1. ". . . lining of the world." Milosz's term for the metaphysical realm, the side of the world God sees and we will see after death. Any true Jew thinks immediately of Bemberg Rayon, expensive material used to line jackets, and stops there. Milosz's Catholicism demands a deeper meaning. Touching, though, to imagine that behind what we see, on the "other side" of it, is something invisible to us from this side, something just as interesting and real. The male voice in the poem finds the same pleasure on this side.

. . .

5. Name of a minor crater on the moon.

6. "Oedipus transmits the power of blessing by surrender to his weakness." Hillman, Oedipus Revisited. "I come to give you something, and the gift/Is my own beaten self." Oedipus at Colonus, Fitzgerald trans. The lovers often sit naked staring at each others' genitals for hours in the belief that such practice will trigger an epiphany.

7. "tears from the eyes bathed the buttocks at the cleft," Canto XX, Inferno, Dante.

8. Manto. Ibid.

9. Belching noises.

10. The name of a fabulous beast with two mouths.

11. Believable, but usually only possible when executed by trained acrobats. The couple sometimes dreams the same dream.