In the window of a coast guard office I am framed, to see if I could meet the men who saved my grandfather, in ’98. There I am just, bearded bottom dweller in T-shirt white carhartt brown, shifting sand in my sandals, my reflection stood up young and proud. He sailed to Tahiti after she died and sailed alone, his sextant, the context of his years. And near the Hawaiian coast his boat jibed, the boom cracking his crown, eighty years, into the sea. Where in the mystery of his days did this await, this air in current streaming, where will a thread drop to the ground and coil? His climb aboard is made mystique : Mercurial salvage, a body damp and plunged. Seven days he drifted, seven: the chronometers unwound, rocking on the sea, the drifting ocean, crests and troughs, Earth’s rotation; until a fishing vessel found the salt smell of him, the once dust of him and wired in Morro Bay. The guard revived him, shrunken dry shell. It was six. There the evening smell of oysters caught today frying in the fishing cabins under oil lamps, algae, dead fish or barnacles and cries of warm fishing gulls. And up the coast toward San Simeon, the years of cypress, oak and eucalyptus, the buckwheat in the narrow streams. Every turn we take is of our spending. Oyster sycamore. To this white washed office, to the gravel pit just beyond I was no more than a stranger, locked, like the boarded blue lights behind me, the cars in parking lots.

. . . but men, their bronze to their chest infused, to their legs and shoulders, make old the numbers of the dead that nestle in the ground – they are the numerous millions. Elsewhere one man pitches on a raft that wanders nowhere near home. Sure, and he envisioned the horse, the fire we sent to the sky inside the city wall. Likewise do warriors drift. Mistresses, buy from Eastern merchants silk dyed in lapis trinkets of jade, Balas rubies they let hang between their breasts; they lounge between the palace cushions, waiting return of my forgotten sex. We are drawn to the seven seas. We are drawn to their gods, their Shivas and dragons and fire-sacrifice; they speak of God as one without second – and the heavy footman drowned in the floods of Simois, those men of strength are reborn, they hold a spear aloft again – I slashed the arm of Venus, that dew-soft arm and started her into the air dove-like, back to her linens and drapes. Insensate was I made in her retreat, I was plunged, I made havoc, I tore the fray open with my war-cry – but what consequence, when now I have not known love, the touch and fever of it since? You will pitch your combat . Like a storm that thunders in the mountains, and for days is heard distant above the valley, will bring a flood for the crop and cattle to be lost in. Soon. Battle will make all men cry like gulls, circling the sea-torn cliff, which is also a place of war.

I couldn’t tell you the evening outlined itself in the hours I sat to see the window displays exhale, the distant way my shadow stretched into the east as though clinging to minutes and revealed the sense of something passed – in this way I escape. I am a feature of east 59th, among the buskers and the horse-drawn carriage and holiday shoppers. To sit still is to detract yourself, to leave the figment of the City but not its fabric: steady within a blur. When I was twenty in Missoula, I am sitting with friends in a well-lit room on hallucinogens; each of us exposed – and we are laughing. Dusk has ripened into night and the sky is clear, and, for a reason now forgotten, I walk into the kitchen. There in the dark, the dishes we piled after dinner, it is quiet. And resolved between the laughter and the dishes an absolute appeared and I bore the precision of the dark and the cat curled into the kitchen chair. Outside a brook filled with rainwater. A mountain grew. A rock fell loose. Bridget, how in its lasting did it create the moment your eyes lingered across my mouth as you gripped a suitcase and said goodbye? How does a name become a point remote: a bookshelf in a room that into each morning comes tea from the kettle and such warm, warm risings?