I don’t yet know what this is about, or if there’s a master plan, but since I am by nature romantic, I’m willing to believe one exists. I trust something good—ennobling even—will come of this. John Keats said, “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter,” and I’d like to believe that’s true.

1. Plaster

A few months ago, my father died.

In 1986, when he was thirty-two years old—the year I turned four—my father, Dr. John Mayers, published his University of Portland doctoral dissertation, The Privacy of Other Places, with a small press in North Carolina.

Whenever I pass the Restaurant Sarajevo in the 2700 block of West Lawrence in Chicago I think of two things. First, I recall the summer evening several years ago when I observed a wedding party standing on the sidewalk outside the restaurant.

I wanted to get hit by a car.

I’d heard about drunk, suicidal types running out onto the freeway and putting their heads through some poor, unsuspecting bastard’s windshield, turning their bones to powder against the hood in a gory scene of unholy carnage. That wasn’t for me.

(1)

Because when my friend calls from Montana he’s walking the aisles of a 24-hour Walmart. Because when I ask him to tell me about the big sky I realize he’s standing in front of the same thing he could see here, could see anywhere.

The storm of passion once over, he would have given worlds, had he possessed them, to have restored to her that innocence of which his unbridled lust had deprived her. Of the desires which had urged him to the crime, no trace was left in his bosom.

“Everyone, I think, will admit that a book is a work of art.” —Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book,

PN 83.a43 1940 mn

“Not this one” —marginalia

I read recently how scientists had run an experiment that proved at last that some particle could move faster than the speed of light, it was all over the Internet, and the next day at work my colleague, who actually can think about these things in intelligent ways, explained with great animation how this opened the way for science to be thinking about parallel universes, and his excitement touched me for a few minutes, I caught some glimmer of how the one thing related to the other.

My absence was God:

His absence grows in me.

If I was not in play, how

Would that go for me?

I understand, Maggie—I, too, expected

Barnabas would break into my bedroom

in the middle of the night. My jugular

was yours in close-up, moist bite marks

Did you know turtles can store dried sperm for five years before using it to fertilize an egg?

Guess what I’ve been doing for more years than that.

Translated from Chinese by Ye Chun, Melissa Tuckey, and Fiona Sze-Lorrain

No one knows, whose ashes

float in the air

entering our eyes,

inhaled as dust into our nostrils and mouths.

The stop-watched tick. The seconds enough

to reckon, to weigh. The pill a pillow pressed to –

Just a swine flu of the mind, just a little touch, I

confess to a waiting room of lips masked clean shut.

Show me the fireball of desire, the scarlet carpet of untamed horses,

the roar of stone lions. Present the evidence! he says,

troubled by

news reports

about what Obama’s

candidacy means,

his sleight

A) Housewife-and-I-want-for-nothing-but-still-want-more white B) Yeehaw-I’m-never-leaving-my-hometown-let’s-BBQ white C) Alpha-male-I-never-ask-for-directions-so-now-I’m-lost white

The tickets in your breast pocket rest on

a pair of tickets and they’ve been punched

already. There is no train. That’s your flickering smile

The ghost wants to walk through

your bedroom wall. When do you sleep?

The ghost wants to know. It wants to turn

the faucet on for your morning shower.

you are terrified

we are also terrified, terrific

there, the smell of wildfires

there, the smell of well water

In all its humming but this time the cringe, the invention

of forethought of portent—the uncomfortable discipline necessary

to bolster prediction but look up—there are cities in small rooms

of houses, there’s travel for pleasure or pleasantly; this all boils

down then to bargaining—once after