In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

It’s beautiful whether or not you let it be colin cheney “Mystery? It’s all a mystery.” I’ve flown back from Thailand for the funeral, suburban Philadelphia. The afternoon before the interment, we drive to the church three, maybe four times, delivering lilies, depositing and retrieving aunts and cousins, standing at the lectern imagining the nave full of family and strangers. Each trip, there and back, we pass a road-killed stag on the edge of the pike. Shoulders tense with rigor mortis, crown of antlers like undead coral on the macadam: the white belly unbroken. No one moves it from the road. Just before dusk, we drive home to linger in the kitchen with bourbon and beer, the ham and gratin potatoes a neighbor has left. When we pass the deer this time, two vultures lurk on the curb—petaled, Beauty rose faces; beaks suggesting an antler half-swallowed— shifting from foot to foot, waiting for the evening traffic to lull. So that they can approach, begin their work. Someone’s sure to call someone to come and gather the deer now that the scavengers have arrived. I wonder how much of the beast they’ll make part of themselves before the body is trucked away. A father and son pry a gravestone out of the speedwell and wood sorrel. With sponge and toothbrush, they scrub dirt from the rills of eroded aleph and daleth 31 and mem that the fishtail and lettering chisels left in the stone. Around them the green light and mosquito heat stretch through the retaken wilderness of the cemetery and out to the encircling wall. After taking the city, the soldiers had smashed the tombstones, sold the choice pieces to masons, and used the rest as paving stones—scattering the unearthed bones. Years later, many of the pieces were dug up, reclaimed and gathered together. And because it was impossible to restore and make each individual memorial whole again, someone began to take these shards of names and dates and created a mosaic of this breakage, this shattered evidence of lives. “In this world / the actual occurs.” Dear Phil— A guy came today to see about the mold in the room that’ll be the baby’s. It’s currently my study. Every few weeks we find something else filmed with a fine, blue mold. A raincoat, my Brooklyn Dodgers cap, my damn books: I went at them with vinegar and baking soda, cursing. My friend Kathy, a cartoonist I know here, came over to translate, as my Thai is still terrible. An architect friend told us these were the guys who’d gone into homes after the flood waters finally fell in January, scrubbing away the two meters of fetid grime: factory runoff, decomposed fauna and flora, the mold blossomed in the greenhouse air. Turns out these guys don’t know anything about mold— “I’m not a doctor,” he says, however one says that in Thai. “I can’t figure out what’s in the air,” Kathy translates. Fantastic. Kathy was up ʼtil five this morning illustrating these poems by Nick Gulig, a Thai-American guy from Wisconsin here on a Fulbright. You’d like him. Serious about poetry, funny—digs boxing and dark, folk harmonies. He’s writing fine, strange poems: “Your name is not // the world of things / I sing.” He told me he’d never written about a city before living in Bangkok. Except the poems aren’t about Bangkok. He’s smart enough to let the poems unfold in an invented cityscape rather than this actual place, this city that I keep trying to build into my own poems. But maybe it took being here to create the pressure necessary to let his imagination work the memory—fragments of memory—into some new reality: the poem. Hell, that’s probably not the way Nick thinks about it. But his poems remind me of something I’d forgotten , something you tried to teach me once about rejigging reality in a poem. 32 So Mari asked me to write something about what it’s been like knowing you. I keep picturing one of those poetry events where the major and minor poets of America stand up to say things like “let me tell you about Phil Levine,” or “what can I say about Philip Levine?” or “let me tell you about the Phil that I know.” The inevitable speeches that’d follow would be beautifully wrought, saccharine, obsequious...

Share