ll be Davy Crockett, or Custer, depending on how things go.  You guys kept your names, even old Potluck. Those were your domesticated names, and there’s no more waiting for the hand that fed us.  When I was Peter there was a Bible and once upon a time a mother who believed in it a little bit, enough to name me for a man of peace, at least round-about. Coming from a long way off, I’m the one to tell you any name that worked back then doesn’t make any sense now. It’s a cross with every kind of poor martyr nailed to it. Until the day he went under you could sell Peter Shinola if you had a white picket fence in the ad.  Kit Carson and the rest of those fellows knew what this place was about; there might be something in those names.”

     Since announcing he was Kit Carson he had slid into a Western movie accent.

     He was here to hunt ghouls.  He’d moved deep into the hills above Santa Cruz, pushed back by the stupidity, especially feminists and political correctness that gave a man no room to breathe.  When he figured out what was happening, he saw it as vindication and knew what his purpose was.  He’d brought an assault rifle, a hunting rifle, scopes, a Glock automatic and hunting knives with him when he moved out to the cabin.  He started out small, stupid when he thinks about it now.  First, he went looking for his landlord, and sure enough the guy was already gone to cannibal, maybe living in a railway tunnel, who knows, and he had the idea of living in his house, but then thought, the hell with that, and packed every piece of ordinance he owned into his rickety van and took off for the abodes of the dot.com billionaires, ferreting out some sons-of-bitches he knew along the way, the liquor store owner for one, and then this girl who sold fancy, hippie clothes in Aptos who had the wildest eyes he’d ever seen, like mosaics they were, made of flakes of a dozen different colors. A beauty, but with a flat ass. Yet flat ass and all she still thought she was too good for him, so he looked her up, busting into the store to check the books for her home address, and making a detour there before heading up the coast.  Found her, she had a couple of kids, and he just laughed to see her huddled up there, told her to hop in and even take the kids, but she was completely delusional, must have thought things would pop back into place, and idiot tourists would still be showing up a few weeks from now. He thought of forcing her but let his contempt for her be a lesson. She had nothing left that would save her. He took over a mansion with a view of the ocean, shot sea lions at Lighthouse Point, otters off the wharf, and pelicans on the wing.  Grew bored, headed for San Francisco.  Looking for tail and justice, a man with a mission, several missions, any mission he chose, any justice.  Went to the police stations, liberated their weapons, fine shit the SWAT teams had, M16’s with grenade launchers and laser-beam aiming, starlight scopes, infra-red night goggles, tear gas and concussion grenades, TASERS, and electric cattle prods, crowd control gimmicks like some shit you applied to the street that made it too slippery to walk on, wet dreams like that. All of these toys he greatly improved upon with time, his Humvee just packed with stuff from National Guard Armories by the time he went partying in Seattle, though nothing compared to Houston, sound emitting devices that liquefied the body. You could turn it on a neighborhood and every biological form would melt into goop, but still, the most fun was in the beginning, and except for using a bazooka on a bear, wildlife he still wasted with classical instruments, more fun, more respectful, the elegance.

     In Frisco, he besieged the Castro District, going after the queers.  They had brought this whole thing on, the AIDS virus and attitude.  They were snobs, funny how that works, but the mud miners thought they were classy, and sold the suckers on it. He hunted them down, shooting long range from penthouses around town with his starlight scope for practice, but that dignified them too much and he went after them with automatic rifles, axes, and fire.  Burned them out of their caves, and when they limped out into the sulpheric sunshine, grenaded them, de-capitated them, or chinsawed them into pieces.  Put himself out of business, things caught fire and Frisco was no longer a nice place to live, and there was no tail anyway. It was the capital of  PC bitches and lesbians, and if you were the last man in the world you still wouldn’t get laid.    

     Kit Carson in fatigues with a rolling arsenal  tells the parable of the last days of Gill Fences that he has put together after liberating his 500 million dollar mansion where Fences had hunkered down at the end.

     (Fences, 29 billion to a foundation for getting the suffering world back on its feet-his criterion for innocence is children near death, any more culpable are stained by humanity and deserve what they get, what he has collaborated in giving them, what he has benefitted from. He wants to launder his money and can’t in water that reflects his features floating in the sewage from his own acts. Malaria it will be, children in rigors’ tongs, little babies leaking pitiful moans or a siren’s ear splitting note as the cerebral form boils their brains. Babies in thatch hutches where the mosquitoes take the shade during the day, biting 24/7, disabled by over eating, potbelly abdomens, hanging on the walls metabolizing corpuscles into new generations, too heavy to reach the ceiling; they burst lush as a grape when swatted. In the thatch snakes hunt rats, a nightmare cosmos whose Gotterdamerung is the arrival of soldier ants who scour it out to the last termite, a salvation if the invasion is during the day, buried in heaven above of mambas and other svelte apparitions and salvation blind soldiers not angels. The whole world he’ll take on, where snakes and mosquitoes are celestial darlings and droughts last for generations and hurricanes hit, and in the best of times a quarter million or so die every day from a half million pristine, chaste, and poetic things that he can use to rage against the blood bourn god whose creation justifies every sin as wisdom and whose image we are. Fences who better than any other individual has managed to funnel the Gulf Stream and the trade winds, and the sums of harvests and droughts, and the totals of child labor against their deaths, and the moils of war and genocide and the sloughs of economic depression, and the remainders after malaria, funnel more than any other individual the sheared off total of blessings into his own pocket, calculating to his favor better than any one else the loss versus gain of all souls on the planet that only bytes can record so not a drop of pus goes un-reaped for profit, he’s going to give back a quarter on the dollar to line edit the Sabbath that as it was left didn’t deserve a rest.).

     “I could only find pieces of him by the time I got there. His bodyguards got him. They’d bivouacked in the meat freezer, perfect for me. I burned them out without the house catching fire, and had the run of the place. The electric still up, powered by a small reactor on its own grid, temperature regulated and air filtered in. The whole place is interactive.  He had a plan to live for ever, recording every minute of his life so it could be down loaded and re-played by folks who would be on his payroll until his money ran out, which wasn’t ever going to happen.  He’s always talking to the walls, telling them what he’s doing, even in the toilet so what’s left will be more complete.  Fences has his wife screwing him on file, each time, so he knows he has it when the children were conceived, and he’s been recoding his organ waves, the electric charge in them and all his DNA has been de-coded, and he’s got these cells from his mouth and stem cells from bone marrow growing in a solution that he pipes these recordings of his life into in digital form so the organs will have his life twisted into them along with their digital bio-rhythms, and that’s why I got the whole record of him going rotten.  I got this on my camcorder and can play it off the cigarette lighter in my truck. You got to see this.”   

     The only recording of the soul of dead folks, and a celebrity besides, we listened, Kit Carson annotating the action that none of us wanted to watch on his monitor. Fences reedy voice recognizable, but heartier, singing “I like the nightlife”, “Are the stars out tonight”, and the Oscar Meyer song for African children cured of malaria, never before allowed at his mansion, but brought there this time, Fences conducting them in the Oscar Meyer song, in “Young at Heart”, a medley we never suspected he knew, and with flourishes and imitation. Fences with soul, and then biting them, not quite fully converted, but keeping a flock of “precious meat”, just snacking, a taste for human flesh, a new aesthetic, not yet a reflex compulsion, and a fuller man for it, for regaining his appetite. The grateful pagan babies used to abuse in the war zones they came from, scenes of dismemberment, burnings, etc. submitting without protest, just involuntary yelps followed by rapid apologies, melodious, woodwind “sorry”(the African equivalent of “excuse me”) when their benefactor chewed off an ear lobe, nipped a Hottentot’s buttock. Fences dressed for Mardi Gras, a New Orleans funeral or African dictatorship, limited references from the web for interfacing with black people but Fences meaning well, perhaps trying for the African Captain Kangaroo or Saint Nick, getting in touch with his own inner child, an inhibited man letting go. These changes are apparently a revelation for Fences. Later tapes will show philosophies founded and theaters to expound them. Modernism and post-modernism are cashiered, dead forms are revived. Classicism, romanticism, irony is refuted by butchery, all the empty space implied by an Epicurean appreciation stuffed solid when gluttony takes over.  What is a man indeed?  A hock, a brisket, a rack of ribs, Fences and his wife eating their children with the more brio than Saturn, even Greek tragedy a bit ambiguous when compared to this more primal ur-myth.

     Without recorded competitors we are left with Fence’s exegesis. The effect is of language rewound until it flaps to shreds on the spool. Each word he voices for its last time is another tissue of light consumed until a howl swallows itself.

     Fences paces the moors, striding the boards, recapitulating a biography of a child’s heart, while feasting on it. “How much sharper the serpent’s fang than a skinny child”, “My meal is like a hart leaping down the sewers of Lebanon” as he eats his wife” a man of infinite jest rudely choked off with a snarl, “My love is like a red, red, nose” and it is not Jack Frost who nips it then, and “I’ll drink to you only with your eyes” means what it says.  Shanks in either hand, the great entrepreneur gives us his metaphysic.  “This suffered?  Then not for nothing.  Give me your poor, your huddled masses; they’re the fat ones.  Open the borders and let the suet in.  Some are blubbers, and some are biters.  What mad dog in the manger gave fangs to…what will I do, my teeth are falling out?  I’ll rip the balls off your incorporation.   The liver is too chewy, the gall bladder may be sucked”, roars and howls, “How do I crack the coconut.”   He smiles into the camera, he tosses body parts to the lens, he piles bodies by the wall, he faces away and naked, rocks his buttocks at the camera: He is offering the mad dog a sacrifice so he will teach him how to crack coconuts.  The mad dog is not recorded biting his ass, labor unrest gets him.  Bodyguards, cooks, accountants and gardeners, a pack made redundant, feasts on the bard.

     Kit Carson shows us a flamethrower.  “First used in Saipan against the Japs, but this baby has never been improved on.  Throws a stream of napalm fifty yards.  This little honey cleans them up and kills the virus, too, and they smell good, like a barbeques.”   “Barbeque doesn’t smell so good,” says Manaloo.  “Soil smells better. Grass, lots of things. Close to everything smells better.” added Potluck.  “Fine. I got other ordinance fits your taste.”  “Don’t think so. Mario, you like the smell of barbeque”, Manaloo asked? 

     Mario is an anomaly among us. He looks like a lover. I have a theory for how he survived; I think he took love too seriously for the times.  He had already met his soul mate, they had loved passionately, and then she moved to Europe.  He never recovered.  He believed in Europe even after visiting her there. He returns to the USA telling melancholy stories to girls who mine their Spartan beauty in calculation. 

     Even sentenced to celibacy by romanticism, how could a guy like Mario remain in a city denuded of women?  Everywhere her apparition beckons, unless as before they are sighing together on a bridge overlooking the Seine.  

     Could Mario join Kit Carson?  Manaloo must wonder. Not to wear fatigues, but what about rummaging through the costume department of a Broadway house to emerge with sword and shield?

     Mario puzzles the question. “Espresso” he finally answers as if that were really the question.  Kit Carson will find no troops on the Left Bank.

     “Hey, it’s not a menu. It’s them or us.”  “Don’t think so. They’re dying off Eating each other down to nothing.”  “Bull shit.  What do they have to eat for anyway, they’re dead?”  “That’s the mystery”, said Manaloo “part of their purgatory, but they have to. Sooner or later all that’s left they can catch will be vegetables and tofu.” 

“You’re waiting for that? “   

     “Preparing for it, brother”, said Potluck.  We’re too busy to read old cowboy stories” 

      “You got to be careful when you come to a new place to not just burn it down. This city is like one of those old ships sunk to the bottom of the sea, and now it’s a reef.  It provides. See these?  These are pea seeds, and this is compost and this is soil with earth worms included, and I’m going to plant this on the tops of buildings and then we’re going to harvest the vines like kelp, pull it up from below.  I’ve already started by taking the tops off some water tanks up there, and they should be catching rain.  Then I use that to irrigate my peas.  But, that’s only part of it.  I’m going to build planter boxes.  We need farmland here but we don’t want to use the parks that now have animals in them, and the light’s good up there and we don’t have to worry about deer and gophers.” 

     “That right”, said Kit Carson, “And probably think you’re the good guys. But, you tell me just who is bringing the damn woods back into the city and just who is fighting to get it back from the beasts.”

     “Not the woods, brother, the garden.”

     “Oh, brother. I’m from Honey Falls, Indiana. Population 812. I love Pamela Lacey. I stopped there on the drive across.  Followed here home from school. Lunch box and books.  She looked back at me when she reached her porch, confused. Twelve year old girl, she was going to give me my first kiss, but Peter isn’t there. Neither is the porch with the swinging couch. The house is gone. No lights came on in Honey Falls when I drove out. Meadows full of flowers; lie down and sleep. Always been more dead than living.  Don’t listen to their sad songs.”

     “We aren’t, brother. It’s the happy ones we hear.  We try to stay in step with them”  

     And that’s how it happened that I worked alongside Potluck on roof top gardens.  Forced into it by Kit Carson. The racket he made with his ordinance, the black smoke from the fires he set, the wheeling, keening birds, forced me to labor just to try to keep the peace. A seed planted to answer each blast from burning Harlem.

     We spent about a moon at it, and Manaloo could out work us all. He’d enjoyed playing tackle in football, a skinny guy with bantam humor, and he would storm in for a while, a day maybe, a few hours, having other obligations, the herbal pharmacy and something metaphysical, a resurgence, a coordinated strategy he joked about-that fits, he’d say, not much more than that and then laugh, and there was a whole empty city with room to fit any damn thing you might please, so you knew either he meant that, spit in the ocean, sucker, or that this fit into a blueprint he had. I was pretty sure he meant both. 

     His head was equal part skull and face. His head shaved, and shaved yet, and out of his drawn, black skin his eyes glowed and his crooked. teeth showed in a perpetual smile, like a skull’s, and I thought, trick or treat, not as a choice but as a koan, the question the Sphinx actually asked. Halloween, all souls night-I thought this about Manaloo, about his plan-the overriding sense and nonsense: All souls. Manaloo was a Hindu,  he might relish the world of forms, illusion of course, but relish seeing Vishnu and Ramah metamorphosing through each other now the veil was removed. What a chance! Action becomes meditation when you awake within Vishnu’s inclusive dream, all souls abroad on equal footing.

     Then, thank the gods for nothing, and rah rah, do it again, do it again, we like it, we like it. Thanks for nothing, thanks for illusion, and included within one more illusion as we were, illusions within illusions, his project on this all souls eve, a night of forms finally naked in their essential costumes, all souls eve, mind you, the soul or atman as solid and ambulatory as every other piece of Vishnu’s dream, his project in which all labor is bent towards undoing, each task is pitching out its own possible weight of shadow  and is  another shovel full of enlightenment.

     We worked up on the rooftops pushed into the blue sky and all its cloud migrations, studied by birds in the hundreds. They had never seemed to like us before, they had hauteur, keeping us at a distance, but they couldn’t contain their curiosity about any thing aloft. Who knows, maybe visitors from other dimensions always attract attention, the trapeze act suspension of them or their blinking eyed innocence, and maybe a touch of morbidity to it, waiting for them to fall or dash upward, comically desperate and out of place before being rushed away? Maybe it was the birds, banking down to land on the roof edges or jumping off, their suspension, their mercurial weight or adhesion to countervailing gravities-the gulls especially having to hunker down, sullenly ignoring the provocation in order to keep from falling up-and maybe it was Potluck’s vision of lagoon harvests, hauling up tresses of beans from below, but you could lose the certainty of up and down, the certainty of their polarity or that they existed as more than interpretation or even just as stigmas or a desperate wish for orientation. It was unnerving, all the unmapped space possibly opened to us. 

     Maybe it was the birds with their free pass into thin air with their assumption more solid than faith in its crammed in, compact existence, its translation of force, and maybe Potluck’s capsized view of farming and Manaloo’s smile whose origin was paradox, and Mario occasionally stopping by but soon discouraged by work, complaining of back pain, Mario who was stronger than any of us but was weighted down by lost loves, those specters and dewy mists-but vertigo set in. Which way we were falling? Bringing loam up from below or pitching sky down from the hayloft?

     We spent some nights up there; ghouls don’t have the concentration to scale heights. Blankets of stars covered us and we did some talking. All confessed to the same madness, stuck so deep into the stars and easy up there, completely relaxed, floating up there, wondering perhaps if the perfection of the moment wasn’t us looking down at ourselves from above, our bodies in the Atlantis of a lagoon bottom. The sky was black when the moon was new and the Milky Way thick as a pebble road, and the distance of a light year the labor of a blink, and the tree in paradise the children call the tree of life audible soughing through the stars. I sang some spirituals I knew and they seemed to fog the complete clarity of the sky, like breath on a glass pane, so close to being could they come against empty space, and so who could be sure that the city might not be spared for one just man and that a mantra might not invite angel or god to join us pedestrians as they once had?  

     Potluck invited us to return with him to the farm. Manaloo thought someone should keep the doors of the pharmacy open.  I decided to join Potluck. I’d miss the living company.

     Mario joined us, besotted Mario.  I thought he looked winsome for the ghosts that bedecked him with mist. And the word echoed strangely to me, a tender note, couched in fragile feeling. I meant his dreaminess, the substance of it that might be shared. Someone might exist personally and uncompleted, as unresolved and therefore still touched by awakenings, by the amorous, solemn delight that opens the first snowdrop flower. Ghostly, ghostly dreams that rise glowing. 

     It echoed strangely, strangely natural that is, testimony to its generations. Its private meanings to me-cherished loss and aching faith-were freshening in themselves and built forms viable in the open air. The past might be a ripening anticipation with strength to bring it forth. To be raveled in longing was a quality of form. Eros, a romantic destiny was intrinsic. 

     We were spared by things rising in tune from the ground. It had been too terrible to recall my friends fixed in themselves by death. How crippling my sacred work must have been for them, whatever solemn whimsy left to them pulled back by my gravity. And all the while revelations peacefully opened.

      Potluck stopped the truck. We piled out. Outside was so big it slapped like a crack of thunder. The Hudson dropped from the edge of the Parkway, green shouldered hills surged under the sky. I couldn’t place the varying distances in order; I didn’t believe in the large vistas. They flattened out like clouds, climbing on top of each other, so I stayed near the truck for a moment to avoid the tumble.

     The world had grown so large in our absence I could only believe the animals had begun sewing together their collective souls long separated by our dominion. The swallows with empty barns to fill with their wattle nests, in number now great enough to resume their guild’s task as originally assigned, have closed the lesion between day and night, and once again eternity swells the canopy. 

      “That’s how we’ll get back”, Potluck said, and he stopped the truck at a dock where a wooden ship with a single mast was berthed. I could see several people lazing on the deck.  This was West Point’s dock. We could see its Gothic stone buildings high up the bluffs. It is a splendid part of the river, and lovely in the summer cradled by the bosomy hills.

     “The good sloop `Clearwater’.“ 

      Guys in shorts greeted Potluck with hugs. They had ponytails as long as his. I watched from the dock. The Lost Boys, I thought, and wandered up the hill to campus. I saw Mario heading for the riverbank. I imagined him often pining on the shores of the Hudson. There is nothing quite like water for melting the heart.

     They had plowed the quadrangle and turned barracks into stable and hen house, mess hall into dairy.  The football field was paddock. The stone buildings were sound and sturdy; the officers’ quarters housed the farmhands.  Most of the buildings remained unoccupied.  Nobody with experience of the military could have anything but contempt for its officers, but still, the faults of the cadets had been those of youth and romance exploited and perverted by the institution.  In memory of bending sacrifice into murder, love into rape, brotherhood into torture, defense into invasion, idealism into genocide, they were teasing this sword into a plough shear.  The new age would make as little use of metal as possible; the military and militarism can be seen as the foundry made into ethos.  There was no clanging here, no blare of brass trumpets.  Plow traces diffused an occasional flat note. 

     The military like any homosexual institution be it Church or Monastery, was intoxicated with pomp and ritual.  The artifacts of this delusion of glory based on a misinterpretation of history and denial were plentiful around West Point.  There were ropes aplenty and fine wool coats, as well as, of course, thousands of sets of the harlequin idiocy of polyester tiger fatigues that keep a crisp edge while poaching their wearer in his own sweat.  There were sabers and rowing sculls, oars and small yachts, a stable, foils and epees, and archery gear. Murals of cavalry charges were hung in the library, but the gruesome end of these manufactured ‘gentlemen’ was painted on the tile walls of the shower rooms and toilet stalls.  Perhaps, the greatest irony was the complete literalness of the end achieved by a military education: in those heretical altars to male nakedness. Dress grays slab rigid in the closets back in their births, trumpets stilled, parade quadrangle empty, just that specter of glory bare-assed under the spray, they went at each other with tooth and nail, hand to hand, purer than Spartans, to the death, no prisoners, no quarter asked but a larger fraction taken, and honored each other’s guts, their intestinal fortitude, with a feast of said bowels.

     The maintenance and custodial crews necessary to maintain the fanatical order that defeats sense in the military had left behind buildings full of tools and some of them meant for working on the archaic talismans precious to the vain military mind, were splendid indeed.  The wood working shop had planes and awls and chisels, braces and bits, saws, clamps, everything necessary for building bluebird houses, which were posted around the base like rural mailboxes.  There was a special effort made to recruit homemakers of all species.  If they sang, so much the better, but other talents and attitudes were solicited as well. Red flowers and red flowering trees had been planted to attract hummingbirds, cardinals were bright on branches, and robins patrolled field and firing range.  Doors and windows had been removed from some barracks to encourage their requisitioning by wildlife; hundreds of swallows shot in and out of the chapel, and a bear denned in the general’s house. Deer grazed among the sheep. 

     There was a spinning wheel and a loom.  They were in a corner room so bright with sunlight reflecting off the polished wooden floors they looked peeled back to sketches of themselves.  Piles of wool of different colors looked like lambs sleeping along the walls. A skein of wool resolved from a tumble of fleece still circumscribed the wheel; the first two paragraphs of a rug were still on the loom with the shuttlecock, like a pen left resting on the half page, set into the strings. The yarn still ran through the eye and the long windows were open and it could not be long since she had left or long until she returned, her absence was only a pause and the room was charged by the cinching of her actions like a string tuned around the chord spindle.  The bright stillness, I would compare it to being in a belfry, maybe even inside the palm of a single bell, and the whole farm could be said to listen for the hours sounded from here, windows left open to drench longing in light. 

      The work around a farm during high summer seems as much desultory as idyllic.  The hunt is on for insect pests and weeds, but it is hardly a chase.  Botany sets the pace.  The crops are mature and weeds that had mimicked them when they were seedlings now stick out like sore thumbs and present a problem only if their numbers schooled in hard knocks are allowed to flourish under the spoiling hand of cultivation. But, there is no rush.  A stroll last week revealed an encampment of pig’s weed, a stroll postponed another week will give them more stem to uproot them from tilled ground and save you a trip to the shed today to find a hoe.  Japanese beetles can skeletonize a berry bush in a couple of days if their numbers are great enough, but their incontinent couplings and enrapturing appetites make them easy targets for control by hand.  They are emerald colored, shiny as metal.  They look like pendants and sweeping them off a leaf and into a can of kerosene is close to picking up scattered jewelry. Tomato hornworms fatten and grow tumescent.  They depend on camouflage and sloth to survive.  They are green and become as fat as a finger before they entomb themselves in chrysalis and emerge as moths.  They will be found resting during the day on stems denuded of leaves.  It’s that way in summer in the garden, there is heat and a drone from insect life, and the pregnant slumber of ripening casts an opiate into the corpulent air, and it is luckily sufficient to pace chores to the gestating fruit, doing the quiet tasks that could fall upon a nurse tending the last heavy weeks before delivery, neatening around the bed, making the lay-in more comfortable.  Green beetles and worms, the squash bugs yellow, the insect world sends in its sweet-toothed legions.

     The pulse in sap slowed me, as it did everyone I saw, and it drew me to waxing color and engorging shape and then would abandon me to a trance in which time was so slowed down and the simplest thing was beyond my comprehension and best left to wonder. How ready everything seemed to shed what luminous rind of form still separated it from fruition. I felt this as the substance of my sloth, the sluggish coursing through my veins being blood’s tardiness, its trailing the heart it fed. I lay down on a blanket of shade, and as if I had labored the whole day at tilling, a scroll of the garden was legible behind my lids.  It had been a long time since I had been tired this way, so full in every cell with slumber that I could not sleep for the perfection of it, when sleep can not be poured into the full cup.  Everything that is in sleep brimmed over, and the sensual delight the body must take in it but is quickly hidden from our eyes, molded my dreams in the shape of its palpable pleasures.  My palm filled with a breast, and lips pressed on mine, and my tongue tasted sweet saliva.  Each part gave itself completion, and my closed eyes saw her at the loom.  It’s this they had wanted and this light that outside of her would have been too bright to look at but necessarily became her form.  I could enjoy this, having her rise off the chair and embrace me in the glowing room, feel her take me in her arms and holding her know she was weaving fates from luminous yarn, and feel for the first time what we are always absent from, the threading of light through the eye of conception, and with that be able to see beauty as truth which is the eyes’ longing. 

     I took her wrist in the circle of thumb and index finger.  So fine her wrist, its bones and tendons.  Her fingertips bid me keep my eyes closed.  She lay down beside me.  My ears had waited for this: She said “Jacob”.  Now I was ready to sleep. 

     There’s a way you sleep when you’re young that you lose.  Sleep still works then, it’s new, the world is new, someone will still say sweet dreams to you and it is as if they were handing you papers of passage for another country.  It’s very clear over there.  In those places you visit, things know themselves.  They are like you once walked, solid and confident, upright through and through.  And waking is like docking. You’ve made a passage across an ocean and you wash up against the shore and you bob there for awhile, a bonny boat not much larger than a cradle and the light comes through your closed eyelids and though you have forgotten your dreams you don’t really wake from them. You don’t need to open your eyes; the two countries are continuous. The same sea washes them both. Their shores disappear and the ocean brakes upon itself, ebbs back and breaks against itself.  And the ocean is light.

     She was lying beside me, her knees against my thigh, speaking nearly into my ear.  “It’s Heather”, and I didn’t answer because I could add nothing to it. It was inevitable. It would be Heather, who half a century before had set the world spinning.  Heather of the meadow who brought grass, bright water and summer.

     We embraced. The smell of her hair, I was very chaste. I was overwhelmed with sentiment when smelling her hair.  It smelled like summer.  The sun had baked into it. I just held on to her for dear life. 

     We took a walk around the old military outpost.  I held her hand.  I nuzzled her cheek.  She was perfectly wonderful and I filled my senses with her, but she was patient; among the many things she did, she worked with farm animals and though most of the time they remain royally oblivious to you, come feeding time they gather around you like disciples, and nudge you with their wet noses. 

     I asked her to say my name.  Now, a sure way of driving someone up a wall when you’re a kid is to repeat their name ad absurdum, but I couldn’t hear her say it enough.  Not in a tumble of connected syllables, but at every opportunity.  “Please”, I’d say, like a tourist asking someone to use his camera to shoot him in front of Niagara Falls, right after hearing a cardinal’s song.  “Now”, she finally began asking, anticipating the request after the dull clang of a cowbell or the stiff-legged jump of a lamb.  And I said her name over and over, not always so she would hear, but at an extraordinary new sight of her.  I said it every time she refracted the world around that principle of grace that a woman imparts to events. It had long been my favorite name for a woman, since I was twelve, anyway, and I was afraid it alone could conjure this Heather. And so each time I said it with her present I dispelled a piece of its old magic and replaced it among the living, as she did for me.  Heather now among a row of bean plants, her long hair of lightest brown, blond and bright as electric filament where it straggled out from the rest and was charged with sunshine.  Small hands of tender bones lifting the latch of a garden fence or thumb hooked on pants pocket, blue jeans with “w” stitched on back pockets and a leather patch, but more, more, the details of a second’s total existence too complex to be memorized, proving her rightly named Heather but necessarily so only because of every anonymous else whose haphazard being relies on active creation. 

     We all gathered for a meal in the summer evening.  It was fruits and vegetables, eggs and cheese and bread.  We ate outside on long tables from the mess hall.  While gathering together I overheard some guys planning the trip to Manhattan to feed the ghouls.  This time they were going by the “Clearwater” with a full cargo collected from up and down the Hudson.  I sat next to Heather, her hip touching mine, the meal on platters in front of us.  Hot corn steaming and fresh whipped butter in bowls.  Across the table a man in a loose white shirt of Indian cotton took the hands of the two men seated beside him and soon we had all joined hands.  I felt a current of peace run through me. 

     “Brothers and sisters”, he said, and I saw there were women at the table, and children, as if the peace had turned on a light.  “They are trapped in darkness and their dreams have been expelled.  Everywhere we look we see what they remember.  All this has become their prayers.  Today we welcome a new brother into our family.  Above his bed hangs “Starry Night” that loam of pearls. Only a shared misfortune in love can substantiate a life.  He has eaten from the carrion of dead light where its prayers fell to earth.  Today he’s with us and hungry as can be for corn with sweet butter, if I read his nose right.”  He was looking into my eyes.  “Bon appetite, Jacob.”

..