She remembers sensing—almost smelling—that he wanted to kill her. Or that for a split second the thought was spreading itself in his mind. She remembers the terrible little theater of his eyes, which she had always thought to be blue. But looking at them in the afternoon glare, she saw that they weren’t even a little bit blue. They were grey.

They dropped their bags off and went across the street to Outback Steakhouse. Peanut ordered a baked potato with sour cream and bacon bits. Frances ordered a full steak dinner. She had always been able to eat heartily under stress and Peanut found this unattractive, too warlike.

Peanut slouched, letting her long brown hair fall over one eye. Lewd tawny light lit the exposed half of her face. “So you’re not going to talk to me?” she asked, pissed to be the first to speak.

“You aren’t saying anything either,” Frances said impassively.

“Well, I don’t know what to say to you when you act like this.”

“What, like mean?”

“More like heartless. Like a piece of statuary.” Peanut stared at Frances. “It’s like you’re autistic.”

Frances smiled like a wolf. “Do you know what that means? To be autistic?”

“Of course I do. Don’t quiz me.”

“Just tell me what you think it means.”

“It means someone who can, you know, rattle off all the prime numbers, but not, like, say hello.”

Frances chewed her steak and swallowed. “I’m like that?”

“Yeah.”

Frances was surprised by how much this hurt her feelings. She continued to eat and wanted to cry.

“You can’t just come in here.” Cindy sat on the floor next to an open magazine.

“I loved to read when I was your age,” Joan said. “But my brother was always stealing my books.” She smiled reflectively. “He didn’t even read them. He just put them on his shelf. What he wanted was my enthusiasm.”

“Mom, get out.”

“I believe this is my book.”

“It was on the shelf.”

“You can have it.” Joan set the book back down on the bed. “It’s good, isn’t it?” she said, but there came no reply. Cindy sat with her arms crossed, a homicidal song in her eyes. Still Joan was too captivated to look away. It was a marvelous view of something utterly gone: her youth.

She set the book back down on the bed and left the room, leaving the door ajar. Then Cindy slammed it.

The bluet is a small flower, creamy-throated, that grows in patches in New England lawns. The bluet (French pronunciation) is the shaggy cornflower, growing wild in France. “The Bluet” is a poem I wrote. The Bluet is a painting of Joan Mitchell’s. The thick hard blue runs and holds. All of the, broken-up pieces of sky, hard sky, soft sky. Today I’ll take Joan’s giant vision, running and holding, staring you down with beauty. Though I need reject none. Bluet. “Bloo-ay.”

My abstention from the Park

is for Billy Nichols who went

bird-watching there and, for

his binoculars, got his

head beat in. Streaming blood,

he made it to an avenue

where no cab would pick him up

until one did and at

Roosevelt Hospital he waited

several hours before any

doctor took him in hand. A

year later he was dead. But

I’ll make the park: I carry

more cash than I should and

walk the street at night

without feeling scared unless

someone scary passes.

Wigging in, wigging out:

when I stop to think

the wires in my head

cross: kaboom. How

many trips

by ambulance (five,

count them five),

claustrated, pill addiction,

in and out of mental

hospitals,

the suicidalness (once

I almost made it)

but – I go on?

Tell you all of it?

I can’t. When I think

of that, that at

only fifty-one I,

Jim the Jerk, am

still alive and breathing

deeply, that I think

is a miracle.

My mother supports an agency that every week or so sends her a list of the world’s political prisoners who are known to be in immediate danger of their lives. She sits over a chunky Adler typewriter and composes polite pleas to jailors and torturers and killers on behalf of their victims. “In the name of liberty, of decency, Your Excellency…”

These petitions for pity and reason, strangled as they are by formality, necessarily without anger, she types on personal stationery of pale yellow or pale tangerine or aqua—the kind got at a pharmacy. Her bursitis makes the typing difficult, and the text is unevenly imprinted, since some of the keys have more bite than others, the way she works them. All the same, her handwriting is impossible.

Sissy and I had, the year before when we still enjoyed the good graces of both our sets of partners, gone to Bermuda. Sissy was out on the beach one afternoon, asleep in a vinyl lounger, the kind with a walloping big tricolored umbrella attached. As she slept, the tide moved on her. I was watching from back in, where I had taken my towel. The sea wash was gulping at the pebbles around Sissy’s chair legs, and then at the chair legs themselves, and then the waters lifted up her nylon duffel and tipped it. Sissy was asleep, and I waded out and rescued her duffel, but I let her stay in the cold tide. I went back in-beach and watched her sleeping until she was like a person on a raft. Still she didn’t move, didn’t wake up. There was the raft and then the big straw circle of her sun hat and then the big circle made by the umbrella. “How Sissy looked, setting sail for the horizon,” I said to them.

One Sunday, they got particularly drunk, and Enoch put a cigarette burn in the cushion of Billy’s silk-covered divan. “Look, do you think that matters?” Billy said to Enoch, who was being contrite. “I’m happy to see signs of life in this place, even if they’re only your cigarette scars.” To show how little concerned he was about the ornaments in his home, Billy dropped and broke a piece of pottery, a crackle-glazed jug that his dead wife had brought from Mexico.

She walks all the time in the Heart Ward.

She makes no sound. She is always alone.

If she is looking in the toilet stall and you come in

she leaves. She calls you Dear.

I was thinking of giving her my flowers.

Just now she came over and said,

‘You don’t have to be writing all the time Dear.’

I said, ‘Do you have any flowers?’

She said, ‘No Dear.’

I said, ‘Do you want any flowers?’

She said, ‘No, no flowers, Dear.’

I said, ‘Don’t you want any flowers at all?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s too late for flowers Dear.’

Naked women are being dragged

down the sandstone shelving

on their backs, very slowly.

With ropes tied to each foot separately

so the legs close and spread open

as they are moved.

When they cry out or shout down

at the men sitting in the lifeguard chairs

looking at them through the gun sights,

the sounds, no matter how angry or foul,

curve and billow like a wave: coming

to the men on a soft wind

caressingly, like sirens singing.

The almost transparent white grub moves

slowly along the edge of the frying pan.

The grease makes the only sound, loud

in the empty room. Even the rim is cooking him.

The worm stops. Raises his head slightly.

Lowers it, moving tentatively down the side.

He seems to be moving on his own time,

but he is falling by definition. He moves forward

touching the frying grease with his whole face.

There was an old buzka on Luther Street known as the Cat Woman, not because she kept cats but because she disposed of the neighborhood’s excess kittens. Fathers would bring them in cardboard boxes at night after the children were asleep and she would drown them in her wash machine. The wash machine was in the basement, an ancient model with a galvanized-metal tub that stood on legs and had a wringer. A thick cord connected it to a socket that hung from the ceiling and when she turned it on the light bulb in the basement would flicker and water begin to pour.

The elephant was there, waiting in the overgrown lot where once long ago there had been a Victory garden, and after that a billboard, but now nothing but the rusting hulks of abandoned cars. The children grew silent as they gathered to inspect it: the crude overlapping parts, the bulky sides and lopsided rump, the thick squat legs that looked like five-gallon ice-cream drums, huge cardboard ears, everything painted a different shade of gray, and the trunk the accordion-ribbed hose from a vacuum cleaner. They stared back at Budhardin’s eyes looking at them through the black sockets above the trunk. The holes were set too close together for a real elephant and made it look cross-eyed and slightly evil.

Calvin held to the sides of his seat as he felt it begin to whirl. For a moment the seat seemed to pitch backward like a dentist’s chair. His body had flinched as the head appeared to roll into space. He struggled like a dreamer half awakened from a nightmare of falling to regain his equilibrium and breath. The earsplitting screaming made him weak and nauseated: he couldn’t understand how it could continue like a broken record. Where was the audience? Had the projectionist gone mad?

Calvin ducked his head between his knees and clapped his hands over his ears. He entered the world of the smell of the theater floor, the spearmint wrappers, the rancid popcorn oil, old urine, stale sweet wine. Above him it went on as if it would never end.