Beautiful weather here now,

if you’re blind. Summer

with that fall bite in the night air,

and through my window,

“In my dream, I am your customer.”

—Laurie Anderson, Words in Reverse

In a pagan posture,

in a Cadillac,

my body synched,

manipulated and ruptured

as a locksmith unpinned.

(For Simone)

Girls just like to dance

to the politics,

wear the stamina

of a rosy Spain pear,

each one a clerk and tangle

of facets and fatalism.

Translated from Spanish by Reginald Gibbons

We weren’t there when it happened.

We were on our way to another city,

another life,

under an ever-changing sky that moved as we moved.

Translated from Spanish by Reginald Gibbons

They’re on the bedsheets,

uncertain,

undone,

flung like ragdolls. Just once

Translated from Spanish by Reginald Gibbons

The car in the shade of a shed,

and fringes of brown weeds at the wheels.

The midday sun beats down on asphalt

and desert sand, liquifies the glittering.

who linger, who watch as I once did from the high corner of a dream, floating above your

hospital bed. I attended night for you. I guard[ed] my Master’s Head. In dreams I gave you eyes.

Body, bundle, country of twigs. Your nine gates opening, closing, spittle wet. A miracle you

existed at all. Fontanel, fallible. Your soul shaking inside. When you died, Leaves unhooked

ices over. Leafless. Listless. Heaven only an idea scraping out its breath. Such cloudy

disappearances. Pentimento, palimpsest. The fade of you still lingers. Blue air splinters white.

Just a glimpse
just past midnight

Half looming
hugely

about to sink
into black trees

(July 1967)

After reading more than her allotted time

(infuriating W. H. Auden, on stage behind her)

then blowing kisses to the audience

at the Poetry International Festival,

Anne accepts Ted’s invitation

to visit him in Devon.

“It was seen all over the world,” Mansfield claimed. “We thought it was

undignified.”

Diane Arbus had been commissioned by Harper’s to photograph the author.

Susann was promoting her novel The Love Machine, which was high on the

best-seller list.

portulan: a maritime map that shows coastlines marked with safe harbors

The map I am making is obsolete, a nautical map from 1573, faded, tea-stained yellow, discolored in places by what looks like the heat of too-close candle flame. The paper is moth wing. The ink sea mist and foam.

The Frenchwoman may have imagined not only that my father’s café was still there, in that town in the industrial heartland of South Africa where she and her husband lived for a while, but that it looked much the same, or much as I recall it, a small building designed, like the rest of that town center, in a functional version of art deco…

It takes Little Bill and his girlfriend, Crystal, exactly eleven minutes and twenty-six seconds to lose all their money at Caesar’s Palace. It takes eleven minutes instead of seven minutes because Crystal weaves down the jangling aisles for four minutes rolling her last three quarters between her thumb and forefinger, testing the machines for a lucky slot.

I had an opponent assigned to me. His name was Cory. He was big and fast and that’s how he talked, too. “I’ll carve you up,” he said. “I’ll make you wish you were never born.”

1.

There is never enough. There is always just barely enough.

2.

Both conditions have always felt true.

3.

I began working at age sixteen, a summer job as a salesclerk: a women’s dress shop in a sleepy shopping center in Roseville, California.

Mr. de Persia of two hands, lighthanded and heavyhanded, one hand fleet and light, the other heavy and dark, wizard repairman of two stranger hands, you were just short of being a god. So get up and come back from wherever you, too, have vanished to.

“Somebody's laying out in the field,” my little brother came to tell us. It was eight o'clock in the morning and already so hot that the weeds were steaming and the locusts calling. For a few days there had been word of a hurricane coming.