I love American newspapers, the way each section

is folded independently and believes it owns

the world. There’s this brief item in the inter-

national pages: the Chinese government has posted

signs in Tiananmen Square; forbidding laughter.

I’m sure the plastic surgeon would approve, he’d say

the Chinese will look young much longer, their faces

unnaturally smooth, but what I see (although

no photograph accompanies the story) is laughter

busting inside them. I go back to the sports section

and a closeup of a rookie in mind-swing, his face

keeping all the wrong emotions in check.

My mother the seamstress had a seamstress

of her own, like the cook who will not

eat her own recipes: nearly everything we wore

was a product of my mother’s sewing,

but she made nothing for herself.

Her seamstress, whose nickname begins

with a consonant for which there are only

approximate sounds in English,

made the dress my mother wore out of Cuba,

then again and again in exile as we unfolded

our maps of dead-end streets

and studied dictionaries filled with

the new country’s euphemisms for no and why.

He closed the deal on the night. A real

bargain, he said. And the city was reduced

to a room, the man’s constant body in bed,

the sheets glowing like phosphorus.

One flaw in the design made it possible

for an occasional body to slip in.

The sheets would glow a bit more brightly

in its presence. Each time it left, the body

would leave more of itself behind,

until there was no absence to speak of.

The man began to count on the occasional body

and its lingering presence, which he now calls

memory.  He understands that the laws

of necessity draw their own conclusions.

The Banker trails behind me with his abacus

and crowd of yes-men. I hear

the gold coins rub together in his vest.

The stoplights remind me. And the scars

on my ankles and the nails in my mouth.

Once my father pointed his finger at me.

Once my mother kissed me on the lips in winter.

I could have been a man like those men

on the roof, eyes narrowed at me

like diamond cutters. In surgical gowns

and crucifix tie clips, tight bands of wires

wound beneath their chests –

they remind me of me. All in sync

they cup their ears to the antenna.

Quiet. The Jew Levine is coming to collect

with his chisels and his sack of flesh.

This is the house my father tried to build.

That patch of dirt raked

in geometric plains is a Japanese garden.

Those gaps the pigeons roost in are French windows.

The step-ladder, a spiral staircase, a helix. My father hasn’t

slept in six weeks. There is a crack in the living-

room wall. There is an icy roof.

He is watching the plaster.

Certain the house will collapse.

Should I talk to him when he doesn’t talk back?

His tongue coated white.

Should I touch him? He is dirty.

By midnight I get over it. I start hammering again.

The guards stand by the fire pit, burning papers.

So many numbers, so many names.

Hammer gently, they say: we’re trying to think.

The guy next to me can’t stop coughing.

The guy next to him can’t stop singing “Glory to God

in His sacred groves.”

When is this going to stop?

The ovens stay lit all night. Everything sounds the same

when it burns, like newsprint, like the telephone book,

like name, rank, number, date of birth.

Once I start talking, what’s there to stop me?

When I run out of nails I hammer pens.

Ink stains the wood the color of my tongue.

I don’t need my pens anymore. They know it was me.

They can sign my name to anything

and they won’t be wrong.

We are the nothing-to-lose ones,

the try-anything-once ones,

weed seeds inside our cells –

dandelion, nettle, lizard tail –

roots sunk in, for it is the tips

that count, reaching out to tap

new moisture. Roots, stems, leaves,

the stomata, those little mouths

opening, closing, sucking in air

in the evening when we boil

wild ginger and sleep in its vapor.

Like cures like, we hear in the morning

when we brush ourselves with

vegetable fiber in the shower,

beat ourselves with our fists.

(This is no crazier than anything else.)

I bet on the reptiles, on the scaly-skinned,

the spadefoot toad who burrows backward

and sleeps seven feet down in the sand.

I go with the insects who breed and feed at night,

with the single-celled protozoan protected

from the heat by is own cyst.

I bet on the woman on the couch with

a growth on her cheek, the seven-year-old

in cowboy boots with eczema head to toe.

I roll for the shay hand, spastic muscle, drooling lip.

I roll for the palsied girl that she may walk,

the diapered man that he may no longer drip.

I lie hour after hour, staring at the lightbulb

in that lamp over the bed, then everything seems rimmed

in peelings – the intercom, the nurse’s caps, the strings

that tie this gown around my neck. I’m encased in

this room and if I could pull away the rind of this illness,

it’s been so long, I wonder what might be left underneath.

My skin. No one can understand the pain of being touched.

Or not. The problem: not even a rash to show the staff

bustling in at 6 a.m. Disappointing, I’m sure, for the interns.

Mountain tips soften after so much rain,

the wild guesses of birds blending with air

and the uppermost buds, with a godlike

promotion, burst open.

Especially beautiful

are the brown and drunken bats

who nosedive down the barnside,

not quite earthbroken.

When I’m one white jawbone

with an army of molars

how strange it will be

for Uranians

or Plutonians to arrive

and find my ashtray

with the crashed white stubs,

some with red rings,

and never know the language:

never guess mouths

drifting from kiss to kiss

made words

driving the spaceships in.

It made a dazzling display:

the table set with the meat

from half of a walnut, a fly

on a purple grape, the grape

lit from within and the fly

bearing small black eggs.

We gathered round the oval table

with our knives, starved

for some inner feast.

We were not allowed to eat,

as we had been hired as models

by the man at our head.

Days passed

in which we grew faint with hunger.

Later we were told

that although we did not appear

on the canvas

our eyes devouring these things

provided the infinite light.

     I wanted for her sake to undo it,

I asked her to forget. There wouldn’t be

time for us since I was married. I’d made her want

another time, when, whole, impossibly together,

we’d rescue my avowal, which was a curse.

Though I asked her not to, she went on

waiting for that time and, by the tree where I

couldn’t get away to meet her, waiting

undismayed, heartsick, eighteen.

      To get away from the house to see her

I’d kept pleading work. The library at school was

quieter, I’d said, the kids weren’t there. It had served,

though they weren’t troublesome or loud. Now, I sit them

next to one another, tell them I’ll be moving

away for awhile, that I’m going to live

somewhere else. Nothing from Geoff, from Bobby

instantly a chuckle and smile.

     “Are you happy? Why did you laugh?”

     “Because now we won’t bother you when you have to write.”

     As he often does when Linda holds him,

he pulls my fingers to his face. First it’s a

nostril that he covers and uncovers languidly

again and again, then it’s an eye. He keeps them moving.

If he could make my fingers fit him as her water did,

if my fingers were her water, it would always have been

his doing to have left it there, to have taken it away.

He’s invented the Baby Kitties and the Six-year-olds.

Do they do that too? The question makes him sleepier.

As silly as they come, he smiles and goes on dabbing

closed and open, closed and open.

I stood there perfectly still, just as I had sat for countless medical photographs: full face, turn to the left, the right, now a three-quarter shot to the left. I took a certain pride in knowing the routine so well. I’ve even seen some of these medical photographs in publications. Curiously, those sterile, bright photos are easy for me to look at. For one thing, I know that only doctors look at them, and perhaps I’m even slightly proud that I’m such an interesting case, worthy of documentation. Or maybe I do not really think it is me sitting there, Case 3, figure 6-A.

I rooted around in the cabinets and came up with a hand mirror and, with a bit of angling, looked for the first time at my right profile. I knew to expect a scar, but how had my face sunk in like that? I didn’t understand. Was it possible I’d looked this way for a while and was only just noticing it, or was this change very recent? More than the ugliness I felt, I was suddenly appalled at the notion that I’d been walking around unaware of something that was apparent to everyone else. A profound sense of shame consumed me.

Because I was never going to have love (this realization, too painful to linger over, I embraced swiftly and finally), I cast myself in the role of Hero of Love. Instead of proving my worth on the chemotherapy table, I would become a hero through my understanding of the real beauty that existed in the world. I decided that it was my very ugliness that allowed me access to this other beauty. My face may have closed the door on love and beauty in their fleeting states, but didn’t my face also open me up to perceptions I might otherwise be blind to?

As the icon passes on its route through the crowds, pilgrims struggle to get close enough to touch the pavilion, running their hands ardently over its sides. Women walk toward it on their knees. Hundreds of these pilgrims have waited all night in the courtyard of the church, hoping for dreams of the Virgin. Families who want a favor from the Virgin often designate a female member to come to Tinos and crawl to the church on her knees up the main street, while motorcycles and cars speed around her. The shots of the women performing this act make them look like amputees, as if the logic of this beseeching forces them to impersonate the disabled in order to be healed.

In the morning, the front-page photographs of Clinton in the papers share space with shots of Stephanopoulos, who will, if anything, dominate the news of the new administration for a time, as Greece reverts to a village in relation to him. His aunt from Evia is photographed leaving for America, with the hopeful text “Maybe she will bring us news”; and in the national style of Greece, his mother gives interviews to the glossy magazines to discuss her George. An editorial cartoon this morning shows a man in a foustanella holding a newspaper marked “Clinton’s promises” and warning his wife, who wears a classical tunic, with a Greek proverb, “When you hear about many cherries, bring just a small basket.” The wife replies, “I’m holding only a thimble.”

The dead are remembered nine days, then forty days after their deaths, then in cyclical ceremonies, all for the rest of the departed soul, whom Greeks seem to expect to be restless—the dead legitimately return to earth during the forty-day period between Easter and Pentecost, and unlawfully and unpredictably as vampires. There is a whole range of vampire lore, anecdotes, remedies, curses. One of the most feared curses used to be “May the earth not eat you.” Vampires seem to function as a kind of underworld, criminal class of the resurrected—a body that hasn’t decomposed could be a sign of sainthood, but also that the deceased has become a vampire. They also seem to be an underbelly version of the much idealized Greek family, since their principal victims in the stories I’ve been told are family members, and since they often seem to be people who died with unresolved family quarrels. Vampirism here is a brilliantly simple metaphor for the tragic side of the blood tie.