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.

I found a white stone on the beach

inlaid with a blue-green road I could not follow.

All night I’d slept in fits and starts,

my only memory the in-out, in-out, of the tide.

And then morning. And then a walk,

the white stone beckoning, glinting in the sun.

I felt its calm power as I held it

and wished a wish I cannot tell.

It fit in my hand like a hand gently

holding my hand through a sleepless night.

A stone so like, so unlike,

all the others it could only be mine.

The worldess white stone of my life!

They come in white livery bringing the sun,

the Robed Heart astride her white mount,

crowds lining the royal road in anticipation.

Ahead, the castle flying the new colors,

a queen’s great labors come to an end.

A shout, and the cord is cut,

the crown placed upon my head.

And I am, Mother, I am!

I count the rays of the jellyfish:

twelve in this one, like a clock to tell time by,

thirteen in the next, time gone awry.

A great wind brought them in, left them here

to die, indifferent time measured my whirling moon

and sun, by tides in perpetual fall and rise.

Englobed, transparent, they litter the beach,

creatureless creatures deprived of speech

who spawn more like themselves before they die.

I peer into each and see a faceless

red center, red spokes like a star.

They are, and are not, like what we are.

                My mother

gathers gladiolas. The gladness

is fractured. As when

the globe with its thousand mirrors

cracked the light. How

it hoarded sight: all the stolen perspectives

and the show of light

they shot around us: so that

down the dark hall the ghosts danced

with us: down the dark hall

the broken angels.

We are not birds. Despite our walls covered

With winged men, we are not birds.

And all that is birdlike in the bats

Is also deception. They have

No feathers, no beak, no high-pitched heart.

Their wings are skin. Skin! Stretched

From shoulder to foot like the cloth

We nailed to wood to build

Our doomed medieval contraptions for flight.

Or like our taut sheets, the high-strung skin,

The great single wing of sex we lean on

But we are not birds. All that is birdlike

In us, in the bats, is illusion.

There is nothing at all of the bird in us…

Except for flight. Except for flight.

The Witnesses come again. They come to my mind

Before they come to the door. The young man wears a red scarf.

And the old woman is soft in the head. We sit on the porch

And she fans the waves painted on the Watchtower’s cover.

The waves are blue as rebellion. “The ocean,” she says,

“See here…the ocean…the ocean is full of dirt…

And it is going…” And she is gone. Stares blindly

At the spot where two drab deer made the baby laugh

By eating dead bushes. He thought they were cows. “Moo,”

He said. “Moooo.” He names things by their sounds.

The young Witness picks up the dropped conversation,

He plies a soft black book. Is pledged to persuasion.

Once he was a Papist, but now he is not. He frowns

At the statue of Mary covered with bird lime. “The signs

Will come,” he says. “The signs, and then the End.

Only the chosen will stand.” My mind lies quiet.