In the months before their separation, Priya had been subject to predictable dreams, textbook things.

She’d be a child again, running up slick marble stairs in sock feet and then tumbling, wildly, airborne, free of anything solid, waking suddenly in a sweat, muscles clenched in expectation of the inevitable snap of impact.

You may not get what the relevance is here, why you are being told what you have not yet been told about someone you have not yet met, and if this is the case, I ask only that you note that the Writer Himself will suffer the same perplexity…

Martha scrubs the windows with a mixture of hot water and ammonia. She wonders when Benjy painted them black. It is night, but still, the effect is palpable. Outside there’s a half-moon and streetlights casting their orange glow. Little gets through.

What a lovely

bunch of

French

terms.

What names.

What attic

Beauvoir’s art was fiction

or Sartre’s love for her was fiction

or both. And so

how to arrive at love—

the human instinct,

simple, tender desire.

Man steps off a train at central station. A city and boxes and forty seasons before him. Seasons like autumn, where he stands now with a smooth face and skinny legs or a spring ten years later when the snow will still fall in May and gather in his whiskers as he cycles down an empty street from a dinner at dawn.

nina we pretty

much could do

exactly what

we want wherever

we are, if you’ve brought

your bellybutton, and i’ve got my gun.

miri come murmur

in my american ear;

israel is a muddle of men &

you are a woman winnowing out the

scraps, collapsing

I.

A mutant violin, the poet Adam Zagajewski calls it, in the poem named for the instrument. It’s been kicked out of the chorus, he says, its low tones not quite right, too close to a sob. Sitting here in the dark-wooded reading room of the local public library, where thick shades blot out the light that should be heralding morning, I am struck by my need for the poem.

Little mouse, little

gray hunger

that nibbles

the night to a bony

toothpick,

Sometimes it gets there

routinely,

with less of a trumpeted burst

than a tepid,

and expected,

trickle.

On August 1, feast day of St. Alphonsus Liguori, the new bishop assumed his office, giving a most peculiar speech in which he noted that he was absolutely certain that he, like St. Alphonsus, would eventually be deserted by most of his companions, be excoriated for abandoning pomposity for simplicity, and have his neck bowed by the burdensome weight of circumstance.

The boy the others teased

all through elementary school

for his angel-cake pallor and Coke-bottle glasses

At the playground, a father was shaming his son,

and though it was none of my business, I made it my concern,

staring at the father until he stared back,

which was enough admonishment for me to turn away,

Mouths that breathe like fish out of water

Faster then slower pursed lips then gaping mouths billowing chests and all

The fixed stare that gives its sense up and over to other sense and reflex

In the picture that wasn’t taken

I lost my arthritis and started running

But was still

Overrun by the sea

My origin is sand. My origin is the smell of sunscreen drying on the long drive home. My origin is the waves you hear as you lie down that night, the pillow cold on your face, your cheeks bright and flush from the day’s sun.

There’s turbulence, the plane suffering mood swings,

the good ones floaty, but you can’t count on them.

Always trust your pilot, says the Air Force flier beside me,

commuting to war, to this war,

Translated from French into English by El Hadji Moustapha Diop

I

I get out of bed early in the morning, while the city is still sleeping. At the back of the living room, I quietly edge my way through the French doors. Our balcony. Cramped. Cluttered. The worm-eaten wooden planks crack under my feet.

I

At Herod’s gate

I heap flowers in a crate

Poppies, moist lilies—

It’s dusk, I wait.