District of tenements, squat brick laundries,
warehouses with shoulders like boxers’,
and one shop that sells ancient maps,

The house burst into flame. That’s a cliché, I thought, burst into flame. For I had been reading day and night. Perhaps I left the stove on after cooking an omelet. Or let the lint cake inside the dryer. Such was the fascination of the book, though scholars who study it all their lives, lives that pass in a breath, claim it has no answers. I held my copy close to my chest, 

Before they stripped me
they dressed me like a doll
in the sanbenito, a burlap sack

last words in Brooklyn

I

Admire my patience
in the grave in Sunset Park.

He asks me to make his ass tight, to give
him more and thicker hair. When he seeks himself
in what gets written, it's to learn

Impossible to stand. Or to sit.
Impossible to sleep.
So I squatted in the cage, my knees trembling.

For what is there to say
that hasn’t been said before with more,
or less, or approximate skill?

I am prowling, my feet are damp.
I am snatching at things to save my life.

My anger is such that the very ice-fields would melt,
if I had the power.
If I had the power.

The skin is the largest organ in the body. The skin of an average-
sized man has an area of approximately seventeen square feet and
weighs about five pounds. —medical handbook