Her companion

The young woman has a limp. Also a wooden staff, ornately burned, which shows that the limp is committed to her and she to it. The staff shines on each end: one rubs the ground and the other her hand. Though indoors, she wears a leather cowboy hat and black sunglasses. A coiled wire figure-eight, or is it a tilted infinity, pins a pair of blue feathers to her hatband. She leans into one bookcase and then the next, going about chores in silence. There is no smile under the hat. The limp has introduced her to many more years than she owns. Still, she is content, and as anyone would, fills her tilted basket full.

Germophilia

"Hope you feel better soon," I tell Imma, handing her a receipt as she leaves. The next lady in line, inches away from releasing her purse onto the counter, suddenly frees herself from gravity and sucks her possessions and facial features upward. She leans away, but hisses with the air of someone leaning in: "Does she have The Flu?"

"Oh no, just a sore throat I think," I reply, from within a mask of cheer.

"Oo. Ooo," she coos, peering at the counter as she would a fresh grave. "I'm a huge germophobe. I think I don't want to set anything down here."

"Well, ah, I'm sure I could wipe it down for you, or would you like some sanitizer?" I reach for my spray bottle and cloth, but her face remains frozen in arches.

"Um, I think I'll just go to another desk."

Her caution has saved her from the plague, she thinks. But who do you think touched the door handle, I want to ask her, or the pens? The delivery confirmation slips? Who stacked the brochures there for you? Who stocked the walls with boxes and stamps? Who coughed in the entry? Who sighed? Her lack of thoroughness in paranoia is disappointing. Why settle for neurosis? If one really wants to be positive of one's hygiene, commit to psychosis. Witness the colorful festival of bacteria dancing on all surfaces, not just toilets and doorknobs. Acknowledge the legion of supremely creative viruses, struggling to evolve as all life forms do, all of us parasites thriving upon other beings to survive. Tremble at the ugly, though incomplete, truth: it's a race to the death, and enemies dwell within necessary oxygen, food and drink, elimination. There is no escape.

The woman has settled at Shanelle's counter. Shanelle hands her a book of stamps, perfectly concealing her sinus headache and congested nasal passages, smiling and nodding. Meanwhile, I greet my next customer, who twiddles his sniffly nose, then reaches forward kindly to shake my hand.

Students at the asylum

She walks us over calm green lawns into the stuccoed belltower building. A fountain bubbles, carved with ample time by long-since-dead artisans in Roosevelt's WPA. It's tiled in yellow and blue ceramic, brightened by a flood of California sun. Once an asylum, today a small public university. Here is her office, admissions, a counseling center. There are now gates in the fences, which were fences built for show, one senses: anyone with a hint of pep and a three-step start could clear them and tackle the foothills beyond. She passes us by the art studio, wide and luxuriantly stocked. Colonial windows bow open to yield summer air, filtered by rising green scribbles of ivy. Students past, among you Charlie Parker, was it too bad a place to be stuck, in either sense of the word? A few say the Eagles wrote Hotel California about the place in its mad days, but only an unrefurbished dormitory makes sinister suggestions: smoke stains, windowless cells. Soon painters will come and leave a cheery white coat. Masons will make holes for the sun, then the new class will arrive.

The voice of Judy Collins

The voice of Judy Collins plain and powerful comes from the tape player across the room while I lay looking at plastic stars taped to the ceiling, glow-in-the-dark. I am in bed, not falling asleep. The voice of Judy Collins sings five songs, then the player clunks and the tape hiss quits. I get out of bed and flip the tape to the other side, six songs. Words I know by heart. I also know most people my age listen to pop from now, not folk from twenty years ago, but I don't feel strange. It is true, but not something I know, that the voice of Judy Collins is what my mother's voice would sound like if she were to sing, if my mother were to stand in front of people and sing from behind long hair and a white dress. Those are the songs she would sing and how she would sing them, if she ever raised her voice.

E1

It was the baby's fault, maybe. "I got to stop somewhere, Mam," I say. "Gini's thirsty."

"Not one of those places," Mami carps as I turn toward a shop. She hates coffee that comes in paper cups and is not Bustelo. But I hold the door open, steadying the stroller with one foot, and she goes in. I leave her at a table by the window, paging through a daily paper.

Twelve minutes later, I come out of the bathroom and if Mam isn't under the table pretending to faint. The newspaper's still on top, fanned open. Lucky for me it's 3 pm and very slow and the coffee servers are busy typing into their phones, not worrying about the lady who slid onto the floor. You couldn't even see her from the street, just a paper on a table with a girl rushing toward it, carrying a baby.

Mam's god is not subtle, that's for sure: right on E1 is the photo of me modeling that ostrich feather stuff of Doro's, with the hat that looks like Rubik's cubes stuffed inside a hen. Leave it to her God to stick that photo under her nose. Leave it to me to forget to hide it. I rub her shoulder, but she ignores me. Gini thinks this is extra fun and crawls onto Mam's neck, squealing. But Mam's staring into the future and sees a teenage Gini begging, or talking to a psychiatrist, or majoring in women's studies or something awful like that. She sees herself in a sweatsuit eating cat food, calling pigeons to her windowsill for company. As if imagination were destiny.

"Mami, get off the floor. If you stay here they'll make you buy something."

"That job will make you famous and you'll leave us. You'll fly off and be flat and cheap like that photo." Perfume rises where Gini tugs the folds of her blouse, making a small atmosphere around us.

"No. I won't. We'll be fine." Is this true? My mother takes five long breaths, staring at the bottom of the table, deciding. She is beautiful there, braid pressed into the floor, baby pawing her brooch of false gold lilies. She feels my eyes on her beauty, the beauty she gave me, copied in papers to sell clothes, that will maybe let my daughter live in beauty too. After the last exhalation, she turns her eyes to mine and, for now, forgives:

"Next time you show me first. There's more rotten pink gum under the tables in these places than a lady should see."

Homecoming

The city is suddenly antiseptic. Sure, I moved to the suburbs to escape the filth, but I'm a little nostalgic for the cocked shoulders of gutter punks, for the rhythmless hippies flogging djembe, for the minor river of paper and dust that teased ankles and eddied down alleys. Mayor Schwarz did a bang-up job, I've got to admit.

I had envisioned a parade of turning heads, old haunts glowing with they-knew-me-when. Instead, newspapers hang open off coffee shop tables, abandoned after the business-lunch rush, their me-centered headlines readerless, unappreciated. This was supposed to be my homecoming.

The cell phone whines in my pocket and I ignore it. No doubt it's Marie wanting an explanation for my lateness to the benefit. I've quit smoking, I decide, except for one more here and now, though I half expect some cop to politely ask me to crush it out. Perhaps it's good to have a disappointing return. Discontent is a great motivator, and if I intend to follow the limelight, I'd better work up a few more stones in my shoes, burrs in my gloves. Nicotine tars my lungs, then disperses tiny clouds of pollution and ego into the neighborhood.

Our sky

We look at the night sky, and what we most want to find are invisible lines between stars that other people have fixed, and named, the shape of a hunter or a woman, a house or a crown or an earth animal. And we like best the brightest ones, the ones closest to us. This way the sky is ours: in our image, members graded by their nearness to our own star. On this planet we are all the dust of stars, clots of aggregate miraculously aware and centered in our own selves. We are all stars. But stargazers remember: stars are not all us.

The last

This is the last time I will see you, he tells the hotel receptionist, silently. And you, and you, to the man pouring paper cups of white waffle batter in the breakfast line, to the squat woman with a wheel of arms who pops in and out of bedrooms, undoing their recent rumples, whirling them back into an original state of cleanliness, as if they had never smelled of guests. He did not know for sure: he might again come through this city, years later, might perhaps stay in the same hotel. But the odds favored finality. He was already sixty, and hotel staff turnover was high. Wondered, if somehow his vision marked those whom he would not see again in their present forms, say with a red glow or dot, just how red the subway throng would be, or the movie crowd, or the family reunion. And who would remain unglowing to the end: who would be with him at the last.

Invisibility

They don't hide their quarreling from me as they would from a person of higher status. As a cashier—a servant—I am invisible until useful. Often, it is the woman who has charge of the transaction. She determines bags or boxes, she's in charge of coupons, she knows if it should be check or credit card. If he's late wandering the aisles, if he picks the wrong broth, or packs ice cream with basil, she reproaches, and I become useful: I should affirm her glance, which says: Men! And very occasionally, a man will belittle his wife before me. He's exasperated that she thinks you use an ink pen to sign the tiny screen. His seeking glance says: Isn't my wife stupid? Both glances are ugly, but his, being more particular, is somehow uglier. Either way, I gaze intently into my scale as if it were a tiny portal to the old invisibility.

Lists 2: Night shift

9 am. Temperature 34, clouds bright but thick, passerby twelve.
9:14 am. Oranges must be peeled in single spiral, else unclean.
9:27 am. Phone Gretchen, get reports on son, dad, weather six miles southeast.
10:01 am. Nap on couch thanks to blissful heat from oven.
12:31 pm. Out of oranges. Also Cream of Wheat, rice.
12:42 pm. Aim to leave, cannot leave, cannot be sure I would not leave oven on, ignite house, immolate journals and pathetic wardrobe.
12:43 pm. Also cannot be sure I would line plants up in correct order. Might disappoint plants.
12:44 pm. Chair, couch, bed.
5:00 pm. Call from Gretchen, rent not paying itself, etc., OK, OK.
5:41 pm. Outfits unfit. Sweaters stretched, taupe, beige. Drowning in ocean of neutrals.
6:12 pm. Beige must suffice.
6:14 pm. But better with orange lipstick.
6:22 pm. Time to go.
6:28 pm. Time to go. Time to go.
6:29 pm. But rituals.
6:59 pm. Must buy fireproof lockbox for journals; can't stand this every day.
7:04 pm. Plants wary but wet. Sleep tight beautiful greens!
7:06 pm. Off to work. Late in both senses of the word. Good night world.

Lists 1: Found in bags left for re-use

Half-eaten string cheese.
Popcorn.
Potting soil. Once rich, now disappointed.
Human hair. Subsets: curly, grey, brunette, wavy.
Dog hair. Mixed.
Earwig. Subsets: living, dead.
Tears. Subsets: oily, spattered, pooled.
Orchid bloom.
Snow.
Laugh.
Shadow of cat.
Hole of mouse.
Sigh.

Empty

Beyond everything is emptiness, they say. It is beyond and also immanent in sunsets, lice, chimneys, beans, philosophy, cribbage, reiki, my god, their gods, love, hell, flannel. The ground of being, from which all is made, into which all dissolves. Unconsoling, unpunishing, unanything, it is also fullness, complete potential. But how can emptiness be the highest currency of spirit? Who can pray to emptiness for clarity? Who can visualize emptiness for concentration? And what did emptiness think it was, to write us into this book of colored chaos?

Minneapolis

Minne from the Dakota water, polis the Greek city. Metro laced with dirty slush, faces tight under scarves and hats and hoods against a cutting wind. Blocks torn up and blocks torn down in perpetual construction, reconstruction, deconstruction. Some are pushed to cheaper rents, some pulled to hotter spots, white flight and black flight and brown and yellow and red flight. But you are home. In dreams some see your true name. They crawl under wreckage, deserted projects and churches and communes. Graffiti signals the low way below the highways: here is where the pure river flows. Wide channel, slow and clear, here your people wade. A baby floats with eyes open. A pair of buffalo enter to drink, a covered wagon pulls to the edge, old ones fill a jug. A round mother, her thin lover, children whoop echoes off the bridges above. Lost vets push into the current, the dirt that had assailed them carried away. A row of paralytics swim, swift and free. High-rise foundations and ghetto beams rise all around us, but light filters through and we swim here in minne the temperature of love.

The blessing of tongues

Three voices bounce off each other, resonating up the stairwell. Two guys and a woman are speaking in Japanese, balancing lunch trays and exchanging jokes on their way to or from the break room. Languages surround you: as you blow on your microwaved soup, as you wait for the bus, as you move your whites from the washer to the dryer. The many tongues remind you that you don't know everything, that other ways exist. That speech is a musical and percussive tool of consciousness, rather than consciousness itself. That the stilted English you hear on the phone is the echo of a deep, full mind, its richness filtered through the coarse sieve of translation. You live in a world of six point seven billion teasing, griping, flirting, exulting aliens, of whom you are one, with whom you are kin.

To the poet

I can see that you're sitting there, pretending to read the paper, fantasizing about me. About my piercings and tattoos and how you could please me by buying me patchouli and fresh local irises and shiitakes. You would rent a loft and have me move in and life would be sunlit and candlelit by turns. I'd be an easy catch, late thirties and still pouring coffee and toasting bagels. But maybe you don't imagine that I have two children? One with a learning disorder? A live-in sister? Psoriasis? You know as well as I do that even if I hadn't, we wouldn't spend the rest of our lives making love on the futon. Anyway, you're not my only gazer: there's the Swedish human rights attorney, and the bass player with the houseboat, both at least ten years younger, I might mention. Does someone pay you to write dreams in your notebook, to stare through the steam of your half-caf? What's behind your glut of down time? My life's bound up, all hours, with ties most folks can't see. And all my dreams are free.