News of the Morning, and: The Birth of Ulysses, and: Like Fruit Flies Among Stones, and: The Dance, and: The Book of the Dead Man (Wartime)

News of the Morning

First the officers, handguns drawn,advance in a strangulating arc.The large man holding the knifeturns away, a curiosity for pedestrianssuspended in disbelief. Patrol carsgrowl helter-skelter where brakedat the call to arms. The man's pixilatedface flutters, and he backs off. His armscircle from his shoulders as ifto fly, and his family yet to be told what will happen. It's newswith an afterlife, an outcome to competewith the scientist who says,when pressed, that the evidence indicatesthere is either no life elsewherein the universe or life everywhere. Wrapyour mind around it. Is space dust, she asks,bacterial? Some think so. The grievingthrow a handful of dirt down towardthe coffin, and those who shot straightwould like to start over.

The Birth of Ulysses

They were asking, "What have we come to?"when they first saw Circe, and were bleedingto learn what was out there. They flinched then,when the boat knocked, and when the waves rose,it led them to question who among themwere hands fit for the whiteouts of stormy water.They latched the latches and buttoned down.They pulled on sleeves to sheathe their tattoosand sat beneath decks riding it out, affecting calmwhile milking each story for a hint of landfall.These who were so earthy sat now in a ring,each of them locked in fear. Not one who mightincline to an expression of it dared to say so.They had used all the words they had been givenand now had to invent the story of Ulyssesand picture in their minds the beautiful Circe.

Like Fruit Flies Among Stones

He split his home town and was scot free,if by a whisker,what with the rippling of tide lines elsewherebringing to mind that shore wherecouples parked to mouth their feelingsand get a lickof love. If he was to travel far afield,he still could not stop laughingat his true self, which favored puffy pancakesfor lunch and hummed the oldies.Picture him stuck on the road, the car radiobleating, "Peg o' My Heart,"while he siphons gas from a friend. How farcan he go? There will be no Ulyssesunless he meets his Penelope.

The Dance

If our fate depends on the electro-chemical maneuverof raising a hand, or curving one's arm,or, at the big moment, puckering one's lipswhen one thought it necessary, and if I,in a time when news was news that no longer is,and the moon was still lit from within,and the wheelbarrow sat in sufficiency,the window shade at normal, and ifthere was a mirror to be admiredas one combed and patted one's hair into place before hitching a ride to her house,and the ducks bobbed lightly in the lake,the boats at the wharf, the seaweed in the canal,and the bobber on the fish line,if all of it were implacable like youth—who can say nowit was not of my doing,in the primacy and privacy of the youngfor whom the world as it isis the right one.

The Book of the Dead Man (Wartime)

Live as if you were already dead.

—Zen admonition

1. About the Dead Man in Wartime

The dead man, dead and alive at the same time, joins up.Being both dead and alive, the dead man has nothing to lose.The corpses that were kept out of sight of the President turn up in the newspapers under their red, white and blue blankets.The unregistered suicides at the front skew the casualty figures.The number one adds up, the tens, the hundreds and thousands, and hundreds of thousands.He cannot find enough wheelbarrows for the innards.His spade is blunted from the digging.The dead man is not loyal...