“What do I want you to do? You really want to know? I’ll tell you. Just look me in the eye and tell me one thing. Just do it. Tell me whether you and Cynthia have made love. Tell me. Go on.”

“The answer is no.”

“You swear?”

“I swear.”

“I believe you,” she said quietly, and for a moment Richard thought it was over until she turned around and screamed at him, “THEN WHY DON’T YOU MAKE LOVE WITH ME?”

He and Cynthia stumbled toward the other side of the room as the entire front end of the tractor broke through the splintered door and entered the house. As it did, the muffler, coming out above the hood, hit the top of the doorway and snapped off.

Oh, help, Caroline thought.

“HOLY SHIT,” Richard screamed.

“STOP HER,” Cynthia yelled at him.

It was an unsettling sight, to put it mildly, for Cynthia to see the front end of a 6,000-pound tractor rolling across her Oriental carpet, the very carpet she had chosen so that all the colors complemented each other and the old pine floor, the deep earth-brown and tan and the reds and yellows, and now, a green, wheezing and roaring monster with oil dripping sat on that rug.

“It’s just that I hate being alone,” Caroline said. “I hate being poor, as well, and damn it all, here I go again back where I started. I hate going backwards. It takes so much out of you to get where you want to be. One person can’t do it nowadays, you know? It’s just too hard. You’ve got to have someone else. That’s what makes me so mad about that thing he’s run off with. She doesn’t need him any more than we need another hot day this summer. You know? She just doesn’t.”

The pond is like a mackerel skin tonight,

the mackerel like a beaded evening bag.

This is like that, that is like this, oh,

let's call the whole thing off and take it straight:

nothing is like anything else.

Even the parrot and the apish ape

mirror, mimic and do like — unmatched.

To begin:  algae, abalone, alewife —

each the spitting image of itself.

Likewise beetles (potato, scarab and whirligig.)

Nothing even comes close to barrel cactus,

nothing is more original than a bog,

more rare than the cougar and crane —

save all the above named.

I've never seen anything like it — dustbowls,

deer, the descent of man and estuaries,

flakes of snow (no two like) fire,

flax, gannets and gulls.

Honeybees and the Hoover Dam

are unique -- there is nothing like a dam.

Ditto inbreeding, ice ages, industrialization,

joshua trees, lagoons and the law

that to liken a lichen is tautological.

Indeed, the rule of diminishing simile holds

that all of these are idiosyncracies:

the Leakeys, legumes, maize, marsupials and moose.

Virtually nothing is extraneous here —

not orchids, ooze, pampas nor peat.

This is the world of plenitude and power —

every bit of it out of this world:

the rain and rattlers, sperm, swamps and swans.

As now we inch toward an end — vectors

and a winter that figures to be like no other,

say the selfsame earth is to your liking,

and let us continue — yeast, yuccas, zoons,

all things like, beyond compare.

When Quiet Woman comes,

she fills my ears

with morning glories.

Morning glories

grow out my ears –

big blue trumpets

in those soft canals.

My hearing is better

than a geezer’s,

but the dog howls

when the telephone rings.

I do not answer

with a flower in my ear.

I hear only wind

and the scuttle of trinkets

she tosses my way:

garters, crosses, scars,

glimmers and brass.

This little line got tongue-tied.

This little line is dumb.

This little line is cockeyed.

This… miracle! A blossom in the stream –

gibble gabble jaw jabber a priori blossom.

Weird how the word works.

BLOSSOM. Brainstem, blowsy,

two syllables, two lips oratorical.

Say Bloss some. Blah, blah, sum.

The blossom drums da Dum within the seed.

Hush, petal ear. Hear the earth’s ambition

creak – orchard to orchard.

Nova, Nova. It is a blooming universe.

Here is a line that opens like a starfish,

like a starfish eating sea blossoms,

embracing the blossoms and slowly,

deliciously, building the body of the world.

The intimate places of his father’s body were now within his reach, turned over to the touch of his fingers: his father who had never embraced him as a child. First he would touch his earlobes, to move them out of the way for the scissors, which had been taken out of the mother-of-pearl damascene box. Then he would take the nose between his thumb and forefinger, and give it a slight lift so as to shave above the upper lip. And the more the cancer gnawed away at the liver and the body grew limp, the more it opened to him, replete with its disappointments, sated with its tribulations. They would sit together in silence, the father and he, the youngest of his sons.

As the Jews’ army was making its way along the road winding up to Deir El-Kasi, Abu Shacker was looting its houses. The inhabitants of Deir El-Kasi had not waited for the convoy to arrive. They were already across the border. And Abu Shacker, who had felt their outstretched arm upon his back in the days of the Arab Rebellion, now entered the home of Mahmood El-Ibraheem, who had been the regional commander in the days of the rebellion. The gate to the courtyard was open, as if the inhabitants of the house had just stepped out for a moment to visit a neighbor. Abu Shacker entered through the gate and shut it behind him as if he were trying to preserve, if only for a moment, the vanishing past, and he stood in the courtyard, in the very spot where he had stood ten years before.

Imagine, then, a British soldier plummeting from the roof high above the third floor down into our courtyard, landing in a puddle of water from the early-December rain. The water splashes on the gas mask over the face of a boy playing by the puddle and blurs his vision. But first imagine a shot, just a single round from among the hundreds that had begun with the gray dawn, whose trajectory crisscrossed the skies of Haifa, in the warp and woof of the war between Jews and Arabs. Then imagine this one bullet hitting the soldier standing watch on the roof. He falls, and behind him the sharp spire of St. John’s Church rises toward the brightening sky. The boy, who is about seven, freezes to the spot where the thud has caught him trying to frighten a neighbor’s daughter with the gas mask he has bought from a peddler of military equipment. Now imagine the long second that passes between the thud and the scream: the silence that falls on the courtyard and is cast over the body, and then is lifted by the scream, which hangs in the air until the silence wraps itself again around the still body.

I like a crusty bread. Last spring, when the man who sold my son the satellite dish told him that the signal wasn’t coming in good because of the big old elm tree across the road by the house, that it was getting in the way of the reception, everyone—my son, my daughter-in-law, my grandsons, and then, because everyone else was, even the man—looked at me. I loved that tree. It was always there. It would always make me feel good to walk in the yard through its patterned shadow on my way into the house. But then, across the road, there was the satellite dish. I said they could chop the tree down but I wanted every bit of wood from it cut and stacked in a pile by itself. And though I hadn’t done it for years, since we’d got an electric stove and a furnace, I started back using the old wood stove, which we’d left in the kitchen mostly for looks. It’s better to cook bread in a wood stove anyway. You can tell the difference not just in the crust but also in taste.

… sometimes in the coffee and pastry shops here in Chinatown I mimic the words I hear, but very softly. If you do it, don’t get too loud, because then it sounds like an echo, and people start looking around.

Chinese, spoken, is such a pleasing language. So many tones – it’s like singing. Since I don’t know what I’m saying, I never try to use those words when it comes my turn to order. I say, “One of those, one of those, one of those, one of those, and one of those. And one of those.” All in one tone. Not so pleasing.

Simmi’s only been in New York three weeks, but the second night she was here Buck took her to a coffee place he knew, and now Simmi makes sure he takes her there every night. Maybe if there’s somewhere else they have to be, something one of them has to do, they’ll skip a night, but they couldn’t miss too many, because then it would become something they used to do. And that would make it part of the past. And what she thinks is part of the past Simmi won’t consider.

It was true that Eva’s male colleagues had by now ceased to joke among themselves that a hopeless crush on Professor Mueller ought to be included among the requirements for the major in philosophy, but this was not because the students no longer fell in love with her. They did, at a rate which had of course slackened over the years but was still not inconsiderable. It was an irony—of course quite lost on Eva, who was steadfastly oblivious to the dramas in which she figured—that many who sat raptly listening to their professor’s lectures on the “futility of the passions,” on the need to transform the passive emotions directed towards objects and people outside ourselves into the active emotions of the intellect, were swollen with an advanced case of that same passive desire whose elimination was being eloquently, even passionately, urged upon them.

The hands of the women lingered over their tumescent bellies. A girl no more than fifteen sat beside Eva. She was obviously in an advanced state. Her skinny, childish legs in cheap sky-blue summer pants dangled down from her engorged womb. Eva stared in disbelief at the bulge of it. The thing quivered, and the girl giggled at Eva, making a motion of swimming. Eva fought down the surge of acrid sickness, averting her eyes from the sight.

She sat all afternoon, as women came and went. There was no receptionist; patients were called in by the doctor himself.

It was in this first book that Eva came upon a reference to Joseph Goebbels’ children. Gisevius made a passing, cynical reference to the presence of the Goebbels children at one of those fêtes the Nazis were such masters at creating, Hitler’s fiftieth birthday party perhaps. “There were the inevitable Goebbels children, trotted out once more for display.” Yes, she could remember them. There had been six of them. They had been pointed out to her once, at some sort of celebration, very very large. Perhaps it had even been that massive birthday party for Hitler! They had been standing on the podium, beside their mama and papa, dressed all in white. She could not really remember how their famous papa had looked. She had only stared at the beautiful children, the six shining specimens of Aryan perfection.

“Look,” Mama had said, “look at how beautiful and good they are.”

For me, to be a feminist is to answer the question “Are women human?” with a yes. It is not about whether women are better than, worse than or identical with men. And it’s certainly not about trading personal liberty – abortion, divorce, sexual self-expression—for social protection as wives and mothers, as pro-life feminists propose. It’s about justice, fairness and access to the broad range of human experience. It’s about women consulting their own well-being and being judged as individuals rather than as members of a class with one personality, one social function, one road to happiness. It’s about women having intrinsic value as persons rather than contingent value as a means to an end for others: fetuses, children, “the family,” men.

We should not be surprised that motherhood does not produce uniform beliefs and behaviors: It is, after all, not a job; it has no standard of admission, and almost nobody gets fired. Motherhood is open to any woman who can have a baby or adopt one. Not to be a mother is a decision; becoming one requires merely that a woman accede, perhaps only for as long as it takes to get pregnant, to thousands of years of cumulative social pressure. After that, she’s on her own; she can soothe her child’s nightmares or let him cry in the dark. Nothing intrinsic to child-raising will tell her what is the better choice for her child…

I had two longish talks with Ramon, punctuated by his calling out “Abortion is murder!” every few minutes as another woman brushed past him on her way into the building. They were not very satisfying conversations. For one thing, Ramon is evasive about facts: his last name, for instance, and his nationality. When I asked him if he had voted in the last election, he told me he was not a U.S. citizen but would not tell me which country he was from, except that it was in Latin America, and he pulled out a plastic rosary. “The Blessed Mother sent me here.” What did his parents think of what he was doing? “The Blessed Mother and Jesus Christ are my parents.”

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.