Fall 2012 Issue - The Harvard Advocate

Published in The Harvard Advocate, Vol. XCV, March 21, 1913

The later poetry of Edward Estlin Cummings is instinctively recognizable to any lover of poetry. His page is a visual canvas, upon which words are not simply sounds that peal back to produce meaning, but aesthetic objects laid out upon the page.

** In Natalie Babbitt’s children’s classic  The Search for Delicious, a fictional, chapter book kingdom dissolves into civil war over a dictionary entry. At the outset, Gaylen, the young protagonist, does not see the need for battle. “Why don’t you leave Delicious out of the dictionary entirely?” he asks. What follows is his pursuit of the elusive definition of Delicious, a quest to objectively

characterize a word that is wholly a matter of taste. **



** While Babbitt’s story is frivolous, and geared towards a fourth grade classroom learning to broaden their culinary horizons, the competitive and comparative nature of food is neither completely fictional nor entirely trivial. In many places, locals simply cannot agree on the best place for a particular city’s specialty. In Chicago, deciding ****where to go for deep-dish pizza is both troubling and exciting. In Beijing, planning an outing for ****Peking Duck is no easier, with concierges recommending the old, established Quanjude and cab drivers preferring the modern Dadong, a newer, well respected, and similarly upscale restaurant. Duck and deep-dish pizza are famous specialty foods, but not everyday fare. Everyday food, often eaten quickly at home rather than savored with complementary bread and butter, seems to lend itself even more to divided loyalty. Isn’t fried rice best when my mom makes it? How can someone really make the best hamburger? And at the end of the day, only one potato can be the best potato.**



** **** Oddly enough, one establishment’s pork dumplings with soup inside, dominate the xiaolongbao scene in Taipei. Taipei’s restaurant and street food culture is dynamic and unique. With Portuguese, Dutch, Japanese and Chinese influences amongst **others, good food from all over can be found at upscale food courts, corner restaurants, and food stalls at night markets, and around the kitchen table at home. With so many choices, somehow this food-obsessed city fawns over one restaurant, Din Tai Fung, and their xiaolongbao in particular. It’s not some inaccessible, eaten-once-a-year dish, but a relatively common food that has made Din Tai Fung a worldwide phenomenon. ****



**** ****** Din Tai Fung’s founder Bingyi Yang is of humble origins. Born in Mainland China, his first job after moving to Taiwan in 1948 was at a cooking oil business as a deliveryman. A few poor investments from higher-ups later, the business folded and he was left without work. So Yang and his wife started their own cooking oil business, which again after a few years struggled. In order to salvage revenue, they started making and selling steamed dumplings on the side, gradually dedicating half of the shop to the endeavor. One dumpling led to **the next. ****



**** ********** Xiaolongbao are not a particularly complex or expensive food to make. Ground pork and a cube of gelatinous broth are wrapped inside a doughy dumpling skin. When steamed, the gelatin liquefies, and then the meal is served. These dumplings are delicate and they take some finesse to eat. With the soup and the soft dough, grabbing the dumpling with chopsticks requires just enough pressure to free the dumpling from the Napa cabbage or cloth that lines the steamer. Too much pressure means soup all over the table. Not enough means no food on your plate. With the dumpling safely in a spoon, the cautious eater will take a nibble, allowing the soup to drain and the rest to cool. Some may add ginger, soy sauce or vinegar to taste. The intrepid eater may wait for the dumpling to cool unadulterated, and then eat it all at once in a single soup-filled bite. ******



****** ************ Din Tai Fung has celebrated this experience of eating  xiaolongbao and elevated simple food from chow to delicacy. In the United States, China and Taiwan, Chinese restaurants either tend to be either a little gritty with a curt wait staff, or stuffy banquet-style restaurants that seem only to serve wedding-or-funeral food. Din Tai Fung manages to pull these ends together, serving food people want to eat in a clean, modern setting with an attentive staff. Din Tai Fung teases the customer by separating the waiting area from the kitchen by glass walls. The cooks systematically pinch the dough together to seal the meat inside in a flurry of steam that sufficiently fogs up the glass and keeps what happens just mysterious enough to keep the hungry entertained. Had Gaylen’s travels taken him across the Pacific, ******************instead of to fantastic forests, caves, and towns, he inevitably would have polled the crowd of eager customers outside Din Tai Fung waiting to be seated and tallied their preferences of taste. ************



************ ************************ Tea is served from pots with long spouts, and the waiters and waitresses raise the pot upwards as they pour, creating a precarious stream of hot tea abruptly cut off with a clean flourish of the wrist. With no smoke or mirrors, just steam, and a modern philosophy of serving traditional food, Din Tai Fung has made simple food special. In an era of Asian fusion cuisine in which some top restaurants distinguish themselves by mixing western flavors with the “exotic,” Din Tai Fung has taken the opposite approach, specializing through simplicity and simplifying through specialization. Din Tai Fung has crafted xiaolongbao in such a way that one drinks tea with the dumpling to complement the light flavor, not to wash it down. ************



************ ****************** In 1993,  The New York Times ranked Din Tai Fung as one of the world’s top ten restaurants. Since then, Din Tai Fung has brought its xiaolongbao to Japan, Singapore, China, Australia, and two U.S. locations in Seattle and Arcadia in southern California. The once-failing cooking oil shop has turned into an international brand that connotes high-quality, simple, a-little-pricy-but-let’s-do-it food. ******



****** ************ I have eaten at all four Taipei locations. While visiting family in L.A., I eagerly dragged them to the first Din Tai Fung in the United States. While the meal did not disappoint, I left quite ******************puzzled. Arcadia lacked the metropolitan charm of Taipei. I felt like I should be dodging rogue ************************mopeds rather than sauntering through a spacious and flat parking lot. Part of Din Tai Fung’s ************************original charm I remembered was that it was local food that locals so enjoyed, and this international branding felt ineffably forced. ************



************ ************************ The characters in The Search for Delicious eventually find resolution to their word problem ******************and decree “Delicious is a drink of cool water when you’re very, very thirsty.” Sure, this is a ************somewhat didactic move to remind young readers to appreciate what is often taken for granted. ************Yet, Babbitt also reminds young readers that Delicious is not a holy grail, hidden far away.  Din ************Tai Fung’s relationship with its local loyal following felt the same way to me. Instead of looking ************elsewhere to find satisfaction, those from Taipei enjoy this food from their front yard without ************needing to peek out at the green grasses of other cuisines. ******



****** ************ But who I am to say? As an American fan, I am guilty of the same misgiving I identified in ******************that parking lot. I reap the benefit of xiaolongbao in America, while also lamenting the ideological shortcomings of smart business decisions. If I want to experience the charm of a busy Asian ************************street, all I have to do is go back. Branding has helped this simple food from Taipei find its place ************************in world cuisine, people in different languages from various places all saying to their friends ************************across the table: “Delicious.”************



 



 



 



 



 



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*Lepidoptera*



Butterfly traps are constructed by suspending a dish beneath the mouth of a long column of net. The dish is full of the most revolting bait—chiefly rotting fruit and bad meat, although animal waste will do. Some people find this surprising, given the beauty of the butterfly. I do. But in any case, you are free to go off and swat other specimens with your own net while the trap blithely collects butterflies and other hapless insects—maybe even a bird. I learned that the traps work because butterflies do not fly down in times of distress. When they think their lives depend on it, they will knock their heads a thousand times against the mesh roof without ever turning around. How stupid. But who has not been in the butterfly’s place?



*Camouflage*



There are several different techniques for camouflage. There is mimesis, as when a moth looks like a crumpled leaf or when a stick bug lives up to its name. This decreases the odds of being preyed upon but increases the odds of being stomped. The dizzying zigzags employed by zebras and some warships in the First World War are known as dazzle patterning. This works better in motion, and in the case of the former, it helps that lions are colorblind.



The most famous type of camouflage is crypsis. We see it in leopards and military uniforms, or in arctic mammals and birds who change from brown to white in the wintertime. The chameleon, too. But the best camouflage, perhaps, is the tiny *Allobates zaparo*, which has the mottled red back and blue belly of a much more poisonous frog. The beautiful can get away with almost anything.



*Zoos*



Who can forget the smell of a zoo? Beneath the stench of the primate house, the lizard rooms, the penguin pool, and the muggy tropic zone, there is a stale animal pungence. The smell is uniform not just throughout the zoo, but throughout all the zoos of the world. The oldest zoo in America is in Philadelphia. That’s where I first smelled it. The oldest zoo in the world is the* Tiergarten Schönbrunn* in Vienna, founded in 1752 as a menagerie. I have never been there but I know its heady stink. Apparently the *Tiergarten* exists for the purpose of science, but we all like to look. In the future everything will be different but zoos.



*Charley*



I had a dog who was fundamentally changed by the death of his friend. When he saw her body he retreated to a corner and moved only his eyes; his chin was planted firmly on the floor. For weeks afterwards he surrounded himself with every one of his toys no matter where he went, even if it took several trips to reconsolidate his holdings. He whined when he pulled out the cotton stuffing as though he were narrating. Grief, then, is not what separates us from animals. Nor mourning.



*Flies*



If you want to kill a fly, wait for it to land. It will clean its front legs as though keeping warm. Hold your hands just above the fly and clap. A friend advised me on how to do this as a fly sat in front of us on a table. When I skeptically clapped, the fly fell dead on the gingham plastic. There is no moral here, just practical advice.



 



 



 



 



 

 



*When I consider how my light is spent

**Ere half my days in this dark world and wide*



- John Milton



On the banks of the Charles there are faded wooden benches. They face the river and its red brick bridges, and they face away from Cambridge—towards Boston, and the sea. In February 1968, a foot of snow has fallen and the benches are nearly submerged, their porous planks sealing in the winter chill. Here on one of these benches Jorge Luis Borges sits down. In February 1969 he will sit down here again, in his story “The Other,” and a younger Borges will walk over and join him on the bench, thinking he is in Geneva in 1919. In the story, the younger Borges will dream their conversation; the older Borges will live it. 



Borges is in Cambridge to talk about poetry. The Argentine writer has been chosen to deliver the 1968 Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard. The lectures will be recorded and shelved in the University Archives, where they will remain for thirty-two years until someone finds them in a forgotten dusty corner, when they will be transcribed, and published, and reviewed in the New York Times. “The unhurried flow and warmth of these talks produce a sense of intimacy,” Micaela Kramer will write. 



Intimacy is a challenge in Harvard’s Sanders Theatre, which seats over one thousand in darkpaneled pews set back from the stage. Borges is small and seems even smaller in this room, as he walks in and ascends the stage, cane in hand, dressed all in gray. He grips the sides of the lectern. “I would like to give you fair warning”, he says, “of what to expect—or, rather, of what not to expect—from me.” His English is faultless, if formal; his voice hoists up the end of his phrases, pausing between them, garnishing their words with a slightly rolled r. He admits from the start that he has no grand revelations and that he can only offer to the audience his perplexities and his doubts. He quotes Stevenson, Chesterton, Milton, and Homer. The citations are from his memory, because he has no notes. He has no notes because, in 1968, Borges is blind. 



*For others there remains the universe, 

**In my half-light: the habit of my verse. *



1955, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Outside the Casa Rosada, where Evita had addressed her adoring crowds, those same crowds in the same plaza rioted. Her husband Perón had fallen into disfavor and one dictatorship was replacing another. Borges’ job (if he had kept it) was that of a poultry inspector. This was thanks to Perón, who had promoted him from his position as librarian, in return for Borges’ politics. In 1955, with Perón in hiding, he was offered a new position: director of the National Library of Argentina. They never officially fired the previous Peronist director, who continued to come to work, sitting perhaps in the reading room organizing copies of La Nación in reverse chronological order, until one day he stopped showing up. 



There were nine hundred thousand books in the library, so approximately infinity (nine hundred thousand and one is one way express the infinite). They were there but out of reach because 1955 was the year Borges’ blindness accelerated and his gate of surveillance swung shut. 



From his “Poem of the Gifts”: “No one should read self-pity or reproach / into this statement of the majesty / of God; who with such splendid irony / granted me books and blindness at one touch.” Nine hundred thousand books—nine hundred thousand gifts—and only their outlines were discernible. When Borges was a child he lived not in Buenos Aires’ suburbs, with its legends and local color, but on the other side of his suburban house’s speared fence: in a garden, and in a library, full of unlimited texts. Eden had been gained through his position and now is lost to his possession. It is enough to make someone go mad. 



In an interview with the Paris Review, years later, Borges would quote Joseph Conrad’s The Shadow Line. He would talk about the unreality of real life, the futility of realism: the idea that even when trying to write realistically about the  world, a story becomes a fantasy, because the world itself is fantastic.



The story of Borges’ blindness might as well be one of his fictions. Borges does not see Cambridge like others do. Its curved squares and fragmented campuses, whatever the weather, are framed in tinted mist. Black and red evade him; blue is seeping out slowly; little by little only a faded yellow remains. His daily trek from 22 Concord Avenue to the white-washed Radcliffe library, his accompanied walks from Sanders to the Charles, can be no more than a theater for conversation and for thought. Clasping his palms together, Borges talks in his second lecture about metaphor, about the movement from the language of Muses to the discourse of the subconscious.  “Rather uncouth,” he says of the latter. “Still, we have to put up with the mythology of our time.” His audience laughs and so for a moment gains a face.



Blindness is more than a nuisance for Borges: it is a literary and a metaphysical problem. Already in 1929, in the poetry collection  Fervor de Buenos Aires, it is more the reader than the writer who is the key to any progression towards truth. “If the pages of this book consent to some pleasing verse, forgive me, reader, the discourtesy of having usurped it,” the “To the Reader” section states. “It is a chance and trivial circumstance that you should be the reader of these exercises, and I their composer.” His essay “Kafka and his Predecessors” posits the reader’s powerful agency: each reader brings to a text his own inventory of previous readings, and in doing so shapes the text itself. The meaning of a poem by Browning is inevitably changed after we have read Kafka; Kafka—or rather the reader of Kafka—might follow Browning chronologically, but still through interpretation creates the poet and his verse. Instead of a linear chronology of literary history,  we have an infinite multiplication of texts and possible readings, each of which inflects what we have read before. 



All texts are wholly original, then—and yet, in a sense, none of them are. This is because all stories have already been told, only to be retold again and again. In one of Borges’ very short stories, Caesar’s death—Et tu, Brute?—is echoed centuries later and leagues away by an Argentine  gaucho stabbed on the plains, who proclaims as he dies: Pero, che? Borges, a multilingual and vociferous reader, finds such implausible connections more easily and is both awed and overwhelmed by them: this is why he will never write a novel, why his stories become increasingly brief. They are rewritings, translations, rather than being the things themselves. “Perhaps the history of the universe is the history of the diverse intonations of a few metaphors,” he writes in “Pascal’s Sphere”—metaphors to be reshuffled and adorned by new writers. The more one reads, though, the better one will perceive those few main stories couching and underlying the rest. It is the reader, not the writer, who creates literature, who brings it to life—and who ensures its continuation. “One reads what one likes,” Borges says in his third lecture, “yet one writes not what one would like to write, but what one is able to write.” And the reader, exempt from this gulf, is happier for it.



“I think of myself as being essentially a reader,” says Borges in his final Cambridge lecture, “The Poet’s Creed.” Borges’ creed is not much more or less than this. What happens, then, when his identity as reader is undermined—when he can no longer make out the words on a page? 



Borges’ blindness is not a surprise. It ran in his family: his father and his grandfather had both gone blind by middle age; his great-grandfather was subject to one of the first British eye operations.  “It was a slow, summer twilight,” he will say. “There was nothing particularly pathetic or dramatic about it.” In blindness he writes in meter again, freed by the confines of classical rhythm, which is easier to remember than free verse. He writes letters, still, to friends like Victoria Ocampo, with whom he had founded the magazine  Sur in the thirties. Some are preserved within manila folders at Harvard’s Houghton Library: a careful slanting print of the early years and a Spanish sprinkled with anglicisms (“roundabout”; “groping our way”), is replaced by the seventies with a wild, nearly unintelligible cursive. In his Cambridge lectures he cites Homer, Milton; in other speeches he recalls other blind writers—James Joyce, William Prescott, the French-Argentine historian Paul Groussac who preceded him at the National Library. He can do this thanks in part to his memory: meeting a Romanian man in Paris, he quotes to him an eight-verse poem, in Romanian, that a young war veteran had composed and recited to him in Geneva fifty years before. Borges did not speak Romanian. In a certain way blindness is his heritage.



This is not to deny that it was excruciating to him. When Borges first went blind he would dream about reading, nightmares of black and red characters proliferating into long unreadable sequences and then curling back in on themselves. He wrote poems about this “hollow gloom,” strung uneasily somewhere between darkness and light.  He missed the darkness, which is denied to a blind man, for whom eyes open and close on an identical scene. From “History of the Night”: “To think that night would not exist / without those tenuous instruments, the eyes.” 



But since he realized he would lose his sight, when he was young, he had time to work through the idea from the start. Blindness is more than biographical in Borges’ poems and stories. Always inevitable, it becomes less a chronological life event and more inscribed in his very person. It is a trait similar to his love of encyclopedias or skill for foreign languages: a trope that lends itself to his fictions more than arising from his biography. Blindness is to be found between the lines of Borges’ earliest poems. Even in Fervor de Buenos Aires, sprinkled with the “local color” that will later embarrass him, there is a sense of uncertainty as to the boundaries between the self and what it sees. Dawn in Buenos Aires becomes “that tremendous conjecture / of Schopenhauer and Berkeley / Which declares the world / An activity of the mind.” In “Caminata” the suggestion is more direct: “I am the only spectator of this street, / if I stopped watching it, it would die.” Such idealism will be diluted later, as Borges actually goes blind and the world he no longer sees comes to seem more real. But as a younger man, there is both a fear of blindness and a doubt regarding the reaches of sight. 



Later, in 1960, “The Witness” meditates on seeing and blindness and the limits of both. When a Saxon man, the last to have seen the pagan rites of Woden, is dead, the rites themselves will die too: so one thing or infinity things die with each person’s death, bound within their sight, and blinded by their loss. And then “Simplicity”: 



*It opens, the gate to the garden With the docility of a page 

**That frequent devotion questions

**And inside, my gaze

**Has no need to fix on objects

**That already exist, exact in memory*



Fear of the unknown has surrendered to acceptance of a reality that has no need of sight; that in a sense renders all blind, because it exists independently—real only in memory. “I live in memory,” he says—that is the imagination, for him: memory, or a peculiar intermingling of memory and oblivion, which creates scenes more attune to reality than those of his or anyone’s eyes. All Borges’ fictions are no more than verbal constructs: they are detached from reality by the same speared fence that cut off his childhood library from the gauchos outside. But there is the hope that the gap between writing and reality, though unbridgeable, can ultimately be obliquely approached. A reader can sidle up closer to it through past readings, through the memory of reading. “I do not know if that geography is important,” he writes in a letter to Victoria Ocampo: “my most vivid memory of Lugano is the passionate reading of De Quincey’s vision.” Reading, sight, and memory become a circular process, fortified and fused by the art of telling stories. 



When Borges is in Cambridge he visits the homes of Melville, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Emily Dickinson. “Friends seemed to multiply in Cambridge,” he will later say to a translator. When he is in Cambridge, in the fall, before the benches by the Charles trap the winter chill in them, he will write “New England—1967.”



*The forms in my dreams have changed;

**now there are red houses side by side

**and the delicate bronze of the leaves

**and chaste winter and pious wood,

**as on the seventh day, the world **is good.

In the twilight there persists

**what’s almost non-existent, bold, sad,

**an ancient murmur of Bibles, war,

**soon (they say) the first snow will fall

**and America waits for me on every corner…*



The red that escapes his sight still populates his memory, as Borges reads Cambridge through history and through books. A Puritan heritage modulates the noises in its streets (an ancient murmur at twilight recalls the seventh day). Emerson too is here in the delicate bronze of the leaves—“Nature” paints them bronze, animates the faded yellow. Perhaps, even, there is the mortal dread of Moby Dick, a futile summoning-up of the non-existent in the middle of what’s there. In New England, in 1967, these all are ways of reading Cambridge, all results of reading poetry. Borges sees it as perhaps only a blind man can.

 



I had not touched a puzzle in eleven years. Now, here I was, perched on a red and cream striped sofa next to the window, slowly sorting my way through a five hundred piece jig-saw of a beach scene: a wooden boat beneath two palm trees. It was about 9:30 in the morning. I had just finished interviewing with my team, which consisted of Laila, a social worker, and Dr. White-Bateman, a young, thin doctor who wore fancy silk blouses and pronounced every word with care in her tiny, raspy voice. They repeated their list of questions. How have you slept? How is your appetite? Do you hear any voices or have speeding thoughts in your head? And, of course, the Biggie: Have you had any thoughts of hurting yourself or others recently?



Have I been thinking of suicide lately?

Of course not. I have a puzzle to do.

I ran my hand over my cheeks. They were a bit dry, but smoother than ever. Everything here at McLean was clean. The ventilation system sucked everything out of the air, including the moisture.



This is a safe place, I thought, as I flipped over the pieces.



I hate this part. Whenever I pour out the pieces I want to fit them all together immediately. I have to force myself to turn them all over before I can start.



Soon, I had the border finished. I started working on the sand at the bottom – the light pieces were easiest to spot. From there I worked my way up, watching the picture slowly form itself.



 



On the first morning, I asked a nurse if I could use my makeup. He came with me to get my leopard makeup bag from the closet and walked with me to the restroom. While he waited outside, I stood in front of the mirror, the door open behind me, and rummaged around my bag. The little bottles clinked against each other, loud against the silence of the hospital. I skipped some of my routine—I did not put on liquid black eyeliner because it took too much time, and I did not put on as much eyeshadow because I did not want to keep the nurse waiting behind me. I stepped out of the restroom, my face freshly covered in powder and my eyes smothered with purple eye shadow. I shyly handed over the bag and scurried away.



The next morning, I asked for my make- up again, only this time, the nurse didn’t have to accompany me. One successful night in the hospital had raised my privileges up. They had erased the “s” next to my name on the whiteboard in front of the nurse’s station, which meant I could use sharps without supervision. I walked down the same corridor towards the same bathroom. On my way I passed a patient talking to his nurse. They spoke in low tones, seated across from each other. “How are you feeling today, Tom?”



He stared at her with the look of the dead. “Good.”



“Have you been sleeping okay?”



The same blankness. His muscles didn’t seem to attach together correctly. “Yes.”



“Have you been having any thoughts of hurting yourself?”



A pause. “Yes,” quieter than ever.



I felt bad for listening and slipped into the bathroom. I did the same procedure again. Dab on the nose. Dab on the cheek. I started to put on my eyeliner, but paused and stared myself down in the mirror. I washed off all makeup from my face and decided then that I would store it away for good.



When I left the bathroom, the room was empty except for all that remained.



 



I made some friends. Five kids about my age. There was Sarah, a pretty young blond who has panic attacks; Neil, a cheery, chubby high school drop-out who was temporarily homeless, and is now taking courses at the Courdon Bleu to be- come a chef; Jess, a BU student who voluntarily came to readjust her medications, which had suddenly stopped working; Tom, a Tufts senior who woke up one morning and swallowed too many pills; and James, a college student who drove his car eighty miles an hour into a tree and emerged from the accident without a single scratch.



We found ourselves idling in the kitchen at around 8:30 in the evening. Someone suggested that we play a game.



Breaking the hesitation, I suggested hide and seek.



Ten minutes later, I was hiding behind a curtain, giggling. The last time I played hide and seek was on a farm in Argentina. And before that, when my family had just moved to America and I was but a tiny toddler prancing through the crumbling apartment buildings of our refugee complex. Ever since I realized my childhood deeply lacked attention, I filled in the years of solitude the best I could in random places, even if it had to be a psych ward.



I had been there for almost two minutes when my nurse came through the door to my side and shrieked when she saw me hiding behind the curtain.



“My Ngoc! What are you doing?” she screamed. 



My answer didn’t satisfy her.

The game quickly broke up as we tracked down all the participants. The five of us collected in the hallway as the nurses told us in strict, maternal voices that we cannot play hide and seek because the staff would not be able to find us for the fifteen minute checks. We hung our heads low, but we were all smiling, eyes, mouths and all. Looking back, I was pretty sure we were the best patients to have graduated from McLean.



 



We gathered on the bed and held hands. My oldest sister, Julie, asked if she could pray for me. My middle sister, Kellie, started to sniffle. When the prayer finished, we all looked up and around. Something special had just happened.



Julie rose and put her hand on my head. She had not flown in almost a decade but left her three young children behind to visit me here. I hugged her, placing my head on her stomach. She felt so warm and calm. When I looked up, I saw her smiling down at me, the gentlest of smiles. There was something about the white light coming through the window and how it hit her face. Something about the bright fluorescent lights of the room. She looked like an angel, and I told her, “I think I believe in God.”



When they left, pattering down the hallway, I sat down on my bed and starting writing. In an instant, I began to cry. My ears heated up, my face went flush. My entire body felt warm, as if blanketed. In that instant, I felt all the good things in this world at once. They poured into my body like nectar. I’m still not sure what happened.



I called my father with the last five minutes I had left on my track phone and told him that I loved him and that I was sorry. He didn’t ask me any questions, and I told him I had to go because my phone was about to die. My phone had only two minutes left.



After that, I took a long shower and then fell asleep.



 



I told my nurse for that day that I wanted to write a book about my depression. I didn’t tell her about thinking that my sister was an angel, however. I didn’t want them to think I was psychotic. Her eyes bulged and her voice oozed out with joy. “Oh my God, you need to go to the creative writing workshop we have today!”



I told her I would. After we talked, I retreated to my little cozy and worked some more on the boat.



Soon the same nurse returned. The workshop was starting.

“I want to work on this puzzle, instead,” I said. I received my medical record a few months



after I was discharged. Towards the end of my report was a line that read, “several of the nurses had reported that My Ngoc sometimes has grandiose thoughts about her writing.” I grunted, laughed, and then filed the paper away.



 



Patients often stroll around the ward as a form of exercise. Nick came by and sat down beside me. As he approached, I felt like an animal, watching another come from a distance. I eyed him up and down, watched his body movements, and found no harm in him coming. We chatted, shared a few sex jokes. “Are you purposefully not looking at the box?” he asked. I didn’t realize that I was doing that, but after he left, I made a conscious effort not to look at the solution. I liked suspense. It seemed more like real life.



Tom came by soon afterwards. He offered to help with the puzzle some, jamming pieces together. We then started making animal noises and awkward tunes together. He didn’t really contribute much, only trying to squeeze together pieces that didn’t fit. I solved the rest of the puzzle, and let him place the last piece. He looked very proud of himself. Two days later, he was discharged.



 



William came that evening. He entered my room slowly and saw me lying in bed. He dropped his bags next to my bed and lay on top of me, with his cheek on top of mine. We stayed like that for a long time. I told him what had happened earlier that afternoon and showed him my journal entry, but we didn’t talk much. A nurse came by and saw us, and quietly left. His cheeks were wet now from being on top of mine. After a while, he lifted his head and cradled my head in his hands. “I’m just glad you’re doing better,” he said. “I knew you wouldn’t get better in just a normal way.”



My sister came an hour later. She had just finished dropping off Julie at the airport. I finished rehearsing my story to her. Like William, she didn’t say much. “I’m glad you’re doing better.” A pause, and then “I’m exhausted.” She lay down to take a nap. William had already been sleeping for a while. His back was curled at an uncomfortable angle. He barely fit on the bed. Even in his sleep, he was clutching my feet in his hands. I looked at both of them and lay down too. Snuggled between the two of them--my sister, who made up so much of my past, and William, who is such a big part of my future--I knew I was exactly where I needed to be--in the present. This time I knew what the feeling was. I fell asleep.



 



I did little the first month I was home. When I felt it was time, I emerged from the house and bought three puzzle sets of disparate difficulty. When it was late at night and I was too tired to write anymore, I went to my desk and sorted out puzzle pieces until four in the morning. Some people prefer mornings. I prefer the late nights, when there is nothing, not even sunlight, to disrupt my thoughts.



Now that I am back at school, I don’t really have time to do puzzles. One night, however, I saw passed a girl in the dining hall working alone on a circular puzzle. She was gone by the time I came back, but I was glad to see that the puzzle was still there. The circular borders had just been pieced together.



Slowly, I put away my coat and sat into the chair, feeling like a traveler who had just arrived home. My goal was to finish the entire puzzle. By midnight I had put together a third of it, but it was time for me to go. There was an anatomy quiz tomorrow, and I had a far bigger and more complex puzzle to study before the morning came. Besides, the night guard would have sent me to bed by this time anyways if I were back in the hospital. And so I left, patting myself on the back for all those pieces I managed to put together.



Two days later, I saw that someone else had finished the puzzle in the dining hall. There was something wholesome in seeing the circle in its completion. I smiled and wondered if it was the same girl who put in the last piece. If it was her, I hoped that she found whatever she was seeking and that when the final picture came together, it was beautiful.



 



 



 



 



 



 

While my older brother lived, I didn’t exist, not even as a thought in anybody’s head.  As a second son who was also a second only son, I’ve always felt confident in my redundancy.  Had I traipsed, back then, into the middle of an idea my Mom or Dad was busy having, they would have shooed me out, beat me back with a broom or bat, like the intruder I would have been.  Then my older brother, Matty, didn’t even call home for three weeks before he went back there to die.   This was in Miami, in the days when you could still blame anything on Mariel.  Mariel was the port from where, in 1980, Castro gift-wrapped his criminals, deranged and in clean T-shirts, and shipped them to us with a kiss.  Suddenly, Cuban lives shattered and the pieces blew across this whole continent and people came searching for them on bended knees and never stood all the way back up.  And blame them my parents did.   Matty was seventeen when he died and, in addition to ruining my life, was very much my brother, even though we never met.  Try and understand.  This is my brother meeting his first refugee.  Age: eight.  It happens because the mango tree bloomed and there is no more space in the house for the fruit.  A crate of it sits in the tub, which they move on top of the toilet in order to shower.  Men ring the doorbell to offer ten dollars to pick the burdened tree, then twenty.  Or they don’t ring and lean on our fence until dad goes out.  They look at him, offended, and move away.  Nights are making him possibly insane.  He keeps himself awake, convinced someone is up in his tree.  And just as he starts to slip away, a mango gets too heavy for its branch.  You can hear the fall even before it hits, and dad is awake, and his face grows dark and bristly like a mango you wouldn’t eat.    One morning he walks through breakfast with a machete.  Cool, Matty says, and wants to touch it.  Where the hell did you get that? mom says.  I always had it, he says.  He sits and leans the thing against his leg point-down and goes at a grapefruit.  Armando on the corner charges three bucks each for mangoes, he is telling them, dislodging wedges of his breakfast.  I thought Matty could sell the rest of the tree, get sign on a chair out in the yard, make a little gumball money.  Huh kid?  Cool, Matty says.  You’ll cut yourself in half, mom says.  Ah, dad says, and picks it up and goes through the back.  He goes to the side for the ladder and carries it and the blade together.  He stands the ladder and spreads it and checks for wobbles.  He turns the machete in his hands, studying it, the realness of its edge, and ascends, holding it away from his body in case he falls.  He hacks a few, but really it’s easiest to twist them til they pop off.  The machete is used for jostling the hard-to-reach branches.  As he works, he talks to the tree about his life, about what’s reasonable to expect from the time left, what he’d like to leave his family.  He is perfectly audible inside.   Matty makes his sign out of sharpie and a flayed cereal box.  He listens to Mom about cars in the street, then he sells alone while dad reclimatizes in the a.c.  The skinny shade of a palm tree swings radially about the trunk, and he follows, relocating the chair and sign and the grocery bags gorged of mangoes.  Underneath is at least the absence of heat, if not coolness.  Only one car has stopped, a mother.  At least she paid ten for only two.  It was charity.  Her kids won’t trust the look of the food, and she doesn’t want many things in the house that just sit and molder.   When the shade moves too far back to serve as a viable retail location, my brother moves back streetside and plants the chairlegs in the naked sun.  They are reclaimed by heat and sting when his own legs brush past.  A man walks down the street, no hat, long pants, closed-toe shoes, probably even socks.  Must have been a walk whatever crazy house he just escaped.  He is smoking, exhaling the shapes of his lungs in vapors that burn away behind him.  He stops before the boy and the incomprehensible sign and looks atthem as at things underwater.  Dipping a finger into a bag, he parts the top and inspects the unripe orbs that needed more time on the tree.  He turns his head away before breathing out more smoke.  Matty has decided not to announce that all paying customers can have their mangoes blended inside into a Mom’s famous smoothie.       Cuantós? the man says.   For how many? Matty says, already seeing himself at school telling this to Señor Garces.   Uno.  Trés.  Cinco por dos.   The man shakes his head.  Es criminal, he says, trying to pronounce the second word as English.  He bends and grinds his cigarette into the road.  He pulls another from his pants pocket, tears off the filter, sticks the rest between his lips.  Fuego? he says.  No.  Sorry.   The man moves on, towards the lighter out there waiting for him.  Matty goes inside and asks mom to take him and the unsold mangoes to church.  That Sunday, he sees mangoes gutted and partitioned on the after-service snack table.  He goes up to say there has been a mistake, that one of the coffee ladies must have pilfered the donation box, and is pointed down the table to the birthday cake that is meant for the kids.  He steals back as many pieces as he can, and later walks the neighborhood, looking for someone in need of fruit as the heat makes it stink and sour in his hands.   I believe he got the better parts of his heart from fishing.  Our father was and is a charter boat captain.  Every dawn he is, apparently, woken by the sound of the ocean.  You can’t hear it from our house.  But when I was little I liked to touch parts of my body to the same parts of his.  Hand to hand, nose to nose.  I guess my parts could know themselves better that way, impossible alone.  When we were ear to ear, I wonder if I could hear the waves.   So he wakes.  Back then, he would move the coffee maker to the hall closet so its grumbling wouldn’t roust anybody else.  One might just as well run an extension cord outside and brew under a palm tree.  But my parents are of the North, where the outside must never be trusted, and no amount of balm in the Florida weather would convince them otherwise.  Often as not he forgot to take the maker back.  Conscientious he may have been, but the sea is loud.  The drip coffee maker—each drop quivering over the pot, should I fall? should I fall now?—taunted his patience.  So our mother’s first move in the morning was not towards the kitchen, where she might lean over the sink, yawn into the morning light of the window, and feel a mother.  Her first move was to the hall closet.   This she could stand.  These were his most honest quirks; he gave them unto her.  She went over and waved the coffee steam away from her jackets and carried the maker back, knowing that everyone is not perfect, and is the better for it.   But the pee.  After rising, before the hall closet, she detoured to the bathroom.  I don’t know her ritual nor God willing will I.  I know it was early, it was dark, things were unreal.  Matty would have been awake, playing quietly, anxious for food to get made.  Basically it is entirely plausible that she overlooked for years a component of her married life.  One morning she looked before she sat: the toilet was already full.      She happened to curse then, audibly.  The thought of that stewing how many morning hours.  She flushed, went, flushed again.  She walked into the kitchen, where Matty was eating from a cereal box with a spoon.  They startled each other, both of them caught in their different acts.  She left, came back.   Sorry I cursed, she said.   S’okay, my brother said.  He doesn’t flush cause it’ll wake us up.   That night she called a family powwow.  She told dad she’d cursed in front of Matty.  She asked Matty to forgive her.  He did, again.  Then she announced that, regarding toilet business, respect for sleepers was appreciated but not extenuating. I saw a son’s share of powwows, too, years after Matty’s last.  Some of the structures they built around him hadn’t fallen before I came around.  I could enter, sightsee, imagine how nice it must have been.  In these meetings we sat separately.  No pair could form a front against the third, no axis of powwow power.  Which meant we had to pull a chair from the kitchen and Dad sat alone on the sofa.  No one quite knew how not to stare into the empty, person-sized space beside him.  I sat on the floor, spurning the imported chair and the efforts it implied and the whole conversation, but also punishing myself both for my contempt and my inability to stand up and leave.  I felt very complicated then.  Dad was a sport, though he was lost after ten minutes.  Mom talked, asked us to share, nodded appreciatively as we mumbled whatever back.  A great talent of hers.   But I wonder what Dad really thought, sitting there with his fisherman’s eyes, brushing his knee against that vacancy.  Fisherman, as an adjective, suggests something that is not truly expressed unless it is looking to something, or nothing, very far away.  So far I’ve found it applicable only to the eyes and the heart.  What did he think of me down there picking at the rug, of the kinds of trouble I was bound for?  Maybe he said, but not with any clarity that I remember.  The living room was our biggest, still it wasn’t ocean enough for him to feel home.  I suppose what I most want his eyes for is their memory of what Matty was like to have around.   Anyway, Dad’s morning movements were but a gentle presence.  So gentle that no sleeper in the house could tell them apart from the other evanescent qualities of morning, birds testing out their voices, sunlight spreading over the shades.  You couldn’t know if they also happened in reality or just in your dreams.  Of course Matty was desperate to fish.  Leaving with Dad at dawn would complete him as a person and make him happy for life, like the GI Joes on the top shelf at Walgreens.  Unfortunately, my brother had an immaculate childhood.  Mom left work for seven years, as she’d always said she would.  She contemplated nursing until he was four, well into his sentience, as a journal suggested; one look from Dad knocked her down to three.  No one else touched him, he spent every night in his own house, and no fishing.  Even a rod kept inside the house would enter an eye, topple a vase.  But what Mom really knew was that fishing was no short-term pleasure.  It took men.  She would lose another.   The sea is called many things.  Vast, wine-dark.  It should get called greedy more often.  Its smell infiltrated the house when Dad came home.  He would fall on the sofa and Matty would climb over him, pressing the sea-laden air out of his captain’s shirts.  Salt lodged in the creases around his eyes, which still squinted into the wind.  On Sundays Mom opened all the windows and drove our vacuum like punishment.  A lot of good that did.  The house was underwater.   Happy birthday, son, Dad said, producing a long package from behind the fridge.  Matty was eight.  The other presents and money-bearing cards were opened, the wrapping and cake-smeared party utensils stuffed in garbage bags, the other second-graders at last captured by their respective mothers.  Matty lit up, inexhaustible in the face of unopened presents.  Dad might’ve looked fearfully, or defiantly, or connivingly at Mom—however the one spouse who knows of an upcoming fight looks at the other.  It was a junior fishing rod, three-foot long, only fifteen feet of line, with a rubbery, No Injury hook attached to the end.  Thanks Dad, Matty said, not letting go of the rod for the next three weeks.  Shit Harold, Mom said, but when Matty wasn’t around to hear.          Matty wasn’t allowed to sleep with it—he was scolded that night for trying, spooning the rod and naming the marlins they would hook together.  He fell asleep staring at it, its long shadow on the wall, and took it outside as soon as daylight let him.  Maybe he saw sunfish flipping in the yard grass, or snook sneering down their snouts at him from the trees.  But they weren’t really there, so he fished the flowers.  He was casting into my flower beds, Mom said that night.   He’s casting already?   He pulled three bulbs clean out.  Last I checked the catch limit was twelve. Harold.  I’ll tell him to fish the garbage can. I don’t see why you had to get him that thing in the first place.  You saw how he looked at it in the store.  I saw how you looked at it.   Matty listened in bed, decided not to ask for a back scratch.  Mom pled on, trying to keep the household safe, dry, behind bulwarks of reasonableness.  Surprisingly not a great talent of hers.  For a few nights, Matty strained to decipher the parents’ hushed argument.  At some point Dad said, because it’s good for him.  Matty, floating towards sleep, bumped and awoke on those words—they were solid, buoyant, and pointed in a safe direction.  He trusted their sea-worth, and in that moment gave himself to their care, and slept.   Still, when he was shaken awake, a couple mornings later, he didn’t right away recognize the man above him.  Dad’s face does look strange, with all but its hardest lines slept away, when you see him just before dawn.  He helped Matty into some pants, with movements that spoke victory.  They weren’t sneaking out, for now.  As they drove, Matty wondered why more people don’t come out to see the first light.  He was elated.  He had a sip of coffee.  At the marina, Matty met his second, third, fourth, and fifth refugees.  Juan Carlos, Carlos Juan, Carlos Carlos, and Juan Juan were their names—probably, people assumed, their re-names.  As starkly real and bathless as the dispossessed come.  They were not, they said, of the rabble, by whom they meant the criminal and the insane they sardine-sat beside on that famous boat ride.  As seen on the news television, they told the hotel guests.  And they all four linked arms and grinned, as if re-configuring a famous picture of themselves, while they each falsely remembered a huge applause accompanying their adjoined first step off the boat.  The hotel guests would promptly think of something they’d left in the room, to which they needed to run for their life that very moment.  We are a movie stars, one Juan or Carlos would call after them.  Their English was in fact much better than what they spoke with.  They had an appreciation for devilment that left little doubt of their hiding something, but whether or not it was only their past no one asked.  Because they worked, and seemed to need only enough money to go out at night and come back alive.  That’s all Gus cared.  Gus owned the hotel.  It was he who carved a marina out of the limestone shore and ran fishing charters for the guests (half-price) and general public (price negotiable, but steep.)  It was he who went to the beach when the Cubans were scattered there like flotsam and stood in the bed of his truck and hollered that he’d take as many as could work and sleep in one room.  He looked furtively for news cameras, but they were off finding the whitest-looking refugee they could throw before their television audiences.  Four men climbed up, one woman made a couple steps his way before thinking better of it.  The men worked hard, slept just fine, and smiled like they weren’t deep in other schemes. The Juan Carloses liked Dad especially.  He arrived at the marina early, and clambered for his first cigarette like a man needing air.  He’s never smoked near any oxygen we might inhale.  They thought he was the funniest thing and, leaving their mops at ease, went to help him with a few puffs.  They felt the affection of strangers in the morning, unable to care what might befall one another, but appreciating the warmth of the nearby bodies.  The marina’s pelican, sleepy on a barnacled pylon, covered his head with his own wing like it was all to much to watch.  Dad hadn’t exactly told Mom of their existence.  Not that she couldn’t’ve dealt.  But the marina was his office space, and its characters as much his right to withhold as a buxom coworker in a problematic neckline.  He just didn’t need Matty finding them interesting enough to gab about later.   She had asked, while they were drafting the minutia of Matty’s big day, if the men had hooked anything undesirable since she’d last been down.   If they did, Dad said, Gus would’ve made us grill it up for the guests.  She moved on to a discussion of sunscreen application in a manner that suggested their son’s sure death was on him.  They stopped at the bait shop for chum, line, two candy bars and two Cokes.  The smell from the bubbling tanks, where half the little bait fish floated belly-up, didn’t bother passing through Matty’s nostrils; it grabbed straight for his throat.  They got to the marina, which sits between the quiet hotel and the wakeful ocean, earlier than any soul save that hopeless pelican.  There was only the hollow hit of water along fiberglass hulls, the sagging of pier wood, and every wind-touched thing’s coordinated sway.  Matty thought he was witness to a new state of water.  He’d only engaged with it through faucets, hoses, the shout of beach waves and the touch of rain.  He’d never known the ocean as useful or usable.  Now he watched it move between the boats, slow and colored like morning, preparing its deep bulk to provide for him.  He lowered a hand in to check if it was still wet.  I’ll never forget my brother’s first time fishing.  I imagine the Juan Carloses wore their clean coveralls, shook his hand, and scraped the grit off the dock like dignitaries.  I imagine Dad said be careful about putting your fingers in like that, fishes eat near the surface.  I imagine the pleasure Matty found, when they reached open water and Dad gunned it, in crouching below the level of the gunwales, where the air keeps still and warm.  I imagine him looking at some flat piece of water, without a fish making a try at his lure for hours, and I imagine the better parts of his heart realizing themselves right there.  I imagine that if you asked him, then and there, why should anyone marry a fisherman, he would look at you, then back at the water, and say, because they can be patient with this big mean thing for so long.  I imagine, because I’ve never been told.  But I can picture the marina as it was then more clearly than I’ve ever known it under my own feet.  Then he turned seventeen.  Then he left for three weeks.  Then he came back and then he died.   The parents didn’t blame themselves.  After all, they should have just left Miami when their friends left, when they saw refugees on the news television and talked about leaving, when their parents called and said haven’t you left yet?  They stayed for pride, but there wasn’t any health in blaming themselves for it.  Because they’d tried.  And there was always Mariel.  (Even though, when Dad pinned Carlos Carlos against his truck and asked him just what in fucking hell were his thoughts on the matter, he found there was nothing in it.  By then, Carlos Carlos was the only one of them that hadn’t died, disappeared, or resurfaced in Atlanta in a troupe of José Fernandos.  All Mom needed to hear about it was that, while Dad’s colleague certainly wasn’t to blame, the tone and wording of his condolences implied that such incidents were tragically common and characteristically Cuban.  Though, as of yet, my research into the subject does not show that immigrants cause drug addiction.)    They didn’t blame themselves, but after that they pretty much boxed it up and mailed it in, so to speak.  When he peed, he flushed and made no mind.  When the coffee maker ended up places other than the kitchen, she just made tea.  If they ever had another son—which of course they wouldn’t—they’d let him go fishing the day he was born, and he could stick all his fingers and toes where the fishes feed.  When they had another son, by accident, of course, he would catch them looking at him like he’d just crawled out from under the sofa, intruder that he was.    

The men of the Timofeyev clan care a great deal about tradition. As far back as the Rurik dynasty, at least one male descendant has mastered the craft of woodworking. The Timofeyev artisans have maintained a legendary reputation in and around Voronezh, due mostly to their rigorous standards for mastery: though impossible to paraphrase elegantly in English, the Cyrillic sign in the family workshop near the banks of the Don reads “every Timofeyev woodworker must surpass his father in both intricacy and prolificity.” These standards, once nominal, have been enforced fanatically since Russia’s industrialization.

 



Draping sleeves



of a white coat drag



and the seams of them are openly unraveling like spiderwebs.





I question the small stitch



missed. The flat white is a glass dam.



Fear and pain wells up on the other side.



I can see it in their eyes



threads of glass



coarse and aching.



What are words or tears or touch



when all is smooth and closed? I don’t



know either. I stand and watch the dam make a deep lake deeper



the fish drinking the blood water



and becoming fat. Alone



the spider travels from epicenter to edge



and the web is stark



and scentless beneath its legs. 



 

Falls blue. Time, it is that small

silver weight in my hand, cool

as a pebble damp grass smoothes— 



now quiet the rustling, crossing

of legs, coy bangles clattering

like little bells of tin, long minute



spent smoothing my wrinkled brocade

as the strum starts under the song—

I’ve gone up this path five times



and gone down four, hear me out—

when you rise in the last morning,

in the shrinking hour thick



with smoke of yeast and sugar,

think of me. Not my face—

overcast with leafed lanterns swaying, 



forest above town greener

as just before rain and just after,

until out of each paper sphere a bird



breaks, flocks, and all life looks up,

taut like drum-skin

a handful of earth clatters onto, 



specks into eyes turning down

sloping back into the city—

that crust I can hook out



in the mornings, first thing,

small seeds hard as seconds

between my fingers . . . 



And what has been within me

is true, just as I wanted.

Wanted a field of dissent settling



as roan ridden into slow grass,

mottle-coat of lustring

and the throat-cut string still vibrating—



wanted unsteady. Wanted fall,

but it was winter before we reached

the middle. Wanted the pearly hum of



beginning set into a silver bezel,

wanted to be thought mastered, thought

wanted, pendular, yours. For a moment.

This light yellows

like a bruise

when the end’s

near. Stay here



with me, stung

smell of lye,

latherless my arms

wasting hot,



sandalwood fixed

to lathe and whirring.

Rowel me on—come, look

what I’ve done for you,



I’ve counted

these twenty-some grapes

clinging to sallow stem

thin as a wick—



dressed in my finest

white linen, helix

of ivy tricked

into my hair,



ibex beauty,

suspense of black

grapes hanging off

this wooden table



like an upturned hand—

pour another, it’s stronger

than it looks, and table’s ajar,

nothing will stay put 



today, peaches careening away

and outside a radio tuning,

crackling of flies outside

the window of this rented room,



even my tunic’s

slipping loose, don’t

look—do you know

about the great man’s ruby—



heavy gleam like

sewer water sputtering

through Rome’s stone gutters

pinned to his finger,



and if you kiss it

you catch it, slippery

as scum. These grapes

are a long thread



of black rubies,

only indulgence

I could spare

today,



don’t take them all.

But just one more?

As boys we dangled

the bunches down



into each other’s mouths—

open up—

sudden breaking

on tongues muffled



grapeskin sticking

at the back of the throat

like a word unvoiced—

as late one afternoon



he and I scampered off

to the olive grove,

fruitless, grey, something like

abstract statuaries,



sun high overhead

but shadows lengthening

toward us as we entered

the stucco-walled field,



dusty scent of quartz

on the air, and what started

falling was snow,

white as a placebo—



how much control

do you think I have—

and his hand inside

my tunic a warm body,



and all that time aware

of where the yew grows,

sticks if you stumble,

let’s not go there—



and the bushes

of prickly rosemary

are beautiful because

they move like the soul,



piling sharp on sharp

in weak banks

too tight to wave in wind,

and even I will agree,



when it snaps

the smell stays

in the mind a long time

like a fugue recorded,



sound of the piano

bench creaking

under the man

with the fingers.



I’m getting so thin,

that bench wouldn’t know

I’m there, or that piano,

or this table—



a bench for you

if you’d care to stay,

toy my ring of ruby

with your lips,



graceful just once more.

I hope it’s not—

oh, boys. The wine’s

a bit young



but it will do the trick,

and do you like

what you can see,

all these goodies,



they’re only here

because you are here—

open up, open up.