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Who can give           an account of occasions

Can     mechanized description so falter

Can move toward gesture to scissor the outline

Each to enable a series of seconds    breaking or burning

Can undo the work of a million years         of human love

if I curse you just right

DOU YI

My hands were packed in dry ice

Flown across the Pacific and

Stitched onto a man who lost his overseas.

My palms open doors to

Rooms my feet haven't walked through and

Caress a woman my eyes will never see.

It doesn't snow there but my

Nails ache when they touch ice and

Scratch strange characters onto that

Soldier's skin while he's sleeping.

His doctors call it post-traumatic stress but

He knows they're words from a

Language his tongue never learned

Justice. 

Justice. 

Justice

Across the East Sea a yam farmer

Uses my corneas to see.

She dreams of snow but thinks

It's ashes from a childhood fire bombing.

On the far side of the Atlantic my stomach digests

Food that never passed through my lips

Food my teeth didn't chew

Food my tongue hasn't tasted

Food that could have made this spirit stronger

And act sooner if someone offered it to Dou Yi.

But my heart--

My heart beats in this town,

Pumping blood through a man

Loved by the son of an official,

A son who moved Heaven and Earth for

His Happiness.

His Future.

His New Harmony.

These offerings have given me strength

I feel my spirit reviving!

Justice. 

Justice. 

Justice.

Justice and burial for the widow Dou Yi

Justice.

Justice.

Justice.

But how can you bury a woman whose butchered body's still living?

Justice. 

Justice.

That is my heart. It should beat inside me.

(Dou Yi thrusts her hand into Rocket's chest and retrieves her heart.)

The boy’s name is Cecil Mayberry; he is twelve, white, and he knows something. He knows what his mother is going to make for supper, pot roast and green Jell-O salad; he knows that the Russians have put a Sputnik in the sky. But these are not the items that are just now on Cecil’s mind. He is thinking about a man, a waterman, lying face down in a tidal pool two hundred yards from where he sits. Cecil knows the man’s name, Grayson “Tommie” Todman, and he knows that two .22-caliber bullets have made a mess of Tommie’s head. He knows the first one entered just below the right cheekline, cutting short Tommie’s last Fuck You to the world, and the second one grazed through his hair before nipping in at the peak and blowing out a portion of Tommie’s unlamented brain.

In fact, this is going to be the first time in Cecil’s life—but not the last—that he is an undisputed expert on a certain subject. He knows who shot Tommie, and why.

The following day, Pablo set the beetle loose, out of “pity,” he told me. (I believe that he was in Mr. White’s employ.) This had terrible consequences for us and our secret files, for that very night the bugs came rolling out of the jungle in a horrible unstoppable scuttling attack and seized me and carried me off down dim dizzy depths and under mountains and along the bottoms of warm shallow seas like my zombies with only a hollow reed in my mouth to keep air passages in working trim, and through sticky ferns and egg caches and incubators and subterranean cockroach classrooms of strategy and along abandoned mine shafts and eaten-away tunnels in hollowed-out documents in unused stacks in an obscure wing of a forgotten branch of a sealed-off area of the very Library of Congress…