Paradise

The second of three rented

apartments was overhung by

banana leaves, which we

didn’t cut back the whole

year our daughter was two,

but when she was three and

there was a hard freeze, she

picked up all the leaves and

hauled them away. Hans, the

German neighbor, came to

San Jose in the 1950s,

worked as an ambulance

driver, said the rival

ambulance companies would

race to the scenes of

accidents, and if his company

arrived second, they’d park

so close behind the first that

they couldn’t get their gurney

out, that’s how you steal a

patient, he said. Time in

which everything seems

already to have arrived. It’s a

flaw of memory, the sense it

gives of always standing atop

a hill, looking out. But in

dreams there is only one

sense working, which is

different than all the senses

active at once, so dreams

were nothing at all like

waking life. Out for a walk in

the dry creek bed. A

complicated melody, the

spreading around of leaves,

the powerful body striding

along. I do believe in the

depth of a living tree.

Paradise

The book I want to read is

always “over there.” When

choosing between lilac and

jasmine, either flower a sign

of breeze in the treetops,

though unrelated. To what

does my body owe its posture

the way grass owes morning

dew. She doesn’t know that

this morning her mother will

take her to Lake Wyola, and

let her wade out to her neck

in the cold, cold water to

reach the line of buoys that

shapes the swimming zone.

Waiting for a parent to

address and stamp an

envelope filled with coins.

But walking down Mulberry

Street with my family, I felt

the shape of the crowd

around us as my own shape.

What made it poetry. Light

evening chill. 

Paradise

The golf balls were always

brought back to shore from

where they’d landed in the 

lake, though not necessarily

that summer. What gets

within a leaf and wets it from

the inside. Surface murmur I

try to hold all the edges of at

once. The space around an

idea is imaginative space. As

a negative multiplied by a

negative becomes positive,

the doubled distance feels like

proximity. His train whistle

imitation was convincing,

and we remembered it

thereafter, because when he

made it at a crossing as a

joke, the driver swerved the

wheel and peed his pants.

That direction, from this

direction. A road is a form

for wonder. 

Paradise

She held two caterpillars

gently between finger and 

thumb, but tracked in lots of

dirt. The kitchen door

wobbled like a favorite

drunken uncle. Painstaking

annihilation of the spirit.

They grow by inclusion,

specifically, they grow by 

difference. The force that

through the sub-street draws

the skyscrapers which, as they

rise, fill with first-world

tourists watching television

from the edges of still-made

beds. It was a sacred space,

but nobody acted that way.

This was evident when the

film simply recast human-AI

love as human-human love

with no apologies. That’s the

nature of experience. He

picked up the nearest phone

to say it.

Paradise

Bored faces stretch at the

edges. The self is discontent

and seeks diversion, or was

that completion, or was that

existence, in the other. My

friend had an exaggerated

sense of his own importance

at thirteen that was evident

still when I saw him, high

and on his way to a concert,

ten years later on the city bus

route my grandfather had

once driven. Stillness in the

air above acres and acres of

asphalt. Streets, of course,

don’t change, but are acted

upon. Absence is without

question absence, as fruit at

the end of its limb is distinctly

fruit. Wind streams shear off

the cloud head. Still, the red

pruning shears are not

nothing.

Paradise

The magician builds trust by

disbelief, acting the idiot

so that later, belief will come

easily when he manages basic

tasks, let alone magic. A

practiced composure, lined

like a formal shirt. But the

problem of perception is

perspective, permanent

condition of the brain in

language. On the path, ferns

grow rough and ragged,

disruptive to my stride. I

asked for a map and was

given a very old map.

But when he pointed into

the woods, I understood at

once that he meant to flee.

The way was buttery, it could

have been rain. I remember

mainly trees.