Paper Soul

VI. TO CLEAN YOUR HOOVES HERE IS A DANCE IN HONOR OF THE GRAPE WHICH THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAS BEEN A SYMBOL OF REVELRY AND JOY NOT TO SAY ANALOGY FOR THE BRIDE AS UNCUT BLOSSOM

Smell I will never forget. Out behind the vineyard. Stone place maybe a shed or an icehouse no longer in use. October, a little cold. Hay on the floor. We had gone to his grandfather's farm to help

crush the grapes for wine.

You cannot imagine the feeling if you have never done it— like hard bulbs of wet red satin exploding under your feet, between your toes and up your legs arms face splashing everywhere— It goes right through your clothes you know he said as we slogged up and down

in the vat. When you take them off you'll have juice all over. His eyes moved onto me then he said Let's check. Naked in the stone place it was true, sticky stains, skin, I lay on the hay

and he licked. Licked it off. Ran out and got more dregs in his hands and smeared it on my knees neck belly licking. Plucking. Diving. Tongue is the smell of October to me. I remember it as swimming in a fast river for 1 kept moving and it was hard to move

while all around me was moving too, that smell of turned earth and cold plants and night coming on and the old vat steaming slightly in the dusk out there and him,

raw juice on him. Stamens on him and as Kafka said in the end my swimming was of no use to me you know I cannot swim after all. Well it so happens more than 90% of all cultivated grapes are varieties of

Vitis vinifera the Old World or European grape, while native American grapes derive from certain wild species of Vitis and differ in their "foxy" odor as well as the fact that their skins slip so liquidly from the pulp.

An ideal wine grape is one that is easily crushed. Such things I learned from the grandfather when we sat in the kitchen late at night cracking chestnuts. Also that I should under no circumstances marry his grandson whom he called tragikos a country word meaning either tragic or goat.

***

XXII. HOMO LUDENS

Omens are for example hearing someone say victory as they pass you in the street or to be staring at the little sulfur lamps in the grass all around the edge of the hotel garden just as they come on. They come on at dusk.

What was he thinking to bring her here? Athens. Hotel Eremia. He knew very well. Détente and reconciliation, let's start again, thinking oysters and glace fruits, it needs a light touch, narrow keys not very deep. Hotel gardens at dusk are a place where the laws governing matter get pulled inside out, like the black keys and the white keys on Mozart's piano. It cheered him to remember Mozart borrowing money every night and smiling his tilted smile. Necessity is not real! after all. The husband swallows his ouzo and waits for its slow hot snow inside him. Mozart (so his wife told him at lunch) scored his Horn Concerto

in four different colors of ink: a man at play. A husband whose wife knows just enough history to keep him going. Cheer is rampant in the husband now. Infinite evening ahead. Its shoals appear to him and he navigates them one by one

slipping the dark blue keel ropes this way and that on a bosom of inconceivable silver—ah here she is. The husband can be seen to rise as his wife crosses the garden. Why so sad. No I'm not sad. Why in your eyes— What are you drinking. Ouzo. Can you get me a tea. Of course.

He goes out. She waits. Waiting, thoughts come, go. Flow. This flowing.

Why sadness? This flowing the world to its end. Why in your eyes—

It is a line of verse. Where has it stepped from. She searches herself, waiting. Waiting is searching. And the odd thing is, waiting, searching, the wife suddenly knows a fact about her husband. This fact for which she had not searched jerks itself into the light like a child from a closet. She knows why he is taking so long at the bar.

Over and over in later years when she told this story she marvelled at her husband's ability to place the world within brackets. A bracket's worth of mirage! all he ever needed.

A man who after three years of separation would take his wife to Athens— for adoration, for peace, then telephone New York every night from the bar and speak to a woman who thought he was over on 4th Street working late. And upstairs that night, which proved a long night, as he was dragging his wounded honor about the hotel room like a damaged queen of moths because she mentioned Houyhnhnms and he objected to being "written off as an object of satire," they moved several times through a cycle of remarks like—

What is this, what future is there I thought You said We never When exactly day year name anything who I was who I am who did you Did you or did you not Do you or do you not This excuse that excuse pleasure pain truth What truth is that All those kilometers Faith Letters You're right Never oh all right once—

which, like the chain of Parmenides well-rounded Truth you can follow around in a circle and always end up where you began, for "it is all one to me where I start—I arrive there again soon enough"

as Parmenides says. So the wife was thinking (about Parmenides) with part of her mind while throwing Ever Never Liar at her husband and he was holding Yes and No together with one hand while parrying the words of his wife when—

they stopped. Silence came. They stood aligned, he at the door with his back to it she at the bed with her back to it, in that posture which experts of conflict resolution tell us ensures impasse, and they looked at one another and there was nothing more to say.

Kissing her, I love you, joys and leaves of earlier times flowed through the husband and disappeared

Presence and absence twisted out of sight of one another inside the wife.

They stood. Sounds reach them, a truck, a snore, poor shrubs ticking on a tin wall.

His nose begins to bleed.

Then blood runs down over his upper lip, lower lip, chin. To his throat. Appears on the whiteness of his shirt. Dyes a mother-of-pearl button for good. Blacker than a mulberry. Don't think his heart had burst. He was no Tristan (though he would love to point out that in the common version Tristan is not false, it is the sail that kills) yet neither of them had a handkerchief and that is how she ends up staining her robe with his blood, his head in her lap and his virtue coursing through her

as if they were one flesh. Husband and wife may erase a boundary. Creating a white page.

But now the blood seems to be the only thing in the room.

If only one's whole life could consist in certain moments. There is no possibility of coming back from such a moment to simple hatred, black ink.

If a husband throws the dice of his beauty one last time, who is to blame?

Rich proposition, drastic economy, hours, beds, pronouns, no one. No one is to blame. Change the question. We are mortal, balanced on a day, now and then it makes sense to say Save what you can.

Wasn't it you who told me civilization is impossible in the absence of a spirit of play.

Anyway what would you have done— torn the phone off the wall? smothered him with a pillow? emptied his wallet and run? But you overlook an important cultural function of games. To test the will of the gods. Huizinga reminds us that war itself is a form of divination.

Husband and wife did not therefore engage in murder but continued their tour of the Peloponnese, spending eight more wary days}in temples and buses and vine-covered tavernas, eight days which had the internal texture of πετραδάκι (ancient πετρος) —that is "broken crushed stone, roadstone, gravel"— but which served a purpose within the mode of justice that was their marriage. Waiting for the future and for the gods,

husband and wife rested,

as players may rest against the rules of the game, if it is a game, if they know the rules, and it was and they did.

***

XXIX. IMPURE AS I AM FOODSTAINS AND SHAME AND ALL) SO TOO MY CONCLUSIONS WHICH AT THE DOOR SCENT YOU AND HESITATE

To get them out of her the wife tries making a list of words she never got to say. How have you been. Fancy seeing you here. I had given up hope I grew desperate why did you take so long. Bloodless monster! had I never seen or known your kindness what might | have been. But words

are a strange docile wheat are they not, they bend to the ground. Fact is,

no one was asking. Well Ray would have asked. So for Ray let's just finish it. Not because, like Persephone, I needed to cool my cheek on death. Not, with Keats, to buy time. Not, as the tango, out of sheer wantonness. But oh it seemed sweet.

To say Beauty is Truth and stop. Rather than to eat it. Rather than to want to eat it. This was my pure early thought.

I overlooked one thing. That the beautiful when I encountered it would turn out to be prior—inside my own heart, already eaten. Not out there with purposiveness, with temples, with God. Inside. He was already me. Condition of me. As if Kutuzov had found himself charging across the battlefield at Borodino toward—

not the emperor Napoleon but a certain old king Midas whose weapons touched half the Russian army into bitter boys of gold.

Words, wheat, conditions, gold, more than thirty years of it fizzing around in me— there I lay it to rest. You smile. I think you are going to mention again those illuminated manuscripts from medieval times where the scribe has made an error in copying so the illuminator encloses the error in a circlet of roses and flames

which a saucy little devil is trying to tug off the side of the page. After all the heart is not a small stone to be rolled this way and that. The mind is not a box to be shut fast.

And yet it is! It is!

Well life has some risks. Love is one. Terrible risks. Ray would have said Fate's my bait and bait's my fate. On a June evening. Here's my advice, hold.

Seldom did neighbours come into that house but whenever they did, Martha told stories. In fact, she was at her best with stories. On those rare nights they saw her pluck things out of the air and break them open before their eyes. They would leave remembering not the fine old house that always impressed them or the man with the worried look that owned it or the strange flock of teenagers but the woman with the dark brown hair which got looser as the night went on and her pale hands plucking unlikely stories like green plums that ripened with the telling at her hearth. After these stories they were sometimes too frightened to go back out into the night, and Deegan had to walk them as far as the road. After such nights, he always took his woman to bed to make not only her but himself sure that she was nobody's but his. Sometimes he believed that was why she told a story well. (The Forester's Daughter, p. 56)

***

It was the easiest thing in the world to humiliate somebody. He had said this aloud at his wife's side in bed one night, in the darkness, thinking she was asleep, but she had answered back, saying it was sometimes harder not to humiliate someone, that it was a weakness people had a Christian duty to resist. He had stayed awake pondering the statement long after her breathing changed. What did it mean? Women's minds were made of glass: so clear and yet their thoughts broke easily, yielding to other glassy thoughts that were even harder. It was enough to attract a man and frighten him all at once. (Surrender (after McGahern), p. 115)

***

Now, too, time has stopped... What a cold, dark room! It's so dark that day merges with night; I no longer know when the days begin or end. I want to cry with the cold—my bones are frozen and they burt; I'm always on top of the bed, flung aside like a rag doll, hunting flies, spying out the mice that helplessly fall into my hands; the room is filled with the corpses of flies and mice; it smells of damp and of putrefying mice, but I don't care, let other people bury them, I don't have the time to; this castle is dark and cold, like all castles; I knew he had a castle ... How lovely to be a prisoner in a castle, how lovely! It's always night and he doesn't let anyone see me; my bouse must be very far from bere; there was a huge fireplace in Papá's library and I used to arrange and dust the books; I want a fireplace to warm myself up, but I don't dare mention it to him, I'm too frightened to bring it up, he could get angry; I don't want him to be angry with me; I didn't say a single word to those men who came, he could show up and catch me; I hid in bed and covered my face with the blankets; we're always together; where are Mamá and Clara? Clara is my older sister—I don't love them, I'm scared of them, don't let them come, don't let them come!... Maybe they're already dead and their eyes are open and shining like José Juan's that night; I wanted to close his eyes, it scared me to have them staring at me— his eyes were open very wide, shining brightly... "You'll be a beautiful bride, all white"— the moon was also white, very white and very cold, and since it's always night he comes whenever he wants; we're always together — if it weren't so cold I would be completely happy, but I'm very cold and my bones hurt; yesterday he beat me cruelly and I screamed and screamed ... José Juan got cold, very cold; I didn't let him fall, but rather let him slip down gently; he was bathed in moonlight and his eyes were staring; the rats' eyes are staring too; he went to sleep on the grass, beneath the moon; he was very white... I was watching him for a long time ... I'd like to lean out of that window and be able to see the other rooms... I can't reach it, it's very high and he could come at any moment and catch me, since he comes anytime, as often as he wants... he could get angry and beat me... That noise in the corner: it's another mouse, I'll catch it before he arrives, since once he comes I won't be able to do anything... (The Cell, pp. 33-34)

***

Haute Cuisine

When I hear the rain beating against the windows, their screams return to me once more—those screams that would stick to my skin like leeches. They would rise in pitch as the pot heated and the water came to a boil. I see their eyes too, little black beads popping out of their sockets as they cooked.

They hatched during the rainy season, in the vegetable plots. Hidden among the leaves, clinging to the stalks, or amid the damp grasses; there they were plucked off to be sold—and at quite a high price. Three for five centavos generally, and, when there were lots of them, fifteen centavos a dozen.

In my house we bought two pesos' worth every week—since they were the obligatory Sunday dish—and more frequently if there were guests. With this dish my family would regale distinguished or very cherished visitors. "You won't find them more finely prepared anywhere," my mother used to say, full of pride, when they praised the recipe.

I remember the gloomy kitchen and the pot they were cooked in, which had been seasoned and given a patina by an old French chef; I remember the wooden spoon blackened with use, and our cook, a fat and pitiless woman, implacable in the face of suffering. Those heartrending screams didn't move her; she would keep on fanning the fire, blowing on the embers as if nothing were the matter. From my bedroom in the attic I could hear them shriek. It was always raining. Their screams mingled with the sound of the rain. They didn't die right away. Their agony prolonged itself endlessly. I would spend the whole time shut up in my room with the pillow over my head— but even so I could hear them. When I woke up at midnight, I could hear them still. I never knew whether they were still alive or if their screams had remained inside me, in my head, in my ears, inside and out, hammering away, tearing me apart.

Sometimes I saw hundreds of small eyes fastened to the dripping windowpanes. Hundreds of round black eyes. Shining eyes, wet with tears, pleading for mercy. But there was no mercy in that house. No one was moved by the cruelty that went on there. Their eyes and their screams followed me, and they still follow me, everywhere.

A few times I was sent to buy them, but I always returned empty-handed, swearing I hadn't found any. One day they became suspicious of me and I was never sent again. After that the cook went. She would come back with a bucket full of them; I would gaze at her with a contempt reserved for the cruelest of executioners; she would wrinkle her pug nose and huff disdainfully.

Preparing them was a very complicated affair and it took time. First she would place them in a box along with some grass and give them a rare herb that they ate—apparently with pleasure —and that served as a purgative. There they spent a full day. The next day they were bathed carefully—so as not to damage them—then dried, and placed in the pot full of cold water, fragrant herbs and spices, vinegar, and salt.

When the water heated up they would begin screaming, screaming, screaming ... They screamed sometimes like newborn children, like crushed mice, like bats, like strangled cats, like hysterical women ...

That time, my last in that house, the banquet was long and savored with pleasure.

***

THE VOICE OF THE DEVIL

All Bibles or sacred codes, have been the causes of the following Errors.

  That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body & a Soul.

  That Energy, call'd Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason, call'd Good, is alone from the Soul.

  That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.

But the following Contraries to these are True.

  Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call'd Body is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.

  Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.

  Energy is Eternal Delight.

***

PROVERBS OF HELL

In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy. Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity. He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence. The cut worm forgives the plow. Dip him in the river who loves water. A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees. He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star. Eternity is in love with the productions of time. The busy bee has no time for sorrow. The hours of folly are measur'd by the clock, but of wisdom: no clock can measure. All wholsom food is caught without a net or a trap. Bring out number weight & measure in a year of dearth. No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings. A dead body, revenges not injuries. The most sublime act is to set another before you. If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise. Folly is the cloke of knavery. Shame is Prides cloke. Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion. The pride of the peacock is the glory of God. The lust of the goat is the bounty of God. The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God. The nakedness of woman is the work of God. Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps. The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man. The fox condemns the trap, not himself. Joys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth. Let man wear the fell of the lion, woman the fleece of the sheep. The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship. The selfish smiling fool, & the sullen frowning fool, shall be both thought wise, that they may be a rod. What is now proved was once, only imagin'd. The rat, the mouse, the fox, the rabbet: watch the roots; the lion, the tyger, the horse, the elephant, watch the fruits. The cistern contains; the fountain overflows. One thought, fills immensity. Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you. Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth. The eagle never lost so much time, as when he submitted to learn of the crow. The fox provides for himself, but God provides for the lion. Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night. He who has suffer'd you to impose on him knows you. As the plow follows words, so God rewards prayers. The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction. Expect poison from the standing water. You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. Listen to the fools reproach! it is a kingly title! The eyes of fire, the nostrils of air, the mouth of water, the beard of earth. The weak in courage is strong in cunning. The apple tree never asks the beech how he shall grow, nor the lion, the horse, how he shall take his prey. The thankful reciever bears a plentiful harvest. If others had not been foolish, we should be so. The soul of sweet delight, can never be defil'd. When thou seest an Eagle, thou seest a portion of Genius, lift up thy head! As the catterpiller chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys. To create a little flower is the labour of ages. Damn, braces: Bless relaxes. The best wine is the oldest, the best water the newest. Prayers plow not! Praises reap not! Joys laugh not! Sorrows weep not! The head Sublime, the heart Pathos, the genitals Beauty, the hands & feet Proportion. As the air to a bird or the sea to a fish, so is contempt to the contemptible. The crow wish'd every thing was black, the owl, that every thing was white. Exuberance is Beauty. If the lion was advised by the fox, he would be cunning. Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius. Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires. Where man is not nature is barren. Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. Enough! or Too much.

***

A MEMORABLE FANCY (excerpt)

THE GLASS ESSAY (excerpt)

But in between the neighbour who recalls her coming in from a walk on the moors with her face "lit up by a divine light"

and the sister who tells us Emily never made a friend in her life, is a space where the little raw soul

slips through. It goes skimming the deep keel like a storm petrel, out of sight.

The little raw soul was caught by no one. She didn't have friends, children, sex, religion, marriage, success, a salary or a fear of death. She worked

in total six months of her life (at a school in Halifax) and died on the sofa at home at 2 P.M. on a winter afternoon in her thirty-first year. She spent

most of the hours of her life brushing the carpet, walking the moor or whaching. She says

it gave her peace. "All tight and right in which condition it is to be hoped we shall all be this day 4 years," she wrote in her Diary Paper of 1837.

Yet her poetry from beginning to end is concerned with prisons, vaults, cages, bars, curbs, bits, bolts, fetters, locked windows, narrow frames, aching walls.

"Why all the fuss!" asks one critic. "She wanted liberty. Well didn't she have it? A reasonably satisfactory homelife,

a most satisfactory dreamlife—why all this beating of wings? What was this cage, invisible to us, which she felt herself to be confined in?"

Well there are many ways of being held prisoner, I am thinking as I stride over the moor.

***

THE FALL OF ROME: A TRAVELLER'S GUIDE (excerpts)

X.

First meeting. Pacing the sidewalk in front of my hotel

in a sweat, will she look different? do I look

different? what if I don't recognize—perhaps she is here already!—I wheel: there.

She is. Smiling hard. Holding five gigantic red flowers upside down (Roman custom?) at which

I clutch, all language vanished from my mind. We knock each other over

in a violent embrace and hurtle off to find Rome.

XXIV.

A stranger is poor, voracious and turbulent. He comes

from nowhere in particular

and pushes prices up. His method of knowing something is to eat it.

XXXI.

On the other hand, it gives me a pretext

for travel (travel

justifies dread: other places really are terrible).

***

THE GENDER OF SOUND (excerpt)

THE FLY

Little Fly, Thy summer's play My thoughtless hand Has brush'd away.

Am not I A fly like thee? Or art not thou A man like me?

For I dance And drink & sing, Till some blind hand Shall brush my wing.

If thought is life And strength & breath, And the want Of thought is death,

Then am I A happy fly, If I live Or if I die.

***

THE LILLY

The modest Rose puts forth a thorn; The humble Sheep, a threat'ning horn; While the Lilly white shall in Love delight, Nor a thorn, nor a threat, stain her beauty bright.

***

THE GARDEN OF LOVE

I went to the Garden of Love, And saw what I never had seen: A Chapel was built in the midst, Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut, And "Thou shalt not" writ over the door; So I turn'd to the Garden of Love That so many sweet flowers bore;

And I saw it was filled with graves, And tomb-stones where flowers should be; And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds, And binding with briars my joys & desires.

***

THE LITTLE VAGABOND

Dear Mother, dear Mother, the Church is cold, But the Ale-house is healthy & pleasant & warm; Besides I can tell where I am used well, Such usage in Heaven will never do well.

But if at the Church they would give us some Ale And a pleasant fire our souls to regale, We'd sing and we'd pray all the live-long day, Nor ever once wish from the Church to stray.

Then the Parson might preach, & drink, & sing, And we'd be as happy as birds in the spring; And modest Dame Lurch, who is always at Church, Would not have bandy children, nor fasting, nor birch.

The Little Black Boy

My mother bore me in the southern wild, And I am black, but O! my soul is white; White as an angel is the English child, But I am black as if bereav'd of light.

My mother taught me underneath a tree, And, sitting down before the heat of day, She took me on her lap and kissed me, And pointing to the east began to say:

"Look on the rising sun: there God does live, And gives his light, and gives his heat away; And flowers and trees and beasts and men recieve Comfort in morning, joy in the noonday.

And we are put on earth a little space, That we may learn to bear the beams of love; And these black bodies and this sunburnt face Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.

"For when our souls have learn'd the heat to bear, The cloud will vanish; we shall hear his voice, Saying: 'Come out from the grove, my love & care, And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice.'"

Thus did my mother say, and kissed me; And thus I say to little English boy. When I from black and he from white cloud free, And round the tent of God like lambs we joy,

I'll shade him from the heat, till he can bear To lean in joy upon our father's knee; And then I'll stand and stroke his silver hair, And be like him, and he will then love me.

***

The Little Boy Lost

"Father! father! where are you going? O do not walk so fast. Speak, father, speak to your little boy, Or else I shall be lost."

The night was dark, no father was there; The child was wet with dew; The mire was deep, & the child did weep, And away the vapour flew.

***

A Cradle Song

Sweet dreams form a shade O'er my lovely infant's head; Sweet dreams of pleasant streams By happy, silent, moony beams.

Sweet sleep with soft down Weave thy brows an infant crown. Sweet sleep, Angel mild, Hover o'er my happy child

Sweet smiles in the night Hover over my delight; Sweet smiles, Mother's smiles, All the livelong night beguiles.

Sweet moans, dovelike sighs, Chase not slumber from thy eyes. Sweet moans, sweeter smiles, All the dovelike moans beguiles.

Sleep sleep, happy child, All creation slept and smil'd; Sleep sleep, happy sleep, While o'er thee thy mother weep.

Sweet babe, in thy face Holy image I can trace. Sweet babe, once like thee, Thy maker lay and wept for me,

Wept for me, for thee, for all, When he was an infant small. Thou his image ever see, Heavenly face that smiles on thee,

After the dessert the women got up and left. My mother closed the door. The whole thing looked premeditated. Uncle Frank got down to business by lighting his pipe, pushing some dishes out of the way, and leaning toward me. He took the pipe out of his mouth and shook the stem under my nose.

He said, "Look here, you little sonofabitch; I didn't know you were a thief too. I knew you were lazy, but by God I didn't know you were a thieving little thief."

I said, "I'm not a sonofabitch, either."

"I talked to Romero," he said. "I know what you did."

"I warn you," I said. "In no uncertain terms I warn you to desist from calling me a sonofabitch again."

"You stole ten dollars from Romero."

"Your presumption is colossal, unvaunted. I fail to see why you permit yourself the liberty of insulting me by calling me a sonofabitch."

He said, "Stealing from your employer! That's a fine thing."

"I tell you again, and with utmost candor that, despite your seniority and our blood-relationship, I positively forbid you to use such opprobious names as sonofabitch in reference to me."

"A loafer and a thief for a nephew! It's disgusting."

"Please be advised, my dear uncle, that since you choose to vilify me with sonofabitch I have no alternative but to point out the blood-fact of your own scurrilousness. In short, if I am a sonofabitch it so happens that you're the brother of a bitch. Laugh that off."

"Romero could've had you arrested. I'm sorry he didn't."

"Romero is a monster, a gigantic fraud, a looming lug. His charges of piracy amuse me. I fail to be moved by his sterile accusations. But I must remind you once more to curb the glibness of your obscenities. I am not in the habit of being insulted, even by relatives."

He said, "Shut up, you little fool! I'm talking about something else. What'll you do now?"

"There are myriad possibilities."

He sneered, 'Myriad possibilities! That's a good one! What the devil are you talking about? Myriad possibilities!"

I took some puffs on my cigarette and said, "I presume I'll embark on my literary career now that I have had done with the Romero breed of proletarian."

"Your what?"

"My literary plans. My prose. I shall continue with my literary efforts. I'm a writer, you know."

"A writer! Since when did you become a writer? This is a new one. Go on, I've never heard this one before."

I told him, "The writing instinct has always lain dormant in me. Now it is in the process of metamorphosis. The era of transition has passed. I am on the threshold of expression."

He said, "Balls."

I took the new notebook out of my pocket and flipped the pages with my thumb. I flipped them so fast he couldn't read anything but he could see some writing in it. "These are notes," I said. "Atmospheric notes. I'm writing a Socratic symposium on Los Angeles Harbor since the days of the Spanish Conquest."

"Let's see them," he said.

"Nothing doing. Not until after publication."

"After publication! What talk!"

I put the notebook back in my pocket. It smelled of crabs.

"Why don't you buck up and be a man?" he said. "It would make your father happy up there."

"Up where?" I said.

"In afterlife."

I'd been waiting for that.

"There is no afterlife," I said. "The celestial hypothesis is sheer propaganda formulated by the haves to delude the have-nots. I dispute the immortal soul. It is the persistent delusion of an hoodwinked mankind. I reject in no uncertain terms the hypothesis of God. Religion is the opium of the people. The churches should be converted to hospitals and public works. All we are or ever hope to be we owe to the devil and his bootleg apples. There are 78,000 contradictions in the bible. Is it God's word? No! I reject God! I denounce him with savage and relentless imprecations! I accept the universe godless. I am a monist!"

"You're crazy," he said. "You're a maniac."

"You don't understand me, " I smiled. "But that's all right. I anticipate misunderstanding; nay, I look forward to the worst persecutions along the way. It's quite all right."

He emptied his pipe and shook his finger under my nose. "The thing for you to do is stop reading all these damn books, stop stealing, make a man out of yourself, and go to work."

I smashed out my cigarette. "Books!" I said. "And what do you know about books! You! An ignoramus, a Boobus Americanus, a donkey, a clod-hopping poltroon with no more sense than a polecat."

He kept still and filled his pipe. I didn't say anything because it was his turn. He studied me awhile while he thought of something.

'I've got a job for you," he said.

"What doing?"

"I don't know yet. I'll see."

"It has to fit my talents. Don't forget that I'm a writer. I've metamorphosed."

"I don't care what's happened to you. You're going to work. Maybe the fish canneries."

"I don't know anything about fish canneries."

"Good," he said. "The less you know the better. All it takes is a strong back and a weak mind. You've got both." (pp. 37-39)

***

I read a hundred books. There was Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and Kant and Spengler and Strachey and others. Oh Spengler! What a book! What weight! Like the Los Angeles Telephone Directory. Day after day I read it, never understanding it, never caring either, but reading it because I liked one growling word after another marching across pages with somber mysterious rumblings. And Schopenhauer! What a writer! For days I read him and read him, remembering a bit here and a bit there. And such things about women! I agreed. Exactly my own feelings on the matter. Ah man, what a writer! (p. 47)

***

"Manuel!" he called. "Oh Manuel! Come here a minute." Manuel came forward, scared, halting, because it was unusual for Shorty to address anybody by name, unless he was going to sack him. Manuel was thirty, with a hungry face and cheek bones protruding like eggs. He worked across from me on the can dump. I used to look at him a lot because of his huge teeth. They were as white as milk, but too big for his face, his upper lip not long enough to cover them. He made me think of teeth, and nothing else.

"Manuel, show this fellow how to work a hand truck."

I interrupted. "It's scarcely necessary, Manuel. But under the circumstances, he gives the orders around here and, as they say, an order is an order."

But Manuel was on Shorty's side.

"Come on," he said. "I show you."

He led me away, the foul words oozing from Shorty's mouth again, easy to hear.

'This amuses me," I said. "It's funny, you know. I feel like laughing. That poltroon."

"I show you. Come on. Boss's orders."

"The boss is a moron. He's dementia praecox."

"No no! Boss's orders. Come on."

"Very amusing in a macabre way—right out of Krafft-Ebing."

"Boss's orders. Can't help."

We went to the room where they were kept, and each of us dragged out a hand truck. Manuel pushed his into the clear. I followed. This was easy enough. So they were called hand trucks. When I was a kid we called them pushcarts.

Anybody with two hands could work a hand truck. The back of Manuel's head was like the fur of a black cat shaved by a rusty butcher-knife. The growth was like a cliff: it was a homemade hair cut. The seat of his overalls was patched with a hunk of white canvas. It was badly sewed, as if he had used a hair pin and a length of string. His heels were worn down to the wet floor, the soles re-soled with wet fiber, held together by big nails. He looked so poor it made me mad. I knew a lot of poor people, but Manuel didn't have to be that poor.

"Say," I said. "How much do you make, for God's sake?"

The same as I. Twenty-five cents an hour.

He looked straight into my eyes, a tall lean man looking down, ready to fall apart, with deep dark honest eyes, but very suspicious. They had that whipped, melancholy cast of most all peon eyes.

He said, "You like cannery work?"

"It amuses me. It has its moments."

"I like. I like very much."

"Why don't you get some new shoes?"

"No can afford."

"You married?"

He nodded fast and hard, tickled to be married.

"Got any kids?"

And he was tickled about that too. He had three kids, because he raised three twisted fingers and grinned.

"How the hell do you live on two bits an hour?"

He didn't know. Lord, he didn't know, but he got by. He put his hand on his forehead and made a hopeless gesture. They lived, it wasn't much, but one day followed another and they were alive to see it.

"Why don't you ask for more money?"

He shook his head violently.

"Maybe get fired."

"Do you know what you are?" I said.

No. He didn't know.

"You're a fool. A plain, unmitigated, goddamn fool. Look at yourself! You belong to the slave-dynasty. The heel of the ruling classes in your groin. Why don't you be a man and go on strike?"

"No strike. No no. Get fired."

'You're a fool. A damn fool. Look at yourself! You haven't even got a decent pair of shoes. And look at your overalls! And by God, you even look hungry. Are you hungry?"

He wouldn't talk.

"Answer me, you fool! Are you hungry?"

"No hungry."

"You dirty liar."

His eyes dropped to his feet as he shuffled along. He was studying his shoes. Then he glanced at mine, which were better than his in every way. He seemed to be happy because I had the best shoes. He looked at my face and smiled. It made me furious. What was the sense in being glad about it? I wanted to punch him.

"Pretty good," he said. "How much you pay?"

"Shut your face."

We went along, I following him. All at once I got so mad I couldn't keep my mouth shut. "You fool! You laissez faire fool! Why don't you pull this cannery down and demand your rights? Demand shoes! Demand milk! Look at yourself! Like a boob, a convict! Where's the milk? Why don't you yell for it?"

His arms tensed on the handle-grips. His dark throat cabled with rage. I thought I had gone too far. Maybe there would be a fight. But it wasn't that.

"Keep still!" he hissed. "Maybe we get fired!"

But the place was too noisy, squealing of wheels and thumping of boxes, with Shorty Naylor a hundred feet away at the door busy checking figures and unable to hear us. And when I saw how safe it was, I decided I wasn't through yet.

"What about your wife and kids? Those dear little babes? Demand milk! Think of them dying of hunger while the babes of the rich swim in gallons of milk! Gallons! And why should it  be like that? Aren't you a man like other men? Or are you a fool, a nitwit, a monstrous travesty on the dignity that is man's primordial antecedent? Are you listening to me? Or are you turning your ears because the truth stings them and you are too weak and afraid to be other than an ablative absolute, a dynasty of slaves? Dynasty of slaves! Dynasty of slaves! You want to be a dynasty of slaves! You love the categorical imperative! You don't want milk, you want hypochondria! You're a whore, a slut, a pimp, a whore of modern Capitalism! You make me so sick I feel like puking."

"Yeah," he said. "You puke all right. You no writer. You just puke."

"I'm writing all the time. My head swims in a transvaluated phantasmagoria of phrases."

"Bah! You make me puke too."

"Nuts to you! You Brobdingnagian boor!"

He began stacking boxes for his load. With each he grunted, they were so high and hard to reach. He was supposed to be showing me. Hadn't the boss said to watch? Well, I was watching. Wasn't Shorty the boss? Well, I was carrying out orders. His eyes flashed in anger.

"Come on! Work!"

"Don't talk to me, you capitalistic proletarian bourgeois."

The boxes weighed fifty pounds apiece. He stacked them ten high, one above the other. Then he eased the nose of his truck under the stack and pinched the bottom box with clamps at the base of the truck. I had never seen that kind of a truck. I had seen hand trucks, but not hand trucks with clamps.

"Again Progress rears its fair head. The new technic asserts itself even in the humble hand truck."

"Keep still and watch."

With a jerk he lifted the load from the floor and balanced it on the wheels, the handle-bars at shoulder height. It was a trick. I knew I couldn't do it. He wheeled the load away. And yet, if he could do it, he, a Mexican, a man who without doubt had never read a book in his life, who had never even heard of the transvaluation of values, then so could I. He, this mere peon, had trucked ten boxes.

Then what about you, Arturo? Are you going to be outdone by him? No—a thousand times no! Ten boxes. Good. I will truck twelve boxes. Then I got my truck. By that time Manuel was back for another load.

"Too many," he said.

"Shut up."

I pushed my truck toward the stack and opened the clamps. It had to happen. Too hard. I knew it was going to happen. There was no sense in trying to out-do him, I knew it all the time, yet I did it. There was a splintering and a crash. The tier of boxes tumbled like a tower. They went everywhere. The top box was smashed open. Cans leaped from it, their oval shapes running over the floor like frightened puppies.

"Too many!" Manuel shouted. "I tell you. Too damn many!"

I turned around and screamed, "Will you shut your goddamn greaser face, you goddamn Mexican peon of a boot-licking bourgeois proletarian capitalist!"

The fallen stack was in the path of the other truckers. They trucked around it, kicking out of the way the cans that impeded their movement. I knelt down and gathered them up. It was disgusting, with me, a white man, on my knees, picking up cans of fish, while all around me, standing on their feet, were these foreigners.

Soon enough Shorty Naylor saw what happened. He came on the run.

"I thought you knew how to work a hand truck?"

I stood up.

"These aren't hand trucks. These are clamp-trucks."

"Don't argue. Get that mess cleaned up."

"Accidents will happen, Naylor. Rome wasn't built in a day. There's an old proverb from Thus Spake Zarathustra..."

He waved his hands.

"For Christ's sake never mind that! Try again. But this time, don't carry so many. Try five boxes at a time until you get the knack of it."

I shrugged. Oh well, what could you do amongst that hotbed of stupidity? The only thing left was to be brave, to have faith in man's intrinsic decency, and to cling to a belief in the reality of progress.

"You're the boss," I said. "I'm a writer, you know. Without qualification I..."

"Never mind that! I know all about that! Everybody knows you're a writer, everybody. But do me a favor, will you?" He was almost pleading. "Try carrying five boxes, will you? Just five. Not six or seven. Just five. Will you do that for me? Take it easy. Don't kill yourself. Just five at a time."

He walked away. The low words rolled under his breath—obscenities meant for me. So that was it! I thumbed my nose at his retreating back. I despised him, a low person, a boob of limited vocabulary, unable to express his own thoughts, however nasty, except through the brummagem medium of foul language. A rat. He was a rat. He was a nasty, evil-tongued rat who knew nothing about Hitler's Weltanschauung.

Pee on him!

I returned to the task of picking up the fallen tins. When they had all been gathered I decided I would get another truck. In the corner I found one unlike the others, a four-wheeler, a sort of wagon with an iron tongue. It was very light with a wide, flat surface. I drew it to where the boys were loading their hand trucks. It created a sensation. They looked at it as though they had never seen it before, exclaiming in Spanish. Manuel scratched his head in disgust.

"What you do now?"

I pulled the truck into place.

"You wouldn't know—you tool of the bourgeoisie."

Then I loaded it. Not with five boxes. Not with ten. And not with twelve. As I continued to stack them up I realized what possibilities lay in this type of truck. When I finally stopped I had thirty-four aboard.

Thirty-four times fifty? How much was that? I took out my notebook and pencil and figured it. Seventeen hundred pounds. And seventeen hundred times ten were seventeen thousand pounds. Seventeen thousand pounds were eight and one half tons. Eight and one half tons an hour were eighty-five tons a day. Eighty-five tons a day were five hundred and ninety-five tons a week. Five hundred and ninety-five tons a week were thirty thousand nine hundred and forty tons a year. At that rate I would carry three hundred and nine thousand four hundred tons a year. Imagine! And the others carried a mere five hundred pounds per load.

"Gangway!"

They stepped aside and I began to pull. The load moved slowly. I tugged backward, facing the load. My progress was slow because my feet slipped on the wet floor. The load was in the midst of things, directly in the path of the other truckers, which caused a little confusion, but not much, both coming and going. Finally the work stopped. All trucks were glutted in the middle of the room, like a downtown traffic jam. Shorty Naylor hurried in. I was tugging hard, grunting and slipping, losing more ground than I was gaining. But it was no fault of mine. It was the fault of the floor, which was too slippery.

"What the hell's going on here?" Shorty yelled.

I relaxed for a moment's rest. He slapped his hand over his forehead and shook his head.

"What're you doing now?"

"Trucking boxes."

"Get it out of the way! Can't you see you're holding up the job?"

"But look at the size of this load! Seventeen hundred pounds!"

"Get it out of the way!"

"This is more than three times as many...."

"I said, get it out of the way!"

KILL THE DAY (excerpt)

"The days you work," said O'Keeffe, "are the best days." Work without love is idle, idleness doing its job for the velvet approbation of kings and presidents without art's purpose to excite a lover's pleasure.

***

RETRIEVER

Two days after Jane died I walked with our dog Gus on New Canada Road under birchy green April shadows, talking urgently, trying to make him understand. A quick mink scooted past into fern, and Gus disappeared in pursuit. The damp air grew chill as I whistled and called until twilight. I thought he tried to follow her into the dark. After an hour I gave up and walked home to find him on the porch, alert, pleased to see me, curious over my absence. But Gus hadn't found her deep in the woods; he hadn't brought her back as a branch in his teeth.

***

ANOTHER CHRISTMAS

Our first Christmas together at Eagle Pond I bought a chainsaw to cut the tree from our woodlot. Puffing with accomplishment I set an emaciated hemlock kitty- corner from the Glenwood stove.

"What will become of Perkins?" Jane asked when she could still speak. Two years later I miss her teasing voice that razzed my grandiloquence: "Perkins, dim your lights." "Somebody cover Perkins's cage.

All year I could do anything I wanted, any time of day or night, travel anywhere, buy anything. Therefore I sat in my blue chair doing nothing and trying to feel nothing. On this second Christmas

I fix, decorate, and cherish a visible vacancy kitty- corner from the Glenwood. Sometimes I dream awake. Sometimes I see her face in its strong-featured beauty with her eyes full of pity.

***

THE PERFECT LIFE

Unicorns envy their cousin horses a smooth forehead. Horses weep for lack of horns.

Hills cherish the ambition to turn into partial differential equations,

which want to be poems, or dogs, or the Pacific Ocean, or whiskey, or a gold ring.

The man wearing the noose envies an other who fondles a pistol in a motel room.

***

THE WISH

I keep her weary ghost inside me. "Oh, let me go," I hear her crying. "Deep in your dark you want to hide me And so perpetuate my dying. I can't undo The grief that you Weep by the stone where I am lying. Oh, let me go.

By work and women half distracted, I endure the day and sleep at night To watch her dying reenacted When the cold dawn descends like twilight. How can I let This dream forget Her white withdrawal from my sight, And let her go?

Her body as I watch grows smaller; Her face recedes, her kiss is colder. Watching her disappear, I call her, "Come back!" as I grow old and older, While somewhere deep In the catch of sleep I hear her cry, as I reach to hold her, "Oh, let me go!"

***

AFFIRMATION

A model that shapes contemporary writing across any number of fields is the crossing of the threshold. It asserts that the world of thought, recently or in an identifiable moment in the near past, has undergone epochal change. Some realization has intervened in history with miraculous abruptness and efficacy, and everything is transformed. This is a pattern that recurs very widely in the contemporary world of ideas. (p. 3)

***

I should declare at the outset my own bias. I believe it is only prudent to make a very high estimate of human nature, first of all in order to contain the worst impulses of human nature, and then to liberate its best impulses. I do not wish to imply malice or calculation on the part of those who insist on a definition of the mind, therefore the human person, which tends to lower us all in our own estimation. It must be obvious, however, that I consider this tendency in modern and contemporary thinking significant and also regrettable. (p. 32)

***

Assuming that there is indeed a modern malaise, one contributing factor might be the exclusion of the felt life of the mind from the accounts of reality proposed by the oddly authoritative and deeply influential parascientific literature that has long associated itself with intellectual progress, and the exclusion of felt life from the varieties of thought and art that reflect the influence of these accounts. (p. 35)

***

Altruism has been and still is an issue because Darwinist evolutionary theory has considered it to be one. Why would altruism persist as a trait, when evolution would necessarily select against the conferring of benefit to another at cost to oneself? Hamilton's rule is thought to have resolved the issue by the power of cost-benefit analysis. A scenario involving the rescue of a drowning child demonstrates, mathemati-cally, without the slightest reference to anything that has happened or might happen in the real world, that a parent would be likely to rescue a child of his own, since that child is presumably the bearer of half his parent's genetic inheritance—possibly including the genetic predisposition to altruism. To quote Lee Alan Dugatkin, "If grandchildren are in need of rescue, the net benefit received by the altruist is cut in half," and so on as the degree of consanguinity diminishes. Note the impossibly narrow set of factors in play here. The potential cost (c) is not the value—even genetic value—invested in the child by the rescuer and potentially lost by him but only the risk to the rescuer's own physical well-being. Nor is the potential benefit (b) the emotional one of recovering the child, or even of feeling adequate to a critical situation, but only of enhancing the likelihood that a gene will survive into another generation. (pp. 60-61)

***

Do elderly mothers go unrescued, being past their childbearing years? Do firefighters run into burning houses looking for kith and kin? In how many instances would those disposed to altruism die in the rescue of strangers whose genetic proclivities were entirely unknown to them? Then how likely would it be that a gene for altruism would persist in a population, given Hamilton's account of it? Whether the formula can be applied to bees and termites and naked mole rats is a judgment that can be left only to specialists, though the observer effect must be assumed to be in play among specialists, too. And a reader in this literature has no more chance of testing the validity of their observations than she has of splitting a photon. (p. 63)

***

What is the nature of the reality we inhabit if we have to conceal self-interested motives? If nature runs on self-interest to its own ultimate enhancement and ours, where is the shame in it? (p. 70)

***

And here we are, a gaudy efflorescence of consciousness, staggeringly improbable in light of everything we know about the reality that contains us. (p. 109)

***

Then there is the odd privilege of existence as a coherent self, the ability to speak the word "I" and mean by it a richly individual history of experience, perception, and thought. For the religious, the sense of the soul may have as a final redoubt, not as argument but as experience, that haunting I who wakes us in the night wondering where time has gone, the I we waken to, sharply aware that we have been unfaithful to ourselves, that a life lived otherwise would have acknowledged a yearning more our own than any of the daylit motives whose behests we answer to so diligently. Our religious traditions give us as the name of God two deeply mysterious words, one deeply mysterious utterance: I AM. (p. 110)

***

What is man? One answer on offer is, An organism whose haunting questions perhaps ought not to be meaningful to the organ that generates them, lacking as it is in any means of "solving" them. Another answer might be, It is still too soon to tell. (p. 130)

***

He woke up, and the moon was falling down on him. The moon had him looney toons, a few monster things, a few ghosts, a few rrrrrrrrrr tiny psycho cyclers. He heard their howling: "Oh, I like that, I like that. Jimmy, Jimmy." It was his mother's voice. Out the window the moon had a rope laid right across the water to the shore. The Gulf was black as grease and the beach wasn't white; it wasn't quite blue; it wasn't grey. The moon had him looney toons. He stood at his parents' doorway and witnessed a thing in their bed, a monster with four legs in the moonlight. But it wasn't a crazy kind of thing, it was familiar, it was Jimmy and Belinda. Rrrrrrrrr behind him the tiny psycho cyclers rode the air into his home, and his father made a noise as if a bad thorn were coming out. The tiny motorcycle maniacs made rrrrrrrrrr boom boom bwa! boom boom bwa! that shot right through Fiskadoro. It wasn't the crying of tiny engines, it was the radio on the windowsill. The radio was playing Jimi Hendrix. (p. 19)

***

Mr. Cheung and Maxwell took their seats at the same time. The history class was ready to start. William Park-Smith, at the front of the room, put on a pair of thick glasses that absolutely blinded him, and addressed the class with a shy wave of his hand. He still wore his flight suit, now streaked with dust and spangled with the stains of rice wine, soup, and gasoline. Beside the zipper, above his heart, he sported a radiation-sensitive button, as much as to say, "I am a believer in rationalism and the sciences." Mr. Cheung could see that the badge was counterfeit. Even those who believed in radiation and ardently feared it made no distinction between the real, original badges and the phony imitations. These days the white cardboard and red cellophane served more to identify than to protect. (p. 43)

***

The dinosaur tracks in England all went from west to east, the book said. By what light was this fact called "knowledge"? Wasn't it just one more inexplicable thing to mystify them, didn't it subtract from what they knew, rather than add to it? The sabotage of knowledge by a wealth of facts—they weren't professors, but guerrillas. (p. 46)

***

"And I go down on my knees on the deck to pray: 'You there up high! Heavenly Eye watching this trouble! Put your secret message in this book!'"

In the light of flames, Cassius Clay Sugar Ray held out his two hands together, the palms up, like the open pages of the sacred Koran.

"The line my finger pointed say, Would you deny these blessings of the Lord?

"I say, 'Scuse me what? What blessings?'

"One more line down the page, it said me again, Would you deny these blessings of the Lord?

"I say, 'Look at the sea all around! This is me I go drowning! Who talking about any blessings?'

"But one line, two lines, three lines—all over the page I see been Allah's one message for me: Would you deny these blessings of the Lord? It say that on those pages of the Koran thirty-two times. When Allah make a message, you don't get no question.

"Now I gone ask to you this," he said: "What that message mean?"

The men and boys around him knew he'd been carried on uncharted currents over the Ocean and washed up against the rotted pier at Plantation, above Key Marathon, and they knew the story of how he'd been carried in a hammock by the Plantation people into Marathon, a completely transformed individual bearing a book about Allah and news of an Alliance for Trading that would make a storm of business over the following decade, until boredom, laziness, and the easy life among laden fruit trees beside a generous sea made work seem too much trouble for the citizens of the Keys. Only the Gambling Alliance remained in effect—also the legend, always larger—and they knew these things by heart, but they didn't know what the message meant, Would you deny these blessings of the Lord?

"It mean, Give thanks," Cassius Clay Sugar Ray explained. "It mean even in the middle of the Ocean, give thanks to Allah. It mean, Dance with your partner. Get it while you can." (pp. 110-11)

***

This music was good now, this was Dylan, the great poet of the times of hard rain:

You know sometimes Satan Comes as a man- of peace...

Mr. Cheung tried to fix himself somewhere at the edge of the crowd, to the left, to the right, back ten steps toward the sea, where he might be able to hear the words. But he stopped listening and only wandered over the sand stupidly, like a puppy who'd been smacked on the ear. I suppose, he spoke inside himself, that I'm very much like Mother. But he could hardly make out the tone of his own ruminations inside all this head-hammering rhythm. History, the force of time—he was aware he was obsessed in an unhealthy way with these thoughts—are washing over us like this rocknroll. Some of us are aligned with a slight force, a frail resistance that shapes things for the better—I really believe this: I stand against the forces of destruction, against the forces that took the machines away. (pp. 122-23)

***

". . . . But the people don't think, even the people with minds." (p. 129)

***

Things were falling apart at the nursing home in Pondville, a small town in the armpit of Massachusetts. There was a leak in the roof in the left wing, and water came down the walls when it rained. The food was terrible, but that wasn't new. The staff kept quitting. The pay was shit. People were dying, all the time, but that was to be expected in this line of work. And just that morning, Dr. Gust found the resident nursing-home cat in his office, curled up on the keyboard like a fat loaf of bread. "Shoo," Dr. Gust said, but the cat would not budge. "I'm fifty-seven," he told Pancakes. Pancakes was the hospital's therapy cat. He was supposed to be in one of the rooms of the nursing-home residents, comforting them. That was his job. To comfort people at their end.

But Pancakes was not comforting the elderly residents, some of whom were quite sick, not long to go. No, the cat was in Dr. Gust's office, and he would not budge from the keyboard. Dr. Gust had to answer emails and think about the budget. Pancakes was purring along with the whirr of the computer monitor. Perhaps he likes the heat from the computer, Dr. Gust reasoned. That must be it. "I'm fifty-seven," he said again. Dr. Gust was a short man, with very bushy eyebrows and no hair left on his head. He wore a Saint Michael pendant around his neck, which was supposed to protect him.

Pancakes kept purring. A bit of drool fell onto the keyboard; Pancakes drooled when he was content. That was enough for Dr. Gust, who picked up Pancakes by the middle and carried him down the hall, arms straight, trying to keep the cat as far away from his body as possible. He marched the cat to the common room, where an arts-and-crafts class was under way. The residents were making butterflies out of markers, clothespins, and coffee filters. "Here," Dr. Gust said, dropping Pancakes in the middle of the room. "Have your pick." He gestured at the room full of residents, all of them over eighty. Instead, Pancakes scaled the bookshelf, and once on top, turned and hissed.

"I'm glad you're mad," said Dr. Gust, hands on his hips. "Because I hate you too."

Actually, Dr. Gust loved the cat. He was the one who'd bought Pancakes from a box of kittens outside the supermarket; he was the one who had made him a valued member of the nursing-home staff. He made Pancakes employee of the month more than a few times. But Dr. Gust still didn't want Pancakes hanging around his office, didn't want him lingering in his lap, because the cat had a remarkable talent.

It was Maribeth on the housekeeping staff who had noticed the pattern. Maribeth was in charge of stripping the beds, cleaning and dusting and sanitizing, and after a resident died, she noticed there was always orange cat hair everywhere, much more than in any other room. She pointed it out to Dr. Gust. She said she had heard there was another cat like that, a therapy cat over at a Rhode Island hospital. It wasn't a completely unknown phenomenon.

"Curious," Dr. Gust had said, and he agreed to look into it. In the morning, the cat was found on the chest of another patient, who had died overnight. Soon Dr. Gust was obsessed with the cat's movements. First, Pancakes spent all his time in Mrs. Monty's room. Dead in three days. Then on to Mr. Broomfield's room down the hall. Dead in a week. Upstairs to Mrs. Anderson's corner room. Mrs. Anderson lived another two weeks. One time, Pancakes snuggled with a patient for three months, but the woman was still the next one in the home to die. And so on, and so on, Pancakes made his choices. And the cat was never wrong. Dr. Gust was so excited, he called the reporter for The South Coast Daily Sun. The headline read: NURSING HOME CAT PREDICTS DEATH, PROVIDES COMFORT AT END. Dr. Gust planned to frame it for his office.

But after the article ran, there was no more comfort in the Pondville nursing home. Before, no one except Dr. Gust and a few members of the staff had known about Pancakes's knack for prediction. After the article, the residents were in hysterics. Here was a four-legged and -pawed Grim Reaper, walking in their midst! Stalking the halls and picking them off, one by one. One of the patients died jumping out the window, just because the cat had sauntered in.

"Get rid of the cat," the nursing-home patients demanded.

"Get rid of the cat," the nurses said at the next meeting.

But Dr. Gust didn't believe in getting rid of animals. He knew shelter animals were treated like they were disposable. He wished they could euthanize some of the patients in the Pondville nursing home instead. He didn't want to get rid of the cat. But now Pancakes was in his office and Dr. Gust didn't want to die either. He was fifty-seven, and he was newly divorced, and he was having some luck on the dating apps. He had just gone on a date with a woman he'd really clicked with; she was newly divorced too. They'd had a great dinner at Applebee's, and a nice time at Dr. Gust's place after. Her name was Linda. She was into bondage.

That afternoon, the first day that Pancakes had showed up in his office, Dr. Gust went to his own doctor, but the doc couldn't find anything. Blood pressure was normal. No hard lumps in his abdomen. His prostate felt better than ever.

Dr. Gust tried to bravely carry on at work for the rest of the week, but every morning that goddamn cat was in his office. Dr. Gust couldn't handle it. He was young. Or youngish. He had so much juice in him yet. So, he did what he felt he had to do: during his lunch break on Friday, he took Pancakes in the cat carrier to the animal shelter. The sad one on Breaker Road off Main Street in Pondville, with the concrete cells.

"He's only two years old and his name is Pancakes," Dr. Gust said to the woman at the counter. "I hope he finds a good home. He's a wonderful cat," he continued. "But he was a... well, he's ... a killer."

"Did you put a little bell on him?" the woman volunteering at the animal shelter asked. Her name was Alana, and she had six cats at home. "If he wears a jingle bell on his collar, it will be much harder for him to kill birds. Or you could always make him an indoor cat. That's a great option."

Dr. Gust didn't want to get into it with this nice lady at the volunteer animal shelter. He did not want to get the cat a jingle bell. It would do nothing to fix the problem. He shook his head sadly. He would not change his mind. "He's an agent of death," he said to Alana.

"That's a shame," Alana said, shaking her head also. "We'll try to find him a good home. Maybe he'll get lucky." Those were heavy words: maybe and lucky.

Dr. Gust teared up, but he turned away. I am a good person, he reminded himself. I work with the elderly. I am a good person, he repeated, before driving away from the animal shelter and back to work.

That afternoon, Alana smoked a bowl at her desk. She fed everyone their kibble, refilled their waters, and then locked up for the night. Pancakes enjoyed his dinner before he started working on the lock. Thanks to his claws, Pancakes was able to pick the lock with surprising ease. Once he was freed, he jumped from his cage to Alana's desk to the top of the filing cabinet. Alana had left a window cracked open to air out the pot-smoke smell overnight, and it was through that window that Pancakes slipped out into the night.

Out on the road, Pancakes took a left onto Main Street. He walked through the town center, past the stone library and the white-steepled Congregationalist church on the right. On the left was the town hall, built in 1856, still coated in a thick layer of lead paint. He went past the athletic club, past the liquor store, past the gun shop, past the crumbling brick fire station. He walked by White Rock Elementary School, a square building with lots of windows, built on land that backs up onto Assawompset Pond. Pondville was named for the network of five ponds in the town, and Assawompset Pond is one of the five. Assawompset is a word from the Wampanoag tribe, and it means "the place of the white stone."

Pancakes kept walking. He followed the main road out to the edge of town, past the cranberry bogs and the cranberry juice factory, past a stone bench memorial for a teenager who had drowned in the bogs nearly fifteen years before. There was an old man who sat on the bench sometimes while he worked through a six-pack, but no one was sitting there now. Pancakes sniffed the legs of the bench. He lingered for a minute. Up ahead was the town border.

LEAVING PONDVILLE, the sign said, at town's edge. BE CAREFUL OUT THERE! it said underneath that. Pancakes had learned to read from one of the patients in the nursing home. Alberta Russet would read aloud from the Russian masters while Pancakes snuggled on her lap. Alberta Russet hadn't made it to the end of Anna Karenina before her death, had missed the entire part about the train.

Pancakes walked to the other side of the roadside sign. WELCOME TO PONDVILLE! it read. And then in smaller letters, written in yellow on a white sign, looking like piss in snow, the town motto read: YOU'RE SAFE HERE.

Bullshit, thought the cat, because he had seen his fair share of bad things, and he was only two and a half human years old. No one was safe in Pondville, because no one is safe anywhere. Pancakes knew with certainty there had been violence in the town. He remembered that the first events of King Philip's War happened in Pondville in 1675, and that war was an absolute bloodbath. All cats have an ancient knowledge; it's dogs that are born with a blissfully clean slate. 

LUPE

She worked in la Guerrero, a few streets down from Julian's, and she was 17 and had lost a son. The memory made her cry in that Hotel Trébol room, spacious and dark, with bath and bidet, the perfect place to live out a few years. The perfect place to write a book of apocryphal memories or a collection of horror poems. Lupe was thin and had legs long and spotted like a leopard. The first time I didn't even get an erection: and I didn't want to have an erection. Lupe spoke of her life and of what, for her, was happiness. When a week had passed, we saw each other again. I found her on a corner alongside other little teenage whores, propped against the fender of an old Cadillac. I think we were glad to see each other. From then on Lupe began telling me things about her life, sometimes crying, sometimes fucking, almost always naked in bed, staring at the ceiling, hand in hand. Her son was born sick and Lupe promised la Virgen that shed leave her trade if her baby were cured. She kept her promise a month or two, then had to go back. Soon after, her son died, and Lupe said the fault was her own for not keeping up her bargain with la Virgen. La Virgen carried off the little angel, payment for a broken promise. I didn't know what to say. I liked children, sure, but I still had many years before I'd know what it was to have a son. And so I stayed quiet and thought about the eerie feel emerging from the silence of that hotel. Either the walls were very thick or we were the sole occupants or the others didn't open their mouths, not even to moan. It was so easy to ride Lupe and feel like a man and feel wretched. It was easy to get her in your rhythm and it was easy to listen as she prattled on about the latest horror films shed seen at Bucareli Theater. Her leopard legs would wrap around my waist and shed sink her head into my chest, searching for my nipples or my heartbeat. This is the part of you I want to suck, she said to me one night. What, Lupe? Your heart.

***

DIRTY, POORLY DRESSED

On the dogs path, my soul came upon my heart. Shattered, but alive, dirty, poorly dressed, and filled with love. On the dogs' path, there where no one wants to go. A path that only poets travel when they have nothing left to do. But I still had so many things to do! And nevertheless, there I was: sentencing myself to death by red ants and also by black ants, traveling through the empty villages: fear that grew until it touched the stars. A Chilean educated in Mexico can withstand everything, I thought, but it wasn't true. At night, my heart cried. The river of being, chanted some feverish lips I later discovered to be my own, the river of being, the river of being, the ecstasy that folds itself into the bank of these abandoned villages. Mathematicians and theologians, diviners and bandits emerged like aquatic realities in the midst of a metallic reality. Only fever and poetry provoke visions. Only love and memory. Not these paths or these plains. Not these labyrinths. Until at last my soul came upon my heart. It was sick, it's true, but it was alive. I dreamt of frozen detectives in the great refrigerator of Los Angeles in the great refrigerator of Mexico City.

***

THE GHOST OF EDNA LIEBERMAN (excerpt)

And your blood lights up the shelves stacked with books, the chairs stacked with books, the floor covered with piled-up books.

***

X-RAYS

If we look with X-rays at the patient's house, we'll see the ghosts of books in silent shelves or piled in the hall or on nightstands and tables. We'll also see a small notebook with drawings, lines and arrows that diverge and intersect: they are voyages in death's company. But death, despite its arrogant aide-mémoire, still hasn't won. The X-rays tell us time is expanding and thinning like the tail of a comet inside the house. Life still gives its best fruits. And as the sea promised Jaufré Rudel the vision of love, so this house near the sea promises its dweller the dream of the destroyed and constructed tower. If we look, however, with X-rays inside of the man, we'll see bones and shadows: ghosts of fiestas and landscapes in motion as if viewed from an airplane in tailspin. We'll see the eyes he saw, the lips his fingers brushed, a body emerged from a snowstorm. And we'll see the naked body, just as he saw it, and the eyes and the lips he brushed, and we'll know that there's no cure.

***

ON THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF (excerpt)

Or like that other dream: the one with the guy who avoids a robbery or rape and punches the assailant until he's thrown to the ground and then keeps punching him and a voice (but what voice?) asks the assailant what's his name and the assailant says your name and you stop hitting him and say that can't be, that's my name, and the voice (the voices) say it's a coincidence, but deep down you've never believed in coincidences. And you say: we must be related, you're the son of one of my uncles or cousins. But when you lift him up and look at him, so thin, so fragile, you understand that this story, too, is a lie. You are the assailant, the rapist, the inept hoodlum who wanders through the useless streets of the dream. And then you return to the coleopteran-hotels, to the spider-hotels, to read poetry on the edge of the cliff.

***

THE DONKEY

Sometimes I dream that Mario Santiago Comes looking for me on his black motorcycle. And we leave behind the city and as The lights are disappearing, Mario Santiago tells me we're dealing with A stolen bike, the last bike Stolen to travel through the poor Northern lands, toward Texas, Chasing an unnamable dream, Unclassifiable, the dream of our youth, Which is to say the bravest of all Our dreams. And put that way How could I deny myself a ride on that fast black Northern bike, breaking out on those roads Long ago traveled by Mexican saints, Mendicant Mexican poets, Taciturn leeches from Tepito Or la colonia Guerrero, all on the same path, Where times are mixed up and confused, Verbal and physical, yesterday and aphasia.

And sometimes I dream that Mario Santiago Comes looking for me, or it's a faceless poet, A head without eyes or mouth or nose, Only skin and volition, and without asking questions I get on the bike and we take off On the northern roads, the head and I, Strange crewmembers embarking on A miserable route, roads erased by dust and rain, Land of flies and little lizards, dried brush And blizzards of sand, the only imaginable stage For our poetry.

And sometimes I dream that the road Our bike or our longing is traveling Doesn't begin in my dream, but in the dreams Of others: the innocent, the blessed, The meek, those who, unfortunately for us, Are no longer here. And with that Mario Santiago and I Leave Mexico City, which is the extension Of so many dreams, the materialization of so many Nightmares, and retake our positions Always headed north, always on the road Of coyotes, and then our bike Is the color of night. Our bike Is a black donkey dawdling Through lands of Curiosity. A black donkey Moving through the humanity and geometry Of these poor desolate landscapes. And Mario's laugh or the head's Greets the ghosts of our youth, The unnamable and useless dream Of courage.

And sometimes I think I see a black bike Like a donkey disappearing down the dirt Roads of Zacatecas and Coahuila, on the outer limits Of the dream, and without quite knowing Its meaning, its ultimate significance, I still understand its music: A cheerful farewell song.

And maybe they're gestures of courage, saying Adios, without resentment or bitterness, At peace with their total futility and with us ourselves. They're the little acts of defiance that are useless—or that Years and custom made us think useless—waving hello, Making enigmatic signals to us with their hands In the middle of the night, on one side of the road, Like our beloved and abandoned children, Raised alone in these calcareous deserts, Like the radiance that one day stood in our path And that we'd forgotten.

And sometimes I dream that Mario arrives With his black bike in the middle of a nightmare And we take off bound for the north, Bound for ghost towns where Little lizards and flies live. And while the dream takes me From one continent to another Through a shower of cold, painless stars, I see the black bike, like a donkey from another planet, Split the lands of Coahuila in two. A donkey from another planet That is the unrestrained longing of our ignorance, But that is also our hope And our courage.

She refers to a phenomenon of moviegoing which I have called certification. Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere. (p. 63)

***

Until recent years, I read only "fundamental" books, that is, key books on key subjects, such as War and Peace, the novel of novels; A Study of History, the solution of the problem of time; Schroedinger's What is Life?, Einstein's The Universe as I See It, and such. During those years I stood outside the universe and sought to understand it. I lived in my room as an Anyone living Anywhere and read fundamental books and only for diversion took walks around the neighborhood and saw an occasional movie. Certainly it did not matter to me where I was when I read such a book as The Expanding Universe. The greatest success of this enterprise, which I call my vertical search, came one night when I sat in a hotel room in Birmingham and read a book called The Chemistry of Life. When I finished it, it seemed to me that the main goals of my search were reached or were in principle reachable, whereupon I went out and saw a movie called It Happened One Night which was itself very good. A memorable night. The only difficulty was that though the universe had been disposed of, I myself was left over. There I lay in my hotel room with my search over yet still obliged to draw one breath and then the next. But now I have undertaken a different kind of search, a horizontal search. As a consequence, what takes place in my room is less important. What is important is what I shall find when I leave my room and wander in the neighborhood. Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion. (pp. 69-70)

***

For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead.

It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can. At such times it seems that the conversation is spoken by automatons who have no choice in what they say. I hear myself or someone else saying things like: "In my opinion the Russian people are a great people, but—" or "Yes, what you say about the hypocrisy of the North is unquestionably true. However—" and I think to myself: this is death. Lately it is all I can do to carry on such everyday conversations, because my cheek has developed a tendency to twitch of its own accord. Wednesday as I stood speaking to Eddie Lovell, I felt my eye closing in a broad wink. (pp. 99-100)

***

We have six drinks in two bars, catch buses, cross a hundred miles of city blocks, pass in the neighborhood of millions of souls, and come at last to a place called Wilmette which turns out not to be a place at all since it has no genie, where lives Harold Graebner the only soul known to me in the entire Midwest. Him, one soul in five million, we must meet and greet, wish good luck and bid farewell—else we cannot be sure we are here at all— before hopping off again into the maze of a city set down so unaccountably under the great thundering-lonesome Midwestern sky. (p. 206)

***

The romantic sits across the aisle, slumped gracefully, one foot propped on the metal ledge. He is reading The Charterhouse of Parma. His face is extraordinarily well-modeled and handsome but his head is too small and, arising as it does from the great collar of his car coat, it makes him look a bit dandy and dudish. Two things I am curious about. How does he sit? Immediately graceful and not aware of it or mediately graceful and aware of it? How does he read The Charterhouse of Parma? Immediately as a man who is in the world and who has an appetite for the book as he might have an appetite for peaches, or mediately as one who finds himself under the necessity of sticking himself into the world in a certain fashion, of slumping in an acceptable slump, of reading an acceptable book on an acceptable bus? Is he a romantic?

He is a romantic. His posture is the first clue: it is too good to be true, this distillation of all graceful slumps. To clinch matters, he catches sight of me and my book and goes into a spasm of recognition and shyness. To put him out of his misery, I go over and ask him how he likes his book. For a tenth of a second he eyes me to make sure I am not a homosexual; but he has already seen Kate with me and sees her now, lying asleep and marvelously high in the hip. (I have observed that it is no longer possible for one young man to speak unwarily to another not known to him, except in certain sections of the South and West, and certainly not with a book in his hand.) As for me, I have already identified him through his shyness. It is pure heterosexual shyness. He is no homosexual, but merely a romantic. Now he closes his book and stares hard at it as if he would, by dint of staring alone, tear from it its soul in a word. "It's—very good," he says at last and blushes. The poor fellow. He has just begun to suffer from it, this miserable trick the romantic plays upon himself: of setting just beyond his reach the very thing he prizes. For he prizes just such a meeting, the chance meeting with a chance friend on a chance bus, a friend he can talk to, unburden himself of some of his terrible longings. Now having encountered such a one, me, the rare bus friend, of course he strikes himself dumb. It is a case for direct questioning. (pp. 214-15)

***

"What do you plan to do?"

I shrug. There is only one thing I can do: listen to people, see how they stick themselves into the world, hand them along a ways in their dark journey and be handed along, and for good and selfish reasons. It only remains to decide whether this vocation is best pursued in a service station or—

"Are you going to medical school?"

NORTH

I returned to a long strand, the hammered shod of a bay, and found only the secular powers of the Atlantic thundering.

I faced the unmagical invitations of Iceland, the pathetic colonies of Greenland, and suddenly

those fabulous raiders, those lying in Orkney and Dublin measured against their long swords rusting,

those in the solid belly of stone ships, those hacked and glinting in the gravel of thawed streams

were ocean-deafened voices warning me, lifted again in violence and epiphany. The longship's swimming tongue

was buoyant with hindsight— it said Thor's hammer swung to geography and trade, thick-witted couplings and revenges,

the hatreds and behindbacks of the althing, lies and women, exhaustions nominated peace, memory incubating the spilled blood.

It said, 'Lie down in the word-hoard, burrow the coil and gleam of your furrowed brain.

Compose in darkness. Expect aurora borealis in the long foray but no cascade of light.

Keep your eye clear as the bleb of the icicle, trust the feel of what nubbed treasure your hands have known.'

***

THE GRAUBALLE MAN

As if he had been poured in tar, he lies on a pillow of turf and seems to weep

the black river of himself. The grain of his wrists is like bog oak, the ball of his heel

like a basalt egg. His instep has shrunk cold as a swan's foot or a wet swamp root.

His hips are the ridge and purse of a mussel, his spine an eel arrested under a glisten of mud.

The head lifts, the chin is a visor aised above the vent of his slashed throat

that has tanned and toughened. The cured wound opens inwards to a dark elderberry place.

Who will say corpse? to his vivid cast? Who will say "body' to his opaque repose?

And his rusted hair, a mat unlikely as a foetus's. I first saw his twisted face

in a photograph, a head and shoulder }out of the peat, bruised like a forceps baby,

but now he lies perfected in my memory, down to the red horn of his nails,

hung in the scales with beauty and atrocity: with the Dying Gaul too strictly compassed

on his shield, with the actual weight of each hooded victim, slashed and dumped.

***

SINGING SCHOOL

6. EXPOSURE

It is December in Wicklow: Alders dripping, birches Inheriting the last light, The ash tree cold to look at.

A comet that was lost Should be visible at sunset, Those million tons of light Like a glimmer of haws and rose-hips,

And I sometimes see a falling star. If I could come on meteorite! Instead I walk through damp leaves, Husks, the spent flukes of autumn,

Imagining a hero On some muddy compound, His gift like a slingstone Whirled for the desperate.

How did I end up like this? I often think of my friends Beautiful prismatic counselling And the anvil brains of some who hate me

As I sit weighing and weighing My responsible tristia. For what? For the ear? For the people? For what is said behind-backs?

Rain comes down through the alders, Its low conducive voices Mutter about let-downs and erosions And yet each drop recalls

The diamond absolutes. I am neither internee nor informer; An inner émigré, grown long-haired And thoughtful; a wood-kerne

Escaped from the massacre, Taking protective colouring From bole and bark, feeling Every wind that blows;

This will be the hardest part, describing our sex and its absence. I'll have to make a few attempts. There are nights we sleep alone. There are nights we sleep next to each other. Nights we touch, kiss, drunkenly wrestle, these same nights we go home with other people. There are nights we are brothers in bed as we are in daytime. Arm in arm down the street, side by side in the alleys, across from each other joking about cocks, film, and death.

If we could show each other the worst thing in the world, something so gruesome we'd never be the same, would we? Hangings, infections, accidents, insertions. What if the thing wasn't an image? What if we had to do it to each other? There is a plane wreck on an island, we are the only survivors, how long before we kill each other with our experiments?

Within friendship isn't there competition? Mustn't friendship grown out of capitalism, harbor its DNA, learn from its mother, live with the contagion? But how about when I show up at the bar dressed as a boy, when you send me your writing, when we dream of the screenplay, when we move Kurosawa to the porch, when we travel alone, when we steal my stereo, drive to funerals, spend the night on the couch, when we're evicted, punch my boyfriends, listen to your messages, poison each other?

***

Multifarious Array #41.

Now winter nights enlarge The number of their hours, And clouds their storms discharge Upon the airy towers.*

I think that if a reader understands that accent is relative, and that it comes in degrees, and understands, moreover, that accent is sometimes reinforced by quantity (a synonym for "duration"), and sometimes not, then the reader will better perceive the attractive, dance-like rhythm in these lines.

Here is a specific analysis to show what I mean. In the first line, the three pairs of syllables (the technical word for such a pair or unit is "foot," plural "feet") create a pleasing effect of crescendo: changes in degree of accent, changes in the difference between the unaccented and accented parts of each foot, changes in quantity, and the way the verb "enlarge" swells or reaches over the line ending toward its object "The number"—all of these elements contribute to the process of crescendo over the three feet, in three corresponding stages.

More minutely: in the first foot, the difference between the unstressed and stressed syllables is relatively slight, with the longer but unstressed syllable "Now" preceding the shorter but stressed vowel in the first syllable of "winter." The effect is a kind of acceleration from the long, unstressed syllable to the short, stressed one, with maybe some sense of tension in what might be called the "interference pattern" between quantity and accent. Then, in the second foot, the difference between the two halves is more distinct, with maybe a less strained or tense movement, because here the duration and accent are in less conflict, though the unstressed syllable of the foot (the "ter" of "winter") is pretty long in quantity. And in the final, third foot, which consists of the word "enlarge," the difference between the two halves is quite distinct: duration and accent both emphasize the second syllable of the word.

This little movement is from quick and tense toward increasingly slow and luxuriant.

*Thomas Campion, "Now Winter Nights Enlarge." (pp. 18-19)

***

A few other terms, of occasional usefulness: one is "sprung rhythm." Sometimes an unstressed syllable is omitted, jamming two stressed syllables together; thus, Fulke Greville writes, about arising in the middle of the night to pursue a forbidden love affair:

Up I start believing well To see if Cynthia were awake; Wonders I saw, who can tell? And thus unto myself I spake.*

The second and fourth lines are straightforward four-foot, essentially iambic lines. The first line omits the first syllable, and the remarkable third line omits the unstressed syllable before "who," creating a double stress "saw, who" in the middle of his line; that is, Greville did not write the more conventional lines,

So up I start believing well To see if Cynthia were awake; Wonders I saw, that who can tell? And thus unto myself I spake.

This small difference, emphasizing the accents, makes the lines that much more various and, in the context of the narrative, that much more sexy—and, perhaps, less complacent and more off-balance.