The East Village Jo Ann Wasserman combination of cosmologies how do you know God wants you to win? because you have won, of course sometimes you have to go to the great sign readers, like Cromwell was a great sign reader he saw that England has this problem it did not yet own Europe and certain effects are done and undone in a poem others have a diminishing vocabulary like to only write of gardens would say something because there are a lot of flower names and then the Latin one which can become musical after so much English one way to break up all the English the way Milton could win out in the end after he saw painting and Michael Angelo so say I could narrow my vocabulary work away from the signified to the sign as in not mentioning the body in the poem but only what the body layed out read as a sign but there is a problem because there was no body, no signified substance a problem identified as "the car exploded shortly upon impact" one person pulled from the wreck and one not so that in the poem the body which had meant somethings like growing, the chance to win or in some sense love ceased to be and so the sign those things it had meant it could no longer continue to say standing at the kitchen sink the water always running, could not say listen this is the best part (she turned the radio up) or what is your problem? (I had so many) her hand moving around the pans like a sign often eating a bit of chicken cleaning she ate more at the sink than at the table one last bite "because it came out pretty good, didn't it?" how could we win? how could I have asked her why are we here, in this house, or in this poem why do we all have to stay under that much foliage? his walking upstairs complicates the poem because once again, it could never just be about us she would stop and say I have to get these dishes done, pop chicken bones into the trash win what? she might have asked when she was a real body, as in what is your problem? so did she know how we lived knocked us down, the one time she said "I would never have believed that it would be like this." was that a sign? I was determined not to miss it, if it came, the sign that she was with me but who knows if it came, if it is embedded in the poem she had a beautiful turquoise ring that we have never seen since then the one that had cracked but still was beautiful she was beautiful I would say now because I have looked at many pictures and that is how they look the problem is if you look away you miss the sign or if you look at something too long, you just can't win there was no way to win it was 4 AM and the knock at the door was a sign (the one in this poem) my brother stood there (thousand miles from his home) there was a problem he started to say "There has been an accident" my mother, once again, had not been the lucky one Jo Ann Wasserman Index