In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist’s appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist’s waiting room.
It was winter. It got dark
early. The waiting room
was full of grown-up people,
arctics and overcoats,
lamps and magazines.
My aunt was inside
what seemed like a long time
and while I waited I read
the National Geographic
(I could read) and carefully
studied the photographs:
the inside of a volcano,
black, and full of ashes;
then it was spilling over
in rivulets of fire.
Osa and Martin Johnson
dressed in riding breeches,
laced boots, and pith helmets.
A dead man slung on a pole
—“Long Pig,” the caption said.
Babies with pointed heads
wound round and round with string;
black, naked women with necks
wound round and round with wire
like the necks of light bulbs.
Their breasts were horrifying.
I read it right straight through.
I was too shy to stop.
And then I looked at the cover:
the yellow margins, the date.
Suddenly, from inside,
came an oh! of pain
—Aunt Consuelo’s voice—
not very loud or long.
I wasn’t at all surprised;
even then I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn’t. What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I—we—were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918.

I said to myself: three days
and you’ll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world.
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should you be one, too?
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.
I gave a sidelong glance
—I couldn’t look any higher—
at shadowy gray knees,
trousers and skirts and boots
and different pairs of hands
lying under the lamps.
I knew that nothing stranger
had ever happened, that nothing
stranger could ever happen.

Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?
What similarities—
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts—
held us all together
or made us all just one?
How—I didn’t know any
word for it—how “unlikely”. . .
How had I come to be here,
like them, and overhear
a cry of pain that could have
got loud and worse but hadn’t?

The waiting room was bright
and too hot. It was sliding
beneath a big black wave,
another, and another.

Then I was back in it.
The War was on. Outside,
in Worcester, Massachusetts,
were night and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth
of February, 1918.

Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal, after learning
my flight had been delayed four hours, I heard an announcement:
“If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please
come to the gate immediately.”

Well—one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there.

An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just
like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing. “Help,”
said the flight agent. “Talk to her. What is her problem? We
told her the flight was going to be late and she did this.”

I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke haltingly.
“Shu-dow-a, Shu-bid-uck Habibti? Stani schway, Min fadlick, Shu-bit-
se-wee?” The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly
used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been cancelled
entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the
next day. I said, “No, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just later, who is
picking you up? Let's call him.”

We called her son, I spoke with him in English. I told him I would
stay with his mother till we got on the plane and ride next to 
her. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just 
for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while
in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends. Then I 
thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know
and let them chat with her? This all took up two hours.

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling of her life, patting my knee,
answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool
cookies—little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and
nuts—from her bag—and was offering them to all the women at the gate.
To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the
lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same powdered
sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie.

And then the airline broke out free apple juice from huge coolers and two
little girls from our flight ran around serving it and they
were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend—
by now we were holding hands—had a potted plant poking out of her bag,
some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country tradi-
tion. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and I thought, This
is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that
gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—seemed apprehensive about
any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too.

This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

Some say thronging cavalry, some say foot soldiers, 
others call a fleet the most beautiful of 
sights the dark earth offers, but I say it’s what-
            ever you love best.

And it’s easy to make this understood by 
everyone, for she who surpassed all human 
kind in beauty, Helen, abandoning her
            husband—that best of

men—went sailing off to the shores of Troy and 
never spent a thought on her child or loving 
parents: when the goddess seduced her wits and
            left her to wander,

she forgot them all, she could not remember 
anything but longing, and lightly straying 
aside, lost her way. But that reminds me
            now: Anactória,

she’s not here, and I’d rather see her lovely 
step, her sparkling glance and her face than gaze on
all the troops in Lydia in their chariots and
            glittering armor.

And a man said, Speak to us of Self-Knowledge.
And he answered, saying:
Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and the nights.
But your ears thirst for the sound of your heart’s knowledge.
You would know in words that which you have always known in thought.
You would touch with your fingers the naked body of your dreams.

And it is well you should.
The hidden well-spring of your soul must needs rise and run murmuring to the sea;
And the treasure of your infinite depths would be revealed to your eyes.
But let there be no scales ot weigh your unknown treasure;
And seek not the depths of your knowledge with staff or sounding line.
For self is a sea boundless and measureless.

Say not, “I have found the truth,” but rather, “I have found a truth.” 
Say not, "I have found the path of the soul.” Say rather, “I have met the soul walking upon my path.”
For the soul walks upon all paths.
The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed.
The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.

Nothing can ever happen twice.
In consequence, the sorry fact is
that we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to practice.

Even if there is no one dumber,
if you’re the planet’s biggest dunce,
you can’t repeat the class in summer:
this course is only offered once.

No day copies yesterday,
no two nights will teach what bliss is
in precisely the same way,
with precisely the same kisses.

One day, perhaps some idle tongue
mentions your name by accident:
I feel as if a rose were flung
into the room, all hue and scent.

The next day, though you’re here with me,
I can’t help looking at the clock:
A rose? A rose? What could that be?
Is it a flower or a rock?

Why do we treat the fleeting day
with so much needless fear and sorrow?
It’s in its nature not to stay:
Today is always gone tomorrow.

With smiles and kisses, we prefer
to seek accord beneath our star,
although we’re different (we concur)
just as two drops of water are.

I caught a tremendous fish

and held him beside the boat

half out of water, with my hook

fast in a corner of his mouth.

He didn’t fight.

He hadn’t fought at all.

He hung a grunting weight,

battered and venerable

and homely. Here and there

his brown skin hung in strips

like ancient wallpaper,

and its pattern of darker brown

was like wallpaper:

shapes like full-blown roses

stained and lost through age.

He was speckled with barnacles,

fine rosettes of lime,

and infested

with tiny white sea-lice,

and underneath two or three

rags of green weed hung down.

While his gills were breathing in

the terrible oxygen

—the frightening gills,

fresh and crisp with blood,

that can cut so badly—

I thought of the coarse white flesh

packed in like feathers,

the big bones and the little bones,

the dramatic reds and blacks

of his shiny entrails,

and the pink swim-bladder

like a big peony.

I looked into his eyes

which were far larger than mine

but shallower, and yellowed,

the irises backed and packed

with tarnished tinfoil

seen through the lenses

of old scratched isinglass.

They shifted a little, but not

to return my stare.

—It was more like the tipping

of an object toward the light.

I admired his sullen face,

the mechanism of his jaw,

and then I saw

that from his lower lip

—if you could call it a lip—

grim, wet, and weaponlike,

hung five old pieces of fish-line,

or four and a wire leader

with the swivel still attached,

with all their five big hooks

grown firmly in his mouth.

A green line, frayed at the end

where he broke it, two heavier lines,

and a fine black thread

still crimped from the strain and snap

when it broke and he got away.

Like medals with their ribbons

frayed and wavering,

a five-haired beard of wisdom

trailing from his aching jaw.

I stared and stared

and victory filled up

the little rented boat,

from the pool of bilge

where oil had spread a rainbow

around the rusted engine

to the bailer rusted orange,

the sun-cracked thwarts,

the oarlocks on their strings,

the gunnels—until everything

was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!

And I let the fish go.

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

^{for Nica, Mary, Ryan, et al.}

A friend on a rival team confesses  
they’ve always been into it.  
As a kid, they locked themselves in a closet  
to read Trivial Pursuit cards.  
They wanted to know everything. 

Their team is named Shooting Nudes. 
We are Butch Believers.  
The next category is Famous Dykes.  
The whole bar is packed and smells like  
bike sweat and Cosmo slushies.  

Our best guess is that it was Audre Lorde  
in ’89 advocating for Palestine.  
On the fly, we struggle to spell  
Stormé DeLarverie, but we’re hoping  
bad handwriting hides it, huddling closer 

so no one hears our answers.  
Meanwhile, the National Park Service  
erases the letter T in twenty places  
from the Stonewall Monument website.  
Slime mold? Whiptail lizards? The category is  

Queer Ecology. Now, a federal directive 
threatens to cut gender-affirming  
care for youth in our city.  
The category is Gay for Pay.  
Will Smith, Tom Hanks, Hilary Swank.  

Cleverness I know can feel exclusive  
but here I lean into my friends’ literacies, 
their wisdoms my shelter. 
The forty somethings know the local lore,  
the bygone parties: Donny’s, Pegasus,  

Operation Sappho, while The Gen Z kids ace 
the tech round, scribbling the name of  
a translesbian hacktivist on a canceled sci-fi show.  
It turns out being an autodidact is  
the unspoken prerequisite for being queer in America. 

Will we nerd ourselves into futures  
of intergenerational knowing?  
In our time, the Press 3 option  
of the youth suicide hotline 
was created and deleted.  

In booths with curly fries, 
we turn to each other and say:  
Kiki. Bussy. Bulldagger.  
Kitty Tsui. Vaginal (Crème) Davis.  
Truths our bodies internalized arise  

in quick crescendos like this one: 
Bernard Mayes founded  
the first suicide prevention hotline 
in the country. I know this because  
he was a dean at my college and the first 

audaciously out educator I ever met.  
Monthly he held a donut hour, 
I was closeted then, so I showed up early 
to squeeze onto a cramped couch 
and listen: In 1961, he leafletted streets 

with a phone number safe to dial 
and then waited by a red rotary phone 
certain that many would call.  
The category is Gay Rage.  
Name the band and the song: 

Bikini Kill, “Suck My Left One”  
Bronski Beat, “Why?”  
Princess Nokia, “Tomboy” 
Planningtorock, “Get Your  
Fckin Laws Off My Body”

When she looked down from the kitchen window
into the back yard and the brown wicker
baby carriage in which she had tucked me
three months old to lie out in the fresh air
of my first January the carriage
was shaking she said and went on shaking
and she saw I was lying there laughing
she told me about it later it was
something that reassured her in a life
in which she had lost everyone she loved
before I was born and she had just begun
to believe that she might be able to
keep me as I lay there in the winter
laughing it was what she was thinking of
later when she told me that I had been
a happy child and she must have kept that
through the gray cloud of all her days and now
out of the horn of dreams of my own life
I wake again into the laughing child

^{The whole earth is filled with the love of God.
—Kwame Dawes}

A stream in a forest and a boy fishing,
heart aflame, head hush, tasting the world—
lick and pant. The Holy Scripture
is animal not book.
I should know, I have smoked
the soul of God, psalm burning
between fingers on an African afternoon.
And how is it that death can open up
an alleluia from the core of a man?
How easily the profound fritters away in words.
And the simple wisdom of my brother:
What you taste with abandon
even God cannot take from you.
All my life, men with blackened insides
have fought to keep
the flutter of a white egret in my chest
from bursting into flight, into glory.

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”

Good morning. Good day. Good afternoon. Good evening.
I am happy to meet you. My name is Richard.
Here is my passport. I have nothing at all to declare.
There is a message for you of the greatest urgency.
Where is the nearest taxi stand? the nearest telephone?
To the right. To the left. Straight ahead.
You can walk there. You can take the bus.
Someone is missing. Word of him can be heard
where the cricket songs are igniting the grass.
Please consult your phrasebook for the proper response.
Two blocks on the left. Turn right. Do you have anything 
I want? How much will this cost? What is the toll on my
feelings? Is there another word for missing? Will you have 
something to drink? You can point to the proper question 
or answer. This is my wife who brought the message.

While you are waiting, let us take a closer look at the town. 
Here is the wonderful Roman Coliseum. What do you know 
about the early martyrs, who wavered before the lions, 
who wept, ashamed, into their own arms? You do not have
to know the exact words. The wind from some far place 
does not have to fill your shoes. How much do I owe?
There is one item missing. There is a defect in the sleeve.
Can we agree on a price? The theater where Catullus played is
on the other side of the Adige. Here is the famous Church 
of the Veronese martyrs. Here are the famous tombs of the Medici.
You will see others built high into the sides of buildings.

But just a minute. Hold on. Wait. This phrase book cannot 
answer everything. This guide book is not really like being there.
Where was the message from? Where are we? The book
says nothing. What does it tell you about the years Dante 
spent exiled here from Florence? For him it was all assassins, 
and the heart’s gravediggers who abandoned 
their half-completed holes to the dark. For him it was 
the moon sweating in the fields outside the walls.

If you wish, we will turn to a different category.
Look, here is the supposed tomb of Juliet. The lovers have 
dropped their notes in languages we might be able to translate.
You should consult our other books in this series. 
We won’t even bother with the language of lovers.
My own love is wondering about the message.
Maybe this is a good time to practice ordering her wine.
We suggest the local Valpolicella or Amarone while you wait.
It seems your urgent news is being delayed in another language.
This is a good time to toast your love. You may mention
the uncut meadow, the haystacks waiting to take shape,
how all the roads to the past have been closed,
how each night she tightens around you with the dark.
Can you find the Piazza Erbe with its famous umbrellas 
and market? You will find fresh peaches and pears.
You will find fresh oranges. Here you will be able 
to practice many phrases. Be careful about numbers.

Nearby is Juliet’s balcony. There are street corners, 
whole towns not shown on your map. There are the dead 
who still lean against the buildings without the proper facts. 
There is Love crouched beside the stalled car on a side street.
Without practice all your new phrases will evaporate 
from the city streets like rain water. Don’t worry. 
Here is a night’s growth of fog, covering the fountains,
disguising the few tourists who are still out, like you.
Here comes night wrapped in a shadow of remembered scents, 
stopping at my bench, opening her sack for me.
What is this made of? Can we agree on a lower price?
Using these idioms, you will soon sound like a real native.
Can you help me find what I want? How far is it?

In the Gobi desert scientists have unearthed an 80 million-
year-old lizard never before known to man.
Beneath the market they have found an Etruscan village.
Would you care for another glass of Amarone? 
It is said in today’s paper that all news of our universe
travels the crest of nearly imperceptible gravitational waves
which we can decipher only months later. It was in this square
that the Roman priests would read the entrails of strange birds. 

So it seems that only later will today’s news reach you.
It seems the phrases are filling with desert and salt.
It seems the crows have been unspooling across the Piazza Bra
for an hour, the very hour your friend has turned his car 
into the wrong lane half a world away. What is the tense for this? 
What is the proper word? You may repeat these phrases. 
I feel sick. I have got to see a doctor. I am only a tourist here.
I have an ear ache. I have a terrible headache. I have a toothache. 
I feel nauseated. It hurts here. It hurts there. Yes, I would like 
to take something for it. When should I call again? 
Our connection was cut off. It was a country road, 
the other car coming through the fog over a hill.
It was late afternoon. He must have been reciting
his favorite Byron, his favorite Dante, turning their grief
into love, making love songs of their elegies. It is not possible.
I have this headache. Just a minute while I transpose the sum.
Sign here. The tip is included. Is this enough? Just a minute. 
Here comes despair picking up the used cigarette butts. 
Here are the old memories crouched in the door stoops.

If you cannot find the correct phrase, don’t worry, 
try combining elements from the ones you already know.
This is the moment you must remember how the songs of lovers
pass from one bird to another and become pure joy.
Even the sky is prepared to lie about its moods.
What is your shadow doing there, bent over against the wall.
Please consult the phrase book for the proper response.
Please listen, then repeat the following lines—

My love, whose fingers are matches, whose waist is 
encircled by the arms of the wind. My love, how the world 
sleeps in your throat, how your heart is filled 
with the scents of raspberries and grapes,
to live inside you, to live inside the warm peach.
Otherwise there is no way to stop despair from lurking 
all night in the shadows beside the old toll gate.
Otherwise we will have to weep in another language.
In that case, all our words will fall in love with gravity.
Otherwise we will have to stop taking breaths 
from this moment on. From this moment on
the stopped clocks will observe us. My love,
our hearts are growing full of broken wings. 
My love, to find our voice in a drop of water,
in the tracks the moonlight leaves behind.
If only this were enough. If only the news.
Even the sky. The sky. It hurts here. It hurts here.