From the window, on a perfect August day, the great shade trees are unmoved, only the uncountable susurrations of their million-fold leaves betraying the breeze in its passage.

  

Roses in bloom, creepers climbing the porch railings, morning glory transforming the hedge into a vast, amorphous caterpillar of violet blossoms, some robins on the lawn hunting worms, two squirrels, an unabashed rabbit venturing out from its den within the ancient azalea bush.

  

The surface of the planet seethes with fellow creatures!

  

Their kinship touches a peculiar nerve, a spot not far from where art resides, primitive, cognizant of the animal nature of the species, the cave where Pan must once have lived, or still does.

  

And from the treetops the oceanic chorus of cicadas, described by Whitman as "rising and falling like brass quoits."

  

Specimen Days. As they all are. Wings pinned, chloroformed in glass vials,

  

catalogued for display in the dusty museum cases of time.

  

Chirp of some warbler, distant traffic, rumble of bass and drums from the all day music festival at the race track where the teenagers in tie-dye and belly button rings themselves resemble birds engaged in inscrutable mating rituals.

  

For blocks around concert-goers fill the streets, stoned or trippy on the day's sweet blue-sky vibe, little kids selling bottled water from red coolers, guys with knock-off sunglasses and t-shirts, the big grills set up on traffic islands for crab cakes and barbeque ribs.

  

The song the cicadas are singing they will sing throughout the brief weeks of their lives, exultant imagos mating in the high branches, and a new generation will emerge from freshly-laid eggs, and burrow underground, ant-like grubs, wingless nymphs subsisting for the next seventeen years on fluids sucked from tree roots, with only that promise to help them endure their long, transitional dreamstate,

  

that memory or fragrance, a sunlit dance of green leaves in wind, that paradisal fragment of sensory data imprinted deep within their genes,

  

only that song—like quoits!—to lead them out of darkness.

1.

  

My old friend John stops by for a few days on his way to visit his older brother, dying of cancer in Tampa. Twenty years since we drank a bottle of cheap scotch together on 105th Street, talking all night about books and their power to transform the world, talking about poetry as if it might save us from the darkness. These days, we agree, there are no simple answers to be found in that bottle, though it is not the worst place to look. For over a decade John has worked as a custodian at a university in California, mopping the corridors of quiet buildings, talking with the young professors, working for the union, carrying a ring of keys to unlock darkened laboratories and libraries. He has discovered amazing things in the book stacks in the small hours of the night, hand-printed pamphlets from Mayakovsky, the plays of Sadakichi Hartman, untranslated poems of Roberto Bolaño. Sometimes poets famous for their political commitment come to read on campus and he alone knows that the kitchen workers in that particular building are bullied and abused by a notorious boss, but they, the workers, immigrants from Laos and El Salvador, refuse to file union grievances, refuse to confront authority in any fashion, too familiar in their previous lives with its costs. That's my niche, he says, between the poets and the dishwashers. Not to bring them together but simply to bridge the distance, the space between lives and words, the passion of the mind to connect and the intransigence of the world restraining it.

  

2.

  

For lunch we go to a Peruvian restaurant in the city and eat ceviche of mussels and onions and a platter of fried shrimp and octopus with bottles of Cristal beer.

  

He would like to live in Cuzco or Lima, find a way to visit Nicanor Parra in Chile.

  

He would like to live in Mexico City for a while and translate young poets back and forth across that frontier.

  

For a couple years I trained to be a masseur, he says, at an institute run by a Japanese master, and one day I felt against my palm a pulse of wind rising from a woman's back as surely as I feel the wind on my face right now—I was looking around the room for the draft, as if it were a practical joke, but it was what it was—pure energy rising out of the body.

  

Why did you give it up? I ask.

  

People would say, You saved my life!—and they would mean it. I didn't want to be that person. I don't believe in saviors.

  

3.

  

The last night of his visit we sat up late talking in the backyard, John smoking his unfiltered cigarettes, our bodies marked by the passage of time but our minds still turning familiar gears, still worrying the old bones—as if the years were the transcript of a trial we could review at command, as if the mind is a prisoner and the thread of its movement restlessly pacing the corridors of a decaying labyrinth might even now be rewound and reexamined.

  

Consciousness is a caged tiger, John said, raging against the bars.

  

But the capsules of our minds open so infrequently, I said, like the airlocks on some giant spaceship. We could live together like penguins, like ants, we could be bees in a hive and still not know each other.

  

A tree frog sat with us, balled on the windowsill, pale and wide-eyed, like a glob of uncooked pastry dough, as the winter trade winds flung the leaves of the live oak tree down upon our heads like soft axe-blows, talking about translation and semiotics and novels written on cell phones by green-haired teenagers in Tokyo subway stations, arguing about literature and how it evolves, or degrades, or transforms—does anyone still read Zbignew Herbert the way we did, or Delmore Schwarz, or Malcolm Lowry, does anyone care about Huidobro, Tranströmer, Pessoa?—eulogizing great bookstores and the evanescence of artifacts, the long-prophesied death of the book, quotidian relic of an archaic technology.

  

But books have been my whole life, he said. What will we do without them?

  

Loneliness is everywhere, John. Not even poetry can save us.

We call the local rats "fruit rats" because it makes them sound cleaner and friendlier, less pestilent. In this tropical climate they live outdoors, often in the tops of palm trees, walking along the telephone lines at sunset, eating the various lemons and oranges, mangos and avocados in backyards up and down the block. Unless they take up residence in my gutters or crawlspace I don't bother them, but recently I've found evidence of such trespass, and so set about to kill the offender with old-fashioned, spring-loaded rat traps from the hardware store. But the first few nights don't go well at all. I set the traps at dusk, and in the morning the bait of old cheese-rind has vanished, with the traps entirely unmolested. Strange. This time I decide to set my three rat traps side by side, with only the middle one baited, and the next morning—disaster: two traps lie wantonly sprung and empty, but the third trap, the middle one, has disappeared. Where? How? It could only be some larger creature that has done it, a neighborhood cat, or a super rat, an animal now injured, or debilitated, which might have crawled some distance into the bushes, perhaps—but I can find no sign of it anywhere. Chastened, I abandon my rat removal campaign, and within a week forget all about it, or try to, until one night watching TV after dinner I hear an odd noise floating through the window, clomp, clump, a kind of straggled clatter, growing louder, more insistent, and I realize, in a flash, that it can only be the noise of whatever animal I have inadvertently snared, a thump every bit as deafening in its accusation as the throb of the "Tell-Tale Heart." Quickly I grab a flashlight and there it is, a young opossum with a rat trap fastened to its left front paw, limping across the deck like a vengeful spirit. Panic tears at me, fear and remorse, the realization that I had known all along that I would not escape unscathed from this misadventure, that a cost would yet be levied against my soul. But there's hope—if I can catch the opossum somehow, if I can release the trap and set him free! I grab a towel as I dash out the back door, thinking to throw it like a net, wondering about scratches, whether possums carry rabies, but he has caught wind of me and begins to scurry away, impaired but still nimble, scooting along the wall and behind the central air conditioner and into a hole scrabbled in the hard dirt below my deck, out of reach. So that's where he lives. In the morning I remove the decking screws and take up several planks but there is no sign of the opossum. It seems likely this eviction will doom it, and I don't know how it survived this long in such a state—though its kind are nothing if not survivors, having borne their prehensile tails and marsupial pouches from the time of dinosaurs—but I do not hesitate to fill its burrow with dirt, and barricade the entryway with slabs and shards from an old flower pot to prevent him from returning. There is nothing else to be done. We are bound by what we carry, we belong to what we kill. The porter weed has failed and needs replacing. Tangerines lie where they have fallen in the sparse grass. In the hours before dawn I find myself in the backyard talking with the ghost of Edgar Allen Poe, begging his forgiveness, though even as I lay the first stone upon his tiny grave—not a stone but a shard of broken pottery—I recognize, by the palpable quality of the moonlight, by the warm tears against my cheek, by the ravishing perfume of night-flowering jasmine—that this life, too, is no more substantial than a dream.

Transformation, disintegration, entropy, loss,

  

fragments of song

  

borne off the ocean on a wind tasting of oysters, pine resin, and brine.

  

Everything vanishes, but where does it go? How do you know where any path will lead, which rock the salamander hides beneath, feldspar and mullein, sprigs of parsley, days of ether in a rye field under Russian skies, seashells, driftwood, old plastics—the scarred, marble-hard artificiality of bowling balls hurled and spun so long the bowling alley has become a tavern, a flower store, then a Laundromat fallen on hard times in a section of the city once seen as up-and-coming now spiraling without explanation into terminal destitution or a post-industrial malaise, no one seems sure which. No one wants to risk a guess. There is no one on that street even to ask, amidst the pale northern sunlight and gutter-collected leaves of late autumn.

  

Still, if the universe is an endless collection of departures they must be met in equal measure by arrivals, conservation of matter being a Newtonian law.

  

Here is the flower seller with her cart, the policeman chewing gum, the spotted puppy, bees at the gates of nectar, ants in dark cities, thorny branches castigated by wind.

  

You can smell the lingering odor of flowers from the lemon tree

  

but you cannot touch them.

  

Where are they now? In which index or chronicle is that precise configuration of molecules recorded—when the boyish policeman stopped to greet the flower girl whose shadow bruised the faces of the peonies as a single pollen-coated bee emerged—

  

that instant erased like fog from a window?

  

In line at the cafeteria the food steams and beckons, suggestive jello cubes in melamine bowls, lima beans exuding butter from every pore, whether we posses a nickel or a fortune in bullion the potential realizations are infinite as long as they remain just that. But we must choose! It is either chicken and rice or a cup of coffee with banana cream pie, which however sensational is still a diminishment, the uxorious richness of the possible replaced by the finitude of the real.

  

From the ever-rotating food-display we have chosen our final meal.

  

From the great time-stream we have arrested a single atomic numeral and so selected our destiny.

  

Tonight the wind is painting the pine needles with salt while the chameleons cling patiently beneath the porch light. They know that moths will come if they wait. They wait. Moths come. The wind calms, the fog begins to lift. The house is restored to its timbre of groaning night sounds, a nocturne of peeping tree frogs, the soft moans of palm fronds and termite-ridden beams.

  

Where once they were bright with flowers,

  

the limbs of the lemon tree are heavy with clustering, forest-green nubs, nuptial fruit amid the thorns.