Anthropological regrets.  Who could not 
have them, watching the Berber boy scramble
up the rocks outside Tetuan in his Lava Orange Gap Fitted Tee,
turning to face the camera for a dirham-worthy shot?
Or the child at the edge of the tributary of the Nile
whose eyes are lit with the eggs of tiny maggots, flickering
against the cracked and blinking screen of a Game Boy?  There were

so many worlds we could have joined that it seems wholly unfair
we were fitted so poorly to the one we inhabit—really,
on what planet are women beating rugs from balconies with sticks
and looking up to the sky to say, yes, this is
the perfect moment, the very era that I was born to live?  It must have seemed 
to you that you were just days late, geologically speaking,
to this world, where the best you could do here
was to imitate, and to follow, and to grieve, listening 
to the steady same thump of humanity in your stethoscope.

When I was a child we ate books about Malinowski
for dinner, we supped on slim volumes of Mead,
we feared kuru, which my mother, in her training, 
had studied, and warned would strike us
if we strayed too far from the nest.  We lived 
one breath from the bullet that buzzed in search
of Tut’s graverobbers.  Death shall come
on swift wings she warned if we peeked 
in her secret closet.  I believed in mystery,
in the unobserved, I disturbed little 
of the universe, thinking it would always be there
to learn.  By the time I found fieldwork, 

it was veiled in the study of dank bathrooms 
on American highways, ethnographies of pee.  
Late autumn, Columbia University, 1995,
2am before my thesis deadline, I began to weep
over Tristes Tropiques.   I could not stop 
my heart’s awful snag on the emptiness of what 
had waned away and what little was left.  It was like all 
of the lost songs of the world threaded through me
in an instant.  I had to flee. I had to become 
someone else—a poet, 
ethnographer of longing, 
chronicler of what has disappeared.
By all accounts, Ishi never touched 
a woman’s body in his lifetime—his body
mute to that warmth the way his movements 
were mute to the parties who searched for his tiny fires,
his arrowheads, his bearskin—souvenirs for the mantle.
We might imagine he had the same sort of sadness 
about skin and heat that you had for the campfires 
his people lit beneath the stars back before the beginning
of this world.  We might imagine he lay awake 
with the dream of pressing berries to the lips of a woman
or translating her long hair into braids.
Even his grief screamed silent and ashen
from the shock of hair he burned
when the remains of his family had been charred.  He did not,
in his language, have one word for goodbye.  You stay,
I go, he taught you, Dr. Pope.  And when he left, how could you
not feel the tremendous shudder of one whole world closing?

For years my daughter took to reading and re-reading
The Ox-Cart Man, crying when Hall writes,
when the cart is empty he sells the cart.   
when the cart is sold he sells the ox,   
harness and yoke, and kisses them goodbye 
on the nose.  I did not know if she was crying
because she did not have oxen 
or because she could never know an ox well enough
to kiss it goodbye. She asked for two things each Christmas—
one, to be inside of a Tasha Tudor painting forever
surrounded by corgis and roast apples,
stringing popcorn on a fir tree.  And the second 
looked something like this:
1) Butter Churn.  2) BUTTER CHURN!!!
I went antiquing; the paddles were waxy and rancid, 
old tallow scrubbed around on the bottom of a shoe.  
We tried.  There was slim delight in the green cream 
that gathered after a half hour of paddling. 
We sang the butter song; Sarasponda Sarasponda 
Sarasponda rat sat sat. There was no mystery
in the curds we churned, nothing but pale clabber
thick on our floor.  I believe this was 
her first regret.  Now she is old enough
to know the story of the world on the wane— 
I did not prepare her for this sort of sadness.  
I go, you stay, she says these days, 
just a few sleeps, as Ishi would say to mark time,
from fleeing my arms altogether.
I understand now what she was trying to tell me years ago—
I will just die if I cannot go back to then.  Some of us 
walk around very welted by what we have lost,
or what we will never know.  And like Ishi, 
we don’t have the language for departure;
we have it backwards—we stay, you go.  We send
whole songs off cliffs, whole peoples
scabbed and torn into photographs, 
down the warbling trail and into the black frame.  
We stay.  When you traveled alone up the canyon

along the silent buckeye of Deer Creek 
to visit the land of Ishi’s shadows ten years
after he left, you wrote, Let the gentle night descend.
I am with my friends.  You said you felt his vanished hand
as you lay beneath the jeweled heavens.  I imagine 
you there, in the timothy grass, hoping 
if you slept long enough, you could watch him
quill just one more salmon from the stream 
or drill a fire in the cup of a rock—without him knowing
you were there, wholly witness to what he held
and what has been lost.  And in that world 

where you are at rest, I would like 
to come upon you in the glade
and put my heart up to your palm
like the sort of quiver you buried him with.
I would say, press that little phone
against me.  I’d say listen, listen, listen, old friend,
I am singing the same sad song.