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 the 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 barbeque ribs and crab cakes.

 

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 105^th 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 start. 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 Bolano. 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, Transtromer, 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?