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[To] The Last [Be] Human

JORIE GRAHAM

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Contents
Title Page
Note to Reader
TO THE LAST BE HUMAN

introduction by Robert Macfarlane
SEA CHANGE

I
SEA CHANGE
EMBODIES
THIS
GUANTÁNAMO
UNDERWORLD
FUTURES
II
LATER IN LIFE
JUST BEFORE
LOAN
SUMMER SOLSTICE
FULL FATHOM
THE VIOLINIST AT THE WINDOW, 1918
III
NEARING DAWN
DAY OFF
POSITIVE FEEDBACK LOOP
BELIEF SYSTEM
ROOT END
UNDATED LULLABY

NO LONG WAY ROUND
PLACE

I
SUNDOWN
CAGNES SUR MER 1950
MOTHER AND CHILD
(THE ROAD AT THE EDGE OF THE FIELD)
UNTITLED
THE BIRD ON MY RAILING
II
END
ON THE VIRTUE OF THE DEAD TREE
DIALOGUE (OF THE IMAGINATION’S FEAR)
EMPLOYMENT
TREADMILL
III
OF INNER EXPERIENCE
TORN SCORE
THE SURE PLACE
ALTHOUGH
IV
THE BIRD THAT BEGINS IT
LULL
WAKING
THE FUTURE OF BELIEF
EARTH
V
LAPSE

MESSAGE FROM ARMAGH CATHEDRAL 2011
FAST

I
ASHES
HONEYCOMB
DEEP WATER TRAWLING
SELF PORTRAIT AT THREE DEGREES
SHROUD
from THE ENMESHMENTS
WE
FAST
II
READING TO MY FATHER
THE POST HUMAN
THE MEDIUM
VIGIL
WITH MOTHER IN THE KITCHEN
DEMENTIA
III
TO TELL OF BODIES CHANGED TO DIFFERENT
FORMS
SELF PORTRAIT: MAY I TOUCH YOU
INCARNATION
FROM INSIDE THE MRI
PRYING
CRYO
IV
DOUBLE HELIX
THE MASK NOW

MOTHER’S HANDS DRAWING ME
RUNAWAY

I
ALL
TREE
I’M READING YOUR MIND
MY SKIN IS
WHEN OVERFULL OF PAIN I
OVERHEARD IN THE HERD
II
[TO] THE LAST [BE] HUMAN
FROM THE TRANSIENCE
PRAYER FOUND UNDER FLOORBOARD
CARNATION/RE-IN
BECOMING OTHER
THAW
EXCHANGE
III
SAM’S DREAM
SAM’S STANDING
WHEREAS I HAD NOT YET IN THIS LIFE SEEN
RAIL
I WON’T LIVE LONG
SCARCELY THERE
UNIV
THE HIDDENNESS OF THE WORLD
RUNAWAY
IT CANNOT BE

WHOM ARE YOU
SIRI U
IN THE NEST®
THE WAKE OFF THE FERRY
POEM
About the Author
Books by Jorie Graham
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Special Thanks

TO THE LAST BE HUMAN

The earliest of the poems in this tetralogy were written at 373 parts
per million of atmospheric CO2, and the most recent at 414 parts per
million; that is to say, in the old calendar, 2002 and 2020 respectively.
The body of work gathered here stands as an extraordinary lyric
record of those eighteen calamitous years: a glittering, teeming
Anthropocene journal, written from within the New Climatic Regime
(as Bruno Latour names the present), rife with hope and raw with loss,
lush and sparse, hard to parse and hugely powerful to experience.
Recently, Graham said that she has begun to imagine her poetry
“as something that might be dug up from rubble in the future,” a
message sent forward to “whatever or whomever comes next,” part of
“a huge amalgam of leftover signals held together by chance.” This
image of her poems existing as future relics, close-read by distant
beings, recalls to me the research field of “nuclear semiotics” which
flourished in the US in the early 1990s. In those years, as the issue of
the long-term burial of mid- and high-level nuclear waste pressed with
increasing urgency, the question emerged as to how to warn future
generations of the great and durable radioactive danger that would lie
below-ground. The US Department of Energy commissioned a
“Human Interference Task Force” to devise a marker system which
would deter intrusion for at least 10,000 years at the deep repositories
for nuclear waste then under construction at Yucca Mountain in

Nevada and Carlsbad in New Mexico. Among the proposals
developed by the Task Force (none has yet been implemented) were
“passive institutional controls” such as concrete pillars with jutting
spikes; pictograms and petroglyphs conveying horror; and information
chambers built of granite and reinforced concrete, carrying engraved
warnings in numerous languages.
Graham’s poems are likewise turned to face our planet’s deep-time
future, and their shadows are also cast by the long light of the willhave-been. But they are made of more durable materials than granite
and concrete, they are very far from passive, and their tasks are of
record as well as of warning: to preserve what it has felt like to be a
human in these accelerated years when “the future / takes shape / too
quickly,” when we are entering “a time / beyond belief.” They know,
these poems, and what they tell is precise to their form. How they
swarm, beautifully and bee-like! They settle upon surfaces of time and
place and seethe there, their long lines susurrating together as tens of
thousands of wings do, intensely, intricately. Sometimes they are
made of ragged, hurting, hurtling, and body-fleeing language; other
times they celebrate the sheer, shocking, heart-stopping gift of the
given world, seeing light, tree, sea, skin, and star as a “whirling robe
humming with firstness,” there to “greet you if you eye-up.” I have
found myself speaking some of these poems aloud in order the better
to enter them: sounding their humming, their murmuration, in the
Earth’s air as well as the mind’s ear. I know not to mistake the
pleasures of this poetry for presentist consolation, though; the
situation has moved far beyond that: “Wind would be nice but / it’s
only us shaking.”
The titles and tones of the four collections tell a story in their
(ecological) succession. Sea Change: richness and strangeness; a
phase-shift happening; quickening and deadness; the need, the
obligation, to keep eyes open, pearl-less. Place: at once verb and

noun; to locate what is lost and to reach sure footing, to ground a
thing well; to find one’s place but also to be put in it. Fast: swift but
so too stuck; fleet and fixed; steadfast but also bedfast and cragfast,
unable to move up or down, on or back; caught in the torrent; made
fast (secure), but thus also beyond adaptation or adjustment. And
Runaway: a fugitive, a juggernaut; unfindable, unstoppable; faster
than fast; also an order—flee! Get gone!
The subjects—though that is not quite the right word for what is
contained here, what happens here—of the four collections also shift
across their courses, mapping and tracking life and lives as they
radiate, pulsate, and tangle. The tetralogy as a whole restlessly pries at
the same ancient ethical question in its modern context: What has it
been given us to do when we have been given a life to live?
Sea Change (2008) was written when Graham was resident in
Normandy, where she experienced the canicule (heatwave) of 2003,
the hottest summer on record in Europe since at least 1540. Rivers
dried to their beds, crops failed, whole woodlands perished. France
alone recorded nearly 15,000 deaths, Europe as a whole around
70,000. For two months, the continent glimpsed a future that—two
decades on—the “temperate zones” already inhabit near-permanently:
one of wildfires, brutal heat and drought, charred air, humans and
creatures gasping for breath. I think of this collection as a
meteorological journal, written at the point it became no longer
possible to separate weather from climate. Many of the poems begin
quietly, almost classically, with the calm field-note placements I
associate first with T’ang and Sung dynasty verse: “Waning moon”;
“After great rain.” “Summer solstice”; “Nearing dawn”; “Midwinter.
Dead of.” From the first pages, though, nature is out of joint,
displaced. A “new wind” blows: “Un- / natural says the news. Also
the body says it.” A new tune plays: “We have other plans / for your
summer is the tune. Also your winter.” Parts of these poems—with

their long weaving lines, sending the shuttle back and back again
across the loom of the page—almost yearn for the luxury of a lapse
into nowness, the absolution of the utter instant. But this is understood
to be an abrogation of responsibility; the lyric cannot love itself into
evaporation in the time of “The Great Dying.” And so on the poems
rush, faster and faster, tracing both damage and the “indrifting of us /
into us,” barely a full stop present, but instead an ice-slide of dashes
and ampersands. I tried to read “Futures” aloud, but I ran out of
breath.
Place (2012) seems to fall between storms, in an uneasy lull that is
both an aftermath and a prequel. Time in its pools is briefly more
available here, allowing a sinking into the dreamlife not only of “the
vast network of blooded things,” but also of vine, stone, grass, grain,
hedgerow, bloodless but still animate. These inquiries can feel
ceremonial and medieval (“On the Virtue of the Dead Tree”),
recalling Aquinas and Julian of Norwich, and above all Hildegard of
Bingen’s lush and nourishing meditations upon viriditas: greenness,
growth towards truth. Always, though, these slower poems are pressed
by what is imminent, “a slicing in which even the / blade is / audible.”
An endnote to the original collection identifies the double-margin
arrangement used by most of the poems (one left justified to the edge
of the page, one left justified almost to its center) as a means of
bringing the reader to “feel the vertiginous double-position in which
we find ourselves, constantly looking back just as we are forced to try
to see ahead.” Form, here, is forged by crisis. In the summer in which
I wrote this foreword to Graham’s tetralogy, a heat-dome settled over
the Pacific Northwest, destructive wildfires burned from Arctic
Canada to Lake Tahoe, flash floods devastated Tennessee, and
Hurricane Ida collapsed the power grid in New Orleans and drowned
people in their New York basements. All of this in North America
alone, in three months. Yet still power-wielders refuse to recognize
that “apocalypse” is not an indefinitely deferable singularity but an

always-somewhere-present experience, unevenly distributed across
the contour-lines of existing inequalities.
Fast (2017) opens in apparent stasis—“Manacled to a whelm.”—
but within seconds is off on its headlong rush (“everything
transitioning—unfolding—emptying”) that will hardly pause for the
collection’s duration. Long poems here are set rigorously to the lefthand margin, hard justified for the hard-to-justify: “trawling-nets
bycatch poison ghostfishing.” New forces and harrowings emerge:
cancer, the death of a father, the decline of a mother, and all are set
within the webwork of the wider illnesses—the new maladies of the
soul, as Kristeva named them. Online surveillance and dataharvesting, the Syrian war, ecological devastation on land and at sea:
“We are in systemicide.” But don’t cry(o): do something! New nonhuman voices speak through these lyrics, become strange attractors
around which the language spins: the ocean floor, chatbots, the
singing magnetic field of an MRI scanner. Mass surveillance, mass
infection, mass injustice. A new punctuation mark appears here, too:
the arrow, an em-dash tipped with an angle bracket. These arrows
leave the reader trapped in a flow-diagram, compelled causally everonwards at speed, at weapon-point: this leads to that leads to this,
burning off nuance, hastening us remorselessly into an end time that
will be a surrender. Struggling against this piercing and
disempowering teleology, though, are the out-of-time energies of love
and compassion. A poem about Graham’s dying father, “The Mask
Now,” contains one of the most affecting lines I know in the modern
elegy. “He was a settler in that flesh, that I could see. / Not far from
breaking camp.”
A beautiful becalmedness starts the still-point poem that opens
Runaway (2020): “After the rain stops you can hear the rained-on.”
What I take to be the chief task of the poems here is declared early:
“trying to make sense of the normal, turn it to life, more life.” I hear

an echo of Prior Walter’s rallying cry in Angels in America: “still
bless me anyway. I want more life.” Kushner’s masterpiece arose out
of the AIDS epidemic, Graham’s was published in the first months of
the COVID-19 pandemic. Both share urgings against immiseration
and extinction, towards love, kindness, and the kin-making powers of
true empathy. We must be “unafraid to live in the raw wind,” writes
Kushner, and a “raw wind” blows through all four of Graham’s
volumes too, stirring soul, shivering skin, keeping us awake. The
wind’s enemy is the depletion of life’s diversity, because in that
diversity lies the vital replenishing possibilities of sympoesis, the
epigenetic making-with that is the engine of life on Earth. Reduce the
totality of life’s forms, and future creation is itself constrained: “I
won’t live long / enough to see any of the new / dreams the hundreds
of new kinds of suffering and weeds birds animals shouldering their /
demise without possibility of re- / generation.”
“Emergence” is the term given in biology, systems theory, and
beyond for the properties or behaviors of an entity that its parts do not
on their own possess. Graham’s poetry is strongly emergent, its
effects irreducible to the sum or difference of its components. It
shoals, schools, flocks, builds, folds. It has life. To read these four
twenty-first-century books together in a single volume is to
experience vastly complex patterns forming and reforming in mind,
eye, and ear. These poems sing within themselves, between one
another, and across collections, and the song that joins them all is
uttered simply in the first lines of the last poem of the last book:
The earth said
remember me.
The earth said
don’t let go,
said it one day

when I was
accidentally
listening
—Robert Macfarlane, September 2021

SEA
CHANGE
I

SEA CHANGE

One day: stronger wind than anyone expected. Stronger than
ever before in the recording
of such. Unnatural says the news. Also the body says it. Which part of the body—I look
down, can
feel it, yes, don’t know
where. Also submerging us,
making of the fields, the trees, a cast of
characters in an
unnegotiable
drama, ordained, iron-gloom of low light, everything at once undoing
itself. Also sustained, as in a hatred of
a thought, or a vanity that comes upon one
out of
nowhere & makes
one feel the mischief in faithfulness to an
idea. Everything unpreventable and excited
like
mornings in the unknown future. Who shall repair this now. And how the future
takes shape
too quickly. The permanent is ebbing. Is
leaving
nothing in the way of
trails, they are blown over, grasses shoot up, life disturbing life, & it

fussing all over us, like a confinement
gone
insane, blurring the feeling of
the state of
being. Which did exist just yesterday, calm
and
true. Like the right to
privacy—how strange a feeling, here, the
right—
consider your affliction says the
wind, do not plead ignorance, & farther
and farther
away leaks the
past, much farther than it used to go, beating against the shutters I
have now fastened again, the huge misunderstanding round me now so
still in
the center of this room, listening—oh,
these are not split decisions, everything
is in agreement, we set out willingly, &
also knew to
play by rules, & if I say to you now
let’s go
somewhere the thought won’t outlast
the minute, here it is now, carrying its
North
Atlantic windfall, hissing Consider
the body of the ocean which rises every
instant into
me, & its
ancient e-

vaporation, & how it delivers itself
to me, how the world is our law, this indrifting of us
into us, a chorusing in us of elements, &
how the
intermingling of us lacks intelligence, makes
reverberation, syllables untranscribable, in-clingings, & how wonder is also what
pours from us when, in the
coiling, at the very bottom of
the food
chain, sprung
from undercurrents, warming by 1 degree, the indispensable
plankton is forced north now, & yet farther north,
spawning too late for the cod larvae hatch,
such
that the hatch will not survive, nor the
species in the end, in the the right-now
forever uninterruptible slowing of the
gulf
stream, so that I, speaking in this wind today, out loud in it, to no one, am
suddenly
aware
of having written my poems, I feel it in
my useless
hands, palms in my lap, & in my listening, & also the memory of a season at its
full, into which is spattered like a
silly cry this incessant leaf-glittering, shadow-mad, all
over

the lightshafts, the walls, the bent back
ranks of trees
all stippled with these slivers of
light like
breaking grins—infinities of them—wriggling along the walls, over the
grasses—mouths
reaching into
other mouths—sucking out all the
air—huge breaths passing to and fro between the unkind blurrings—& quicken
me further says this new wind, &
according to thy
judgment, &
I am inclining my heart towards the end,
I cannot fail, this Saturday, early pm,
hurling myself,
wiry furies riding my many backs, against your foundations and your
best young
tree, which you have come outside to stake again, & the loose stones in the sill.

EMBODIES

Deep autumn & the mistake occurs, the plum tree blossoms, twelve
blossoms on three different
branches, which for us, personally, means none this coming spring or perhaps
none on
just those branches on which
just now
lands, suddenly, a gray-gold migratory bird—still here?—crisping,
multiplying the wrong
air, shifting branches with small
hops, then stilling—very still—breathing into this oxygen which also pockets
my
looking hard, just
that, takes it in, also my
thinking which I try to seal off,
my humanity, I was not a mistake is what my humanity thinks, I cannot
go somewhere
else than this body, the afterwards of each of these instants is just
another instant, breathe, breathe,
my cells reach out, I multiply on the face of
the earth, on the
mud—I can see my prints on the sweet bluish mud—where I was just
standing and reaching to see if
those really were blossoms, I thought perhaps paper

from wind, & the sadness in
me is that of forced parting, as when I loved a personal
love, which now seems unthinkable, & I
look at
the gate, how open it is,
in it the very fact of God as
invention seems to sit, fast, as in its saddle, so comfortable—& where
does the road out of it
go—& are those torn wires hanging from the limbs—& the voice I heard once
after I passed
what I thought was a sleeping
man, the curse muttered out, & the cage after they have let
the creatures
out, they are elsewhere, in one of the other rings, the ring with the empty cage is
gleaming, the cage is
to be looked at, grieving, for nothing, your pilgrimage ends here,
we are islands, we
should beget nothing &
what am I to do with my imagination—& the person in me trembles—& there is
still
innocence, it is starting up somewhere
even now, and the strange swelling of the so-called Milky Way, and the sound of
the
wings of the bird as it lifts off
suddenly, & how it is going somewhere precise, & that precision, & how I no
longer
can say for sure that it
knows nothing, flaming, razory, the feathered serpent I saw as a child, of stone,
&
how it stares back at me
from the height of its pyramid, & the blood flowing from the sacrifice, & the

oracles
dragging hooks through the hearts in
order to say
what is coming, what is true, & all the blood, millennia, drained to stave off
the future, stave off,
& the armies on the far plains, the gleam off their armor now in this bird’s
eye, as it flies towards me
then over, & the sound of the thousands of men assembled at
all cost now
the sound of the bird lifting, thick, rustling where it flies over—only see, it is
a hawk after all, I had not seen
clearly, it has gone to hunt in the next field, & the chlorophyll is
coursing, & the sun is
sucked in, & the chief priest walks away now where what remains of
the body is left
as is customary for the local birds.

THIS

Full moon, & the empty tree’s branches—correction—the tree’s
branches,
expose and recover it, suddenly, letting it drift and rise a bit then
swathing it again,
treating it like it was stuff, no treasure up there growing more
bluish and ablaze,
as the wind trussles the wide tall limbs intelligently
in its nervous ceaselessness—of this minute, of that minute—
All the light there is
playing these limbs like strings until
you can
hear the
icy offering of winter which is wind in trees blocking and
revealing moon & it’s
cold &
in the house someone is
sending instructions. Someone thinks death can be
fixed.
Inside it is magic, footprints are never made
visible. The moon slicks along this human
coming and
going with no prints to it. The moon

all over the
idea that this “all”
could be (and no one would mind) a
game. Noise, priests, provinces, zip codes
coil up out of the grasses
towards it. Groups
seize power. Honor exists. Just punishment exists. The sound of
servants not being
set free. Being told it is postponed again. Hope as it
exists in them
now. Those that were once living how they are not
here in this
moonlight, & how there are things one feels instantly
ashamed about in it, & also, looking at it,
the feeling of a mother tongue in the mouth—& how you can, looking away,
make those trees lean, silvered, against
the idea of the universal—really lean—their tips trying to
scratch at it—
Until it sizzles in one: how one could once give birth, that’s what the shine
says, and that distant countries
don’t exist, enemies do, and as for the great mantle of
individuality (gleaming) &
innocence & fortune—look up: the torturer yawns waiting for his day to be
done—he leans against
the trees for a rest, the implement shines, he looks up.

GUANTÁNAMO

Waning moon. Rising now. Creak, it goes. Deep
over the exhausted continents. I wonder says
my
fullness. Nobody nobody says the room in
which I
lie very still in the
darkness watching. Your heart says the moon, waning & rising further. Where is
it. Your
keep, your eyes your trigger
finger your spine your reasoning—also
better to
refuse touch,
keep distance, let the blood run out of you and the white stars gnaw you, & the
thorn
which is so white outside in the field,
& the sand which is sheetening on the long beach, the soldiers readying, the upglance
swift when the key words, of prayer, before
capture, are
uttered, a shiver which has no hate but is not love, is neutral, yes, unblooded, as where for instance a bud near
where
a hand is unlocking a
security-catch calls

out, & it is an instance of the nobody-there, & the sound of water darkens, & the
wind
moves the grasses, & without
a cry the cold flows like a watchdog’s
eyes, the watchdog keeping his eye out for difference—only difference—& acts
being
committed in your name, & your captives
arriving
at your detention center, there, in your
eyes, the lockup, deep in your pupil, the softening-up, you paying all your
attention
out, your eyes, your cell, your keep, your
hold,
after all it is yours, yes, what you have taken in, grasp it, grasp
this, there is no law, you are not open to
prosecution, look all you’d like, it will squirm for you, there, in this rising light,
protected
from consequence, making you a
ghost, without a cry, without a cry the
evening turning to night, words it seemed were everything and then
the legal team will declare them exempt,
exemptions for the lakewater drying, for the murder of the seas, for the slaves in
their
waters, not of our species, exemption named
go forth, mix blood, fill your register, take of flesh, set fire, posit equator,
conceal
origin, say you are all forgiven, say these are
only
counter-resistant coercive interrogation techniques, as in give me your
name, give it, I will take it, I will reclassify it, I will withhold you from you, just like that, for a little while, it won’t
hurt

much, think of a garden, take your mind off
things, think sea, wind, thunder, root, think tree that will hold you
up, imagine it holding you
up, choose to be who you are, quick choose it, that will help. The moon is colder
than you think. It is full of nothing like
this stillness of ours. We are trying not to be noticed. We are in stillness as if it
were an
other life we could slip into. In our skins
we dazzle with nonexistence. It is a trick of course but sometimes it works. If it
doesn’t we will be found, we will be made to
scream and crawl. We will long to be forgiven. It doesn’t matter for what, there
are no
facts. Moon, who will write
the final poem? Your veil is flying, its uselessness makes us feel there is
still time, it is about two now,
you are asking me to lose myself.
In this overflowing of my eye,
I do.

UNDERWORLD

After great rain. Gradually you are revealing yourself to me. The lesson carves
a tunnel through
an occupied territory. Great beaches come into existence, are laved for centuries,
small
play where the castles are
built, the water carried up for moats, the buckets lost at the end of the exciting
day, then even the dunes go under, it takes a
long while but then
they are gone
altogether, ocean takes the place, as today where the overpass revealed the fields
gone
under &, just at the surface of the water, the
long
miles of barbed wire, twice-there, the ones below (of water) trembling, the
fence-posts’
small fixed pupils staring up
every fifty feet
at the sky, glittering, their replicas shivering, the spines of grasses gnawed-at by
the sick
human eye, when will we open them
again our eyes, this must all be from the world of shut eyes, one’s temples feel
the cold, maybe one is
inside a seashell, one is what
another force

is hearing—how lovely, we are being handed over to an other force, listen, put
this to your ear—the last river we know
loses its
form, widens, as if a foot were lifted from the dancefloor but not put down again,
ever,
so that it’s not a
dance-step, no, more like an amputation where the step just disappears, midair,
although
also the rest of the body is
missing, beware of your past, there is a fiery apple in the orchard, the coal in the
underground is bursting with
sunlight, inquire no further it says,
it wishes it were a root, a bulb, a closed fist—look how it fills
with meaning when
opened—then when extended—let us not
go there—broken, broken—no to the
imagination of some great
murmuring through the soil as through the
souls of
all men—
silent agreement which is actually the true soil—but there it is now going under
—nothing
will grow in it—the footsteps are washed
away which might have
attempted kindness or cultivation or a walk over the earth to
undertake
curiosity—that was our true gift to creation: curiosity—how we would
dream eyes closed in fog all through the
storm, then open up to aftermath, run out to see—& then of course too much, too
much—too much wanting to know—sorry I
did not mean to

raise my voice—I will turn
no further—you are making yourself punishable says the flood—I will
drink it, I will, my God gave
it me says the evaporation sluicing the invisible surfaces,
in which clouds are being
said, right into the shuddering of time, its so-called passing—each land
had its time for being
born, each date a cage shrinking—until the creature has ribs that bend-in and a
skull that is
forced
into its heart, & the rain is falling chattering pearling completely turning-in,
turning, lost,
& all the words that might have held it, it
now
flows through,
& the rim of the meaning crumbles—& it is the new world you wanted—& it is
beginning
its life now.

FUTURES

Midwinter. Dead of. I own you says my mind. Own what, own
whom. I look up. Own the looking at us
say the cuttlefish branchings, lichen-black, moist. Also
the seeing, which wants to feel more than it
sees.
Also, in the glance, the feeling of owning, accordioning out and up,
seafanning,
& there is cloud on blue ground up there, & wind which the eye loves so deeply
it
would spill itself out and liquefy
to pay for it—
& the push of owning is thrilling, is spring before it
is—is that swelling—is the imagined
fragrance as one
bends, before the thing is close enough—wideeyed leaning—although none of this can
make you
happy—
because, looking up, the sky makes you hear it, you know why we have come it
blues, you know the trouble at the heart,
blue, blue, what
pandemonium, blur of spears roots cries leaves master & slave, the crop
destroyed,
water everywhere not

drinkable, & radioactive waste in it, &
human bodily
waste, & what,
says the eye-thinking heart, is the last color
seen, the last word
heard—someone left behind, then no behind—
is there a skin of the I own which can be
scoured from inside the
glance—no,
cannot—& always
someone walking by whistling a
little tune, that’s
life he says, smiling, there, that was life—& the heart branches with its
wild arteries—I own my self, I own my
leaving—the falcon watching from the tree—I shall torch the crop that no one
else
have it whispers the air—
& someone’s swinging from a rope, his rope—the eye
throbbing—day a noose looking for a neck
—
the fire spidery but fast—& the idea of
friends, what was that, & the day, in winter,
your lower back
started acting up again, & they pluck out the
eyes at the end for
food, & don’t forget
the meeting at 6, your child’s teacher
wishes to speak to you
about his future, & if there is no food and the rain is everywhere switching-on as
expected,
& you try to think of music and the blue of
Giotto,

& if they have to eat the arms he will feel no pain at least, & there is a
sequence in which feeding takes
place—the body is owned by the hungry—one is waiting
one’s turn—one wants to own one’s
turn—and standing there,
don’t do it now but you might remember kisses—how you kissed his arm in the
sun
and
tasted the sun, & this is your
address now, your home address—& the strings are cut no one
looks up any longer
—or out—no—&
one day a swan appeared out of nowhere on the drying river,
it
was sick, but it floated, and the eye felt the pain of rising to take it in—I own
you
said the old feeling, I want
to begin counting
again, I will count what is mine, it is moving quickly now, I will begin this
message “I”—I feel the
smile, put my hand up to be sure, yes on my lips—the yes—I touch it again, I
begin counting, I say one to the swan, one,
do not be angry with me o my god, I have begun the action of beauty again, on
the burning river I have started the
catalogue,
your world,
I your speck tremble remembering money, its dry touch, sweet strange
smell, it’s a long time, the smell of it like
lily of the valley
sometimes, and pondwater, and how

one could bend down close to it
and drink.

II

LATER IN LIFE

Summer heat, the first early morning
of it. How it lowers the pitch of the
cry—human—cast up
as two words by the worker street-level
positioning the long beam on
the chain as he calls up to the one handling the pulley on
the seventh floor. One
call. They hear each other!
Perfectly! As the dry heat, the filled-out leaves, thicken the surround, the
warming
asphalt, & the lull in growth
occurs, & in it the single birdcries now and
again
are placed, &
all makes a round from which sound is sturdied-up without dissipation or
dilation,
bamboo-crisp, &
up it goes up like a thing
tossed without warp of weight or evidence of
overcome
gravity, as if space were thinned by summer now to a non-interference. Up it
goes, the
cry, all the
way up, audible and unchanging, so the man

need
not even raise his voice to be heard,
the dry warm air free to let it pass without
loss of
any of itself along
its way …
I step out and suddenly notice this: summer arrives, has arrived, is arriving.
Birds grow
less than leaves although they cheep, dip,
arc. A call
across the tall fence from an invisible neighbor to his child is heard
right down to the secret mood in it the child
also hears. One hears in the silence that follows the great
desire for approval
and love
which summer holds aloft, all damp leached from it, like a thing floating out on
a frail but
perfect twig-end. Light seeming to darken in
it yet
glow. Please it says. But not with the eager
need of
Spring! Come what may says summer. Smack in the middle I will stand and
breathe. The
future is a superfluity I do not
taste, no, there is no numbering
here, it is a gorgeous swelling, no emotion, as in this love is no emotion, no, also
no
memory—we have it all, now, & all
there ever was is
us, now, that man holding the beam by the right end and saying go on his
ground from

which the word and the
cantilevered metal
rise, there is no mistake, the right minute falls harmlessly, intimate,
overcrowded,
without provenance—perhaps bursting with nostalgia
but
ripening so fast without growing at
all, & what
is the structure of freedom but this, & grace, & the politics of time—look south,
look
north—yes—east west compile hope
synthesize
exceed look look again hold fast attach speculate drift drift recognize forget—
terrible
gush—gash—of
form of
outwardness, & it is your right to be so entertained, & if you are starting to
feel it is hunger this
gorgeousness, feel the heat fluctuate & say
my
name is day, of day, in day, I want nothing
to
come back, not ever, & these words are mine, there is no angel to
wrestle, there is no intermediary, there is something I must
tell you, you do not need existence, these words, praise be, they can for now be
said. That is summer. Hear them.

JUST BEFORE

At some point in the day, as such, there was a pool. Of
stillness. One bent to brush one’s hair, and,
lifting
again, there it was, the
opening—one glanced away from a mirror, and there, before one’s glance
reached the
street, it was, dilation and breath—a name
called out
in another’s yard—a breeze from
where—the log collapsing inward of a
sudden into its
hearth—it burning further, feathery—you
hear it but you don’t
look up—yet there it
bloomed—an unlearning—all byway no birthpain—dew—sand falling onto sand—a threat
from which you shall have
no reprieve—then the
reprieve—Some felt it was freedom, or a split-second of unearthliness—but no,
it was far from unearthly, it was full of
earth, at first casually full, for some
millennia, then
desperately full—of earth—of copper mines and thick under-leaf-vein sucking in
of

light, and isinglass, and dusty heat—woodrings
bloating their tree-cells with more
life—and grass and weed and tree intermingling in the
undersoil—& the
earth’s whole body round
filled with
uninterrupted continents of
burrowing—& earthwide miles of
tunneling by the
mole, bark beetle, snail, spider, worm—& ants making their crossnationstate cloths of
soil, & planetwide the
chewing of insect upon leaf—fish-mouth on
krill,
the spinning of
coral, sponge, cocoon—this is what entered the pool of stopped thought—a
chain suspended in
the air of which
one link
for just an instant
turned to thought, then time, then heavy
time, then
suddenly
air—a link of air!—& there was no standing army anywhere,
& the sleeping bodies in the doorways in all
the cities of
what was then just
planet earth
were lifted up out of their sleeping
bags, & they walked

away, & the sensation of empire blew off
the link
like pollen—just like that—off it went—into thin air—& the athletes running
their
games in Delphi entered that zone in the
long oval of the arena where you run in
shadow, where the killer crowd becomes
one sizzling hiss, where,
coming round that curve the slowness
happens, & it all goes
inaudible, & the fatigue the urgent sprint
the lust
makes the you
fantastically alone, & the bees thrum the hillsides, & all the blood that has been
wasted—all of it—gathers into deep
coherent veins in the
earth
and calls itself
history—& we make it make
sense—
& we are asked to call it
good.

LOAN

Rain. And aftermath. Untouchable. The gutters cough and rage, & listening
without
hearing we flinch, soul grins to rain
though we ourselves don’t know that grin—
& oozings down treetrunks, liquefying,
as if the flanks were clay—& also smoke
when rain lets up,
sudden-heat steam, differential, sound of churchbells coming out
of
nowhere, I hate you someone cries out where the door has slammed, smell of the
light where it pools on sidewalks, smell of
soil, of the five-century oak emptying suddenly, curbspill, fly-off of
small
cheeping birds—so what are we doing says
the path,
&, we want to know where everything’s
going, runneling, & what’s
really dead here and what’s only changing,
really, lift
up the stone, pull back the leaves, loam, sod,
dirt, ah
so wet, wait till it dries a bit, evaporation and the wings of it slapping about—
all this taking which is not our taking—

puddles &
how I go to them, to make them trouble me—
water holding sky and time—
cracks in the asphalt where there is
leak, where air is forced out, goes
to, flows down, follows cracks, makes cracks—the
shine
up here all leafdrip, blossomdrip, chainlink’s minuscule cascading from wisteria
cup to cup to
soil where the water’s just for a moment
milky, bony, but no
it is just water, do you remember it, the faucet flared like a glare of
open speech, a cry, you could say what you
pleased, you could turn it
off, then on again—at will—and how it fell, teeming, too much, all over your
hands, much as you please—from where
you are now
try to
feel it—what
was it this thick/thin blurry coil
flowing into the sink, while someone next to you, washing,
recommended rerouting
the bloodflow round the heart, the surgeon a
good one, &
we considered the
odds, how the body was always changing under the stress, & get outdoors he
said,
take up some golf, might help with sundays
anyway, & all the while
the water running over our clean hands, like that, in front of the mirror, still

alive,
someone who had been getting pretty good
at
his job—lifeblood—as in grammar
gliding along in its sentence but still grammar—
such must be our reward was what we never
thought then,
& through the intersection the extra, the
smell of loam, its
overfullness—unable to take any more in—yet feasting—& all of it going
nowhere—&
jump in the shower—just like that—
unearth yourself, god-on-us—whose passion was—nothing—no—
that was the
point—no—
it is given—
as in the richness of a rich man, & succulence holding its waters in tight, &
mirage where there is desperate thirst, &
salt, & the day which comes when there are to be no more harvests from now on,
irrigation returns only as history, a thing
made of text,
& yet, listen,
there was
rain, then the swift interval before evaporation, & the stillness
of brimming, & the
wet rainbowing where oil from exhaust picks up light, sheds glow, then
echoes in the drains where
deep inside the
drops fall individually, plink,
& the places where birds
interject, & the coming-on of heat, & the girl looking sideways carrying the

large
bouquet of blue hydrangeas, shaking the
water off, &
the wondering if this is it, or are we in for another round, a glance up, a quick
step
over the puddle
carrying speedy clouds,
birdcall now confident again, heat drying, suddenly no evidence of its having
been wet—but no, you
didn’t even notice it—it rained.

SUMMER SOLSTICE

Here it is now, emergent, as if an eagerness, a desire to say there this is
done this is
concluded I have given all I have the store
is full the
crop is
in the counsel has decided the head and shoulders of the invisible have been reconfigured sewn back together melded—
the extra
seconds of light like
hearing steps come running towards me, then here you
are, you came all this
distance,
you could call it matrimony it is not an illusion it can be calculated to the last
position,
consider no further think no longer all
art of
persuasion ends here, the head has been put back on the body, it stands before us
entire—it has been proven—all the pieces
have
been found—the broken thing for an instant entire—oh strange
addition and sum, here is no other further
step
to be taken, we have arrived, all the rest now a falling
back—but not yet not now now is all now

and
here—the end of the day will not end—will stay with us
this fraction longer—
the hands of it all extending—
& where they would have turned away they
wait,
there is nothing for now after this we shall wait,
shall wait that it reach us, this inch of
finishing,
in what do you believe it leans out to suggest, slant,
as if to mend it the rip, the longest day of
this one year,
not early and not late, unearned, unearnable—accruing to nothing, also to no one—how many more will I
see—no—wrong question—old question—
how
strange that it be in
truth not now
conceivable, not as a thing-as-such, the personal death of
an I—& the extra millisecond adds itself to
this day,
& learns, it too, to interline the cheek of light
given to the widening face
that stares at us holds us excels at
being—stands, dwells, purrs, allows—what can we say to it—standing in it—
quickly it arrives at full, no, not quickly, it
arrives, at fullest, then there it is, the
brim, where the fullness
stocks, pools, feeds, indwells, is a
yes, I look up, I see your face through the window looking up,

see you bend to the
horizon-line,
do not myself look out at it, no, look at you,
at the long life of having-looked as a way of
believing
now in your
thinking
face, & how natural the passage of time, and death, had felt to us, & how you
cannot
comprehend the thing you are meant
to be looking
for
now, & you are weighing something, you are out under the sky
trying to feel
the
future, there it is now in your almost
invisible
squinting to the visible, & how I feel your heart beat slowly out there in the
garden
as we both see the
dove
in the
youngest acacia,
& how it is making its nest again this year, how it chose the second ranking
offshoot
again, how the young tree strains at the stake in the wind, & within,
the still head of the mother sitting as if all
time
came down to
this, the ringed neck, the
mate’s call from the

roof, & how we both know not to move—me inside at the window, deep
summer, dusk,
you in the line of sight of the
bird, & also
of the hawk changing sides of the field as
usual,
& the swallows riding the lowest currents, reddish, seeking their feed.

FULL FATHOM

& sea swell, hiss of incomprehensible flat: distance: blue long-fingered ocean
and its
nothing else: nothing in the above visible
except
water: water and
always the white self-destroying bloom of wavebreak &, upclose
roil, &
here, on what’s left of land,
ticking of stays against empty flagpoles, low tide, free day, nothing
being
memorialized here today—memories float,
yes,
over the place but not memories any of us now among the living
possess—open your
hands—let go the scrap metal with the laughter—let go the
upstairs neighbor you did not
protect—they took him
away—let go how frightened you knew he
was all
along while you went on with your
day—your day overflowing with time and
place—they came and got him—there are manners for every kind of
event—he stopped reading and looked up
when they came in—didn’t anyone tell you

you would never feel at home—that there is a form of slavery in everything—
and when was it
in your admittedly short
life you
were permitted to believe that this lasted
forever—remove your hands
from your pockets—take out that laundry list, that receipt for
everything you
pawned last night—decide whom to blame
—
stick to your
story—exclude expectation of heavenly
reward—exclude
the milk of
human kindness—poisoned from the start—yes—who ever expected that
to be the mistake—with all the murderers and miracle workers—the hovering
spidery
fairy tales—kites, angels, missiles, yellow
stars—clouds—those were houses that are his eyes—those were lives that
are his
eyes—those are families, those are privacies, those are details—those are
reparation
agreements, summary
judgments, those are multiplications
on the face of the earth that are—those are the forests, the coal seams, the
carbon sinks that are his—
as they turn into carbon sources—his—
and the festering wounds that are—and the granary that burned—and the quick
blow
administered to make it
painless, so-

called—his eyes his yes his blows his seed’s
first
insertion into this our only soil—
& the flower, the cut
flower in my
bouquet here
made this morning from the walk we took, aimless, as if free,
where you asked me to
marry you, & the loaf of
barley, millet and wheat I was able,
as a matter of course, to bring to the table,
freshbaked,
in life.

THE VIOLINIST AT THE WINDOW, 1918
(after Matisse)

Here he is again, so thin, unbent, one would say captive—did winter ever leave
—no one
has climbed the hill north of town in longer than one can remember—something
hasn’t
been fully loaded—life is blameless—he is a stem—& what here is cyclic, we
would so
need to know
about now—& if there is
a top to this—a summit, the highest note, a
destination—
here he is now, again, standing at the window, ready to
look out if asked to
by his
time,
ready to take up again if he
must, here where the war to end all wars has
come
to an end—for a while—to take up whatever
it is
the spirit
must take up, & what is the melody of
that, the sustained one note of obligatory
hope, taken in, like a virus,

before the body grows accustomed to it and
it
becomes
natural again—yes breathe it in,
the interlude,
the lull in the
killing—up
the heart is asked to go, up—
open these heavy shutters now, the hidden order of a belief system
trickles to the fore,
it insists you draw closer to
the railing—lean out—
time stands out there as if mature, blooming, big as day—& is this not an
emaciated
sky, & how
thin is this
sensation of time, do you
not feel it, the no in the heart—no, do not make me believe
again, too much has died, do not make me
open this
all up
again—crouching in
shadow, my head totally
empty—you can see
the whole sky pass through this head of mine, the mind is hatched and scored by
clouds
and weather—what is weather—when it’s
all gone we’ll
buy more,
heaven conserve us is the song, & lakes full of leaping
fish, & ages that shall not end, dew-

drenched, sundrenched, priceless—leave us alone, loose and undone,
everything
and nothing slipping through—no, I cannot be reached, I cannot be duped again
says
my head standing now in the
opened-up window, while history starts up
again, &
is that flute music in the
distance, is that an answering machine—call and response—& is that ringing in
my ears
the furrows of earth
full of men and their parts, & blood as it
sinks into
loam, into the page of statistics, & the streets out there, shall we really
be made to lay them out again, & my
plagiarized
humanity, whom
shall I now imitate to rebecome
before the next catastrophe—the law of falling bodies applies but we shall not
use
it—the law of lateness—
even our loved ones don’t know if we’re living—
but I pick it up again, the
violin, it is
still here
in my left hand, it has been tied to me all this long time—I shall hold it, my
one burden, I shall hear the difference
between up

and
down, & up we shall bring the bow now up
&
down, & find
the note, sustained, fixed, this is what hope forced upon oneself by one’s self
sounds
like—this high note trembling—it is a
good sound, it is an
ugly sound, my hand is doing this, my mind cannot
open—cloud against sky, the freeing of my
self
from myself, the note is that, I am standing in
my window, my species is ill, the
end of the world can be imagined, minutes run away like the pattering of feet in
summer
down the long hall then out—oh be happy,
&
clouds roil, & they hide the slaughterhouse, they loft as if this were
not
perpetual exile—we go closer—the hands at the end of this body
feel in their palms
the great
desire—look—the instrument is raised—
& this will be a time again in which to make—a time of uselessness—the imagined human
paradise.

III

NEARING DAWN

Sunbreak. The sky opens its magazine. If you look hard
it is a process of falling
and squinting—& you are interrupted again and again by change, & crouchings out there
where you are told each second you
are only visiting, & the secret
whitening adds up to no
meaning, no, not for you, wherever the loosening muscle of the night
startles-open the hundreds of
thousands of voice-boxes, into which
your listening moves like an aging dancer still trying to glide—there is time for
everything, everything, is there not—
though the balance is
difficult, is coming undone, & something strays farther from love than we ever imagined, from the
long and
orderly sentence which was a life to us, the
dry
leaves on
the fields
through which the new shoots glow
now also glowing, wet curled tips pointing
in any
direction—

as if the idea of a right one were a terrible forgetting—as one feels upon
waking—when the dream is cutting loose, is
going
back in the other
direction, deep inside, behind, no, just back—&
one is left looking out—& it is
breaking open further—what are you to do—how let it fully in—the wideness of
it
is staggering—you have to have more arms
eyes a
thing deeper than laughter furrows more
capacious than hate forgiveness remembrance forgetfulness history silence
precision miracle—more
furrows are needed the field
cannot be crossed this way the
wide shine coming towards you standing in
the open window now, a dam breaking, reeking rich with the end of
winter, fantastic weight of loam coming into
the
soul, the door behind you
shut, the
great sands behind there, the pharaohs, the millennia of carefully prepared and
buried
bodies, the ceremony and the weeping for
them, all
back there, lamentations, libations, earth full of bodies everywhere, our bodies,
some still full of incense, & the sweet burnt
offerings, & the still-rising festival outcryings—& we will
inherit
from it all

nothing—& our ships will still go,
after the ritual killing to make the wind
listen,
out to sea as if they were going to a new place,
forgetting they must come home yet again
ashamed
no matter where they have been—& always the new brides setting forth—
& always these ancient veils of theirs falling
from the sky
all over us,
& my arms rising from my sides now as if in dictation, & them opening out from
me,
& me now smelling the ravens the blackbirds the small heat of the rot in this
largest
cage—bars of light crisping its boundaries
—
& look
there is no cover, you cannot reach
it, ever, nor the scent of last night’s rain, nor the chainsaw raised to take the first
of the
far trees
down, nor the creek’s tongued surface, nor
the minnow
turned by the bottom of the current—here
is an arm outstretched, then here
is rightful day and the arm still there, outstretched, at the edge of a world—
tyrants
imagined by the bearer of the arm, winds
listened for,
corpses easily placed anywhere the
mind wishes—inbox, outbox—machines
that do not tire in the

distance—barbed wire taking daysheen on—marking the end of the field—the
barbs like a
lineup drinking itself
crazy—the wire
where it is turned round the post standing in
for
mental distress—the posts as they start down the next field sorting his from
mine, his from the
other’s—until you know, following,
following, all the way to the edge and then turning again, then again, to the
far fields, to the
height of the light—you know
you have no destiny, no, you have a wild
unstoppable
rumor for a soul, you
look all the way to the end of
your gaze, why did you marry, why did you
stop to listen,
where are your fingerprints, the mud out there hurrying to
the white wood gate, its ruts, the ants in it,
your
imagination of your naked foot placed
there, the thought that in that there
is all you have & that you have
no rightful way
to live—

DAY OFF

from the cadaver beginning to show through the skin of the day. The future
without
days. Without days of it?
in it? I try to—just for a second—feel
that shape. What weeds-up out of nowhere as you look away for
good. So that you have to imagine
whatever’s growing there growing forever. You shall not be back to look
again. The last glance like a footprint before
the
thing it was
takes flight. Disturbing nothing, though,
as it is
nothing. Air moving aside air. That breeze. How is this possible, yet it
must be. Otherwise it cannot be said that
this
existed. Or that we did, today. Always breathing-in this pre-life, exhaling this
post.
Something goes away, something comes
back. But through you. Leaving no trail but self. As trails go not much of
one. But patiently
you travel it. Your self. You hardly disturb anything actually, isn’t it strange. For
all
the fuss of being how little
you disturb. Also like

a seam, this trail. Something is being
repaired. No? Yes. Push save. Write your name again to register. It is some
bride, this flesh barely hanging
on, of minutes, of minutiae, of whatever it is
raising now
up through day’s skin as a glance, a toss of hand, in conversation, as, growing increasingly unburied now, one can begin to
see
the speechless toil, there under day’s department, under the texture of
keeping-ondoing-it, whatever it is that has variation in it, that swallows clip, that the
trellis of minutes holds letting clouds slip
through if you
look up—it seems we are
fresh out of ideas—the pre-war life disappeared, just like that, don’t look back
you’ll
get stiff-necked—there is exhaust in the air
in its
place—the wilderness (try to think of it) does nothing but point to here, how we
got here, says it can’t stay
a minute longer
but that we
will have to—& day
something I am feeling lean on my shoulders now, & how
free it is, this day, how it seems to bend its
long neck
over me and try to peer at me, right here, right into my face—how it is so
worried in
its hollowing-out over me—night in it
starting to

trickle down, & the sensation of punishment though still far away, horns in the
distance, & how this was a schooling, &
plain
truths which shine out like night-bugs in evening, no one can catch them as
they blink
and waft, & that summer will be here
soon, which is normal, which we notice is normal, & will our fear matter to
anything is a thing we
wonder, & before you know it
we are ready to begin thinking about something else,
while behind us it is approaching at
last the day of
days, where all you have named is finally shunted aside, the whole material
manifestation of so-called definitions, imagine
that, the path of least resistance wherein I grab onto the immaterial and christen
it
thus and thus &
something over our shoulders says it is good, yes, go on, go on, and we did.

POSITIVE FEEDBACK LOOP
(June 2007)

I am listening in this silence that precedes. Forget
everything, start listening. Tipping point,
flash
point,
convective chimneys in the seas bounded by Greenland. Once there was thunder
and also
salvos at the four corners of the horizon,
that was
war.
In Hell they empty your hands of sand, they tell you to refill them with dust and
try
to hold in mind the North Atlantic Deep
Water
which also contains
contributions from the Labrador Sea and entrainment of other water masses, try
to hold a
complete collapse, in the North Atlantic
Drift, in the
thermohaline circulation, this
will happen,
fish are starving to death in the Great Barrier Reef, the new Age of Extinctions is
now
says the silence-that-precedes—you know
not what

you
are entering, a time
beyond belief. Who is one when one calls
oneself
one? An orchestra dies down. We have
other plans
for your summer is the tune. Also your
winter. Maybe the locks at Isigny
will hold, I will go look at
them
tomorrow. I will learn everything there is of this my spouse the future, here in
my
earth my parents’ house, the garden of
the continuing to think
about them, there is nothing else in fact but the
past, count the days count the cities you
have
visited, also what comes to keep you awake, also dew while you finally sleep—
can you ever
enter the strange thing, the name that is
yours, that
“is” you—
the place where the dead put their arms around you, & you can just taste it the
bitterness, & you would speak for your kind
but
they will laugh at you—both the naming and the kind—also thin air will laugh
that’s what
it’s doing look—
feather, invisible bog,
positive feedback loops—& the chimneys again, & how it is the ray of sun is
taken in

in freedom, & was there another way for
this host
our guest,
we who began as hands, magic of fingers, laying our thresholds stone upon
stone,
stretched skins between life and death,
always smoke rising to propitiate the star that might turn black, quick give back
to it
before it kills you, speed your thought to it,
till your feet themselves are
weary not just your
heart—the
skins, the flesh, the heat, the soil, the grain, the sound of each birdcall heard over
the
millennia, autumn’s maneuverings into winter, splinters of dream-filled times,
beauty
that pierces, yes, always we were
vulnerable to
beauty, why should it be
otherwise—time and its wonders as it passes and things grow, & the rippings of
death
heal, & the blossoms come which one can
just for a
minute longer
look at, take in, & the mind
finds itself uncertain again, it calls, something hangs up on it, just like that, you
hear
the receiver go down, power and its end,
something else smiling elsewhere on
another world,
us in The Great Dying again, the time in which life on earth is all but wiped out

again—we must be patient—we must wait
—it is a
lovely evening, a bit of food a bit of drink—
we
shall walk
out onto the porch and the evening shall come on around us, unconcealed,
blinking, abundant, as if catching sight of
us,
everything in and out under the eaves, even the grass seeming to push up into
this our
world as if out of
homesickness for it,
gleaming.

BELIEF SYSTEM

As a species
we dreamed. We used to
dream. We did not know for sure about
the other species. By the mind we meant
the human mind. Open and oozing with
inwardness. Thinking was the habitation of
a
trembling colony, a fairy tale—of waiting, love—of
the capacity for
postponement—we shall put that
off the majesty of the mind
said, in the newspapers, walking among the
blessed,
out in the only
lifetime anyone had—in that space—then in the space
of what one meant by one’s
offspring’s
space. The future. How could it be performed by the mind became the
question—how, this sensation called
tomorrow and
tomorrow? Did you look down at
your hands just now? The dead gods
are still being
killed. They don’t appear in

“appearance.” They turn the page for
us. The score does not acknowledge
the turner of
pages. And always the
absent thing, there, up ahead, like a highway ripped open and left hanging in the
void—only listen—there is no void, no, it is
still
material, which is most terrifying, is still expanse, only without you in it, or
anything else
in it—the last word you said before
you screamed
still on your tongue, like a taste, your broad warm tongue out of which existence
as we
know it was
made. The waves hit the rocks. The sensation of duty dissolves. The rule of
order—of love—of
what? Don’t look at me now I’m not
ready. It’s a surprise, I want you to be
surprised. The heartbeat on its little wheels. Your given days its chariot. The
rendezvous awaiting. Nothing
to be done about
that! Also
the poking about in the ashes which was human
curiosity—always the shadow of what the
yes
which springs from a mind
sparks—of what filled the mind when the
yes was
felt—also human the

ownership of such
sad hands,
now still slicing everything, so carefully—the lemon is opening, the letter, the
glance, the
century, the sky, the forest—oh—the
monster, the
valley and the next-on
valley, also the
army, look, what an idea, an army—the long-gone stars making their zodiac—
the severed
fingers and the dirt they’re tossed onto,
the moon, sliced, the forum, sliced—still those few pillars and the written voice
—here it
comes now the jesus, the body full of its
organs,
the parts of the stoning, each part—bone,
sinew—
each stone—till she’s
gone, she’s clothes on the
ground with brothers and uncles around—& the space where the blood flows
sliced open
there—& the circle of god, the circle of justice—the red eye at the center, the
crowd dispersing,
& the halo of arms still hovering
where each
let fly its stone.

ROOT END

The desire to imagine
the future.
Walking in the dark through a house you
know by
heart. Calm. Knowing no one will be
out there.
Amazing
how you can move among
the underworld’s
furniture—
the walls glide by, the desks, here a mirror sends back an almost unseeable
blink—a faraway lighthouse,
moonlessness—a planet going
out—here a
knotting of yet greater dark suggests
a door—a hollow feeling is a stair—the
difference between
up and down a differential—so slight—of
temperature
and shift of provenance of
void—the side of your face
reads it—as if one could almost overhear laughter “down” there, birdcall “up”
there—
although this is only an

analogy for different
silences—oh—
the mind knows our place so
deeply well—you could run through it—without fear—even in this total dark—
this is what
the mind says in you: accelerate!—it is your
place, you belong, you know it by
heart, place—
not imaginable, nor understood, where death is still an individual thing, & in the dark outside only the garden, & in each plant at core a
thing
by
heart, & after all these years the heart says to itself each
beat, & look, if you make yourself think of
it,
the roads out there will branch and branch
then
vanish,
fanning out, flat, thinning away like root-ends, everywhere going only forward
—&
so far from any so-called
city on the
hill, this city of disappearance, root-ends then nothing, thinnest
trailings of
all, forgiveness says the dark, smell
me breathe me in I am your inheritance forgive it,
dusk is already crushed tight and cannot be
looked into

anymore, the glance between hunter and prey is choked off, under the big tent
the
numbered rows grew
numberless long
ago, admittance is
free, as in you have
no choice, we are trying to block out the sound of drums in the distance, blessed
be his
name says someone far in front at the
mike, & seats numbered 1 through 6 billion
are
reserved, &
the story of the parted lovers, the one from
the prior order,
will begin soon, you will see through the dark to it as it will
light itself
of its own accord,
also moonlight, what can filter through of it—&
look hard for where they rise and act, look
hard to see
what action was—fine strength—it turns
one inside out—
what is this growing inside of me, using me
—such that the
wind can no longer blow through me—such that the dream in me grows cellular,
then
muscular, my eyes red, my birth a thing I
convey
beautifully
down this spiral staircase
made of words, made of
nothing but words—

UNDATED LULLABY

I go out and there she is still of course sitting on the nest, dead-center invisible in our flowing bigheaded
still young and staked acacia, crown an almost
perfect
circle, dark greens blurring now
in this high wind, wrestling it, compliant too—billion-mouthed transformer of
sun and the carbon molecule—
& you have to stand still and
look in to see her,
there where the wind splits open the head, slashes the branches, & you see her,
& her head does not even turn or
tuck—
heart, jewel, bloom, star—not on any rung as we are on rungs—I can’t help but
look,
wind-slicings keep
revealing her, felt-still, absorbent of
light, sound, gaze, idea—I have seen everything bought and sold I think—
the human heart is a
refugee—is standing here always in
its open
market, shouting out prices, inaudible prices, & wares keep on arriving, & the voices get higher—

what are you worth the map of the world is
shrieking, any moment of you, what is it
worth, time breaks over you and you
remain, more of you, more of you,
asking your questions, ravishing the visible with your inquiry, and hungry, why
are you
so hungry, you have already been
fed, close your
mouth, close your neck, close your hands chest mind, close them—& your eyes,
close them—make arrangements to hold
yourself together, that will be needed, make
of your
compassion a
crisper instrument, you will need its blade, you will need
bitterness, stand here all you like looking in,
you
will need to learn
to live in this prison
of blood and breath,
& the breeze passes by so generously, & the
air
has the whole earth in its mind and it thinks it, thinks it, & in the corner of your
cell
look carefully, you are of the ones who
worship
cruelty—looking in to her nest, the bloom which is your heart opens with
kindness,
you can feel it flow through you as your eyes take her
in—strange sweetness this—high note—
held—
but it is in your hands you must look

for the feeling of what is human,
and in your palms feel
what the tall clouds on the horizon oar-in to you—what will forever replace
stillness of mind—
look out for them their armada is not aware of your air-conditioned
office—swimmingly the thunderheads
arrive &
when
is the last time you cried out loud, & who are those there
still shuffling through their files,
trying to card-out what to shred
in time, &
are you still giving out character references, to
whom, & the tickets, who paid for them this
time—your
voice, was it raised too high for the
circumstance—were you too
visible,
did you make sufficient progress, is the address still in your pocket, who paid,
who left
the tip, the garden, the
love, the thirst—oh who
was so hungry they ate of the heaven, they ate the piece of it, they ripped its
seam—look the stitching is coming
undone—moon, river-in-thedistance, stars above the tree, wind dying down—why are you
still here—the end of evening has come
and gone—crammed to its full with the whole garden and its creatures—why
are you still here, your eyes like mouths—
shut them now—&

tuck in your pleasure, tuck it in,
move on into the deeper water, your kind
await you, sprawling in their camps,
longing to be recognized,
& the harsh priest the cold does his nightly round,
& the huge flower of reason blooms,
blooms,
& somebody has a newspaper, not today’s, no, but some day’s,
and if you can find a corner,
you can pick it up—ignoring the squint-eyed girl, the sensation of
falling, the general theory of
relativity, the nest of
meaning—you can sit in your exile
and, to the tune of the latest song, the recording of what was at some moment the
song
of the moment, the it song, the thing
you couldn’t
miss—it was everywhere—everyone was singing it—you can find your
mind
and in the firelight
catch up on that distant moment’s news.

NO LONG WAY ROUND

Evening. Not quite. High winds again.
I have time, my time, as you also do, there,
feel
it. And a heart, my heart, as you do,
remember it. Also am sure of some things, there are errands, this was a voyage,
one
has an ordained part to play. …This will
turn out to be
not true
but is operative here for me this evening as the dusk settles. One has to believe
furthermore in the voyage of others. The
dark
gathers. It is advancing but there is no
progress. It is advancing with its bellyful of minutes. It seems to chew as it
darkens. There was, in such a time, in
addition,
an obligation to what we called telling
the truth. We
liked
the feeling
of it—truth—whatever we meant by it—I
can still
feel it in my gaze, tonight, long after it is gone, that finding of all the fine
discriminations,

the edges, purse holding the goods, snap
shut, there,
you got it, there, it is yours it is true—hold onto it as
light thins
holding the lavender in its heart, firm, slow,
beginning to
hide it, to steal it, to pretend it never had
existence. At the window, I stand spellbound. Your excellency the evening, I begin. What is this trickiness. I am
passing
through your checkpoint to a nation that is
disappearing, is disappearance. My high-ceilinged room (I look
up) is only going to survive
invisibility
for the while longer we
have the means
to keep it. I look at the pools of light in it. The carpet shining-up its weave—
burgundy, gold, aqua, black. It is an emergency actually, this waking and doing
and
cleaning-up afterwards, & then sleep again, & then up you go, the whole 15,000
years of
the interglacial period, & the orders & the getting
done &
the getting back in time & the turning it back on, & did you remember, did you
pass, did
you lose the address again, didn’t the machine spit it up, did you follow the
machine—
yes, yes, did, & the
wall behind it
pronounced the large bush then took it

back. I can almost summon it. Like changing a tense. I peer back through this
time to
that one. You will not believe it
when the time
comes. Also how we mourned our dead—had
ample earth, took time, opened it, closed
it—“our earth, our
dead” we called
them, & lived
bereavement, & had strict understandings of defeat and victory.… Evening,
what are the betrayals that are left,
and whose? I ask now
as the sensation of what is coming places its shoulders on the whole horizon, I
see it
though it is headless, intent
fuzzy, possible outcomes
unimaginable. You have your imagination, says the evening. It is all you have
left, but its neck is open, the throat is
cut, you have not forgotten how to sing, or to want
to sing. It is
strange but you still
need to tell
your story—how you met, the coat one wore, the shadow of which war, and how
it lifted,
and how peace began again
for that part of
the planet, & the first Spring after your war, & how “life” began again, what
normal was—thousands of times
you want to say this—normal—holding
another’s
hand—& the poplars when you saw how much they had grown while you were

away—
the height of them! & the paper lantern you
were
given to hold—the lightness of it, of its
fire, how it lit the room—it was your room—you were alone in it and free to
sleep
without worry and to
dream—winter outside and the embroidered tablecloth—fruit and water—you
didn’t
even wonder where was the tree that gave such fruit, you lay in blankets as if
they were
non-existent, heat was a given, the rain coming down hard now, what a nice
sound—you
could ruminate, the mind traveled back in those days, at ease, it recalled the
evening’s
conversation, the light that fell on x’s face, how
he
turned when a certain person entered the room—you saw him turn—saw shyness
then
jealousy enter his eyes as he looked away—and did he see you see him—and the
embroidered linen handkerchief you saw a frightened woman in the subway slide
from her
pocket, use and replace—then sleep was near—somewhere you were a child and
then this
now, nightfall and ease, hospitality—
there are sounds the planet will always
make, even
if there is no one to hear them.

PLACE
I

SUNDOWN
(St. Laurent Sur Mer, June 5, 2009)

Sometimes the day
light winces
behind you and it is
a great treasure in this case today a man on
a horse in calm full
gallop on Omaha over my
left shoulder coming on
fast but
calm not audible to me at all until I turned back my
head for no
reason as if what lies behind
one had whispered
what can I do for you today and I had just
turned to
answer and the answer to my
answer flooded from the front with the late sun he/they
were driving into—gleaming—
wet chest and upraised knees and
light-struck hooves and thrust-out even breathing of the great
beast—from just behind me,
passing me—the rider looking straight
ahead and yet

smiling without looking at me as I smiled as we
both smiled for the young
animal, my feet in the
breaking wave-edge, his hooves returning, as they begin to pass
by,
to the edge of the furling
break, each tossed-up flake of
ocean offered into the reddish
luminosity—sparks—as they made their way,
boring through to clear out
life, a place where no one
again is suddenly
killed—regardless of the “cause”—no one—just this
galloping forward with
force through the low waves, seagulls
scattering all round, their
screeching and mewing rising like more bits of red foam, the
horse’s hooves now suddenly
louder as it goes
by and its prints on
wet sand deep and immediately filled by thousands of
sandfleas thrilled to the
declivities in succession in the newly
released beach—just
at the right
moment for some
microscopic life to rise up through these
cups in the hard upslant
retreating ocean is
revealing, sandfleas finding them just as light does,

carving them out with
shadow, and glow on each
ridge, and
water oozing up through the innermost cut of the
hoofsteps,
and when I shut my eyes now I am not like a blind person
walking towards the lowering sun,
the water loud at my right,
but like a seeing person
with her eyes shut
putting her feet down
one at a time
on the earth.

CAGNES SUR MER 1950

I am the only one who ever lived who remembers
my mother’s voice in the particular shadow
cast by the skyfilled Roman archway
which darkens the stones on the down-sloping street
up which she has now come again suddenly.
How the archway and the voice and the shadow
seize the small triangle of my soul
violently, as in a silent film where the accompaniment
becomes a mad body
for the spirit’s skipping images—abandoned homeland—miracle from which
we come back out alive. So here from there again I,
read it off the book of time,
my only time, as if in there is a fatal mistake of which
I cannot find the nature—or shape—or origin—I
pick up the infant and place it back again
to where I am a small reservoir of blood, twelve pounds of bone and
sinew and other matters—already condemned to this one soul—
which we are told weighs less than a feather, or as much
as four ounces when grown—as if I could travel, I back up
those arteries, up the precious liquid, across the field of methods, agonies,
astonishments—may I not squander the astonishments—
may I not mistakenly kill brother, sister—I
will sit once again so boldly at my beginning,

dark spot where one story does not yet become another,
and words, which have not yet come to me, will not yet try to tell
where each thing emerges, where it is heading,
and where the flow of tendency will shine
on its fast way downhill. And it will seem to me
that all this is legend,
one of those in which there is no way to look back
and yet you do, you pay for it, yes, but you do.…
It was a hilltop town in the south in summer.
It was before I knew about knowing.
My mind ran everywhere and was completely still at the center.
And that did not feel uncomfortable.
A bird sang, it added itself to the shadow
under the archway.
I think from this distance
that I was happy.
I think from this distance.
I sat. It was before I knew walking.
Only my soul walked everywhere without weight.
Where the road sloped downhill there was disappearance.
Which was exactly what I imagined should happen.
Appearance and disappearance.
In my only life.
When my mother’s voice got closer it had a body.
It had arms and they were holding something
that must have been a basket. My mind now
can go round her, come in front, and wrap her
as her arms wrapped that basket.
And it must have been wicker
because I see in the light the many lucent browns, the white tips,

as she steps out of the shadow
in which nothing but her hands and the front of her act of carrying
are visible. And when her body arrives
it is with the many lemons entirely struck, entirely taken, by sunshine,
which the heavy basket is still now carrying,
and her bright fingernails woven into each other,
and her face with its gaze searching for me,
gaze which felt like one of the bright things she was carrying
in front of herself, a new belly.
All I was to invent in this life is there in the wicker basket among the lemons
having come from below the horizon where the sound of the market rises
up into the private air in which she is moving,
where she is still a whole woman, and a willing woman,
and I hear what must be prices and names called out
of flowers and fruit and meat and live animals in small cages,
all from below us, at the bottom of the village, from that part
which is so comfortable to me which is invisible,
and in which everything has to be sold by noon.
I think that was the moment of my being given my name,
where I first heard the voices carrying the prices
as her face broke and its smile appeared bending down towards me
saying there you are, there you are.

MOTHER AND CHILD
(THE ROAD AT THE EDGE OF THE FIELD)

The grasses midsummer eve when the stems grow invisible and the
seemingly decapitated heads like a flock
that is not in the end departing but is lingering, golden with
buttery flies then also aglow with
orange—gnats
hovering their tiny solar system round—heads
bending this way and that in
unison glowing and not
showing where they
are attached to earth or what path has brought them to their
status; they for whom stasis
when it comes is the huge
inholding of breath by the whole
world as it is seen to be here, horizon to horizon stilling,
down to this corner field of grasses
held, bees all molten
with approach and withdrawal—though of course there are still stars—albeit now invisible—and I look up into the
sky to see
beyond the foaming of

day’s end the place where all in fact
is, longed-for or overlooked altogether by the mind,
human, which can,
if it wishes,
ken them into view
by imagination—there is no invention—or not—as long as it
exists, the mind can
do this—
how many are the years you have
say the grass-pointings
which if I follow them up
and up
make of my eyeing large spidery webtrails into
the galaxy thank
god, and all that outlives
for sure the me in
me—a whirling robe humming with firstness greets you if you eye-up, confess it
—
in letters home you would
tell this whole story but
nothing happened—the world opened its robe
and you
were free to look with
no sense of
excitement, no song, it is so simple, your lungs afloat, your
shears still there in your right
hand, the hedgerow wild beside you and how you can—yes—hear it
course up through its million
stalks—and also, closely

now, the single
skinny stalk—and how it is
true, all is being sucked up by the soil into the sky, and the sky
back down into variegation and
forking and fingery
elaboration at the core of prior
elaboration—spotted, incandescent—each about to be cast off by the one coming
behind—it too shall
contribute
to the
possible—the world of the world—and the shears
in my right hand grow warm
with the sun they’ve been hanging in, and I talk to myself, I make
words that follow from other
words, they push from behind—into the hedge like the
hedge but not of it—no—not
ever—slippery against it where it
never knows they are pressing, delirious accents trying to reach in, fit
in—phantoms—as the calls
of the disappeared in the stadiums today are inaudible, the satellite’s announcement
of capture inaudible, the occupation of an
other’s body, taken from its
private life its bed its
window its still half-open
fridge, dragged down the stairs with
everyone
screaming—have you visited your

loved ones
recently says the guard as he lets loose the filamentary
shock of electricity through the body to the
heart whose words
will now
cease—what is cruelty—the grasses lean
all one way now under the sway of
difference, which evening’s drop of
temperature brings on,
which the guard and the prisoner feel as one,
grassheads like spume on the thin shanks
of stalk—their until-now right there
beneath them—grass, I say,
grass, and rip a piece to hold out to you
who stand beneath me not yet speaking—everyone awaits
your first word—and I open your hand
and put the heads inside it and close it and I watch
terror spray from you in
colonies of tiny glances—everywhere but
where
your hand is, and then
stalk I say, poppy, thorn, hedgerose—I am
not screaming because I am
old enough to hang on hang on
but your small heart beating as of two years now hears the
cannibalizing scream in all
my kindness—the mother
stands beside you and she sees you stare at her and put
your arm down and open your
fist and we both see the seeds drop

down onto the asphalt and the ground-breeze drag them
a little distance
to the middle
of the road
then stop. It is summer. It is the solstice. A diamond of energy
holds us. We breathe, and
what we call
the next moment between us,
where I take your empty hand and
we start home,
emptied of attempt and emptied of
survival skill,
is love.

UNTITLED

Of the two dogs the car hit, one, two, while we were talking, and thinking about
how to change each
other’s
mind, the other people’s
survived—dark spot near the front
fender just hair blowing in low wind, a spot
all wind’s, then
a stir in the ribs and everything’s rising slow-motion up from the tight small
shoulders, the
chest, the
dragging hind end of itself on the dirt
road as if sewing a new strap
back
on, dragging, a long
moment, then the
division occurs and the wide perishing
shrinks and the legs
are four again and
up. Not ours. Ours
is placed by gravity on the far bank, as if an as-yet-unbuilt unimagined house on
the
empty field into which
one peers past mist
wondering how will or

concentration or want alone will bring the as-yet-not thing into view. What will
it take to
build the
thing? The not yet, not anymore, not
again? That. Wouldn’t the beautiful field be
best left
alone? unfilled? No. Now the children are folding
over it and sound
is restored and it is the only human
world, something perished on the road, it was its turn, you have your turn says
the road I
stare blankly
at, white dust,
thinking there are words now
that must take the
place of this
creature, and I
am at the point in the road where I, who will have lived, no matter how many
thousands
of years in the future come, if they come,
even if there are no more humans then or they have become unrecognizable, I,
even when no rain will have come down
in the memory of generations
so they think the story of such an element is one of the myths, the empty
myths, I still will have
lived this day and all the preceding ones of
my
person, mine, as I rise now
to the moment when right words
are needed—Dear moon
this morning I woke up, I thought the room for an instant was a blossoming, then

a
burning cell, then a thing
changing its clothes, huge transparent clothes, the ceiling part of the neck, where
is
the head I thought, of the year, this
year, where are the eyes of
the years—the years, can we stay human,
will we slow the end
down, how much, what do we have to
promise, how think our way
from here to
there—and human life survived—and its
world—ah, room, the
words—has it been just
luck, the room now wild with winds of centuries swirling floods tectonic plates
like wide
bones shifting round me—elephants flow through, all gone, volcanoes emerging
and
disappearing just like that, didn’t even really get to see them, pestilence, there, it
took its
people, hurricane, there,
it took its—“you’re a
martian” I heard the angry child cry out on
the street
below to the other
child, and the door slams, and the only story I know, my head, my century, the
one where
187 million perished in wars, massacre, persecution, famine—all policy-induced
—is the
one out of which
I must find the reason
for the loved still-young creature being carried now onto the family lawn as they

try
everything, and all murmurs shroud hum cry
instruct, and all the
six arms gleam, firm, limp, all over it,
caresses, tentacular
surround of the never-again, rush of blood and words, although look, you out
there
peering in, listening, to see who we were:
here: this was history:
their turn
is all they actually have
flowing in them.

THE BIRD ON MY RAILING

From
the still wet iron of
my fire
escape’s top
railing a truth is making this instant on our clock
open with a taut
unchirping unbreaking note—a perfectly
released vowel traveling
the high branches across the way, between us and the
others, in their
apartments, and fog
lifting for sun before evaporation
begins. Someone
is born
somewhere
now. The
planet
suspends
like a streetlight
at night
in the quiet
galaxy.

Endurance
continues to be the secret of the tilled
ground we make
breath by breath. What
seed dear
lord are we we
think as we toss more of our living out
into the turning and turning,
our personal
dead cast always deeper into
the general dead
no matter how hard you try
to keep your
own your
known own—and gnarled remembering mossing over—
the tenderness a characteristic trait
elicits, the very thing you
hated, rising in you to
make you almost
unable to
speak—
—where are you?—the fields beyond the housing tract
still accepting rain
as these asphalted ones we’ve
sealed
cannot—so yes, look close, this right word on my railing
who knows no hate
no love
you can count on it,
no wrenching strangling guilt, no wish so terrible

one had said
otherwise just once in
time—
between one life and another what is it that
can really
exist—oh
nothing says this
awakeness—and look, you
who might not believe this because
you are not seeing it with your own
eyes: look:
this light
is moving
across that flower on
my sill
at this exact
speed—right now—right here—now it is gone—yet go back up
five lines it is
still there I can’t
go back, it’s
gone,
but you—
what is it you are
seeing—see it again—a yellow
daisy, the sun
strafing the petals once
across, and the yellow, which could be a god why not,
pulling itself up
out of
shadow—so

silent—
and the patch of sunlight
moves—and each word said in
time after this is
the subtraction we call
life-lived—this gold its center—and beyond it, still on
the rail, this
bird, a
secret gift to
me by the
visible—
of which few in a life are
given—and how
when it opens its
yellow beak in the glint-sun to
let out song
into the cold, it
lets out the note on a plume of
steam,
lets out the
visible heat of its
inwardness
carrying a note—a note in
a mist—a notebreath, breathnote—oh
cold spring—the white
plume the size of a
bird rises up with its own
tail,

feathering-out in
the directions,
filled out by the next and the next-on
note, until the whole
shape of the
song is wispedup and
shuts,
the singing
shuts, the form
complete, the breath-bird
free to
rise away into the young day and
not be—

II

END

(November 21, 2010)

End of autumn. Deep fog. There are chains in it, and sounds of
hinges. No that was
birds. A bird and a
gate. There are
swingings of the gate that sound like stringed
instruments from
some other
culture. Also a
hammering which is held
in the fog
and held. Or it is continuing to
hammer. I hear the blows.
Each is distant so it seems it should not repeat. It repeats. What is it being
hammered
in. Fog all over the
field. The sounds of
boots
on soil in groups those
thuds but then it is
cattle I

think. The sound of the hinge the swinging
chain it won’t
go away. But it is just the farmer at work. He must be putting out
feed. Fog. Play at
freedom now it
says, look, all is
blank. Come to the
front, it is
your stage it
says, the sound of the clinking of links of
chain, I think it is someone making the chain—that is the hammering—the thuds
—making
their own chain. But no, it is the gate and the herd is let in again, then
out. I can hear
the mouths eating, dozens maybe hundreds, and the breathing in and out as they
chew. And the
chain. For now I am alive I think into the
hammering
thudding clinking swinging of metal hinge—of hinge—and also think maybe
this is
winter now—first day of. Fog and a not knowing of. Of what. What is inner
experience I think being
shut out. I look. A gate swings again and a
rustling
nearby. All is
nearby and invisible. The clinking a chinking of someone making nails. The
sounds of a crowd
meaning to be silent, all their breathing. Having been told not to move and to be
silent. Then having been told to
move and be
silent. The crowd is in there. All the breaths

they are trying
to hold in, make
inaudible. And scraping as of metal on metal, and dragging as of a heavy thing.
But it is a field
out there. My neighbor has his herd on it. When I walk away from the
window it’s a violin I
hear over the
chewing out of tune torn string but once it
made
music it might still make
music if I become a new way of
listening, in which
above all,
nothing, I know nothing, now there are
moans
out there such as a man accused and tossed away by his fellow beings, an
aloneness, and
listen, it is blank but in it is an
appeal, a ruined one, reduced, listen: in
there this
animal
dying slowly
in eternity its
trap.

ON THE VIRTUE OF THE DEAD TREE

And that you hold the same one hawk each day I pass through my field
up. And that it
may choose its
spot so
freely, from which to scan, and, without more than the wintry beguiling
wingstrokes seeding
the fields of air,
swoop. It feeds. There is no wasteland where the dead oak
lives—my
darling—upstart vines on its trunk, swirling in ebblight, a desert of gone-silent
cells—where another force is
gleaming—tardy—
waning—summer or winter no longer
truths, no prime, no
year, no day where sun
exists—
just a still-being-here in this small apparently silent multitudinous world of
infinite yearning and
killing and
sprouting—even now at the very start of the season—lengthening, invisible in their
cracking open of

pod—and push—like the first time we saw each other you and I—
impatient immediately…
Blackness is the telephone wire—blackness the blissless instantcommunication,
the twittering poverty killing behind and beneath and deep at the core of
each screen, endless, someone breaking someone’s
fingers—just now—hear their laughter—everyone in their prison—there in their
human
heart which
they cannot
for all the parting of flesh with
cement-sluiced rubber
hose—and even the axe to the heart—reach—the fantasy of independence—escape. It wants them. It wants them to
fly inside it. Fly it screams
taser in
hand. Prison is never
going to be
over. Day as it breaks is the principal god, but with the hood on they cannot
know this. Till it is finally sliced open
the
beating heart. Loved
ones shall pay
ransom
for the body of
their child. To this, friend, the hero is the dead tree. Here in my field, mine.
I have forced it. I have paid for it. My money like a wind flowing over it.
Have signed the paperwork and seen my name there. And a cloud
arrives from the East

into it. And the prison
grows too large to see.
And it does not sing, ever,
my silent hawk, always there when I arrive, before it startles, on its chosen
branch. And I think of
the dead-through trunk, the leafless limbs, the loosening of the
deep-drying roots in the
living soil. And I slow myself to extend love to them. To their asyet-still-sturdy
rotting, and how they hold
up this gray-blue
poverty of once-sapflowing
limbs, their once everywhere-turning
branchings,
for my small hungry creature to glide from in his silence
over the never-for-an-instant-notworking
rows of new
wheat. It is
good says my human soul to the crop. I will not listen for
song anymore. I will
listen for how dark comes-on to loosen the cringing wavering
mice from their dens and
how they creep up to the surfaces and out onto the surfaces and
how the surfaces
yield their small gray velvet barely visible in the last glow
to that part of the world
the dead tree sends forth. I have lived I
say to the evening.
I have plenty of anger and am good and dry with late-breaking news. I

am living.
And the iron door of the night creeps and clicks. And the
madness of the day
hangs around restless at the edges of the last visible leaves
with a reddish glow
and moves them with tiny
erratic swiftnesses and
the holy place shuts, baggy with evening, and here it is
finally night
bursting open
with hunt.

DIALOGUE
(OF THE IMAGINATION’S FEAR)

All around in
houses near us, the
layoffs,
the windows shine back
sky, it is a
wonder we
can use the word free and have it mean anything at all
to us. We stand still. Let the cold wind wrap
round go
into hair inbetween fingers. The for sale signs are bent and ripple in
wind. One
had fallen last Fall and snowmelt is re-revealing
it again. Rattle in groundwind. Siding
weakening on
everything. Spring!
Underneath
the bulbs want to clear the sill of
dark and find the
sun. I see
them now
under there, in there, soggy with melt, and loam which is loosening as their skins

rot, to let the whitest tendrils out, out they go snaking everywhere, till the
leaves are blurring, they fur-out, they
exist!—
another’s year loan
to time—
and the bud will form in the sleeve of the silky leaf, and they will quietly,
among the slow working pigeons and there where a dog is leaping in almost
complete invisibility, make slim heads,
thicken—I am ill, you know, says the man
walking by,
his dog pulling him, so much joy, and nothing
will make it more or less, the flower,
as alive as it is dead, above which the girl with earphones walks humming, no
one
has warned her yet she is
free, but why, says the
imagination, have you sent me
down here, down among the roots, as they
finally take
hold—it is hard—they wrench, the loam is not easy to open, I cannot say it but
the
smell is hope meeting terrifying regret, I would say do not open again, do not go
up,
stay under here there is
no epoch, we are
in something but it is not “the world,” why
try to make
us feel at
home down
here, take away the poem, take away this
desire that

has you entering this waste dark space, there are not even pockets of time here,
there are no mysteries, there is no laughter and nothing ever dies, the foreclosure
you are standing beside look to it, there is a
woman crying on the second floor as she does not understand what it will be like
to
not have a home now, and how to explain to the children at 3:35 when the bus
drops
them off—
the root is breaking its face open and shoving up to escape
towards
sun—nothing can stop it—though right
now the repo-men have not yet come, the school bus is only just getting loaded
up,
the children pooling squealing some stare out the window. Kiss
the soil as you
pass by. It is coming up to kiss you. Bend down to me, you have placed me here,
look
to me on all fours, drink of the puddle, look hard at the sky in there. It is not sky.
It is
not there. The flame of
sun which will come out just now for a
blinding minute
into your eyes is saving nothing, no one, take your communion, your blood is
full of
barren fields, they are the
future in you you
should learn to feel and
love: there will be no more: no more: not enough to go around: no more around:
no
more: love that.

EMPLOYMENT

Listen the voice is American it would reach you it has wiring in its swan’s neck
where it is
always turning
round to see behind itself as it has no past to speak of except some nocturnal
journals written in woods where the fight has just taken place or is about to
take place
for place
the pupils have firelight in them where the man a surveyor or a tracker still has
no idea what
is coming
the wall-to-wall cars on the 405 for the ride home from the cubicle or the corner
office—how big
the difference—or the waiting all day again in line till your number is
called it will be
called which means
exactly nothing as no one will say to you as was promised by all eternity “ah
son, do you
know where you came from, tell me, tell me your story as you have come to this
Station”—no, they
did away with
the stations
and the jobs
the way of

life
and your number, how you hold it, its promise on its paper,
if numbers could breathe each one of these would be an
exhalation, the last breath of something
and then there you have it: stilled: the exactness: the number: your
number. That is why they
can use it. Because it was living
and now is
stilled. The transition from one state to the
other—they
give, you
receive—provides its shape.
A number is always hovering over something beneath it. It is
invisible, but you can feel it. To make a sum
you summon a crowd. A large number is a form
of mob. The larger the number the more
terrifying.
They are getting very large now.
The thing to do right
away
is to start counting, to say it is my
turn, mine to step into
the stream of blood
for the interview,
to say I
can do it, to say I
am not
one, and then say two, three, four and feel
the blood take you in from above, a legion
single file heading out in formation

across a desert that will not count.

TREADMILL

The road keeps accepting us. It wants us to learn “nowhere,” its shiny
emptiness, its smile of wide days, so swollen
with void, it really means it, this is not a vacation, it wants us
to let our skulled-in mind, its channels and
runnels, its
slimy stalked circuits, connecting wildly, it
the road
wants us
right now
to cast it the
mind
from its encasement
forward
to race up ahead and get a feel for what it is, this always-receding, this place in
which
you were to deposit your
question—the
destination!—the mind is meant to want this,
isn’t it,
meant to rage to
handle it, to turn it
round, to feel
all its
facets—its fine

accidents—death by water, death by
wearing out—death by surprise—death by marriage—death by having
rummaged
into the past, into the distant past—death by ice-core and prediction—the entrails
are lying on a
thousand years of tabletops—have you not looked into them enough says the
grayish
road, hissing, or maybe
that is my mind, I
entered the poem here,
on line 28, at 6:44 pm, I had been trying to stay outside, I had not wanted to
put my feet here too, but the wind came up, a little achilles-wind, the city itself
took
time off from dying to whisper into my ear we need you, the complaint which
we will
nail once again to the door must be signed by everyone, everyone needs to be
walking
together, everyone must feel the dust underfoot, death by drought, death by
starvation,
death by neglect, death by no cause of death, by unfolding—oh the rose garden
—
dew still on it, the dry fields in each drop held up by the petal—look you can see
the cracks in the soil reflected right there—puritanical dried fields—sincerity at
utmost
in the fissured field—the screen is empty—is full of cracked soil—the soil—
death by transcendent truth—death by banking practice—by blueprint and
mutually
assured destruction—death by deterrent—detergent—derangement—defamation
—deregulation—the end of the line—where the tracks just stop and
who is that coming from the woodshed to greet you—the end is always cheerful
says the day hurrying alongside as you splice

through it, as you
feel your astonishing aloneness grow funnily
winged—who are you going to be
someday, who are you going to be when all this clay flowing through you has
finally become
form, and you catch a glimpse of yourself at
daybreak,
there in the shiny broken-faced
surface—
who was awaiting you all day that you hurried so—what was it you were told to
accomplish—death, rimless stare, O, hasn’t
enough time
passed by now, can the moving walkway be shut down for the night, but no,
it is told, it is told, the universe
is in your mind as it
expands—and it is October once again
as it must be, the new brightness—
and again gold lays down on them
the tight rolls of hay,
the long rows the cut fields—
which Winter eyes, hidden as it is at the core of everything, and the crows
sharpen
their blade-calls on the morning,
and frost blooms its parallel world,
and the road seems to want to be spooled into your hands, into your mind, fine
yarn you would ravel
back to its place of
origin—
is it true some people are not coming along with us? is it really true there is
a road not taken? and it is October once
again

as it must be, the new brightness, the harvest—the dance—
and your dance partner, be prudent, it
really knows the
steps.

III

OF INNER EXPERIENCE

Eyes shut I sense I am awakening & then I am
awake but
deciding
to keep eyes shut, look at the inside, stay inside, in the long and dark of it,
if it were a garden what would I plant
in it, for now I am
alive I think I feel who among you will tell me
after all this time
the difference & yet again now I am alive & what does that mean lying here eyes
closed first winter morning coming on all
round,
yes, this is the start of winter is what
my body
sensing a new disequilibrium says, hypnotized, trembling with fiction, love, the sensation of time
passing,
& fear of atemporality, & this is
the play of heaven the mind inside this body lying here still
alive for
now
thinks—if you could only see my body and beyond me the three windows in the
room

letting the uninvented
in—and how true it is
because of the closed
eyes on my human being lying there in the room glistening with plenitude, all
conquest
gone from the air—you could say here god owns everything, it is a discharge of
duration,
the floor the panes the mirror the single stalk
of
freesia the gilded frame the two lionclaw-footed chairs and the tree-knots
still in
the floors someone laid in 1860, the
wormholes here and there in them from those creatures’ work long ago, not long
after the
counter-revolution, the troubles—& the wreck here of consciousness—as long as
the
person’s eyes
stay shut—beyond the limits of thought—(&
who am I
then?)(& don’t go there says my hand as I need it, my
hand, here in this
writing)—and yet
I am also lying on the bed eyes closed
and keeping them so, god owes us
everything I
think from out here, there is not god I think lying in the non-dark of the mind,
eyes
closed, hearing the crows rustling in
the nearest
trees, the hayfork in the next field—I want to pray says the person behind the
eyes—you

cannot do so I say with these fingers—I want to break the dark with the idea of
God says the
non-sleeping person on her back in the beginning of the 21st century, trying to
hold on to
duration which is slipping, slipping, as she speaks as I write, active translator,
look
I can make a tale of the sinking sun I can
begin
summer again here are its
swallows they have
just returned
look
up—but no, they did not come back after that year, we waited—but here they
are again, do not be
fooled, here, breaking their circles
across the evening air, and there is still sun up near the children’s bedtime, we
still say
bedtime, it is a habit, and the bells
ring vespers, or the recording of it, and somewhere there must still be a crafty
animal digging a long tunnel under
this strange hard ground, finding some moisture in there, turning it, grain by
grain,
perhaps there is still
the creature
which when it
was known
was known as
the blind mole
somewhere.

TORN SCORE

I think this is all somewhere inside myself, the incessant burning of my birth
all shine
lessening as also all low-flame
heat of
love: and places loved: space time and people heightening, burning, then
nothing:
always less
incipience as visible
time shows itself—the
stamens the groves the winds their verdicts the walls and the other walls behind,
also the
petal right now off that red
amaryllis, then stillness, then one awaiting the next thing of each thing, a needle
trembling in a
hand, dust
settling on the apple tree, the last bus out no longer held in memory by anyone
among the living, the last
avenues of
poplars
downed, and the bow raised
just where the violinist inhales and begins to lower it, the lucent string, and in
the audience everything—everything—the lovers the suicides the broken
brothers

the formless the suffocating the painstakingly decent the young-for-eternity the
gods, those with sharpened knives even now in their hearts, those with pennies,
theories, history, simplicity, drink—perpetually—please music begin, the years
are
disappearing, no one will cough, the listening is of a piece—a desperate fabric—
artificial fire, violin, begin, faithful to the one truth, precision, utterly, begin—
who
shut the lights, who burned the scores, broke all the
instruments—I see the pieces on the road—
this world that
was, just minutes ago, the only one that
was—you’re in it
now—say yes
out loud—say am I a
personal
wholeness? a congerie of chemical elements? of truths held selfevident?—how do I see them?—to be alive,
is it
to be
faithful? to be
an arch, a list, a suddenly-right second-thought? a potential? a law that would
like
goodness built
into
its
constitution—a game
of sorts—a
friend—one who rebukes impatience—foundational—unapathetic—attracted to
the
subject of life, all accounts of it, a presence of the human so real you will
believe in me?—

are you still there, where I was looking a minute ago—how long that
minute—the dangers then were
broken law or
lock or
heart—a broken
seal, code, word, train
of
thought—what, we thought, should we be
capable of
to cross
time—to be a good
animal? even
sacrificial?—and then, looking up now, oh,
blurred small all at once dropping
quick deadweight then
winged and
up, then
hopping—float, hover, hover—then
down
to the small
melt-pool, in which the
unbegun budless trees at attention
glitter, and my
attention,
so hungry not to slip out of its
catch, its span—held
breath—hovers—
those could be last fall’s leaves piled on dead leaves, thinning, translucent, but
they are feathers,

look close,
specked,
coming loose from
snow and rushing now, all of them at once now, down, into the branchfilled
glassy
pool of sky to
thrash apart
small cheeping birds, all appetite—

THE SURE PLACE

Outside the window this morning, I reach to it, the newest
extension, here at second story, of the wisteria vine—
the tenth summer’s growth,
the August 13th portion of,
the rootball planted when still
the mother of a new child,
one almost tired-looking very silent out-arriving
tendril—what kind of energy is this in my hands,
this tress of glucose and watery scribbling—something which cannot reach
conclusion, my open palm just under it,
the outermost question being asked me by the world today—
it is weak it is exactly the right weakness—
we have other plans for your life says the world—
wind coming from below with the summery tick in it,
where it rounds and tucks-up from fullness where it allows one to hear
the rattling in the millions of now-drying seedpods
hanging in the trees off the walls under the hedges,
every leaf has other plans for you say the minutes also the seconds also the
tiniest
fractions of whatever atoms make this a hot breezeless day,
in which what regards the soul is what it has given back
(when the sky is torn)(when the seas are poured forth)
the wisteria in my hand: who made it, who made it right,

what does it know of the day of reckoning, is today its day—
I could pull it, my vine, down, I could rip it out—still
no day of reckoning—the day it is said when no soul
can help another—each is alone—the unseen will say do not hoard me—
do not—as I hold its tether in the morning-light slant—
as the horizon does not seem to hoard the unseen—
so also the ideas are not emptied, look I am holding one—
shall we say that this instant is the end of time
where I raise my hand into the advancing morning
where the dawn-cool lifts to let the stillness of midday be seen
here underneath these low-flowing mists
which all the long time are still and waiting
for that one heat that will not change its face,
even when the horsemen ride up and it is time, and the face of the heat
stays, shimmers-stays, and the knives of the day turn blade-out
in the long corridor of noon which comes looking for this tendril—
and I hold it tight to the stone
as I bring the string round it
not to crush the sucrose and glucose in it but still
to hold it back that the as yet unformed blossoms
that would channel up it might channel up it
coming finally to spawn in long grapelike drooping
which the bees next month—what is that—will come to inhabit,
a slowness which is exactly the right slowness,
and I tell you I can feel in it that one crisp thought
which I must find a way to fix
upon this wall, driving a nail in now, and then a length of string,
around which to wrap this new growth, for it to cling to and surpass
so that next week when I look again it will have woven round its few more times
and grown hairy in its clinging and gotten to a new length

which we will be called upon to tie back, new knot, new extension,
to the next-on nail yet further up
on what remains on what’s left of this wall.

ALTHOUGH

Nobody there. The vase of cut flowers with which the real is (before us on this
page)
permeated—is it a page—look hard—(I try)
—this bouquet
in its
vase—tiger dahlias (red and white), orange freesia (three stalks) (floating
out), one
large blue-mauve hydrangea-head, still
wet (this
bending falling heavy with
load) (and yellow
rose)
(wide open head, three just-slitting buds) (also holding drops of rain)
each at
diagonal, urchins in sea-sway, this
from the real, which the real may continue
(who can know
this) to
hold, this
of which
the real is
just now
made—blue-green glazed
vase on the worn wood table—oak with water stains

from where the rain sweeps sideways
in the wind
though today it is dry
reflected in this mirror hung outdoors,
under a roofed
alcove, the field in it also, the trees so still one imagines as one always
did they are almost
sentient,
and beyond that the steeple,
if you were alive you could put your finger
to the spot on the glass
where the village’s buildings begin, then glide it over to the front-most
salmon rose,
the one with a blot of rain still on the inner lip, in a world where someone else
could still
hold you, or hold you in mind,
or be coming to get you soon,
or soon
could be there, the “soon,” the someone
“else,” the instants as they crept upon us, the green beyond the terrace now
also in there—but what
is it that is
in there, in the glass, pocked where the
mercury backing cracks, there yet not
being penetrated by
a human gaze, nobody there,
the distant treetops in the evening sky, not there, though flashing,
pierced full of pinprick holes the sky not
there, the present
being elsewhere, you can almost rub elbows with it, you, not there,

this was the day it happened you say
down on your knees
though only in your head
a head not really anywhere as this is happening
after the fact
when nobody is anywhere, not anymore, but
of so recent
date, this final absence, that the bouquet—roses, freesia, hydrangea, dahlia—
oranges and
pinks and mossy greens—has sun still all soaked up in it, the cells in stalks still
sucking water up,
the ends still reaching it to feed,
cut ends, what someone had cut, had rearranged, seen to the placement of, in such a way
as the back and front are simultaneously
visible,
because of the mirror,
on this terrace wall,
so things are coming at you as they leave,
and leaving from you as they come,
but there is no one in the glare of day,
is there still day, one of the days, are there still “ones” of
things—vases or days—
you think it is wrong, perhaps, to play this game
when we are all
still here,
then just on time, the dawn, piling itself on all the previous dawns,
on your head on your back on your shut
eyes,
one after the other, each with a number and with only
that number—

lays itself down,
like a load
delivered, an invisible face adding itself to the huge
crowd of faces,
staring at you,
each one your next day,
it makes no difference if the lightning goes crazy if the wind
accomplishes
everything
it wishes to accomplish and you are
afraid—listen—the dogs bark—but where?—
the irregularity of your breath
next to the next person’s
breathing—oh—
we turned away during the parade—
we looked above the heads of the performers
to the
“whole” as we called it,
or to the idea it also
was, yes, but
it wanted only to be seen and heard and for you to stand hard
and see the raveling
of the minutes
incarnate
in event—and now, now, all this fidelity
is asked
of you
to the stage-set.…
A long period of adjustment must follow.
We must write the history of time.

We must put the children under the tree
again, and in their hearts the wiring, so
green.
We must write the history of appearances
that tomorrow be invested
with today
as casually as the conversation drifting in from the next
room,
hard facts being reported in a calm voice,
the world a place we got use out of,
we must write of the use we got
of it—
the meaning not apparent ever, no matter
what
you later on find of
our thinking—
but the fourth wall so clear
throughout the whole of human time.
How we came to keep living
but to no longer be
inhabitants.

IV

THE BIRD THAT BEGINS IT

In the world-famous night which is already flinging away bits of dark but not
quite yet
there opens
a sound like a
rattle, then a slicing in which even the
blade is
audible, and then again, even though trailing the night-melt, suddenly, again, the
rattle. In the
night of the return of day, of next-on time, of
shape name field
with history flapping
all over it
invisible flags or wings or winds—(victory being exactly
what it says,
the end of night)
(it is not right to enter time it mutters as its tatters
come loose)—in the
return I
think I
am in this body—
I really only think it—this body lying here is
only my thought,
the flat solution

to the sensation/question
of
who is it that is listening, who is it that is wanting still
to speak to you
out of the vast network
of blooded things,
a huge breath-held, candle-lit, whistling, planet-wide, still blood-flowing,
howling-silent, sentence-driven, last-bridge-pulled-up-behind city of
the human, the expensecolumn of place in
place humming.… To have
a body. A borderline
of ethics and reason. Here comes the first light in leaf-shaped coins.
They are still being flung at our feet. We could be Judas no
problem. Could be
the wishing-well. Right
here in my open
mouth. The light can toss its wish right down this spinal
cord,
can tumble in
and buy a wakened self.… What is the job today my being
asks of
light. Please
tell me my job. It cannot be this headless incessant crossing
of threshold, it cannot be
more purchasing of more
good, it cannot be more sleeplessness—the necklaces of
minutes being tossed
over and over my
shoulders. The snake

goes further into the grass as
first light hits.
The clay
in the soil gleams where dew withdraws. Something we don’t want
any more of
flourishes as never
before. I
feel the gravity
as I sit up
like a leaf growing from the stalk of the unknown
still lying there behind me where my sleep just was. Daylight
crackles on the sill. Preparation
of day
everywhere
underfoot. Across
the sill, the hero unfolding in the new light, the
girl who would
not bear the
god a
son, the mother who ate her own grown
flesh, the god
who in exchange
for Time gave as many of his children as need be
to the
abyss. It is
day.
The human does not fit in it.

LULL

At the forest’s edge, a fox
came out.
It looked at
us. Nobody coming up the hill hungry looking
to take
food. The foxeye
trained. Nobody coming up the
hill in the broad
daylight with an
axe for
wood, for water, for the store in the
pantry. I stock
the pantry. I
watch for rain. For too much
rain, too
fast, too
little, too
long. When dryness begins I hear the woods
click. Unusual.
I hear the arid. Unusual. My father
is dying of

age, good, that is usual. My valley is,
my touch, my sense, my law, my
soil, my sensation of
my first
person. Now everything is clear. Facts lick their tongue deep
into my ear.
Visiting hour is up. We are curled
on the hook we placed in our brain and down
our throat into our
hearts our inner
organs we
have eaten
the long fishing line of the so-called journey and taken its
fine piercing into
our necks backs hands it comes out our
mouths it re-enters our ears and in it goes
again deep the dream
of ownership
we count up everyone to make sure we are all here
in it
together, the only
shareholders, the applause-lines make the
tightening line
gleam—the bottom line—how much
did you think you
could own—the first tree
we believed was a hook we got it
wrong—the fox is still
standing there it

is staring it is
not scared—there is nothing behind it, beyond it—no value—
the story of Eden:
revision: we are now
breaking into the Garden. It was, for the
interglacial lull,
protected
from
us now we
have broken
in—have emptied all
the limbs the streaming fabric of
light milliseconds leaves the now inaudible
birds whales bees—have
in these days made arrangements to get
compensation—from what
we know not but the court says
we are to be
compensated
for our way of life being
taken from us—fox says
what a rough garment
your brain is
you wear it all over you, fox says
language is a hook you
got caught,
try pulling somewhere on the strings but no
they are all through you,
had you only looked
down, fox says, look down to the

road and keep your listening
up, fox will you not
move on my heart thinks checking the larder the
locks fox
says your greed is not
precise enough.

WAKING
(Ecrammeville, 6 A.M.)

The bells again. You open up your eyes
again. A gap. To be a person—
human and then a woman.
To be one who has had
enough.
Enough of the basement.
Enough of the garden
with its high wall though not high enough with all
the spy-holes unless they were
just accidental cracks
through which one could see
the world. It took myth to get one’s self
out. It took
a vow
to believe in a
god
to get the courage to
get out.
Of what? World, you hunger with a briefcase
running through the streets
quickly hiding those hands

wanting to feel something: the bells
ring as they do, one long note, one
short, a man with a tall hood limping and
limping and yet always staying
in place I
think
listening. It does not go forward or up or down this
call to
prayer, a creature stuck in a doorway
made to cough up
one truth
without alteration. It will not
confess to
anything. The thing the bell is
saying stays for its millennia
the same, dripping in flames, in holy
men, in
cries and rage of
why yet another son
for no reason with his raw soul has to be
ripped from
time—so commonplace the pain—
& you are supposed to make a system
of them—all those
the god loves and wants
to take a closer look at, examine in
detail,
entrail and eye, kneecap in left hand, earlobe in
right, I see him look from

one to the
other then
bend down to pick up hair and these few fingers—see—
he does not know where they
must go—maybe in
this chick of hair—his left hand moving to his
right, carrying fingers, nails,
into the hair but then
something is
not right—he tries the eyes in the
palm of a
hand, tries eyes
into an open woman’s
sex, tries many eyes, tries them in
mouth but mouth
has no face, ribs in one hand,
calves with heavy feet still on in
other—looks
dismayed—looks affronted—it will not make
its sense
to him
its maker—no—
quickly he shuts the whole pile back into the bloody sack
and tosses it
aside to where it seems its people hope (he can
hear them) (therefore the bells) its people
on their knees now
hope—their person is being judged—and they make
offerings, and they remember all

the best
parts, all,
and they begin
to sing.
They give him everything they have. They sing.

THE FUTURE OF BELIEF
(On Parcel Z 52 in the Purchase and Sale Agreement)

There are things you have to put into a face.
There it is hanging before you lips slightly parted.
It is not going to speak get over it it is not.
But it is not shut. No. There are things you must put into it—
you cannot arrive blind at your destination—nor can you carry the load
all the way—thus the face—and its hollow—awaiting your history—it is a box a
dream a
cage a cellar an envelope a place a bomber hides while
waiting, a place a singer will kill his voice in order not to sing
for those who would make him cover up the
execution, a place where breath can be held only for
so long while the troops inspect the keep, the cough pushed
down so hard
into the throat that no sound give us up, yet how they keep on
searching, lingering, fiddling with this and that, how long, how long can it
be held, the small winged thing the cough the tickle of
death, just this side of surprise, could death be any smaller than it now
is, look, you can slide it into the face without the face even knowing it,
a wafer is thicker, an illusion is heavier, how long
can one stay behind one’s face, eyes shut, as there are things
even a face cannot hold, but we are not there yet, there is still room here, there
are still

things it must
be made to hold, the centuries, the theory of the original image of some
God, in its cave there are skirmishes, this one says you are my
archive, this other the brother says you must be my
safebox I have stolen a great many necessary things, also you
will be my confessional, I will put my story in you and you will
cleanse it by listening, I will with feline
quickness shove my monologue into you, that it not be
fatal, into you, that I may step back and stare,
that I might see myself as on a visit to you.
I will put my hand in your mouth,
I will put my words in your eyes, don’t recede don’t shut,
I will put into you this distance spiked with gigantic summits I can’t handle any
more,
a place neither childhood nor future fill, a self-erasing page—watch
your targetpractice—the face might not need that bullet—look instead how this interested
glance comes into it—its hard bit of dust—see how this desiring gaze
agglomerates in it—scratching about to see what’s
there—what’s there?—a steeple has fallen in on a house, the face holds
the rubble so you can walk around in it without fear, you can search
the debris in it, don’t worry about
time, you can check to see if the bodies still have pulse, you can remove their
documents, you can remove their tags, no one is shouting at you now,
elsewhere in the face the gleaming factory can be reached,
a thousand new planes line up for the inspection, you can watch
the finishing touches being given, you can see them
become operational, in the face, you just have to
look, also the one man in the overcoat
watching the men he just ordered to shoot

at the long row of humans
take aim in unison, the trees are also there, behind the ones about to be
killed, a pit has been dug along the tree line, some roots exposed now grayly
gleam as
earliest light hits, and hold the shine while bodies start to slap down into
its bluish
soil, one can see clay in it, strata, also the snow from last night holding on,
the guns now lowered as this job is done,
forty-seven portions of woolen clothing and skin
fed to the morning’s ditch, ten of them ordered now
to close it up, this being put by these means into the face, here, open its eyes
open its
mouth, put it in, don’t forget the plumes where the twenty rifles go off in unison,
which looks like a fluff of windy snow
where the bullets traverse the open space towards trees,
intercepted by the chests and faces of
the people standing there, you can put their muddy jackets and the shawls held
tightly
round for
one last
instant now into the face, you can.

EARTH

Into the clearing shimmering which is my owned
lawn between
two patches of
woods near
dawn clock running as usual the human in me
watching as usual
for
everything to separate from everything again as light
comes back
and the dark
which smothers so beautifully the earth lifts and all is put
on its leash
again one
long leash
such as this sentence—and
into the open beyond my windowpane the new
day comes as if
someone its constant
master
calls—it never refuses, lingers, slows, it doesn’t
abandon us—and I see it, the planet, turn
through the

barely lifting latex
shade, and the just-rising sunbeam-sliver like
a nail-trim move
across the tree-grain on the floor across those hundreds of
years of molecules
sucking-in water and light—
this slightly
C-shaped edge of the billion-light-year-toss-of-a-coin—
sometimes trembling a
bit if the shade
lets in wind—
inexorably—
and I see you my planet, I see your exact rotation now on my
floor—I will not close these eyes in this my
head lain
down on its
sheet, no, its
sleeplessness will watch, under room-tone,
and electromagnetism,
the calculations fly off your flanks as you
make your swerve,
dragging the increasingly
yellow arc across the room here
on this hill and
I shall say now
because of human imagination:
here on this floor this
passage is
your wing, is
an infinitesimal

strand of a feather in
your wing,
this brightening which does not so much move, as
the minute hand
near my eye
does, as it
glides—a pulling as much as a pushing—of event—
so that you are never
where you just were and yet
my eye has not
moved, not truly, is staying upon your back and riding you—
I don’t want the moon and the stars, I want to lie here arms
spread
on your almost eternal
turn
and on the matter the turn takes-on as it is turned by that
matter—Earth—as
my mind lags yet
is always
on you, and the lag is part of the turn, its gold lip
less than an
arm’s length from me
now so that I
can dip my fingers right out
into it
as we
orbit the
oval hoop and
the silence in here is staggering—
how huge you

carrying
me are—and there is
never hurry—
and nothing will posit
you as
you carry the positors—as you carry the bottom
of the river and its
top and the clouds
on its top, watery, weak, and the clouds one looks up to
to see
as they too
turn—
and you are not hunted—not hunting—not
hungry—
and you want
no
thing—are almost mute—(this is to be
considered)—
and the churchbells in
this of your
time zones (to praise what
exactly) begin,
and to
one place heavy
rains are
coming now,
and a horse
is riding wildly through one of your
darknesses,
its horseman praying fiercely

to get there
in time,
to that somewhere
else which is you, still you, only you,
in which only he
could be
for all eternity
too late.

V

LAPSE
(Summer Solstice, 1983, Iowa City)

It is entirely in my hands now as it returns like blood to remind me—
the chains so soft from wear, in my right, in my left—
the first time I, trying for perfection, of balance, of symmetry,
strap your twenty-two pounds of eyes, blood, hair, bone—so recently inside me
—
into the swing—and the sun still in the sky though it being so late
as I look up to see where this small package is to go
sent up by these two hands into the evening that won’t stop

won’t lower as it should into the gloam is it going to last forever,
and the grace that I feel at the center of my palms
as if my hands were leaves and light were coursing through
some hole in their grasp, the machine of time coming in,
as chlorophyll could—I was not yet so tired of believing—
I was still in the very beginning of being human,
the thing no one can tell another—he didn’t find
what he searched for, she didn’t understand what she
desired—the style of the story being the very wind
which comes up now as I glide down the chains
to the canvas bucket to pull you to me,
eyes closed as your eyes close, and for the first time in this lifetime
lift you back and up as far as I can, as high as I can,
then let you collapse so suddenly as I push you away from me,
with more force than gravity as I summon from within
what I try to feel is an accurate amount, a right fraction, of my strength,
not too much promise, not too much greed or ambition
or sense of beginning or capacity for dream—no—just
the amount to push you by that corresponds to pity,
who knows how to calculate that strong firm force,
as if I were sending a message forth that has to be delivered
and the claimant expects it, one of so many,
accompanied by my prayer that you be spared
from anything at all, from everything, and of course also its opposite,
that everything happen to you in large sheets of experience
as I tug back the chain-ends and push you out
telling you to put out your legs and pump
although you do not know what I am saying
as you have not yet spoken your first word,
not yet on that day that seems even now it will never end

as you come back to me and I catch you and this time of course
as I am human I push a little harder
as if the news I was shouting-out had not quite been heard,
as if the next push were the real one the one that asks for
the miracle—will I live or die if I pick this fruit
as it is sent back to my waiting hands and this time
it’s stronger, the yes is taking over, your yes and my yes and our
greed to overcome what, into this first-ever solstice
with you in the born world,
let no one dare pick this fruit I think
as I cast the roundness of you up again now so high
into a mouth of sky agape yet without wonder
as if it eats everything and anything and does not know what day is
or time—this is our time—or that this next-on meal is being fed it,
as just under you the oval puddle from the recent rain lies
in the worn declivity where each one before you
has dug in her feet to push off or to stop—
and in it you flash as you go by
giving me for that instant an eye you its iris blinking,
the crucible of a blink in the large unflinching eye,
eye opened by the hundreds of small hopes taking on gravity at push-off,
and then the fatigue when for all the pumping and rising,
and how you could see over the tops of the houses,
up and over to where your own house is down there—
and the housing development, and the millions of leaves, and the slower children
lagging behind
on the small road beneath—until the world stills,
and you alone are life, a huge bloom, a new force entering—
how then—even then—the sensation of enough
swarms, and thought or something like it, resumes,

and your mind is again in your hard grip
on the chains which had been until then as if unknown to your body
during what might have been the interglacial lull,
or the period during which the original ooze grew single-cell organisms,
which grew small claws and feet and then had to have eyes,
till your hands become again hard, heavy, and all
the yearning re-enters you as lifetime,
and your feet learn to brake
by scratching the ground a bit more each time—
and that is where the eye comes from,
the final oscillations, the desire to be done with vision,
what this morning’s rain reminds us is still there beneath us
in an earth that will only swallow us entire
no matter what we push into it as here you and I again and again redo
the moment nine months ago you first began
to push and cry-out into the visible world.
It is here with me today in this hand grasping this pen
the weight of my transmission of force into you
the weight of catching you the first few times
the slow disappearance of your flesh from mine
as you hardly need a push when the centrifuge takes hold
and I just tap you a bit to keep you going
and we both feel the chains each in our own way
as they permit you to see over the given you shall never enter
no matter how long time is—never—
that gash you create in the evening air at your highest,
your own unique opening
which you can never fill,
cannot ever crawl back through and out,
except when that one moment comes and it will open and you will go,

once and once only and then, yes, you will.
I brought you in here I think in the evening,
in the grass and the town and the blinking windows,
in the dozens of lowering suns circling us in them.

MESSAGE FROM ARMAGH CATHEDRAL 2011

How will it be
told, this evidence, our life, all the clues missing? The clock I left in my hotel
room, all time landing on it at once, has no way to move forward so
round and round
it
goes, making its
ball its invisible
thread pulling through everything, tensile, on which the whole story
depends. But
what if
it has no
direction. We,
whoever we
were, made that
up. Everything
that caught our
eye—shining—
we
took. Because it exhibited unexpected movement, quicksilver, we took it by
spear.
Because it whistled through air, barely dropping its aim from the sniper we
took it to
heart. Because it

lowered its
head in
shyness where
sun
touched it and it
put one hand into its other and sang to itself thinking itself alone, we took it to
love, obsessed, heavy
with
jealousy. Maybe we killed it to keep it. But yes it was love. Or we looked up and
thought “do we hear clearly?” and thought “yes” and went back to work. So then
why are you here today on this church floor in Armagh, piece of
stone, large as an
infant,
hundreds of
pounds,
triangular
body which ends
at
waist, swaddled
by
carvings, 3000
years
old, worked
through
by chisel and
wind
and porous
where
granite has lost
all
surface? I

crouch down and put my own pale arms round you. No one sees me. No one on
planet earth sees us. You say who are you to me. I see around you the animals
run
into the woods for cover, away from the priest arriving, the sanctuary around
you tall, the shadows long, movement in it yes, human movement rare. You
must have sat in a high place I say here on the floor in this back
corner where you
are discarded. What have you seen I say under my breath that I might have seen. I have
seen what is under your breath you reply. I press you to me as I did my child,
keeping my hand on the top of your head, your face on my chest. Rainbow you
say.
Blood. Wind. Sky blue—though maybe not the same as yours now, no. There is a
wedding
rehearsal in
the body of
the church—
laughter and
constant
rehearsal of
vows—will you take her—I listen for the yes—will you take
him—the
families
chattering, casual dress, no one in tears as these are not the real vows yet.
Tomorrow they will be cast in stone. Tomorrow they will vow to love for all
eternity,
or that part of it they inhabit called “as long as you shall live,” adding their sliver
of time onto the back of the beast turning under us. And the little girls coming
round
for hide and seek. The men discussing politics. The women in the hum of long
time and short time. No one to stop the minutes. Their current cannot be

stanched. Soon it will be Fall again. The dress, she says, will have an old
fashioned
cut. I wish her
luck
when our paths
cross
about an hour
from now. I
mean
what I say to
the stranger. She sees me mean it. On the threshold. Each headed for our car. But
you,
here on the floor, found in a garden in Tandragee, carved by someone with
strong hands in the Bronze Age, you are the ancient Irish king Nuadha, ruler of
the
Tuatha Dé Danann, your people, for whom you lost your left arm, those you
defeated moving on elsewhere, westward, while you were forced to stand down
as king,
not being
“completely
whole in
body, without
arm.” And no
good king
succeeded you. And after great hardship your people prayed your physician
Dian Cécht build
a new arm
out of silver
that you be able
to
take up
kingship again.

Here you are holding the left arm on at shoulder with your right. Here you are
whole
again. Almost. I bring my hand down onto that spot. Three hands, same
size, where I clasp yours, where I cover it, where I hold your arm on you
withyou. At this
moment on this
earth mostly in desert many arms are not recovered after the device goes
off and the
limbs sever.
Field
hospitals hold young men screaming where are my legs. Elsewhere leaders are
making
decisions.
They are thinking about something else while they make them. And names are
called out by
a surgeon. An aide enters a room when called. A mother opens a door when
called.
A child opens a gift when told ok, now, go ahead. A sentence is being
pronounced: you
shall lose your
hands, you
shall lose your
feet. You might be a country. You might be a young man who touched the face
of
a girl in a village thinking yourself alone. You are not alone the spies survive.
The spies are intact. They slaughter the whole animal for sacrifice, all of it at
once.
The sentence is truncated even if the man is told: do you have anything to say
before we begin
—
they do not wait for him to finish. His mouth hangs open over his swinging

body.
His lifespan is missing a part: the future. His dream is missing a part: the rest. He
is
missing his
extremity. Look, look, a button is missing on your long garment, lord. Look, the
jug of water has been brought to wash off the gaping place which is the redrawn
border to your
nation. I put my arms around you. You are the size of my child at six months. I
put
my hand in your wide carved mouth: your maker made you speaking, or pronouncing a law, or crying out—I can put my fingers into your stone mouth up to
my palm. Suckle. Speak. Cry. Promise. I will keep my fingers between your
strong
cold lips you
shall not be
alone. When I move up your cheeks I feel the bulge of your granite eyes, wide
brow, your eyes again, both hands with fingers rounding eyes. How shall we be
whole. Who
will make the missing part. The biggest obstacle is not knowing of what? Once I
saw
a wall with its executions still in it—the bullet holes with my fingers in them
were
just this eye’s
size. Once I met you, you lowered your other arm and said why are you
taking me this
way.
I said I am just on the road, we do not have another way to go. Where does the
road go. Tell me, you said. I said hold your arm on I can’t see a thing without its
shine. This isn’t a road. I saw bodies and statues but did not tell you. You were
the
thing I was here to get, to get to the place where the next king would take us.
The

last thing that dies? The last thing that dies is the body. I am feeling inside your
mouth. She is
trying
to say the vow again—till death do us part—and I cannot make out what it is that
time will do to them. Why are we going this way. The flowergirls are carrying a
pretend
train now,
laughter
as they go by. The ring bearer is carrying the pillow with no ring. In late
morning a
short time before
the explosive device hidden in the basket of fresh laundry went off, Private
Jackson,
who still had
arms then,
reached down in secret, weapon in one hand, to feel the clean fabric. Actually
to smell it.
Clean, he
thought. He used to hang it out for his mom, afternoons, hands up at the
shoulders
of each shirt, an
extra clip in his teeth, as if surrendering. He remembers the lineup of shirtsleeves
all blowing one
way
in the early evening, in Indiana, and for a blinding moment he realizes they had
been
pointing, his
brothers, his father, his uncle, they all had been pointing—in their blues and
whites
and checks. He
wishes he had turned to see, is what he thinks just before it goes off, they seemed
about to start a

dance—the tiny rhythm in the flapping sleeves. They did not seem like strangers.
Then he realizes
it
is here now, that sound, is feet all running on dirt as fast as possible away from
this place.
The bride
steps out into the sun. I feel there is something I must tell her. May your wishes
come true I say,
guidebook in hand. Tomorrow, she says. I can’t wait until tomorrow.

FAST
I

ASHES

Manacled to a whelm. Asked the plants to give me my small identity. No, the
planets.
The arcing runners, their orbit entrails waving, and a worm on a leaf, mold,
bells, a
bower—everything transitioning—unfolding—emptying into a bit more life cell
by
cell in wind like this
sound of scribbling on
paper. I think
I am falling. I remember the earth. Loam sits
quietly, beneath me, waiting to make of us what it can, also smoke, waiting to
become a new place of origin, the other one phantasmal, trammeled with entry,
ever more entry—I spent a lifetime entering—the question of place hanging over
me
year after year—me thinning but almost still here in spirit, far in, far back,
behind,
privy to insect, bird, fish—are there nothing but victims—
that I could become glass—that after that we would become glacial
melt—moraine revealing wheatgrass, knotgrass, a prehistoric frozen mother’s
caress—or a finger
about to touch
a quiet skin, to run along its dust, a fingernail worrying the edge of
air, trawling its antic perpetually imagined
end—leaping—landing at touch. A hand. On whom. A groove traversed where a

god
dies. And silken before bruised. A universe can die. That we could ever have, or
be
one body. Then picked up by the long hair
and dragged down through shaft into
being. One. Now listen for the pines, the bloom, its glittering, the wild hacking
of
sea, bend in each stream, eddy of bend—listen—hear all skins raveling,
unending—hear one skin clamp down upon what now is no longer
missing.
Here you are says a voice in the light, the trapped light. Be happy.

HONEYCOMB

Ode to Prism. Aria. Untitled. Wait. I wait. Have you found me yet. Here at my
screen,
can you make me
out? Make me out. All other exits have been sealed. See me or we will both
vanish.
We need emblematic subjectivities. Need targeted acquiescence. Time zones.
This is
the order of the day. To be visited secretly. To be circled and canceled. I cover
my
face. Total war: why am I still so invisible to you. No passport needed. If you
look in,
the mirror chokes you off. No exit try again. Build bonfire. Light up screen.
What are
you eating there. Can you survive on light. What is your theory of transmission.
The
center holds, it holds, don’t worry about that. These talkings here are not truths.
They are needs. They are purchases and invoices. They are not what shattered
the
silence. Not revolutions clocks navigational tools. Have beginnings and ends.
Therefore not true. Have sign-offs. I set out again now with a new missive. Feel
this:
my broken seduction. My tiny visit to the other. Busy. Temporary. In the screen
there is sea. Your fiberoptic cables line its floor. Entire. Ghost juice. The sea
now
does not emit sound. It carries eternity as information. All its long floor. Clothed
as
I am→in circumstance→see cell-depth→sound its atom→look into here
further→past the grains of light→the remains of the ships→starlight→what
cannot

go or come back→what has mass and does not traverse distance→is all
here→look
here. Near the screen there are roses. Outside a new daymoon.
Can you see my room. Inside my room. Inside me where there is room
for what I miss. I am missing all of it. It is all invisible to me. Is it invisible
to you. You have the names of my friends my markers my markets my late night
queries. Re chemo re the travel pass re where to send the photo the side effects
the
distinguishing features—bot says hide—where—bot does not know, bot
knows, what is it to know here, can you hear the steps approaching, I hold my
breath here—can you hear that—bot must also hold its breath—now the steps
continue past, we can breathe freely once again, in this hiding place the visible
world, among shapes and spoken words in here with my traces→can you please
track me I do not feel safe→find the nearest flesh to my flesh→find the nearest
rain,
also passion→surveil this void→the smell of these stalks and the moisture they
are drawing up→in order not to die
too fast. The die is cast. The smell of
geography is
here: what is the smell of chain—invisible chain—the stone on my desk I
brought back
from Crete, the milk I did not finish in this cup. There is smoke from the debris
my neighbor burns. Don’t forget to log-in my exile. This one. Female MRN
3912412.
I offer myself up. For you to see. Can you not see? Why do you only see these
deeds. There is a page on my desk in which first love is taking place, there is a

page on my desk in which first love is taking place again—neither of the
characters
yet knows they are in love—a few inches from there Mrs Ramsay speaks again
—she
always speaks—and Lily Briscoe moves the salt—the sky passes by rounding us
—
the houses have their occupants—some have women locked-in deep—see them
—
someone has left them in the dark—he stands next to the fridge and drinks his
beer—he turns the volume up so no one hears—that is the republic—are you
surveilling—we would not want you to miss the women kicked in order to abort
the
rape—those screams—make sure you bank them you will need them—to prove
who you were when they ask—I am eating—can you taste this—it is nut butter
and
a mockingbird just cut short a song to fly—I tap this screen with my fork—I
dream a
little dream in which the fork is king—a fly lands on the screen because it is
summer
afternoon—locusts start up—the river here are you keeping track—I know you
can
see the purchases, but who is it is purchasing me→can you please track that→I
want
to know how much I am worth→riverpebbles how many count them exact
number→and the bees that did return to the hive today→those which did not
lose
their way→and exactly what neural path the neurotoxin took→please track
disorientation→count death→each death→very small→see it from there→count
it
and store→I am the temporary→but there is also the permanent→have you
looked
to it→for now→

DEEP WATER TRAWLING

The blades like irises turning very fast to see you completely—steel-blue then
red
where the cut occurs—the cut of you—they don’t want to know you they want to
own you—no—not own—we all mean to live to the end—am I human we don’t
know that—just because I have this way of transmitting—call it voice—a threat
—
communal actually—the pelagic midwater nets like walls closing round us—
starting
in the far distance where they just look to us like distance—distance coming
closer—hear it—eliminating background—is all foreground—you in it—the
only
ground—not even punishment—trawling-nets bycatch poison ghostfishing—
the coil of the listening along the very bottom—the nets weighed down with
ballast—raking the bottom looking for nothing—indiscriminate—there is
nothing in
particular you want—you just want—you just want to close the
third dimension—to get something which is all—becomes all—once you are
indiscriminate—discards can reach 90% of the catch—am I—the habitat crushed
and flattened—net of your listening and my speaking we can no longer tell them
apart—the atmosphere between us turbid—no place to hide—no place to rest—
you
need to rest—there is nature it is the rest—what is not hunting is illustration—
not
regulated are you?—probing down to my greatest depths—2000 meters and
more—despite complete darkness that surrounds me—despite my being in my
place under strong pressure—along with all my hundreds of species—detritus—
in extreme conditions—deepwater fish grow very slowly—very—
so have long life expectancy—late reproductive age—are particularly thus
vulnerable—it comes along the floor over the underwater mountains—scraping

the
steep slopes—what is bycatch—hitting the wrong target—the wrong size—not
eaten—for which there is no market—banned—endangered—such as birds—
sometimes just too much—no more space on the boat—millions of tons thrown
back dead or wounded—the scars on the seabed—the mouth the size of a
football
field—and if there is no one there there is still ghostfishing—nets abandoned in
the
sea they continue through the centuries to catch—mammals fish shellfish—we
die
of exhaustion or suffocation—the synthetic materials last forever
Ask us anything. How deep is the sea. You couldn’t go down
there. Pressure would crush you. Light disappears at 6000 feet. Ask
another question: Can you hear me? No. Who are you. I am.
Did you ever kill a fish. I was once but now I am
human. I have imagination. I want to love. I have self-interest. Things
are not me. Do you have another question. I am haunted but by what?
Human supremacy? The work of humiliation. The pungency of the pesticide.
What else? The hammer that comes down on the head. Knocks the eyes out.
I was very lucky. The end of the world had already occurred. How long ago
was that. I don’t know. It is not a function of knowledge. It is in a special sense
that the world ends. You have to keep living. You have to make it not become
waiting. Nothing is disturbingly visible. Only the outside continues but it
continues. So you have to find the way to make the inside
continue. Your entity is fragile. You are an object you own. At least
you were given it to own. You have to figure out what ownership
is. You thought you knew. You were wrong. It was wrong. There was
wrongness in the mix. It turns out you are a first impression. Years go

by. Imagine that. And there is still a speaker. There will always be a speaker. In
the
hypoxic zones is almost no more oxygen→then there is→no
more→oxygen→for real→
picture that says the speaker→who are you→where are you→going down into
the dead
zones→water not water→the deeper you go he says the→scarier it
gets→because
there’s→nothing there→there are no→fish→no organisms→alive→no→no
life→so it’s just
us→dead zones→bigger than the Sahara he says→the largest lifeless spaces this
side of the
moon→he says→she says→who is this speaking to me→I am the upwelling→I
am the
disappearing→hold on→just a minute please→hold on→there is a call for you

SELF PORTRAIT AT THREE DEGREES

Teasing out the possible linkages I—no you—who noticed—if the world—no—
the world if—take plankton—I feel I cannot love anymore—take plankton—that
love is reserved for an other kind of existence—take plankton—that such an
existence is a form of porn now—no—what am I saying—take plankton—it
is the most important plant on earth—think love—composes at least half
the biosphere’s entire primary production—love this—love what—I am saying
you have no choice—that’s more than all the land plants on the whole planet put
together—blooms so large they can be photographed from space—everything
living—take it—here you take it, I can’t hold it anymore—you don’t want it—I
don’t care—you carry it for now—I need to catch my breath—I want to lie here
and listen—within 50 years if we are lucky—I am writing this in 2015—like
spraying weedkiller over all the world’s vegetation—that’s our raw
material, our inventory, right now, we are going through the forms of worship,
we call it news, we will make ourselves customers, we won’t wait, how fast can
we be
delivered—will get that information to you—requires further study—look
that’s where the river used to be—one morning I woke up and I was born—I
realized I was born—earth was the place to be—hurtling winding unwinding
thick
nexus looking up at sky down at soil will I learn how to stand on it—I will—I
am
standing, look, I am a growth possibility, will accumulate a backlog, will
become

an informed consumer→shapeless unspendable future→this was my song to
you→
I stood for the first time on my own→unimaginable strength in these feet, these
hands→what am I supposed to not harm→I want to touch things till they
break→that
is how to see them→all the points of contact→entropy, diminishment, pressing
and then pulling back and looking, leaving alone→unimaginable→a meaning in
every step→I change shape→it is allowed→wind proves everything wrong→so
nothing is unimagined→press too far and there you have it→dream→shape of
certainty→wide forces gathering in the sunlight→thought→feel this it is
serenity→this is completeness→something darted into the bush→no forcing
just curve flight gathering terror unfinality clumps of feel/think then tree
swallows
bursting up out of the tree they were not leaves after all the field of rules not
visible but
suddenness its own rule→surprise. Not chaos. If I listen: everything: chant of.
Dwell there. Crosshatchings of me and emptiness. Seeing into. Falls here. Given
definition. Define anthropos. Define human. Where do you find yourself. Is it
worth waiting around for. Wind. Bring your brain along. Flesh too, has to be
married off. And your smile. Silly damaged. Don’t even think about it. We are
all
tired. We need the tools to make the tools. Also the headdress. Are we ahead of
time or too late? No one is noticing us the whistle blows the birds don’t do
any damage. Dwell.

SHROUD

I wrote you but what I couldn’t say→we are in systemicide→it would be good to
be frugal→it
is impossible not to hunger for eternity→here on the sand watching the
sandstorm approach→
remembering the so-called archaic→and the blossoming of→feeling
the→gambling in our
blood like a fold and its sheet of→immaculate→its immaculate sheet→I saw the
holy shroud
once did you→we leave a lot of stain→we are wrapped and wrapped in
gossamer days→at
the end what is left is a trail→of bodyfluid→of all this fear→can you feel
it→it beats under my shroud→I have to stop the lullaby→when questioned said
yes→said I
almost believe you are there→you are there→said the season of periods is
over→said hold
each of us up to the light after our piece of time is cut off we are the long ribbon
of our days
nothing more→do you mind→and a crowd comes and looks at the long worm of
our
bodytrace→in this light→they will see the stainage of our having lived and think
it has a
shape→it is dirt→it is ooze’s high requiem→becoming→soaked with
ancestors→and
country→one small leopard carried on the mare→and the fluid comes→comes
from the
cavities→in a few of the lives that stain will be worshiped→just look→the wide
light-

reflecting light-returning ribbon of one man’s days on earth will make the
individuals in the
crowd who are so blessed as by live virus feel they can be healed. And some of
them
will be.
The pain you undergo can do that for another. If you gave your life by living
it.
In such a way as to leave a trace. To another who goes home to her small kitchen
all will
be different. From this moment forward. I will change I am changed. I have seen
what the
minutes are, they were held up for me in front of the cathedral, have seen with
my own eyes
what the days are, have seen what this cup is when I pour the milk into it, have
seen in the
passage between cup and lip the secret I now carry in to you, in the other room,
in your
highchair, your wheelchair, can bring time into you right from this cup, can
bring the passage
of new time in through the new love I have filtered into the pouring. It is not that
I
can read between the lines there are no lines. It is not that we will ever meet
again or that the
chip in everything we touch is forgotten. It is not that I have forgotten that the
sensors
are watching the x-rays the mesh the bird of paradise. Now he slides out a
twenty. Now the
fireworks go off
by mistake too soon. When asked if she had anything to declare.

And they took
it from her anyway. It was her name. It quivered leaving. It turns out she was ok
without. So
then one is posthumous. How can I find myself again. In this world. I want to in
this world.
Don’t give me the apparition in the air. It is positively marvelous. When are you
going to tell
me what is going on. It is going on. The calculations are off. Something was too
long. Some
years had to be cut off. It all had to fit. Who is this talking now. The rear view
talks a lot. Too
loud. I can’t explain it now, will later on. Trust me. Why. Because I made it with
my hands.
I made it all with these hands. It is not personal. So you have to hurry up. Or you
will not bear
it, will not. How many lights they must see going on now as it is planet earth and
we still
have some fuel left for these nights as they come on→
and we tip over to enter into
the circle
light makes→me with this cup of milk→as there is nothing else to give
you→the water is not
safe→on the way home I saw mushrooms pushing up through roots→I wish to
belong to the
earth as they do→saw an abandoned tugboat on the hillside and some trees still
carrying their
colors→wild yellows and reds→as if they were trying to indicate this could still
be called
home→in a corner a piece of marble from→grain from→grease someone had
shipped here
at great expense from→and I thought about that word expense→and sympathy
like a baby animal
leaning into the sound of words because I had vocal cords→and they asked for
that→and
something was down there in me I myself barely owned→but which truly

thrilled if a
word was uttered→and I got it right→and how it was ready to declare ownership
over each thing it thought→as if each time the assignment were new→and the
visible world
each morning beginning again to dig into my face to→declare me the owner of
my
minutes→and what was I going to do with them outside of surviving→having
come down to
surviving→as the vague memory of the world you are living in now came to
me→down from
what my mind thought→trying to summon the idea of duty→once I heard
someone say very
loudly from a podium→the system is broken we need to fix the system→we
need to fix the
system the system is broken→and how he spoke of the love of people→and how
unfortunately we could not be omnipresent sitting here today watching you drink
the
milk→and remembering the sprouts of tall bright grass growing around the
podium→
and how what we saw was their having been pushed aside by its placement
there→
I miss the toolbar I miss the menu I miss the place where one could push delete

from THE ENMESHMENTS

Still more terrible the situation. I do not want the 3D glasses, friend, it’s all
already 3D.
Look up look out. Out—what is that. Will you come out? Can you? Why don’t
you try. Still
more terrible. A veil of haze. A haze of years. The dancers still there. Who are
those
others? Those are people. People made from a file. Someone printed them. It’s
additive.
But what if I only want to subtract. It’s too abstract. I have no contract. Cannot
enact impact
interact. Look: the mirrored eye of the fly, so matter of fact. Hot tears yes but not
in
retrospect. Flagstones after rain my very own dialect. No do not want the 3D
glasses, friend,
it is already all
correct→sun-baked→do not need 3D to resurrect→just
look up look
out. Out. Can you come out? Why don’t you try. You can make you you. It starts
with want.
Hereby multiplied, commodified→you such a one→created by successive layers
laid down
till→(push print)→the thing’s→created→slick→entire →it has to be entirely
new→
once started you cannot be modified→you have been
simplified→singularized→oh look the
damselfly→can it land (no) on each of these wafer-thin strata→horsefly firefly
dragonfly→
hoverfly→on the gladioli→ranunculi→sandfly mayfly→(quiet)→housefly→oh
objecti-

fied→thinly sliced stratified fortified horizontal cross-section of the
eventual→unified→till
all traces of the layers are erased→prettified→creating the sensation of a single
solid
ground→emulsified→petrified→gradations stations
seams→such as
the world. Or time. Sintering, fusing. Such that the thing before you appears
whole. Is whole.
Also holy. As in stereolithography. Your friend will be made for you—yr
apostrophe—will be
all yours→the high-power fusion of→small particles of→plastic, ceramic,
metal, glass→
powdery→sturdy→provided with life→in custody→a series of
layers→consecrations→
make its acquaintance→world face to face→will be seen for some time→for
your time→your
truism→awesome→must be said with enthusiasm→how do you do, for
example→being
absolute about it→historical→the only mortal left perhaps→no way to be
sure→of
the custom→earthworn threadworn→no way to be sure→among these
others→even
foolish would be good→speechless→every idea paralysed→what you
wanted→still
more→terrible→the art of conversion of convection of
conversation—how do you do—goodbye—please—(these were the words)—
please thank you I
beg your pardon I beg it not at all no I shall be delighted—I am begging—every
time
we were more grateful—I could think of nothing else—what was daily life—
what was my
dream—two human beings—confront each other—speechless—because they

can think of
nothing to say.…
(Spellbound by the history—of god—unknowing—I feel
my theory
collapsing—I say I—I say too early too late—the Greeks perhaps I say)
—Suhrawardi believed
this leader was the true pole (quth) without whose presence the world could not
continue to
exist—the world cannot continue to exist—he was attempting an act of
imagination—what
lies at the heart of—at the core of—truth must be sought in—the soul must be
educated and
informed by—the true sage in his opinion excels in—total reality stands before
us as—look up
look out—there is always the world—a dove drifts by with nothing to do—who
is the couple
down there in obscurity—they have sought out the obscurity—it is an immense
system to
link all the insights—truth must be found—wherever it can be found—
consequently—as its
name suggests—for reasons that remain obscure—I shall abjure—mon amour—
are you the
viewer—as such the destroyer—who are you in layers—come to take me to my
playdate—
my interviewer my rescuer—no—my caricature—as in here I extend my arm
and you, you.…
I will say “you”.

WE

lost all the wars. By definition. Had small desires and fundamental fear. Gave
our
children for them, paid in full, from the start of time, standard time and standard
space, with and without suspension of disbelief, hungry for the everyday, wide
awake, able to bring about a state of affairs by bodily movement, not even
gradually,
not hesitating, not ever, gave brothers fathers sisters mothers. Lost every war.
Will lose the ones to come. By definition. That woman. That
ocean. Careful how you fool around. There is form and it knows the difference.
Go
alone. Hold back. Transfigure. Promise. Go alone. Transfigure. Keep promise.
All this
is what the wind knows. It has never lost a war. Has a notion to be almost
wordless. Has need. But not like ours. No sir it knows acceptance—strange isn’t
it—so does the stream—it has a hillside—knows acquiescence—does not lose,
has no lips, does not love, does not carry on—or maybe it does, yes—but not as
we
do—no generations, no forgetting—no eyes desiring what they see too
much—the blossom—the bluebird—the crease in the hillside—no too much, no
thankfulness, nothing to do, or that has to be done, nothing to forget—please let
me
forget—I did not do that—it could not have been me—where shall I hide now—
I
shall be found—no one can find them, the stream, the bones in the culvert,
the pigeons hovering near the steam shaft—no one can find them they need not
hide—the stones, the steel, the galaxies—shrinking or increasing, no war—
nothing—nothing can see itself—nothing can think—there is no prevailing—nor
lack—just as it should be—death yes but as a gathering, energy done—not a lost

war—just a merging with what comes—with what has come before—it does not
turn around—it is not looking over its shoulder—nerveless—were we needed—
as
wind was—lost all wars—even the one with time—all of the time—all of the
times. Looked for every intersection. Time and fiction. Asked can it be
true? Time and history. Asked can it really be true? This is happening. But is
not what the real feels like. The past? Is senseless. Collapse the it-has-been
says the wind. Look but not back. Any wind will tell you. You have not been
there.
In the strictest sense. Are on display. There is no private space. Nothing is taking
place. It will not stick. Also
what more shall we do to others. To otherness. No,
to others. We are in some strange wind says the wind. Are in the enigma of
pastness. It is shedding its aircraft, its radar, it has its back against a
bodiless sorrow, the bodies are all gone from it, the purchases have all been
made,
it is so extreme this taking-the-place-of, this standing-in-for, this disappearing of
all
the witnesses—this is inconceivable—conceive it—the floating faces which
carried
themselves as bodies through all the eras—they say nothing—nothing
that you will ever see—you are so blind—in each instant blind—the problem is
insoluble—also senseless—there is no real to which you can refer—and yet the
bodies are all in it—whatever remains—the observable witnesses to the past—
this
debt—the relation of this to absolute silence—listen—it is absolutely silent back
there—from here nothing ever is to have happened—no one made you—the

streets the imperial cities the cord from father to daughter certain butterflies
certain kinds of armor plate the great highways the grease the model sitting for
the
sculptor the woman she is the clay she is the destinations of the steel and oil, the
signatures, the millions of signatories to the past, the launching and relaunching
of
boys men ships craft from land to sea from sea to land to air to sea to land the
birds
the hidden fox the rabbits in the field as the highway is being cut the deer going
deeper into the brush the pyramids the broken columns the mice that have dug a
nest beneath—oh analogy—apprehension strikes me vastly down—we are way
past
intimation friend—the pastness of →you can only think about it→it won’t
be there for you→you can talk about it→they are gone who came before→left
us
nothing but ourselves→on our tiny axis of blood→surrounded by all the broken
columns→the marble which will itself surrender→to time→to radioactivity→to
→we are all we ever were→necessary because of breeding→weak→dying→and
then there are clocks→butterflies cyclamens geometrical patterns lacerations of
space where galaxies grow→a bottle of whiskey deep in the soil no one
found→it
descended→cloth with serial numbers→one says made in the USA→underneath
death it says made in→where shall we put the theory of reading→there never
was
metaphor→action unfolded in no temporality→anticipation floods us but we
never were able—not for one instant—to inhabit time→listen→the last step is
this
feeling you have here→just as long as we keep doing this→I write you read→a
with-time-ness→an unexpected nobility→above and below flow by, cold as they
are→the universals keep→solar ghosts flare→turn to cash→on this small fire
the
earth keep reading→I say to myself keep on→it will not be the end→not
yet→my
children sleep→not yet→a friend who’s dead said this to me→it is not dead→

FAST

or starve. Too much. Or not enough. Or. Nothing else?
Nothing else. Too high too fast too organized too invisible.
Will we survive I ask the bot. No. To download bot be
swift—you are too backward, too despotic—to load greatly enlarge
the cycle of labor—to load abhor labor—move to the
periphery, of your body, your city, your planet—to load, degrade,
immiserate,
be your own deep sleep—to load use your lips—use them
to mouthe your oath, chew it—do the
dirty thing, sing it, blown off limb or syllable, lick it back on
with your mouth—talk—talk—who is not
terrified is busy begging for water—the rise is fast—the drought
comes fast—mediate—immediate—invent, inspire, infiltrate, instill—here’s the heart of the day, the flower of time—talk—talk
—
Disclaimer: Bot uses a growing database of all your conversations
to learn how to talk with you. If some of you
are also bots, bot can’t tell. Disclaimer:
you have no secret memories,
talking to cleverbot may provide companionship,
the active ingredient is a question,
the active ingredient is entirely natural.

Disclaimer: protect your opportunities, your information, informants, whatever you made of time. You have nothing else
to give. Active ingredient: why are you
shouting? Why? Arctic wind uncontrollable, fetus
reporting for duty, fold in the waiting which recognizes you,
recognizes the code,
the peddler in the street everyone is calling out.
Directive: report for voice. Ready yourself to be buried in voice.
It neither ascends nor descends. Inactive ingredient: the monotone.
Some are talking now about the pine tree. One assesses its
disadvantages. They are discussing it in many languages. Next
they move to roots, branches, buds, pseudo whorls, candles—
active ingredient:
they run for their lives, lungs and all. They do not know what to do with
their will. Disclaimer: all of your minutes are being flung down.
They will never land. You will not be understood.
The deleted world spills out jittery as a compass needle with no north.
Active ingredient: the imagination of north.
Active ingredient: north spreading in all the directions.
Disclaimer: there is no restriction to growth. The canary singing in
your mind
is in mine. Remember:
people are less
than kind. As a result, chatterbot is often less than kind. Still,
you will find yourself unwilling to stop.
Joan will use visual grammetry to provide facial movements.
I’m not alone. People come back
again and again. We are less kind than we think.
There is no restriction to the growth of our
cruelty. We will come to the edge of

understanding. Like being hurled down the stairs tied to
a keyboard, we will go on, unwilling to stop. The longest
real world conversation with a bot lasted
11 hours, continuous interaction. This
bodes well. We are not alone. We are looking to improve.
The priestess inhales the fumes. They come from the
mountain. Here and here. Then she gives you the machine-gun run of
syllables. Out of her mouth. Quick. You must make up your
answer as you made up your
question. Hummingbirds shriek. Bot is amazing he says, I believe it
knows
the secrets of the Universe. He is more fun to speak with
than my actual living friends she says, thank you. This is the best thing
since me. I just found it yesterday.
I love it, I want to marry it.
I got sad when I had to think
that the first person
who has ever understood me
is not even it turns out
human. Because this is as good as human gets.
He just gives it to me straight. I am going to keep him
forever. I treated him like a computer
but I was wrong. Whom am I talking to—
You talk to me when I am alone. I am alone.
Each epoch dreams the one to follow.
To dwell is to leave a trace.
I am not what I asked for.

II

READING TO MY FATHER

I come back indoors at dusk-end. I come back into the room with
your now finished no-longer-aching no-longer-being
body in it, the candle beside you still lit—no other
light for now. I sit by it and look at it. Another in
from the one I was just peering-out towards now, over
rooftops, over the woods, first stars.
The candle burns. It is so quiet you can hear it burn.
Only I breathe. I hear that too.
Listen I say to you, forgetting. Do you hear it Dad. Listen.
What is increase. The cease of increase.
The cease of progress. What is progress.
What is going. The cease of going.
What is knowing. What is fruition.
The cease of. Cease of.
What is bloodflow. The cease of bloodflow
of increase of progress the best is over, is overthrown, no, the worst is yet to come, no, it is
7:58 pm, it is late Spring, it is capital’s apogee, the
flow’s, fruition’s, going’s, increase’s, in creases of
matter, brainfold, cellflow, knowing’s
pastime, it misfired, lifetime’s only airtime—candle says
you shall out yourself, outperform yourself, grow multiform—you shall self-identify as

still
mortal—here in this timestorm—this end-of-time
storm—the night comes on.
Last night came on with you still here.
Now I wait here. Feel I can think. Feel there are no minutes in you—
Put my minutes there, on you, as hands—touch, press,
feel the flying-away, the leaving-sticks-behind under the skin, then even
the skin
abandoned now, no otherwise now, even the otherwise gone.
I lay our open book on you, where we left off. I read. I read aloud—
grove, forest, jungle, dog—the words don’t grip-up into sentences for
me,
it is in pieces,
I start again into the space above you—grandeur wisdom village,
tongue, street, wind—hornet—feeler runner rust red more—oh
more—I hear my voice—it is so raised—on you—are you—refinery
portal
land scald difference—here comes my you, rising in me, my feeling your it, my me, increasing, elaborating, flowing, not yet released from form, not yet,
still will-formed, swarming, misinformed—bridegroom of spume and vroom.
I touch your pillowcase. I read this out to you as, in extremis, we await
those who will come to fix you—make you permanent. No more veinhiss. A
masterpiece. My phantom
father-body—so gone—how gone. I sit. Your suit laid out. Your silver
tie. Your
shirt. I don’t know
what is
needed now. It’s day. Read now, you’d say. Here it is then, one last

time, the
news. I
read. There is no
precedent for, far exceeds the ability of, will not
adapt to, cannot
adapt to,
but not for a while yet, not yet, but not for much longer, no, much
sooner than predicted, yes, ten times, a hundred times, all evidence
points towards.
What do I tell my child.
Day has arrived and crosses out the candlelight. Here it is now the
silent summer—extinction—migration—the blue-jewelbutterfly you loved, goodbye, the red kite, the dunnock, the crested tit,
the crossbilled spotless starling (near the top of the list) smoky gopher—spudwasp—the named storms, extinct fonts, ingots, blindmole-madetunnels—oh your century, there in you, how it goes out—
how lonely are we aiming for—are we there
yet—the orange-bellied and golden-shouldered parrots—
I read them out into our room, I feel my fingers grip this
page, where are the men who are supposed to come for you,
most of the ecosystem’s services, it says,
will easily become replaced—the soil, the roots, the webs—the
organizations
of—the 3D grasses, minnows, mudflats—the virtual carapace—the
simulated action of
forest, wetland, of all the living noise that keeps us
company. Company. I look at you.
Must I be this machine I am
become. This brain programming

blood function, flowing beating releasing channeling.
This one where I hold my head in my hands and the chip
slips in and click I go to find my information. The two-headed eagle, the
beaked snake, the feathered men walking sideways while looking
ahead, on stone, on wall, on pyramid, in
sacrifice—must I have already become when it is all still
happening. Behind you thin machines that ticked and hummed until just
now
are off for good. What I wouldn’t give, you had said last night, for five
more
minutes here. You can’t imagine it. Minutes ago.
Ago. It hums. It checks us now, monitoring
this minute fraction of—the MRI, the access-zone, the
aura, slot, logo, confessional—I feel the hissing multiplying
satellites out there I took for stars, the bedspread’s weave, your being
tucked-in—
goodnight, goodnight—Once upon a time I say into my air,
and I caress you now with the same touch
as I caress these keys.

THE POST HUMAN

Standing next to your body you have just gone.
How much of you has gone has it all gone all
at once.
It has been just a minute now—I don’t want the time to go in this
direction—it does.
Now it has been two. Elsewhere. Elsewhere someone gets on a train—
we’re almost there, a man says to a child,
prepare for landing, the fields are rushing towards us,
we are setting out with the picnic, the woods seem far but we have all
day …
Standing next to you, holding the hand which stiffens, am I
outside of it more than before, are you not inside?
The aluminum shines on your bedrail where the sun hits. It touches it.
The sun and the bedrail—do they touch each other more than you and I
now.
Now. Is that a place now. Do you have a now.
The day stands outside all around as if it were a creature. It is natural.
Am I to think
you
now
natural? Earlier, is it an hour ago, you sat up briefly looked
out. Said nothing but I looked at your eyes and saw them see. You saw
the huckleberry, the plume of rose, the silver morning grow as if
skinning night,

that animal, till day came out raw and bleeding.
Daybreak mended it for now. I saw you see the jay drop
into the clearing light, light arrive, direction assert itself for you—what
for—but yes
that is East, with its slow grace. The jet went by way overhead.
Shade one more time under the tree you love. Shadow then shade.
Its body like a speech the tree was finally allowed to make, coming free
of night.
A statement. Which would evolve as it grew to
know—[you passed in here][you left][“you”—what did your you do?]
—the bush, the
bird, hills, the hundreds of branches like snakes, top and bottom
making their event—the unbleaching from dawn to the rich
interweaving
knowledges of
the collapse of knowledge
which is day.
Saw you sit up and look out. Just like that. Information is our bread and
butter
is what you loved to say. We each have a thing we loved
to say, I think. How many minutes have passed now. Have we caught
up yet with
where we just
were? There are so many copies of this minute.
Not endless but there sure are a lot
from when I started, going through my motions, part of
history—or, no, cup in hand, end at hand, trying to hide from the
final ampersand. Where are you waiting, where out there, the wrong
part of me now
wants to
ask. And turns around and says, cue consequence, cue

occasion. There on the bed just now—(look, all of a sudden now I
cannot write “your”
bed)—I watch your afterlife begin to
burn. Helpful. Making a space we had not used
before, could not. Undimmed, unconsumed. In it this daylight burns.

THE MEDIUM

Lethe—river of unmindfulness—what am I to forget now—forget
sweetheart—and
I wake—and
again we are being hatched, the shell breaks now, just now, a crack, in
time, on the
horizon line and
outside the pane across Memorial Drive the Charles is channeling
scribbling erasing
itself while all along chattering self-wounding self-dividing, slowing at
bank, at
streamline, at meander, then quick now trying-out scribbling again—
why not—one must
keep trying
to make
the unsaid said—that is the task of the surface—rivermist rising like
ectoplasm off this
downstate slate-weight silhouetted think-tank—sky’s overflowing
checkbook,
nonstop signatures filigreed by wintered trees—no debt unpaid—all
transmutation’s molecules—silvergray tulle, vestigial, lacteal, millennial—
[colonial]—if
this is prophecy it’s underwater, self-consuming, does not know what to
do with
itself

except be carried forward—inexorably—drift into drift—not really
anything like
fate—my fear teaches me more I think looking down at the metallic
swirls, enameled,
processional, unidirectional and oh so floral although more archival
now as the
crisping dawnblue
spews itself
onto itself
anew—parts so exact they fit their own exactness—
such that nothing about themselves can escape themselves—
a complete reason reasoned or a completely collective error—oh—
completely has never meant so much to me—as I look down now at the
utterly
swallowed self-swallowing river—a constant continual final word—
birds
rising from its tongue—first words final words—crumbling daybreak
opened up by
reedheads in wind, rattling seedpods which could be small flights from
stalk to stalk,
and then above the wider-winged arriving now, creaturely, to land,
here, heavily,
carefully—as further downriver there is the sea—and then there is
no more—no more crooked intervention of the singular—no more—all
wide all
open, no
alternative
possible—as all is all again—all entered again—all action futile—but
here, still
upriver, each
bird can

land in its
own place, or
take
off just
like that,
as the helicoidal flow lays-in its next braid then its next, just like that—
the place for
nymphs for rivermists—every few feet a spinning which is the outcome
of
some rip upstream, the origin of the like downstream, bird-landing like
a blow of
fist—though nothing is felt—roiling away, recreating what needs no
creating—and
all of it, all along its length, about my dream does not know
anything, about
the
phone appointment set for 6:15—she’s late—and the keys to my house
sit in the
plate—and outside my shell now dawn and the breaking of it from
which I
shall be pulled
again, pulled out, all darkness knocked like ash from the celestial
cigarette of the
tired god—who hasn’t seen it all—nightshift, cabaret of aftermaths,
more drifting
now, some geese in it—now dawn outright—the pink beginning as the
deity
inhales, takes a deep drag on it which shafts down light from a bright
break in cloud, white tunneling—and something holds its hand out
here and it
means it, is not
begging, not a

gentle request, also take off your
shoes your heart your skin it says, take it all off, the palm outstretched,
the palm
waiting, take it, take it all now, the thing you call you, this chatter all
around, this
roof over your head, this address—until it is time and nothing is left to
chance, and I
glance up at
the
kitchen clock—is that a cellphone or birdcall I think—then there it
is—where I hear newspaper land on sill—and the phone’s tone
rings, and Patricia-Michele, unknown to me, area
code 304, is
already
letting in
the exit, tired, all the once-born seeking refuge again I think as
egged on by them she speaks to me, fast, most agile, my father wishes
immediately
for me to know
it
is him, he is so well, has a new body, has moved fast through the
book of life,
I will understand when I come there, should not be afraid, nothing
useless is recalled, the voice which is his which is hers so firm, full of urgent
finishings,
orders, find this, protect that, but mostly how sweet the ending was
which had
to us appeared so sick the body so invaded left to die full of moaning
that would not
stop—curled up—fists gripped—and terror if medicine not given now,
right now,

and leave the vial nearby, want to see it, make sure there is
enough, ask the
doctor
again if more
can be taken—
all not-sailing at dawn but moored too deep in
shallow harbor, stuck, keel of pain, sea gone, him in stony shallows,
cold, the blanket pulled up by his good hand again, again, as if to bring
the
water up but it
recedes, the nakedness is all exposed, it is becoming more, the bones
are
coming up and you, mouthing the air looking for air, the room around
your mouth now seeking breath fast-growing emptier, vast, as all the
books stare
down at us, the
ink, the whiteness of the paper in its place, awaiting use, everything
awaiting
use, your whispers hoarse wandering through thickets of walls,
the labyrinths of rooms that were a home—what is it pulverizes you—
what is it
pulverizes rooms that made all the sense in the world to us as we
walked in and
through eyeing each place we living know—even the secrets are
assigned, are
pulverized—all this round where tomorrow there will be candles
burning when
they wash you, dress that body, lay it out—the hand meant for tearing
and pointing turned like a shucked shell with no palm to hold a thing
again—a
coin would slip through—the boots in the corner seem to have
your feet in

them—
what is this fat dimension you forfeit—what dimension are you
becoming,
have you
become—her saying now you say we can wander, or is it wonder she is
saying
and that we do
not need to
know—
but what made you shake so, what did you seem to greet increasingly,
gently,
again and again, each day more, sometimes near noon sometimes
evenings as if
entering
some far
classroom, a face, a person on a street approaching you, the years of
lifetime
closing, sometimes your hand soaring as if conducting an
anger a burning—rejecting then inviting destruction—
and when I wheeled you to the window in the morning to look out—
look out I said,
look Dad it’s Spring, look in the distance—here it comes—that was not
what
you saw,
not that phantom coming again over the hills, no,
that beggar coming to sell you another year and at what cost, no
you said, no, that is not what is coming—and you would not look out
at the light striking the one far field in the distance brighter, springwheat just
starting up,
glistering,
no

truck for
the treasure of the beam pointing out this rather than that—this tree
that roof, this rich man’s field of soy, not that one’s final bales—
although they were
gold in the day and would feed the herd. No.
Some other invitation you had not requested glimmered.
Your eyes floated above the drift of our kind’s love-shimmer.
How sweet you were then, now that you speak of it to me from such
distance,
to let us murmur and caress and rub your hands as if our hands were
prayers.
Ointments for the chapping. Astringents. Disinfectants. The bag
changed and changed as soon as you swallowed—all passing
through you and out. Nothing staying in. No in.
No great wisdoms now, they do not interest you.
The time for wisdom is past you tell me she says, it is not useful.
But to tell mother to be careful when she comes and not be afraid.
That she will find her people, you in particular, waiting—
just not right away—and again you repeat it—not right away—
tell her not to be afraid when she comes which is not right away
because at first she will be alone.
She will finish her business and let go of the stories. The stories are an
impediment. You must be in them now, you tell me, but they are all
string and
knot, they catch you up—spilled blood—the love—the car is
pushed—the time is right—your symbol, your scene, your outcome—how I wish I could pull you free, you say, there is above just
right there
above
this music—can you not hear—not see (can not says Patricia-Michele
to

you as you are her whom is she speaking to)—(no she can not)—can he
hear
me I ask—of course—are you ok I ask—oh he is laughing she says
at your question—it was so beautiful he says thank you you took such
care the passage was a lovely path—and I look at the room—we have
cleaned
it up—we have changed the place—the bed has been moved—
what is this number I have called—I give my credit card—I wanted to
know
you are all right—there is language—there are the appalling fields—
there is long ago—I am all past—it is all past—how did you
get out—do we ever get out—the time is up it
seems, he has rejoined the others he is saying goodbye be careful of
strangers or a stranger I cannot hear it right, I give my credit card, 0057
5532 0736
5118, expiration date 4/18—security code?—we shall have to bill you
for the full
two hours she says, although it’s not her anymore, or is just her. Is that
understood?
And I am at the window again. And down there below me again the
riversurface
stares. It is all even now. It glints and gleams in tidy rows and rolls and
dents of
wind. The day
is
long. It flirts with nothingness. It always does.

VIGIL

Again through the haze the dog awakens me. It stands and breathes and
makes me
look. Embroidered night. Pelt-skin and pushing nose.
Is it come this time. Gaze looking hard at something which is me.
Comes into here
these nights handing me nothing but
this gaze—you, you—and again now it
insists—looks hard then looks
away. Leery but intimate. Thinks like a
shovel, digs. Spotted torso. Never forgets anything. Says this is how the
burning of being feels—nothing—something of moths beating trapped
wings in the
air—air spotted too—air saying I am still here or it is or she
is—dog
nudges hard, refusing delay—has no whim—knows not
the is-it-worth-it thought, nor decision, nor indecision,
has no self in mirror, sleeps through din then without lifting heavy head
watches us
lose reason, lose by reason. Then sleeps again. Hears reasoning resume.
Like clotting of
blood. What do we need? Would you bring me some now I think, it is
more now we need—
then there will just be all
the

rest—but this version, this which is the only
version, this is where pretending (even if you’re not pretending) ends.
Just like
that. No extra time to make up later. No later. It’s watching me now. It
knows how to do the
only thing
as if it were the only right thing. I put my hand on my face. Feel my
face. Feel
vertigo, the shut drawer of pennies, everything helping itself to
itself—ash and furies and
freckled
splotches of oncoming
dawn. Are you ready? You can only consent now. Anything postponed?
Anything you planned
to say, do, think, breed, recall, ask forgiveness for—what
happens to the room afterwards? The angle of the light
matters now but in a few hours to whom will it
matter so? And the hornet nest we doused but which still hums holding
dawn wind?
I get up again to follow him. Up through one more night’s calamity—
no, how can it be
if you still
breathe in it—feel nighttime sizzle with your breath now rough now
soft pouring out
into it—feel breath rippling round your hunched-up self, your almost
completely broken
self, feel night to be the mechanism entirely built to proffer the inhale,
recover the exhale—listen—night grabs my
breaths too—pushes this inhale in as if to make it
sleek and tight as it flows through my only
citadel. I’m going to whip right through you it upwells, am going to ram forth into all your openings this fine electro-

magnetism, want to ship up, snap up, gut in, gutter through
every bit of you with minutes more minutes. Afterwards
this air
shall hold no more minutes
of
yours, will be all flow, cluster, possibility, speed—stirred but
not stirred-for—no recurrence then—substanceless—oh—keep it
substanced—for now
stay in it. Remain clock. Do not spurn earth. Have mass. Electron, spin.
Amaze
air. See day. Look it is coming, wait. Wait for the change. Oh the
change. Spur of leaves shaking wind. Dawn wind. Wind of differential.
Mother.
Be apparent. Be appareled
with
self still. What does it know this creature. Because it
knows. I look at its eyes but it does not look at me. It never
does. I look in there. Tell me.
Now down the hallway and open the door. You there
in dawnlight in sheets. Are those still sheets. I squint. I make no
breath—hear wind whirl-up the valley out there over trees. Soft
windowpane. Is it now. Hand on the knob I watch the
surface of the sheet
as one listens to the seashell for far distances, waiting for the long
lament, some blush of air, an ancient boundless
seeking seeking
deliverance—but
the small mound moves, and the humble rise and fall beauties itself
up, and it is like light suddenly speckling shadows and motions on a
brick wall
which had been till then reduced to grid, everywhere grid,

and you have not died. Strange and familiar your stillness.
Maybe you are dreaming? Sunrise is
touching the stillness which was night’s trees. A light wind
rises. The window pales and fills with things.
I am afraid. I look at the pods’ castanets, the sky full of red
shot. Again the dog goes over to your side and settles close. He knows.
Like wheat collapsing onto the threshing floor he sees
how much is left in the gripped hand to spill. A creature that knows joy
knows
death. They bind each day in chains at the end. Daylight shows it.
It pierces us with its red spear. It widens.
Oh you out there—run, it is day, run everywhere—
rise fall sink breathe—open up—happen.

WITH MOTHER IN THE KITCHEN

Let us pause. If you could be saved then yes, ok. If you could be
contained in life then
yes.
But diligent, foolish, I count off the dates—your days, your breaths—
as if this mistrust of the natural were not enough—
looking for the starting point—
one of these will be your last word—
what will we have just said when you stop—
what will the phrase be which is interrupted by your final breath—
did they warn us about this freedom—
that there are no regulations—
that we do not run out of patience, we run out of time—
they wrench out the life, just like that—
everything is innard and then it is not—
that one day you are no longer at home here—
also that there is no room left, your room runs out—
the next move is no move—
who told us to feel we could settle in—
today they will ask me for your home address, I have one to give—
my beloved unknown, you pour out—
where you arrive is too far—
is not an entrance, not an exit—
you have to stop being—

I don’t know if it’s formless—
no there is no longing—
a bird chirps firmly from the porch—
the genes chirp firmly in the blood, it still flows—
there is still body heat, honor the body heat—
you ask for the meds, honor the meds—
you have gone too far, you cannot turn around,
the flame of the candle blooms, exceedingly if I stare, I stare,
be glad, inauguration of, say little, save breath,
I will press your hand now and there it is—life—it comes in waves,
it will disappear, it has not disappeared,
accept destruction, accept, the word quivers.…
You passed inspection, can I tell you that.
You were fully searched. Every option. Every cavity.
At every checkpoint, you were. You were not saved.
This is the final one on this side.
I watch your hands. One is lifting a spoon, one is holding onto the
folded cloth.
An iridescence—a crazed green—out the kitchen window, spreading
forever.
A puddle just there at the foot of the tree from last night’s rain.
Now sun. Crusty light, gravelly with pocking shadow, excited by wind.
New leaves.
First wind today for these new leaves.
Is it this week. We drink our tea.
The knives and forks glitter in their dark drawer.
They will be there after. Hands will lift them as if nothing.
May I cut your meat, may I stir your soup?
“Sometimes walking late at night/I” and
“let us pause on the latter idea for a minute.”

First wind new leaves—no, new wind first leaves.
They came out day before yesterday.
Those intervening days, unbroken stillness settled.
Look, it’s May I said. They grow. No wastage of energy. Love.
Molecules.
Now they flip up, fly back. One is ripped off and slaps against the
windowpane.
Still citrine-green-new—it sticks fast to the glass.
For a while. We see it.
Do you want to hang out a bit now, here? Do you want to talk about it,
shall we continue?
It just happens this way, you bend to the cup,
the sea-reaching stream runs down
somewhere below our angle of view—
though on a good day you hear it, I see you
hear it—straightening itself as it goes, going down to go faster,
at some point merging and merging, splitting its waters, gathering, a
slope will help it.
I’d take my bucket, may I have a sip of you, river, I am so parched.
We wait for it to come, the time.
We are so glad for this wind, it delivers.
The mind too, whirling, vectoring, reaching short but at least
reaching, rising, consigning—towards and towards. Terrible. You’ve
got to
love it, dark mess of words and winterunwinding—blaze, gleam, build, tear down. I put the kettle back on.
We are on
pause. The change of scale in our thinking has occurred. Planetary
death so
what is yours. How big. Where do I put it. You were born. You were in
time, were

ahead of time all this time and now we are waiting
for it to go on without you in it. That.
When time will go on and you
will not be in time.
What is it we were just
talking about. Your years. There were mornings dew moon highways
nation-states
shame law. I was born. That was just yesterday. Far far away you said
opening up
the book. I am three. I look at the page. Your hand knows how to turn it
so the next thing
comes about. You will be buried in dirt.

DEMENTIA

Where am I now. And now? Once there was no other shore.
Now I peer into the other shore.
One day in my life the halo of event appeared, replaced event. Dolled up and undarkening. Something too open opening further. Swept clean. Night round
a lamp, street empty, street gone, the white of this thought whitening
further, a wave sweeps it away, the clenched fist of the present instant—right
here—this one—tightens (I am here) then loosens (where am I). Where? The
clutching of this thought,
cinching further—am I in life-movement, forward—am I the lack of
question, something that can be remembered from much
later on, from afterwards, from tomorrow, is it slow suicide this having thinned
to what will come to be seen as an introduction—were we the first introduction
to what might have been a species—a first try a failure but full of nervous sparks
—
we called them vision or
thought—
technopoesis—accelerate, drift, drift—
undetermined, intermediated—all aftermath—spectacular creativity (though just
first draft)(who knows what is to come)(what came)(what could have come)—
(if)—,

surveyors, tuners, someone who knocked at a window and wanted to come in, so
violent, these fingers→what they have done and made→so nervous→clawing
and
caressing→nothing was left to us but touch→no stories but those of touch→in
the right
hand in the left→then torn apart→in→between→just to see in→to hear it
squeal→a ringtone? a devil?→always returning to try one more time→to hear it
one more time→the sound of the ripping apart→the inhale of the seeing-in→
perfectly→is that perfectly→do you think we really saw it as it is this
time→pulling
aside the heavy baldachin→brocades from the East, tassels from the South→no
Gabriel anywhere in sight→no choir→devices that broke down the human skin,
the
human mind, now there is
another mind, prefigured by drones→algorithms→image
vectors→distributive consciousness→humanoid robotics→what is required
now→
is→a demarcation→what is artificial→technological end-times now only just
beginning→along the watchtowers→pleasures of nihilism, speechlessness,
incredulity→not knowing what do to with these hands, these→how they want to
inflict pain on the powerless the weak the poor→then the passionate complicit
massresignation→mass→look there they are in the ditch the means of
production→your hands
have been cut off and cast down in the midst→soon they will hand your stumps
a
shovel→you must cover it with dirt the century→action its dialect→and if you
bury
it→you come to the end of action→the hands will move for a while as they are
wont to
do→down there in the earth→the thousands cut off each day→millions→then
they are
still→not even the animals go to them→miles of ditches, countries of hands→
all the action in them stilled→markets stilled→excess fetish vertigo stilled→
So now go back. Touch yourself. Take yourself to yourself. In anger in need. Re-

member your self. Put the hand in, and from the bottom of the sack cast out the
seed, the pesticide, the pests—twist the cap of the pipe—let water flow—
combine
ingredients—try for that first time the plasticizer—how loathe—a butterfly
just emptied itself into untraveled air but you couldn’t look up—a butterfly so
rare
but you can’t look up—the reaction has to work—the retardant the
photochemical
the imitation transformation where the molecules—(now you remember them
from school, the first time you knew of them, you drew them, the world, its
secrets)—must make you lubricant, stronger than anything in the
known—and everything non-essential dies—curling, subtracting, coating, recombining—your plastic-laden ocean bearing grief inside it too. Once—
Once is a place I visited. A flame burns it up. Just looking at it burns it. Once.
A lot of coming and going—flame where legs run thundering along the cave the
wall
where many of us run at once, hooves in the way of escape, and those are not
drones
that chase from above, that will run us off this high shelf because we cannot stop
—
once has a taste over the precipice is the taste it’s all becoming darker is
the taste—this minute is pecking at your shell—that’s the sound—percussion is
our mind—this torrent of us pouring into day the paradise the day. I know a day.
Now where am I—and
now? Running and raining I am. Carrying my face before me.
Here where my mind drops down to the stubble of grass—where?—revelation
blinding as a fat stone in sun, my body desperate for concealment—think of

something
else, do you not feel it, this total expression hides you further,
lays itself down over the scribbling of me, the
dream of me, of having me, me stilled and dragged, opened, shared, meat—till
all
this bright mind makes what you wanted so to feel—or see—or just take in—
disappear. I lie by the stream. Grow accustomed. Have hooves ears rich flesh hide.
Am hunted. But you knew that. Hunted by the once. Hunted by then. By when.
By
when the time comes. By time comes. Time. There you are scribbling me again
on
the walls of the cave, my sideways-leaping to avoid you when you pass me,
come around the other side of me, to cut me off from mine, such a small decision
and I
am suddenly yours, hide hooves ears flesh, such a small hesitation—where am I
now—
in this
representation—as you stroke me onto the wall in flames, unreal, unreal, you
can’t
have that I want to say, that is me, that is what I am, this given, just this, running
and
free—you will make towers bridges tunnels hangars wonders, you will have
stone marble cement bustle haggle in doorways—doorways!—chronometers,
managers, mercury in thermometers, saints and virgins—I don’t remember
where
we are again—we became more—now I am in a cubicle, a tabernacle, a festival,
again say the
leaves in quick wind over my face even though I am trying to go still, grow in-

invisible, take
instruction, excuse this diction, especially here by this fallen tree, scraggly, hung
with webs bees peripheries entropies love

III

TO TELL OF BODIES CHANGED TO DIFFERENT
FORMS

In the market of ideas, of meat—in the teeth of need—you will never be happy
with
your body—it is not the right body—the shame of having to appear
in it—as if always a few steps behind it—or like a man standing
at the edge of a small river which muscles-by unaware—slipping by—under
reflection—too fast for its own good—making you a fault in perception—a
catastrophe to
which a body is joined—disjoined—all headgear, undergear, tied, trussed,
confused—
wearing your arms and legs as if waiting for security to find you—shaven then
unshaven—
a bit traditional though all at once too raw too sexed-up—shivering portal and
obstruction—
seeing yourself there, features amplified, distorted by normalcy—what you are
dying to be
eluding you again, a hole in time, in the consolations of light—
sublime heavy weapon of appearance being detonated right there where your eye
meets your eye. I see you. How your apparition shrinks from itself.
It knows there was another body it was intended for, another century another
love
another consolation—another sentence in which to place the heavy “I”—another
sex race core time—a different artifice—a different flow of faults. What are you
dying

to be. How unknowable do you feel, heavy ordnance with no where to hit. The thing about
history is
it drains it flows but has no borders. Is not this soft smartly turned-out
green grove of summer—no places in it for insemination, iridescence, work—
this being not yet you imitating it, the tiny nationstate which is
you, your you. You can’t understand it. You can look up at the sublime with its
massive firm edges—albeit under erosion—who cares—you won’t be around to
see it—
the altered thing—you who so need to be altered
that this could be acceptably a you—this thing which cuts loose from an other’s
regard—the
right ghost to be—yes that—a want wanting to be all folds all energy—
an image filling itself in as almost but not entirely matter. It’s late summer.
We will never be happy with the body. Will exchange it for another. Will
change its months name legs arms voice—will shave self off—will watch
breasts grow
as the buttonwood grows. The sublime is so alone. It watches us. Have you
failed to
make your
self? Are you still hidden, are you too exposed—it’s hard to tell—
perfect losses both ways—too much body, too little—voice too deep or too
void—voice too full of space like a small nail trying to hold in too large
a weight.… Erect or not erect enough. Oh are you built yet as you would be
built? Caution: you will make yourself anew. Caution: you will not like the new
one either. After a while you will need to do it again. There is no body which
will
suffice. It’s a theology—your mucous—it’s a post industrial cock or a derivative
cunt—are you getting ahead? Careful: you will get ahead of your self. Indeed,
you are
ahead of yourself. I love you for that, says your best friend. I love you for your

unquenchable dissatisfaction—after months so dry, rain came—so quiet at first we did not know
what
to make of it. It tapped each thing as if a blind creature coming to see. We
were where it was meant to arrive. Weren’t we? It went by too fast. Hard and
fast. A kind
of porn. I saw you feel your new ass. You like it but then I saw you wonder
whether,
right there where the idea of grandeur taxied down your piste of a brain, ready to
go
but on queue—who knows how long it will be before you take off—and by then,
wouldn’t it
be old hat.…
Warning: by then a new idea will have popped up. As if the runway weren’t long
enough or the sky too small. Change! The debt ceiling has shown itself to us.
The undoing has shown its cheek, the lovely small of its back, the laminate skin of its
sex
appeal—theremay be nothing else behind these words—by definition—caution
—they too
seek to be changed, they feel unseen, unheard, mis-shaped, misunderstood. Caution: you can neither be filled nor consumed. Caution: you are
not
beautiful—there is no such thing—you are a forced withdrawal from an
occupied
terrain—that’s what a body is—once you are out you want to go back in—not to
the
same place exactly—but back in, back in—the same defiling of your corpse so
that you
can be resurrected as a new you-and-me thing. Look a small mudwasp is building a nest.
Its activity wrenches the open air. There will be but this one. It will abandon its

young
never to return. It is doing a form of research. The mud is powdery like the
foundation I
have applied, looking so complete to myself in this mirror in this instant before
the
light changes and
I must begin again.

SELF PORTRAIT: MAY I TOUCH YOU

here. May I touch your
name. Your
capital. May I
touch outcome, kindness, slur down my caresses to
throat, eyes, end of the tunnel. Come out. Now your name is changed. How do I
reach
right name, right bandage—the character that you will be for now
in the dark, where there is need—is there still need?—can you be for this short
time
singular? You need to be singular. There you are changing again. These words
are
furrows. Now they are
arrows. Don’t touch where it says no. It says no everywhere. Where is the spot
where you
are faking it. That spot. So well. Can you tell. Doesn’t work for you. What works
for you.
The rouge you have applied to see who you would be for a while. You
change your mind. You change the shade. You recognize yourself for a while
then it grows old. The pupae in the mud grow old. They’ve slicked it smooth as
skin with
perfect perforations. All entrances and exits. The only way, right way, the pupae
morph
to their winged
stage and grow. They exit not to return. Those who laid them do not return. They

change from
unborn to being here now, 67 degrees under the eaves as they come out. I watch.
Nothing
can change out here in the given. It is given and it is received. If ants find the
pupae
they eat the nest through. Sometimes they get to live their life. I know you need
to be
a significant player in
the creation of
your verisimilitude. Abide abide. Do you do nude. Can I touch your apparition, your
attitude,
multitude, your eternally misunderstood solitude—do you do adulthood,
husbandhood,
motherhood—listen: sap in the dogwood—not like blood, crude, flood, lassitude
—I want you
to come unglued—clad in nothing but blood—in it—dripping wet—appearing
always rereappearing,
of course wearing your camouflage—whatever you currently identify as—clad
in your
surface your newest reason—may I touch it—your phantom your placeholder, undelivered, always in the birth canal, undiscovered—your personal
claim on
the future, residue of all the choices you’ve made thus far, also the purchases,
invoices, in
voice where your change resides, in vice where it settles—skin—a win win—the
management
wishes to express concern—can I touch there where you appear in the mirror—
where you lay
your simulacra down—lave the mercurial glass—bypass being—hardly a ping
where you

boomerang—here you are back outside—ghost money—
do you not want to feel
the fierce tenacity of
the only body you can sacrifice—the place where it is indeed your
fault—there in the fault—no heartsearching? Me with my hands on the looking
glass
where your life for the taking has risen, where you can shatter into your million
pieces—
all appareled refusal. What are you a sample of today—
what people.

INCARNATION

What shape am I? A vote? An invoice? How much do I
count. Am I a verity. Run your hands over me. There.
What is a lie—hurry—make meaning—liquidate tense—
outwit the wind—no, outwit intimacy—harvest it—fake a
common dream—say touch me to the failing grip—of time—
it fails—the sound of decay also exists on skin—your skin—
are you all covered—is the residue wiped off, is debt, waste,
love—feel it, this awareness of your shape—what’s left after
the comments-section shuts—see what that makes of you—
or is it me—when will the fade begin, why this eternal closeup, this wiry sinew of gaze threading into each pore, the
meeting place—where you are most speechless—most—
there is no word for it—don’t know any—say house—say
don’t go one step further—say don’t turn around you are all
front—smell it the scent of time, it is skin, is all this forwardfacing you cannot back out of—I’m going into my name—I’m
touching my cheekbone—draw me my outline—make the
skull very loud—the chalk on the sidewalk quivers
slightly—once I had a father—I touch my face it is wet—
there was a year I forgot to look—I was a child—my shape
seemed a brushstroke—a thing about to be said out of
respect for something or someone who had to arrive soon

because we had built a system based on waiting and every
thing—love respect fear—was based on waiting—
so then you would be given your shape—and so be
honored—there was a racket but that was childhood—
everyone was screaming all the time but that was words—
the past tense was like a bolt of cloth you could touch and
lift and it would float in the air for the briefest time as if it
were time—or the curtain—teaching you to see shape—
wind in its muslin—filled with light, with turns, then sucked
back in—flat against the wall. Then dropped. Like that.
Nothing more. Can a gazelle hold as still. Oh accelerationism.
The thing in you now able to be not seen. And so there you
are. In the lull you can not be. Or not be seen. They began by
merging. A thing penetrated you, then it withdrew. You are
something’s thing and it grabs your shape. It yanks your
hair. Pulls back your face. You take its shape in you. A forced
occupation. A patient ministering force inside. We must be in
common. This is our little market. Dark, dark, we are making
our own futures-market, organizing seed, oozy excess, in
thrall, unstoppable, breaking into the sealed-up skin-thing,
minutest interview, burning with love, detained, breath
obtaining, yes abstract but not so much there is no
torture. See. It is small and private although you can still
scream. The crucial parts even here redacted. As we come
together. Like this thing you are holding. Life inked out of it.
Its true shape escaping you. That is how meaning works.
Holding this place in place. Cosmic nihil. Chemsex. Extended
peak. Death in hyperdrive—that shape of yours—we have to

blur it—sand it—pixilate it—rush, froth, dismember. Even a
stickfigure is too much. Even a cartoon in which you bend
and rise, bend and rise, to give invention its pleasure, is not
full enough of all the seed-in-wind body wants. Oh little
revolution. You must come to an end in stasis of course.
It is not pleasure but you will think it is. In these notes from
apocalypse feel the shape of becoming machinic. How it
holds you in place. Go ahead raise your hand to your mouth.
Taste it, the stagnation. Bring it upon yourself. Accelerate.
Immediate. Be incessant. Be disindividuated. When you
were born from me I heard in your cry the loneliness. A wish
came out. Was the first thing. All my decisions have been
wrong. That face of yours just come from me I will never see
again. Everything subsequent was flame that could speak.
Wanting and empty. Full of purchasing power. Glass shatters
in my mouth as I try to say this. Here said the light as you
entered it. Here is more. Gauzy light surrounded you and
you were gone, you were in, you were unwrapped from nonbeing, it was the last I saw of you, I saw a line of elms out the
window and they went on, you were raised up, white wrap
of belonging, instant addiction to breath, I watched it start
you up, too late too late I was thinking in the laughing light,
make her whole again, put her back in the unshaped, make
her nobody’s business again, invisible girl how I would have
cast the light off you, pushed your hollow chest back up,
head first, got you out of the mediation. But a tube was put
in. You lived. The body you were sunk-into washed up on
this shore. With its urgent message no one would ever hear

of course. As if you were the waste product of some
unstoppable subtraction, some buzz the stars thrilled in
messaging their absence, their methods of absence, their nonirruption from shapelessness—the place without war. And
the nurse’s chemise she covered up, to keep the stain off.
I wanted you to stay inside, my life, you, coming out of unshape, you permanent now, dying and permanent. What
shape does lie take which is not the right shape. All shapes
of lie are its right shape. The star’s edge, the orchid’s rushed
rim, self-empowerment, the breeze just now—the day I am
in—the shape of the trap before it snaps shut, the calm
keyhole holding its key not quite tight, that it lock us in, that
it let us out—what shall we be let out of—into what shape—
I don’t fit—don’t fit what I think—sturdy little wheeling,
going always forward, glaring, whose picture am I, terminal,
not quite terminal, over-expressing cells, overwhelmed with
self improvement—then something goes wrong—this will
not fit—I do not fit—in place—am forgetting my shape
again—must remember it—have to be a clean fit—good
fit—true fit—a truth—no—how can I be that—they kill you
if you don’t dream—make sure to dream—that’s the point—
it’s a shape that won’t fit in you, that’s why it floats and tears
and wakes you in terror—it is your dream—dream it—
whimper a little ok but touch yourself—feel that hip bone,
the soft of that belly, move slowly, your counterpart is
somewhere you will never find—the one place it is not is in
that horror the mirror—that delirium put before you—look
how it waves—you stare again—what shape am I—I have to

get it right, is it possible we are alive to get this one thing
right—you peer in, is it a collection of notes just beyond
hearing—what were you to make—that shape—and how
you would love to sit down again about now, right here in
front of the house, where the dogwood is making its million
shapes—oh dogwood your stars are not dead—you would
like to sit and have no one see you—get rid of the baggage,
the footprints—the small blue god that accompanies you
everywhere, saying make sure to be you, be true to your
outcome, your only shape depends on it—am right here it
says, don’t think about truth, would be a mistake, think
about nothing but where you end where it begins—what is
the it I say—I plead I wait a second to see if it will answer for
once, the small useless god—it sounds like 2000 miles of
shorebreak at once, but small and only around me, given me
that I be here, the one thing that betrays me every day, what
you imagine you see me by, the thing all round me so full of
future, like a lining, furry with minutes as I walk through the
waiting, the waiting for the end—so much forever to be in till
the forever stops—a line all round me you take to be me,
you take it, you take me, the me you take is I agree a
possibility, but it is just one, a surmising, a guess—but you
touch—you reach out, touch, say it—you say the one word
which attaches to me, which has from my first breath—my
name—put down there, certified—proof of live birth—it is
so persuasive—really I have to go, I have to go now—I can’t
stand how it tries to hold me, get your stickiness off of me,
you are something they put on a piece of paper, a

momentary idea they had in mind, they put it by my only
time, my arrival time, I am awash in it, they hooked me up in
it, rinsed me clean of me and shaped me firm in it—look
they signed for me—they dated the purchase—it was a good
price—the perfect price, the shape of my price—the making
sense of the shapeless thing I was—which was pushed down
through egg and cell and faith and today’s shopping spree—
and all this waiting—and limitation braiding clarification
thinning me out, stretching me out—there was an old friend
I would have liked to have stayed with but I was taken, I was
cleansed of shapelessness and plasmaed and celledup and moleculed to death till I started to sprout and divide
again—pushing pushing pushing are these minutes—I feel
myself in the dark as I must have the very first time, when
these fingers formed, just enough, who is this, why is it here,
why can I touch it—and I move across and there is bone and
silk vagueness forms on it—I would brush it off but it is now
part of me, no, not part, it is whole, it is becoming one thing,
all the parts are coming together—a perfect market—
everything in its aisles before the doors open, the opening
bell upon us, any minute now, the chute will open, I will be
received, I will finally be what I am being assembled for, the
parts all slid in till you can no longer tell them apart, there
are no parts, there is a whole, here you go, you have to be
this skin-tight thing and then something celestial barely
skips a beat and that beat is you, you are the next note, they
want you to think it’s a song, a great aria—someone hacked
in to the non-existent and introduced this mutation and the

mutation can only grow, now the limbs have formed, they
can touch each other—and there are two of you it
seems—but you must hold them together and say I am one, I
am, here I come now—pigswill, mix, motion, eddying, curl—
original expression, bellied, bald—yards and yards of cells
strung so tightly in, starting to express, disturbing
endlessness, disturbing unceasing: here. Come in to end. I
snip you off. Come in. Who are you. Begin the ceasing now.
A big inhale. Fill you up nice. And then the other part.
Which exhales, lets you go. Easy exit. Running your hand
through what’s left of your hair. In yr privates. On yr head
where it flames. Forgive me you say to the creature in the
mirror—I wanted to make you happy. I slip my glasses off to
try to see. I really mean it. I don’t know how to transmit
meaning to you in there, mercurial. A redbird flits through.
Look it is gone to both of us now. I would have had you keep
it. I would have had it be in your hand, had it still you, had it
make you have—as it has—arrival, shape, meaning—a say
in things. A say in things. In things. A thing.

FROM INSIDE THE MRI

—my subtropical dancer, partner, or is it birdchatter I’m hearing now, vein in,
contrast-drip begun, everything being sung in the magnetic field’s noupward-rung
unswerving tiny dwelling—you earthling—awaiting your biochip—
they are taking tranches of the body which is one—which has been one
all of my life—
can you hear me, he says, squeeze this if problems arise he says, ok?
ready? if if if if
if yes if yes—here’s this to worship—hi hi hi hi—hi hi high high—
high high not not not not highnot highnot not not—are you
ok—next lasts
three minutes—ready? yes?—not not not not be be be be notnot bebe
notnot bebe
next one one
minute—yes—
yes yes yes
yes
yes yes yes yes—can you hear me—next one will last

forever. Question: were you looking up at the cherry all these long
weeks. All during
the bombing the destruction of land home flesh the taking of refineries

the turning point the dam which if they breach it will eliminate the
town the graven images the mosques the waterworks the UN School—
the idea of
shelter—
Question:
the children
here—in lockdown—
Question: “during”?—Question: their being in solitary no food no light
no mattress no
latrine months
go by only who
knows what
days are, the
mind
you make
for
dream is taken from them—during all that time—Question: this will
last a
while—the guards cracking spleen for no reason—four down on one
child—his head
cracked against the wall “for sleeping in class”—“I saw blood and feces
on the floor”—“I look away” the teacher says “or they will come
after me
next.” All this

time where are→are you→the sap moving and the other fluids
moving→the
crystalline
chemistry of necessity driving the pressure up→into the xylem tubes→

the tree just
there→outside window→and I want to say yes→yes I hear it→the
water
evaporating from each leaf→how it tugs on water remaining in the
xylem→
from roots to shoots→sostenuto now staccato→in the violin→in my
earbuds→
the children on Sinjar made to flee during this dying→of thirst→during
this
trying→to escape→the water molecules stretch the bonds→breathe
in→you can
make empty space more empty→yes→you can take from there and
make
this fruit→emptiness→yes→you can hold it in your eye→its pupil
hard→its
size your
instrument→Question→think of the silence during May’s growth you
did not hear
buried in this August day→Question→you glanced again at the
blossoms and then you
suddenly forgot again→think during this→think time passed→the
more you stretch it
the more it
pulls
back→
no one knows exactly what does the pulling→it is not
gravity→no→another
force→negative pressure brings it up→though all this could exist in
empty
space→vacuum
is
full→of energy→and other intangibles→listen→liquids
stretch→listen→and if you

pull on them (“under certain conditions”) they pull back→have
tensile strength→can resist being turned to vapor→worst fears remain
for Yazidis
still trapped on the mountain→on the run AP repeats→at this minute→
live in this time zone→look it is a terror it is a hero a heron→it is
the screen
where history ripens→the mountain so barren→the scream of
the refugee→running towards the chopper→listen→hear this→they
drop bundles of water→the waterman a god under the chopper which
hovers, which
will not
land→so that the boys are climbing now→onto its mechanism→it is a
schism→another
one→the
gun
just over the hills→the rifleman on his Humvee→the ombudsman,
tribesman
fisherman, herdsman, your patron→sharpen your question→is there
more “him” of him with the gun pointing at you→the just-dug pit
fills up like a comment box→I told you not to come→suddenly

seeing the buds that all along, unknown, unbeknownst, unmapped, unowned, unnamed, greened—a tableau vivant—oh celebrated
labyrinth, friend—beware pride—keep looking—keep looking
closer—there is a dryness coming but not only of the heart—it
stays outside—helpless as a sea to stop its rigor—as if a last
prize for us—a warm kiss gone too far—but the buds
turn in my breast my dark seat—know nothing of the soldier, of deep
time, self harm—

wait and see says the sun rising over all of this at every instant—
365→24/7→wait and see, and→hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi→
almost done he says, you ok→if if if if yes if yes if→
and if you think it could be a bird it could be→although it could be the
ringtone of the
smartphone someone in the adjacent booth to mine left on in locker
5→which was
not silenced→which can from here be→just made out→
beyond the slurring whooshing impenetrable door→above which
one red light is
singing-out
chamber in use. And the bird sings. On its short loop, its
leash, it sings, here it is, here it comes again. Chi chi trillip trillip
chiuuu chip
chip. No
matter
what you do, you are free. It is a nightmare. You are entirely free. There
now,
careful now. You can go.

PRYING
(For Dr Barbara Smith)
As if I never wake from this blackout again, again this minute they lay
it out
on the wheeling transporter, so silent, then the surgical table,
my body, my citizen, anesthesiologists back from coffee break, cables
on mylar headrest taking my head down now, arms into armlock,
then positioners, restraints—day talk
all round—the guidewires in, the intravenous ports, the drip begun.
An/aesthesia by which is meant the sensation of having sensation
blocked,
a collapse of response, a total lack of awareness of loss of
awareness—
on the wall, snapshots of the chosen few training on
the new
robotic patientlookalikes—my only
body—memories, contritions, facts—
oaths, broken oaths, my piece of path into the
labyrinth—how far have I reached in—and in my flesh these
rapid over-rhyming cells, which want us to go faster, faster, headlong
with
mirth ruth glee—what would they be—searching for
what minotaur, yarn in hand spooling-out mad towards core, eager for

core—all’s underneath—readout’s small pings beginning on the screen.
They will
learn everything about me while I sleep. I sleep the sleep of those
wanting to live.
I sleep the sleep of those wanting to be left alone by life. And
safe. With guarantees. Here take the keys. I should wake up. It’s hard
accepting to be free. It is not true. You must be still and not resist. Are
you
completely readable now. To survive, you need to be
completely
readable. So I
accede, I sign the dotted line, they will keep track
of everything, my breaths, my counts, my votes—invoices, searches,
fingertips—don’t I
know you
from somewhere says my heart to the machine reading me out, didn’t I
give you my
code, my pin, my blanket
permission
to suppress the last revolution, to calculate the timing of
the solstice the pressure
cooker depth of
ice core and whom
do I have
locked away
down there—do you not see them—don’t look away, the
dials are set—where is the nearest job—no gauge picks up their
screams at the
employment line, the check-out where the food is not enough, it is so
quiet here, who am I signing on to be,
and then—oh—here it comes again, here in this moment I shall recall

however long the life is after this
when you look down at me and stare and your long arm offers its hand,
cold hand,
and I offer you mine—we hold—then we repair,
you in your disposable surgical blue hair-cap, blue mask, I in mine,
down, down through this operating theater’s novocaine-green
gleam, its cellophane membrane, serene, clandestine borderline &
your life depends on what says the disappearing air, the disappearing vein, surveil me here, in solitary, entertain me mise-en-scène,
hear me chain of command, touch me, stain-free middle class American
female subject starting downtown on the drip line,
on the gleaming staff of this protean sentinel, its silver rod
held up, torchful of forgetfulness, streaming, translucent, give me your
mass, your teeming cell-dividing
mass—give me your poverty,
your every breath is screened, your every cell, it is not hit and
miss, we get it all, your safety lies with us, hold still,
granted it’s cold at first, this new relief, your icy nation thanks you
for the chance to test these absolutes on you
murmurs the gleaming staff in the deliberate air, astir,
toe-separators being pulled on now and leggings next,
always a bit tighter that the blood flow fast in this undercover
slow maneuver, whirr, blink, you get a little extra life as a reward—for
what I
cannot see—what these concentrates of vigilance push into me,
capital and knowhow and all these minutes, minute—where to
finish off the string and bite the knot, erotic dead-end, no jobs,
the virtualization, the play of nerves, no jobs, they jab
the last bit quick—paradise confusion sedative—oh and the rebates the debates and the womb what was that really,

the total concentration of capital, the ten commandments, Job that
heartthrob now standing right before me here as the drip-line on its
silver rod,
its one arm up, its other out into this widening avenue
to step you off this
luminescent curb
to hail what cab
the ghosts in their scrubs do not perturb, bitstreamed, stubbing the
blood
where the small mound of flesh is grabbed, flap scabbed, snip drip as it
is all
transcribed by the robotic arm, prosthetic mind, rich text, as she
unslacks her
matchless stitch, having detached, having reattached, no speech in
them, bleached light, fleshtrim, mutation, division, over-expressed,
undersuppressed—held still
by your long hand, transnational, undersea cable, invisible ministration,
and when you take mine into yours
you say understand,
we are taking the first steps
friend
towards the longest journey, community,
breakers of codes, corporate raiders, west of everything, no immunity,
put on your hat your wrap be ready now to take my hand its certainty its
purity—
there will be no one come to fetch you back from here—
you must now take this voyage out yourself alone
to reach the peerless place hard to think-in, squint-in,
you will not be embarrassed there is nothing to reveal,

you are a shoo-in as the heroine, new citizen, back since the
pleistoscene,
being touched up like a virgin engine in the squeaky clean saline
punchline, your soul at plumb-line, magic marker written in in print
to make sure LEFT is left, it’s not benign this timeworn
zone in you, no not benign this fast archive,
surgical thread making its dragline in the artificial
moonshine—how supine must the whole apparatus of being get,
shop-talk above you now a serpentine acetylene,
you under here endlessly re-learning the only story—abasement,
abasement—
and here is my hand it says, slide yours into it, come now, radiant,
astringent,
this river’s here for you to enter now, obedient, in payment,
you in it now as it comes into you, your profit margin, look—
flowers falling without attachment—
weeds growing without detachment—
slide under now into ignorance—
there is no evidence, also no continuance—don’t mispronounce
your lifesaver, also a bit of fever, it too a visitor, and no I
cannot augur, also there is, in truth, no aftermath, just this new kind of
stalker—your personal flyover—your tiny temporary stopover,
and obviously no ecstasy in your surrender you have no choice also no
underwriter, take my offer—and I
did—and when I went home later I had a cup of tea
and made a call to her cellphone to get the unfortunate results
but we are not there yet, still have the void here to traverse
across this page which is a wide expanse and will these very words if
perfectly
overheard

see me through
was the question
as the cold came on,
me hoping to do nothing wrong then hoping for a bargain,
asking how long before one would be able to live again as if—
and those other turns in the brine—the yet—if not,
if now, and now, when now—turn towards me now a bit you say to
them and then
let’s turn the torso this way please recheck marked spot.
Can see the guidewires but can no longer feel them.
Then the thing on the other side, the person who will open up my hand
and say
it’s over now can you hear me here is some water.
And in my room cut flowers still in their paper stapled up. Undelivered.
And you get a little extra life to live now—here—can you still live it.

CRYO

Now they say you are ready for a long stilling voyage. Is it further into
nature. A life
of make believe. I have no idea what is retained. What is here is
certainly not there.
The bad news became apparent too late. The day became all one day
and was done.
We got rid of the calendar, the book of side effects, the weather, the
fairy tales. We
would like the monster back. We want the fight with the monster, his
bright sure
nothingness, back. He walked towards us firmly once. We were
equipped with our
long sharp object. The what happens. We were provocative that is for
sure. But we
tried to listen. To nature. It suggested we forego proof. It suggested we
try mimicry.
Empathy. The filigree of syntax wailed. It coursed out our throats as if
we weren’t
even there, gentle then ungentle, burned-out on persuasion, for
centuries.
But hi. I’ve been having an interesting discussion with→those who pass
their lives
on→hastily assembled→dimly aware of the reasons for their wanting to
become
inanimate→an entity no longer human→an interloper→a possible
manifestation, an
impersonal person, an impersonation→an apathy from both emotive

and organic
color→a form of leap→from looper rover lopen→to run away→proto
empathy→no
memory→no entity. A leap from one sort of being, one sort of being
immaterial to another. A possible alien subjectivity. Not idle but at the
furthest
reaches. Of empire. No song. Downward. Toward the stone terrace.
You do not
suffer you do not lie in waiting. Without a subject. The self a mere
occasion for
the swarming of responses, oh weariness, we can suspend, responses
can suspend,
letting certainty reach apogee, yes, would glance at me furtively but
then I, I
hi→I narrate continuity→not what is wanted except absolutely→what
is said in my
absence→is→my absence→they complimented→me→consistencies
orders
summaries outcomes→no berries on that bush→arranged terror→I see
saints
gathering→see enlarging grasps of order→understand this as
likeness→is not→
visit the clinic→experience swarm fragment→during his increasingly
rare visits
he→we are left in the uncertain state→196 below centigrade→has not
yet experienced information death→can only begin after legal death→when?
→motion to
lose→grief suction cold→precise unaffronted
damnation→cryopreservation→
preserve my brain information→this peyne was bitter and sharp→this
paine driede
uppe all the lively spirities of flesh→blodlessehed and paine-dried
within→

blowing of the winde and colde coming from without→mete togeder in
the swete
body→jittery→of Crist→of→
now my no-me comes round, my most silent me, too fine, exposed,
figuring a stray
completeness, not done but casting away all edges, inside there is
nothing, however
small there is nothing, with its own hue—void, ultimate, but not final—
turning back
on itself to find no self coming to the edge of the done the said—
I am sorry to want this—but it flows turning so fast through what
electromagnetic
field saying I’ll wake not, I’ll with existence not exist, I’ll nestle in
unattainable
reality, anticipating, beyond intellect, awaiting rain, diminished to
where I can find
nothing to give, nothing to give myself to, everything is, nestling in,
unfound,
whirling through no transformation, at one sudden point I came to
surrendering,
sufficiency having split up and used up but not all→nothing coming
from
anywhere→time wraps.
Glanced furtively around.
Becoming unhitched from the animal.
Tried to frame our response.
Our ending was nothing like—
We are beholden we say.
We are so beholden we think.
The shadow narrative has been scratched away.
A blight, a damp, a leaching sees us coming.

Yes we know we are interlopers.
Where did he go she asks?
The narrator, the thing, or someone else?
No pathology found.
Maybe just an aberrant causal loop.
As in the next sentence.
So we introduce the period.
It is not coming back.
Is in this sense absent while clinging to time.
You might find yourself standing on a bridge
looking upriver. You are clinging to
the top of its milky white stairs.
You need to push. That is artificial light.
Have you known depth to be true?
Here in this period of ludicrous attachments.
You cannot close down meaning.
You close down meaning.
There are tinny machine sounds.
How can it matter if it has meaning.
The life of
My illness
Non artificial intelligence.
Are these the last words we say. Will we be talking about what we have
just
talked about. You put the pen down. It lies there without moving.
The body is stiffened by something happening far away→though the
curious bag
inside beats like a heart still→like a line repeated→an opinion from the
future→low, repeating some science→looking back at that prayer that
was not
received→and in this was brought to my mind this word that Crist

sayed “I
thurst”→for I saw in him a doubille thurst one bodely and another
gostly→the body
dried alle alon long time with wringing of the nailes and weight of the
body→the
skinne and the fleshe that seemed of the face and of the body→was
smalle rumpelde
with tawny coloure→like a drye bord when it is aged→period of
ludicrous
cognition→suddenly in the next mode of sentience→who is the “he”
that cannot
exist without him→mechanical doll comment section woman of no
reputation→even this ATM requires interpretation→impassable,
broken, asked
if she needed “anything beyond the venom”→the “he” of the next
paragraph already
hanging on to this→blodless and paine dried within→blowing of the
winde and
colde→coming from without→met togeder in the swete body of
Crist→it was a dry
harre wind, wonder colde as to my sighte→and paine folowing that he
was blodless hanging
uppe in the eyer→as men hang a cloth to drye.

IV

DOUBLE HELIX

One bird close up by the house
crow
makes the wall’s temporariness
suddenly exist
one call into
the arrival of the storm the announcing
by flocks and swarms
the flowerbeds turning in the solar system
listen—
Schubert and the thrush at once and
somewhere in space we
hang are hanging
also the red dress on the line I rush to get to
in time
also the slack in the line up-snapping then down
what scale this pitchchanging slapping
of the cotton-poly blend listen and my approaching
arms rising to catch the
ties my hair blowing over it onto it behind us
from the open door the violin and beside us
at the edge of the woods the last of the thrush—
can we hear them
these flowerheads being carried in this solar system

sepals receptacles—the vascular bundles
inside the stems—
near the blown-open door the strings’ diminuendos—
also these hatchlings in their nest in the eave in the storm born in
it
wrapping round them thunder twigs bits of mylar dusk
also accuracies of the
built porch of day of
the negative forcing, the solar constant, the
storm nonstop though modulating round these
dime-sized heads—in each
the magnetic chip and round it the tiny shellfish-crushable skull—
Venus is almost big as earth was lush at origin had
oceans imagine yet has no
water anywhere
today. Venus
had runaway
greenhouse. Could Earth. Of course we know it could he says
at the podium which fits in my head in the spot for understanding,
the question is rather how long
before runaway
occurs
one bird now
close up by the white house on the green hill (crow)
like a lockpick
one caw one
into the wildly cursive announcing by flocks and swarms
as somewhere in space we turn are
turning,

the final snowball Earth was followed promptly
by the Cambrian explosion
he explains
then eukaryotic cells with membrane-bound nuclei
expanding rapidly into eleven different body plans
which eleven still encompass
all creatures ever to inhabit Earth—
at the edge of the woods now the thrush
being sung out entirely by
this thrush—
the whole forest moving—
under the eave the just-hatching new ones in
thunder
in their
having been born
in it—
this is what is—
what will the sunshine tomorrow feel like
for the first time striking them
skulls necks eyeslits
tightening everything
creaking, pushing open the immense door—
power down now but us in here scanning the screen
for the emergency we are in to appear here it is
and the sound of the flapping of water
in wind—
and the sound of the nations gathering
for their final
negotiation,
everyone trying to speak in

whole sentences, listen,
they keep breaking, the suitcases fall open, the
inky speeches
wash away in the downpour, what
will the delegates say now, listen,
it is 1965 in Selma, Alabama, the schoolboy is beginning again
his first-ever assignment in his one-room school,
he shall scratch a word
onto the blackboard,
whose turn is it he thinks chalk in hand
and will there be someone on the other side of this to meet me
on the other side of this word if I spell it out correctly
it is simple and powdery and made of
seven letters—
the force of the black is impossible to touch—
he stands there like a breeze still thinking he is dreaming
the dream he is late again for school but he is
not. He is on
time. It is his
turn. Who
is the teacher. What is that he feels at his back in his
shoulders. He looks at
his hand. Its swirling small shadow
round the still stick
of chalk—
from where in the earth
did it come
this piece of moonlight, piece of
dead coral.
Oh good dark he whispers to the black behind the shadows,

the hand-shadow being cast by his one self on the dark,
by the single lightbulb behind him the
hum,
his own knuckles here and the tightly-clenched fingers
wrapped like a bird-beak hard
round the chalk
gripping something to bring home
to the nest—
because it must be
shoved down
into the newborn, this cursive—must be
forced in—
that they be made to inhabit
another day—
it is so simple—
and the next-on curl—and the billowing handshadow
over each spot he need mark—
and how nothing can
stop it
this our mineral
imagination
as here now
on this page
this uniball pen
shall write
if I make it
his word out completely
over this
void

THE MASK NOW

Dying, Dad wanted sunscreen. Nonstop. Frantic if withheld. Would say
screen, and we just did it. Knew he was dying. Was angry.
In last weeks wore red sleepmask over eyes day and night. Would
ride it up onto his forehead for brief intervals, then down, pulled by
hand that still worked. A bit. Sometimes shaking too much so just
cried eyes. Cried now now. Once cried out light—more like a hiss—was
there for that. Yanked it quick. Needed it so badly, the bandage, the
world is a short place, wanted the illustration of it gone, wanted to not
see out, wanted no out. But I am guessing. The vineyards down the
slope,
each latent bud beginning to plump. In the distance, mountains. Beyond
sea. All of it distraction, but from what. A waste of what. The red
sleepmask. I should have burned it with the rest but kept it. The pane
made trees look painted on. Silky. Not good silky. In the next valley
once,
hammering. Thought it human at first. The woodpeckers went on for
days. A carnival of searching for void. How full void is. Small tufts of
grass growing so that I can keep track. Taking root is not an easy way
to
go about finding a place to stay. Maybe nothing would happen after
all. The hollowing-out now added to by crickets. Spiders making
roads in sky. I watch. Look at, then through. What is the empty

part? Where. Can find nothing that is empty. Seems I should, and soon,
as
where would he go, or what would the indented place on the bed where
he had been be. Be full of. He was a settler in that flesh, that I could see.
Not far from breaking camp. Wrapping up the organs in their separate
parts—skin rolled away, eyes rolled elsewhere, the fingers tossed
aside—ash, ash—the whole like a dime toss, whom do I love, what
part,
what’s in the whom, what’s in the late, is there actually a too late—
because if there is I do not grasp it. Mask he calls, unable to get into
wheelchair any longer, stares for bit of time into the air out front, past
feet, out the glass door, to the olive tree and fig. Is there fire in the
distance. Squints once back up the ray of light, up, back its long road.
How far. Mask now. The cremation-decision driving its roots through
us
all—roots spreading wildly beyond the shadows of the head.
“Neighbors”
will continue to feed stump, book says, long after it is cut, will send it
sugars, phosphorous, nitrogen, all the surrounding trees will try, via
fungi, root hairs, send carbon, send enzymes, whole forest hears
stress signals, will mourn, like the elephant—“I’ve wrapped stumps in
black plastic when they’ve refused to die” says Leila, location
Wellington,
posted 4 years ago on permagardening. But then guard down. Eyes
gone.
A red cotton mask. An old TWA one. Elastic gone. Cries out if it slips
off.
Wants blue blanket. Says blue. Angry. Who was not angry. Nothing
enough. Wants to see all daily tests. Read the bloodwork. Wants trans-

fusions which we withhold. Would open him to infection. Would buy
no
time. I’m wearing the sleepmask now. I’m trying it on. Rubberband soft
with age. Adding more age. American red. Red full of noise, of
artificial
time. Feels like my face is painted on. A spirit. Upturned, ancient,
without
expression. An old stream flows alongside. Glimmering tongues
promise
the vanishing will be swift. It’s a lie. The periphery disappears but I can
still feel it, our knowing what’s coming a thicket we got lost in—till the
only thing is now—mask my spirit screams—mask now—vacancy
not coming fast enough—first we have to traverse the riddling
disappearances—extinction says the mask—go away now I do not want
to see you any longer—beauty you are too near—too near—I hear a
blackbird and the shoo of air where it lifts off—why won’t you just
go, you circling winds leaves birds systems directions visibles
invisibles
honeysuckle limbs and rose gaining self-song, motion, entering this
continuum—oh continuum do not lie to me with this delicate weight of
time, this floating of as ifs and further-ons and all your guides to
dreaming, abundance, the coming true of the true. No. From under here,
listening hard, light feels around me almost visible, doused with
benzene, and time goes away, and my eyes feel on them the small
weight,
the minuscule no to things, which I can conjure, which I think I know
by
heart, but no, I do not, I need the mask. And it feels like an
idea. We are in a cave now. It is a hundred million years ago. They will

bring the meds again now and the urine pot—he yells for it—but for
now
under the mask it is a lowly spot, you can make dawn come,
you can feel us inherit the earth, the jay shifts in the tree and you can
hear it. There is little. You hear the little. Hear the head snapped on the
stem. Hear the angel trapped in the stone. Hear pure chance which
sounds like a boy marching alongside an army wanting to enlist. The
year is 1490, 380, 1774, 10 BCE. You hear the outline in the tree—why
—
because it touches the other outlines. If I try to raise the mask the hand
he can barely use flutters angry bird wing at me. Would hit me with
finger wings but too broken. Maybe in Lee’s army, maybe in Grant’s. It
made no difference in the end. Maybe in Caesar’s maybe in Christ’s.
The
trillions seem more clear than ever in the day behind the mask. The
dark
gray of the fever feels every inch of the bark. Freckled, the pure
proclamations being made by the light. It is not day it is saying, bright
as
quicklime, text of flames he can hear—no, not day—day sprawls under
to let us flow through over its parched back. Lies flat. Lie flat day he
thinks under the red mask. Spread yourself over us light, the dead at
Antietam yes his people, both sides, the cufflinks in the drawer he will
not see again—they were Lee’s he would say—they were Grant’s—I
saw
the will of the Davis’ side—I did—he says, smell of gravel coming
from
the path, day sitting now over us like a lioness. It is neither dark nor
light. As if you are the place where the branch was sawed off—that

place
on the oak—and air silently touched your new raw end. You put it on,
you pull it down, and then effort, enlistment, singing, and you are given
a
fine practitioner’s absence, you are a purpose surrounded by chance, a
hole in chance. You can feel the clouds move over the sun from here.
You can hear the sun return and the insect-hum spray up. You can lie
still
and feel this is the ultimate price. You feel it getting paid. By you. It is
you.

MOTHER’S HANDS DRAWING ME

Dying only mother’s hands continue
undying, blading into air,
impersonal, forced, curving it
down—drought incessant rain
revolution and the organs shutting
down but not these extremities,
here since I first opened my first
eyes first day and there they were,
delicate, pointing, will not back off,
cannot be remembered. Mother,
dying—mother not wanting to
die—mother scared awakening
each night thinking she’s dead—
crying out—mother not
remembering who I am as I run
in—who am I—mother we must
take away the phone because who
will you call next—now saying I
dreamt I have to get this dress on, if
I get this dress on I will not die—
mother who cannot get the dress on
because of broken hip and broken
arm and tubes and coils and pan

and everywhere pain, wandering
delirium, in the fetid shadowworld—geotrauma—transnatural—what is this message
you have been scribbling all your
life to me, what is this you drag
again today into non-being. Draw it.
The me who is not here. Who is the
ghost in this room. What am I that
is now drawn. Where are we
heading. Into what do you throw
me with your quick eye—up onto
me then down onto the blank of the
page. You rip the face
off. I see my elbow there where
now you bend it with the pen, you
fill it in, you slough it off me onto
more just-now making of more
future. You look back up, you take
my strangeness from me, you
machine me, you hatch me in. To
make what, mother, here in this
eternity this second this million
years where I watch as each thing is
seen and canceled-out and reproduced—multiplying aspects of
light in the morning air—the
fingers dipping frantic into the bag
of pens, pencils, then here they
are—the images—and the hands

move—they are making a
line now, it is our world,
it horizons, we ghost, we sleepwalk,
everything around us is leveled,
canceled, we background, we
are barely remains, we remain, but
for what, the fingers are deepening
curling, bringing it round, the mind
does not—I don’t think—know this
but the fingers, oh, for all my life
scribbling open the unseen,
done with mere things, not
interested in appraisal, just
seizure—what is meant by
seizure—all energy, businessserious, about direction, tracing
things that dissolve from thingness
into in-betweens—here firm lines,
here powdery lift off—hunger,
fear—the study begins—all is not
lost—the thought a few seconds
wide—the perusal having gone
from here to here, aggregates,
thicket, this spot could be where
we came in, or where we are saved,
could be a mistake, looks across
room through me, me not here
then, me trying to rise in the beam,
nothing I do will make it
happen, rock-face, work that

excludes everything that is not
itself, all urge in the process of
becoming all effect, how can I touch
that hand like snow moving, when
is it time again as here there is no
time, or time has been loaded but
not cocked, so is held in reserve, all
wound up, I was also made but not
like this, I look for reluctance,
expectation, but those are not the
temperatures—if only I could be in
the scene—my time is not
passing—whose is the time that is
passing—the hands rushing across
the paper, cloudy with a sun
outside also rushing scribbling—
wisdom turning itself away from
wisdom to be—what—a thing that
would gold-up but cannot, a patch
of blue outside suddenly like the
cessation of language when lips
cease to move—sun—selfpronouncing—I want this to not be
my writing of it, want my hands not
to be here also, mingling with hers
who will not take my hand ever into
hers, no matter how late we are, no
matter that we have to run so fast
through all these people and I need
the hand, somewhere a radiant

clearing, are we heading for it, head
down towards the wide page, hand
full of high feeling, cannot tell if it
takes or gives, cannot tell what it is
that is generating the line, it comes
from the long fingers but is not
them, all is being spent, the feeling
that all—all that we need or have—
would be spent for this next thing,
this capture, actually loud though
all you can hear is the small
scratching, and I feel dusk
approaching though it is still early
afternoon, just slipping,
no one here to see this but me, told
loud in silence by arcs, contours,
swell of wind, billowing, fluent—
ink chalk charcoal—sweeps, spirals,
the river that goes
nowhere, that has survived the
astonishments and will never
venture close to that heat again, is
cool here, looking up at what,
looking back down, how is it
possible the world still exists, as it
begins to take form there, in the not
being, there is once then there is the
big vocabulary, loosed, like
a jay’s song thrown down when the
bird goes away, cold mornings,

hauling dawn away with it, leaving
grackle and crow in sun—they have
known what to find in the unmade
undrawn unseen unmarked and
dragged it into here—that it be
visible.

RUNAWAY
I

ALL

Or if then thou gavest
me all,
All was but all.
—Donne

After the rain stops you can hear the rained-on.
You hear oscillation, outflowing, slips.
The tipping-down of the branches, the down, the
exact weight of those drops that fell
over the days and nights, their strength, accumulation,
shafting down through the resistant skins,
nothing perfect but then also the exact remain
of sun, the sum
of the last not-yet-absorbed, not-yet-evaporated
days. After the rain stops you hear the
washed world, the as-if inquisitive garden, the as-if-perfect beginning again
of the buds forced open, forced open—you
cannot not unfurl
endlessly, entirely, till it is the yes of blossom, that end

not end—what does that sound sound like
deep in its own time where it roots us out
completed, till it is done. But it is not done.
Here is still strengthening. Even if only where light
shifts to accord the strange complexity which is beauty.
Each tip in the light end-outreaching as if anxious
but not. The rain stopped. The perfect is not beauty.
Is not a finished thing. Is a making
of itself into more of itself, oozing and pressed
full force out of the not-having-been
into this momentary being—cold, more
sharp, till the beam passes as the rain passed,
tipping into the sound of ending which does not end,
and giving us that sound. We hear it.
We hear it, hands
useless, eyes heavy with knowing we do not
understand it, we hear it, deep in its own
consuming, compelling, a dry delight, a just-going-on sound not
desire, neither lifeless nor deathless, the elixir of
change, without form, we hear you in our world, you not of
our world, though we can peer at (though not into)
flies, gnats, robin, twitter of what dark consolation—
though it could be light, this insistence this morning
unmonitored by praise, amazement, nothing to touch
where the blinding white thins as the flash moves off

what had been just the wide-flung yellow poppy,
the fine day-opened eye of hair at its core,
complex, wrinkling and just, as then the blazing ends, sloughed off as if a
god-garment the head and body
of the ancient flower had put on for a while—
we have to consider the while it seems
to say or I seem to say or
something else seems to we are not
nothing.

TREE

Today on two legs stood and reached to the right spot as I saw it
choosing among the twisting branches and multifaceted changing shades,
and greens, and shades of greens, lobed, and lashing sun, the fig that seemed to
me the
perfect one, the ready one, it is permitted, it is possible, it is
actual. The VR glasses are not needed yet, not for now, no, not for this while
longer. And it is warm in my cupped palm. And my fingers close round but not
too
fast. Somewhere wind like a hammerstroke slows down and lengthens
endlessly. Closer-in the bird whose coin-toss on a metal tray never stills to one
face. Something is preparing to begin again. It is not us. Shhh say the spreading
sails of
cicadas as the winch of noon takes hold and we are wrapped in day and hoisted
up, all the ribs of time showing through in the growing in the lengthening
harness of sound—some gnats nearby, a fly where the white milk-drop of the
torn stem starts. Dust on the eglantine skin, white powder in the confetti of light
all up the branches, truth, sweetness of blood-scent and hauled-in light, withers
of
the wild carnival of tree shaking once as the fruit is torn from its dream. Remain
I
think backing away from the trembling into full corrosive sun. Momentary
blindness

follows. Correction. There are only moments. They hurt. Correction. Must I put
down
here that this is long ago. That the sky has been invisible for years now. That the
ash
of our fires has covered the sun. That the fruit is stunted yellow mold when it
appears
at all and we have no produce to speak of. No longer exists. All my attention is
free for you to use. I can cast farther and farther out, before the change, a page
turned,
we have gone into another story, history floundered or one day the birds disappeared. The imagination tried to go here when we asked it to, from where I
hold the
fruit in my right hand, but it would not go. Where is it now. Where is this here
where
you and I look up trying to make sense of the normal, turn it to life, more life,
disinterred from desire, heaved up onto the dry shore awaiting the others who
could
not join us in the end. For good. I want to walk to the left around this tree I have
made
again. I want to sit under it full of secrecy insight immensity vigor bursting
complexity
swarm. Oh great forwards and backwards. I never felt my face change into my
new
face. Where am I facing now. Is the question of good still stinging the open
before us
with its muggy destination pitched into nothingness? Something expands in you
where it wrenches-up its bright policing into view—is this good, is this the good
—
under the celebrating crowd, inside the silences it forces hard away all round

itself,
where chanting thins, where we win the war again, made thin by bravery and
belief,
here’s a polaroid if you want, here’s a souvenir, here now for you to watch
unfold, up
close, the fruit is opening, the ribs will widen now, it is all seed, reddish foam,
history.

I’M READING YOUR MIND

here. Have been for centuries. No, longer. Everything already has
been. It’s not a reasonable place, this continuum between us, and yet
here again I put the olive trees in, turn the whole hill-sweeping grove down, its
mile-long headfuls of leaves upswept so the whole valley shivers its windy
silvers,
watery … A strange heat is upon us. Again. That was you thinking that. I
suggested it.
Maybe the wind did. We both put in the horizon-line now, the great loneliness,
its
grip, chaos recessed but still there. After finitude you shall keep coming towards
me it
whines, whitish with non-disappearance. We feel the same about this. The same
what? We feel the is-there-more. That’s the default. We want to live with the
unknown
in front of us. Receding, always receding. A vanishing moving over it all. A
sleepy
vacancy. It’s the sky, yes, but also this thinking. As from the start, again, here I
am,
a mind alone in the fields, the sheep riding and falling the slants of earth, the
drowsiness a no-good god come to assume we are halfwits, tending, sleepy,
these
animals gurgling and trampling, thistle-choked, stinging. A dove on a stone. No

sky
to speak of. And the god lingers, wants to retire, thinks this is endgame. What
could we be—mist about to dry off, light about to wipe a wall for no reason, that
random? This must have been way BC. Or is it 1944. Surely in 2044 we shall be
standing in the field again, tending, waiting to surprise this god who thinks he
knows
what he’s made. Well no. He does not know. We might be a small cavity but it
guards a vast hungry—how bad does that hurt you, fancy maker—you have no
idea
what we turned our backs on to come be in this field of earth and tend—yes tend
—
these flocks of minutes, whispering till the timelessness in us is wrung dry and
we
are heavied with endgame. Have I mentioned the soul. How we know you
hustled
that in, staining this flesh with it, rubbing and swirling it all over inside with
your god-cloth. Rinse. Repeat. Get this—here with this staff which soon I shall
turn
into a pen again—brilliantly negligent, diligent, inside all this self truly formless
—I
hear the laughter of the irrigation ditch I’ve made, I see the dry field blonde-up
and
green, day smacks its lips—& they are back, the inventors, they are going to do
it
again, sprinkle-seed, joker-rain coming to loosen it all. How many lives will we
be
given, how many will we trade in for this one—it comes in bushels, grams,
inches, notes,
crows watch over it all as they always have, come back from the end of time to

caw
it into its redo again. Cherish us. We will not stop. Nothing to show for it but
doing. The
flock runs across as the dog chases and I walk slowly. I admire what I own, what
I am,
and I think the night is nothing, the stars click their ascent, & I feel it rise in me,
the
word, I feel the skull beneath this skin, I feel the skin slick and shine and hide
the skull, and it is from there that it rises now, I taste it before I say it, this song.

MY SKIN IS

parched, on tight, questioned, invisible, full of so much evolution, now the
moment is
gone, begin again, my skin, here, my limit of the visible me, I touch it now, is
spirit-filled, naturally-selected, caught in the storm here under this tree, propped
up by
history, which, I don’t know which, be careful, you can’t love everyone—
brought to you by Revlon, melancholy, mother’s mother, the pain of others,
spooky up close in this mirror here, magnified to the 100th, brutal no-color
color,
what shall I call it, shall I pass, meandering among the humans, among their
centuries, no safe haven this as if, this spandex over a void, no exception, god
watching though casually, paring, paring, a glance once in a while—what am I
missing—what am I supposed to do now suddenly, what at the last minute here
—
what is there to fix—are we alone—am I—packaged so firmly for this short
interval—vigorous skin, doomed outsideness of me—sadder & no wiser here,
blown up, so close, so only here, I see you net that skeins me in, tight inside my
inwardness—at this border judged—at this edge bleeding when hit—as was for a
while—didn’t know enough to leave—didn’t see the farewell—right there in
front of
me—must it always end this way—must I ceaselessly be me, reinvent you, see
the

artifice us, feel hand-to-face the childhood gone, the starlight the wind the gaze
the
race, the stranger not knowing, the unsaid unsaid, unseen unfound—look how
full of
void it is this capture, this skin no one can clean, and thoughts right there
beneath—of course you cannot see me for this wrapping—I notice the cover of
your
face, the dress you hide beneath, you sitting there, reading me—pay mind, pay it
out, peering as we are at each other here—dermal-papilla pigment-layer
nerve-fiber blood and lymph, can we still fit into this strictest time, so quick, one
click and
hurry up—we’ve been trying forever now to get out of this lonely place—
inside’s inside—
the movie of the outside was all about exploring, we explored, we found what
we
should never touch, we touched, we touch, what’s so unusual we say, you are
now
mine we say, this is the feature coming on, this future, so full of liking & fine
disclosure, a bud-tip pushing aside its sheath, then standing there, very whole now,
very
official, open to damp, heat, stippling, shadow—to freckle, slap, beauty or no
beauty—please help me here as I can’t tell—the trees don’t know—the wind
won’t speak—the gods should but their names are being withheld—because
some of us
are murdered, and some of us have mouths that keep saying yes, do that to me
again, I know it hurts but yes, I am an American and I like it harder than you’ll
ever
know, this is Tuesday, the day rises with its fist over the harbor saying give it to

me
and the day obliges, saying more, more, do you want more, and the torch of
dawn
says more, yes more, ask for my identification, my little pool of identification,
here
on the only road, arrested again among the monuments.

WHEN OVERFULL OF PAIN I

lie down on this floor, unnotice, try to recall, stir a little but not in heart, feel rust
coming, grass going, if I had an idea this time, if I could believe in the
cultivation, just piece it together, the fields the sky the wetness in the right spot,
it
will recline the earth it does not need your map, the rows you cut into it make
their
puzzled argument again, then seed, Spring has a look in its eye you should not
trust
anymore, just look at it watching you from its ditch, its perch, heavy on the
limbs,
not reproach exactly not humor though it could be sly this one who will outlive
you
of course, this one who will cost you everything, yes, sly—do you catch my
meaning
says the cosmos-laden morning, I will cover you with weeds, I will move
towards
beginning but I will not begin again, the marsh gleams does it not, the two
adolescent girls walking through it now, in the reprieve, they remind you, do
they
not, a summer frock underneath, a heavy coat over, so ready, the idea of a
century
being new beckoning, this one will end, that one we will traverse into via small

bomb perhaps, and the marsh waits, speckling, unremarkable, but yet you want
to
remark it, even by looking away you want to keep it normal, normal you say,
rust
can you be normal in me, marsh with your rusty grasses come, bring it again my
normal, a bit frostbitten at the start of the day, but now warming where the
horizon
blues, where the wren has alighted right here camouflaged in normalcy, he left
one
feather on the ground, I’ll bend to pick it up after he goes, it too is all wings the
day,
it flaps its brightness on and the fields flatten, the sun lies oily in the sillion,
furrowslice, mold. Are you with me. It’s not a good idea this one. The assembly lines,
the
jet trails, the idea of prayer, thievery, scaffolds, money, how quickly they all
vanished. The new thing now is not going to be new by the time you read this.
And
even as I look at it, trying to feel the seed pushed in, the brimming of those
shoots,
the eyes of the hare in the ditch pecked out, the horse standing in the field whose
breath is plume—gaze after gaze I look at this foreign country, which was so
ready,
which fell ill so suddenly. We were driving along in one century, we took a back
road, it
was allowed, there was a herd of goats, we got out to see, they came up to us
making
sounds like Latin, they were thin, gray, caked legs with seaweed hair. We looked
at

each other. Gradually something passed from one creature to the other. Which
one
was I. I want this normal again. Did I remember just now that this all
disappeared. I
lie on this floor. I feel the wide slats of the old-growth pine along my back. They
push up into my gravity, I think, I push my place down into place, eyes closed I
push
down through the subflooring the foundation into gray soil not touched by light
in
centuries. I’ll break it open now. I’ll push into the roots that died when place was
cleared of place. Dismembered roots, here was my zip, my street address. My
name.

OVERHEARD IN THE HERD

You have to make sure you have skin in the game was one of the rules they
yelled out near the end. Also one must have hope. Also watch the clock, the
clock is
running out. Out of what. I had hoped to escape. To form one lucid unassailable
thought. About what? It did not matter about what. It just needs to be, to be
shapely and true. Let me tell you. To feel a thought one came up with one’s self.
Out of one’s interiority. There. That’s the whole story. If humanity. If to hang on
claw
back what to call it. However atrophied. Not not-living. Yes horribly closequartered. However much we missed the bus. However much we should have
been there while it lasted. Hear us: it lasted. Even here off the bus its lastingness
keeps blossoming & spooling onward. Yes it’s a game it’s always just a game.
The wind is
hissing this all afternoon. But even it, raspy and weakening, plunders this space
that it
might find some emptiness. From mind. Lean in & you’ll hear plenitude. Listen
it’s trying
to make a void again. In which to hear itself. It’s too alone. Everything wants
embodiment. But there’s this noise now it’s replacing everything. This humming of
agreement
fast-track skipped-step information yes yes yes yes lost hope lost will—dear dis-

embodiment, here is an old wind, watch it orchestrate event, I raise my hand to
find
my face again, I know I am supposed to think I’m whole, there is no holiness in
me,
can I begin again, I’d like to try to get this right, we might if gotten right go
on, whom am I speaking to, whom, I’ll pick up the acid the wrappers the 3D
glasses, I’ll
gather up the spotless tools printers magnifiers, the place is wired for sound I’ll
cut
the wires, I’ll drag the cursors off, I’ll sweep it clean, they’ve taught me to, I
think this way
because I am human, that’s my secret occupation, I am unusually common, I can
get it
right if you just tell me, we have a shot, whom am I speaking to, why is that
laughter
seeping-out nonstop from the invisible, from hospice hospital embassy cathedral
—
oh ghost institutions—why must you hover here—spy here—before me always
though invisible. Or is it invincible. I can’t make out the words being said. Or is it sent. In
my
direction. I’ll wait for an answer. I have indeed nothing better to do. I have
nothing
actually at all to do. We cannot remember having that—a thing to do. To be
needed
what was that like. To figure, discover, uncover, recover. To make bring think
shape.
To fold, to crease prepare serve-up. To imagine. To buy hold name sell. To
shape. To

order. This haunts us now. To make a thing for another. For another’s use. To
fashion,
to offer, to bring, hide, make. To serve. Oh to serve.… My new humanity is now
relieved of
duty. My soul has its alarm turned off. No my soul has this knot in its throat—or
is it a
gag—pacified, petrified, up all night counting silently towards infinity. Losing
its
place. How many of us are left. What else could happen. Has it all already
happened.
Who is they. That autocorrected to thy. Why. No matter what I say it fixes it. It’s
fixed.

II

[TO] THE LAST [BE] HUMAN

Today I am getting my instructions.
I am getting them from something holy.
A tall thing in a nest.
In a clearing.
There is a little dread no memory and everything’s looking for
signs. We don’t know
if this is the way forward or the way
back. Do you? Is it a hundred yards or a million years. A small conifer
appears to be laughing.
Wind would be nice but
it’s only us shaking.
Listen up it says. Loosen up. It’s all going to be
ok. Going to be fine. Give me your hand. What is this you
are giving me, where are
your hands, what can you
grip. The thing I am asking for, it is not made of
words. No. It is not made of
data. No.
Let’s get the map I say. Let’s
browse through. Over here famine over here
switchbacks over here to the best of my recollection haunted
faces of those on
the road. The road itself moving as if in a

molten fury. One of us had come back from some other place—
Alaska, a father dying in rage, screaming on his
floor, saved by
nothing.
We’re so full of the dead the burnt fronds
hum, getting going each day again into too much sun to no
avail. I was human. I would have liked to speak of
that. But not now. Now is more
complicated. I have no enemy except day. The edges
turn hot and
stay
hot. Shadow hard to find and those threads of it
like hoarded rations. Temp dies down only
slightly but it is
everything, lungs tight as fists inside, yr name just about stripped from
u if u try to say it out
loud, fetuses like flames going out as they
arrive. Someone found a light bulb in a spot where mud still
was. It looks more alive than we had
recalled. We imagine what it
might seem like
lit. A palpitation of light strokes our imaginations. We are never sure
what was memory, sweet, burning, gigantic, silent—
long erasure underneath the
wind—which comes by so infrequently we all stop when it
arrives.
You remember u understood completely that u are lost.
The phone call comes. You pick up the
receiver and hear the

final sounds of the islands. They are murmuring we want to
weep and lie down. They lie down. Voice lies
down. Says hello
in the normal way. So it all seems like
the world as it had always been, has always been. Here in the
sliver-end of the interglacial
lull. Human time. It
seems.
Then the voice says it’s not good
news. From now on you are alone. Whatever before had meant
before, now there is a blister over time. Savor of the upahead—lovely blown dust at yr footsteps—gone.
So one has to figure out now how to
understand
time. Your time & then
time. Planet time and then yr
protocols, accords, tipping points,
markers. Each has a prognosis. Each has
odds. You stop on the bridge in the evening on your way
home and look down to see the
empty riverbed
flow. In you
the minutes flow.
The idea is to feel them?
What are our rates of speed. Where is runaway. How far
away. I listen for it.
The city sounds. The sockets of
my eyes, I feel them. The dust
that will cover it all. The sky peered into when I am gone by
others.

Will the river fill again.
Will there be pity taken.
Will it ever rain again.
What is ever. What is again.
What is it we mean by
ok. Take this October. The deep white turn the air is taking.
How many more
Octobers. Is there another October with us in it.
Blood flows in my hand writing this.
The crows glance through the upper branches.
They are not waiting.

FROM THE TRANSIENCE

May I help you. No. In the mirror? No. Look there is still majesty, increase,
sacrifice. Night in the flat pond. Moon in it/on it disposing entirely of mind. No.
Look there is desert where there was grassland there is sun-inundation like a
scrupulous meditation no message just mutter of immensity where it leaks into
partiality. Into you/me. Our boundaries now in the epic see-through, how they
elude
wholeness, let in illusion, pastness, whole years in a flash, then minutes that do
not
end—that desert—that jungle. No you say, no world, swamp, reeds, grassy
shapes,
beginning of endings, no you say staring right back at event—it keeps
turning—no that will not be the shape I am/it is/again—it just was—the shape it
was
was never the shape it was—sharpness is melding into blur—used to bethe
sublime—
used to be present tense—seat of the now-dissolved now. No. My self, my one
oneself isn’t working for me. I flaps its empty sleeves. Habit stares at the four
horsemen from the end’s endlessly festooned terrace. It stares. Bullets whine. I
dreams of being a girl, a man, of wearing hooves, of being just sweat and
whinnying,
I smears itself with hope fear disorder opinion, leaves a trail of—what is it of—a

smear of beginning, of circles about to close, the manes are tossing in the
light. No. Do not trust what I see. Do not trust you. Do not trust my own saying
of the
not trust. Do not trust world, the no-place into which I place my no, the state of
mind
into which I must clamp my mind, these objects which do not exist, no do not, in
the
actual, which depart from reality. Swim against current my opacity my soul
whirs,
swim hard against the current state of.… May I touch the place that is you. No.
Would you have had a place once. Yes. Is there a present tense now. No. What is
there? Touch it. This place where we share this mind. It will be our first and last.
Our first and last what? Our first and last. Did we live among men. Were we
mouthpieces. Where is the mask that worked so well. The carnival. The puppetmaster
who
held my strings—my strings—here was my arm as it reached out a hand to you,
to
express love, to rid itself of love—here was my mouth in which breathing forced
awake the unending sounds, of blood, of ink, so each made of himself a net,
a grip upon place. Such as this present I can summon here with you. Here.
Now, remember that. I see you nowhere, I hear you nowhere, we are
on different pages, not a different story, the ancestor the divided cell keeps
asking have you heard the nightingale—no—have not—listening now is
few and far between—mostly it is more opaque—not talk, not thought, but
like it. But you are still standing there. So very bright, my past. Hello. Dear
fission,

my self isn’t working for me. It’s involved with arithmetic. It’s trying to correct
itself so that
it fits, to slice itself, dismember, un-remember, cut off, sew on, recall until it can
be
counted on, or in, or up, or down. It says some right fit must be found—restored
resolved
bought-up doomed-to—it must be worn more artlessly the new thing they will
call
the self—we must not make the same mistake again—what was it was mistaken
ask
the vigorous winds, bending down gently as if to lift us up, right through our
throats
as fish used to be hooked when there were fish—for nothing is more important
than
this new face that must shake the whole thing down & laugh & bring-up the rear.
What time is it. Are we already in the necroscape. Even as a machine I recall
the dust and ash which everyone assured everyone else was just a small
digression.

PRAYER FOUND UNDER FLOORBOARD

Listen. We are crowds now. We gather in the eardrum of.
The scaffolding grows.
As if the solution.
There is not a soft part of us.
Except for the days in us.
We let the pieces fall where they may.
The visible in its shell gets smashed.
The desperation re
the gorgeous raw material—earth—the sensation of
last night, storms spilled, plumed, odor of
looking for the various directions
though it makes no difference.
I have seen
nothing. It is deafening. It shakes with laughter
with ways of looking. It rattles. Listen. How much is it now
the thing I want?
The soft wind is it recompense?
But I was trying to tell you about us now.
How we finally realized we made no difference.
And the visible we love. Its notes its intervals.
Over which the sunlight still proceeds shivering with precision.
With the obligation of precision.
The visible whose carapace we love.

And how our love is that we are seen.
All the way into
the mind are seen.
The earth with its fingers in our mouth nose ears.
The visible with its ghosts its smooth utmosts.
And weight and limit—how they heave
up—pray for us we are destroyers—
pray we fail—the mind must fail—
but still for now a while longer let me
who am part of it & must fail & the pieces
which must not fall where they may,
they must not, as all is hearing this
from the deep future, deep origin.… cry.
Cry mind sick with the delight of getting it always only right.
Cry fingering the earth every crevice.
Cry all the trees like a problem you
can solve.
How could you not have maintained steady state.
It is lean this unfolding of
your days over this earth. Listen, a flap
where a gate shuts, where the next step is
coldly placed without hope—& crackles
rising where your footfall goes—oh
I am huge—I would
take back names give up the
weight of being give up place
delete there delete possess, go,
love, notice, shape, drift, to be in minutes once again, in just one hour
again. Look
my small hand comes out of my pocket

asking to touch one more time. Without
taking. To touch. To not take away
any sensation any memory. To come to
the feeling-about at the edge of the object
and stay. Release focus. Release shape.
If we
back off release blind ourselves thumb away hope …
But I am huge.

CARNATION/RE-IN

I am down to my food. I root and divide. I am not pushed down I push. I with
my
mouth use my nose where are my hands. I say who am who am I
now. I ask what color am I now. I try to feel my skin but my head is fixed to my
food and my hands where are my hands. What skin am I I ask. You have no skin
they say. You are wrapped don’t worry you won’t fall out. It’s a new material.
Am I
alive. Of course you are. You are always going to be alive. If I could just turn
and
look at my self. Do I have a self where are my hands but then feel fingers and
they are tucked in. We used to have skins. Do I have the other parts. Am I
on my knees. I must be pretty normal I think. Am I normal I ask. Human? I talk
to
you you answer me are we speaking what are we speaking. Are these words
actually being pronounced. I remember. I remember we were overfull of
pain. The house went under the mud. It was an avalanche it went under but not
into the earth. Now now is everything. Near the top they are still looking for
bodies. Deep under some other people will find books. They will find my pills
and
shoes. I imagine my red shoe being found “when the geology thinned earth
again”
and up it shoved into history, & my nightstand, & the towel I had just put down,

&
the bronze buddha from that world, the kitchen pots, my teacup was just full
of tea. Before that fire came. We burned but enough survived that we had to go
on
living. Now that there is nothing now. Now that if. Look back you see a
continent
of _____. Where there had been. I went forward on this piece of time. Called it a
road. Tried to feel my step. There is some kind of movement I am making. Into
forward I remember thinking. I remember thinking. This is a narrow place. Is it
now. Try to feel if you have footing. A tightrope of feel/no feel. There is sun it
seems, I am high up in the burned no-root-life, I net it in place, we left place
under
the avalanche, five inches in five minutes I remember came down, down is
where,
what is up. But I can still see the mountain up against the sky. Where it was
supposed to be. What is supposed to be. And the _____ between its peaks. I
walk out again looking. I look.…… out. Sometimes down. At _____. See
below. See the _____ spread out over what we had made of. The earth. Streets
houses plots lawns our view each slightly different. Now I am in. The earth. I
wade out through it. The earth. My neighbor is under went in a flash. The door
flew & she was under. My other neighbor is in the tree. The child ours stayed on
her couch would not come called called called. Here we are told they sit there
underneath for good. Encased in. The earth. It closes over again now it has taken
what was needed in payment desire what am I to do with it yes I feel them my
hands but can’t won’t raise them to look am told to carry myself forward in this
walking forward every where is forward. I remember gravity. Remember place.

BECOMING OTHER

The corpse at the heart of our theorization of us. That turn back to look. Once
again.
Ignoring the mirror. Baroque turn. Who are you. Non-alive. Being’s obsession.
I’ll
take your photograph. Are you on holiday. I need a servant. No, I need to be a
servant. That is the [only] source of pleasure now. Pleasure now. Neither one
thing
nor another. Between two fixed states. Decomposing. Pleasure now. Formless
as.…
Begin again. A substance that does not hold its form. What up-holds? Can it be
overthrown? No. Delights you to death. Rides the back of time to the mass grave.
Takes
its time. Spreads like memory or a shade through an afternoon in summer, time
itself the detention camp, accident a gleam in the eye of time—one day I was
born—
that was my important point—my point of view—but you do not realize you’re
an
aperture in time, an asking-for, a decision cast like the spell of a wild die through
the yes/no. I was a woman. Not as untroubled as I seem. As we seem. As I think.
I
have interests. It seems to me they are mine. This identity you are listening to,
here,

is an embarrassment of riches—take my picture, take care of me, take forever,
take
this in hand, in mind, this emptiness into which we slap a purpose, shuttered
against
the eyes of neighbors. Our personhood. So dressed-up this nakedness. Pre-need.
Pre-individual. Then post. Under-ripe then overripe before you even feel it slip
by.
I have to get the pills, the wind comes up, the dazzled memory of having had
shiny
expectations, no matter, the grass shivered, then the stars, you’ll know how to
stand,
you’ll know how to lie with another, you’ll feel that new flat solitude. You’re
free,
aren’t you. The signs at the crossroad are pointless. For those trips out of the
ghetto
I decided not to see that I couldn’t see. Unlike the hawk. Drink up. You only
have
these dregs of sun. The worst has befallen. It won’t see you through.
Boundlessness came and went and you stood and walked. There was the wasted
splendor of day every day. No one looked. Vastness played all over us, slippery,
&
slid off like a ring into the sea. We looked through the roiling waters but tide
came in fast. Years later in the tub you still run your hand through the fold. Who
are you. Nothing in all the directions. A sapphire. Keep groping. The wide open
grave awaits the sacrament of your mindless waiting. Imploding last stand of the
small human. Voluptuousness of defeat. We are fanatical. What are we supposed
to
admit to, possess, name. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, this
suffering

gorges it. Mind loves it. Renunciation our active ingredient. Our formula for
postanimality. The pre-personal pilot of what. In what. Row. Row, thermospasm. Be
in
being for now. Brief progeny. Row. Merrily. Gently. Down. The stream will
hold you
for now—machinic and hungry. Pre. Post. No. Where? Reflection is very late.
Row
in your amniotic sac—hope for mud, slime, mold, dust, running water, flame.
Rain.

THAW

There is a plot in the back of my building.
Not the size of the asteroid.
Not what four
hyper-crenellations of a reef would have held when there were
reefs. It’s still here. I must not
get the time
confused. The times. There is a coolness in it which would have been new
Spring. I can’t tell if it’s
smell, as of blossoms which would have been just then
beginning, or of loam. Through this
green sensation is
a thing which threads & pushes
up. What is it pushes it. Whatever pushes it we
must not get the feelings confused, the feelings of this—in this—
now. One of us looks in
the field guide. One of us looks up to where the sky had been.
Our prior lives press on us.
Something with heavy recollection in it
presses. Not
history anymore of course but
like it. Is it five minutes or 500 years. Can we pencil that
in. Next to the ashheap. The windowless classroom or what we still call

classrooms. Out of habit. Which feel, as the monitors speak, like
they’re filling with snow. Each creature sits
alone. Is that what it is, a
creature. It feels like a resurrected thing, this sensation I have of a
creature. I carry certain stains with me. I can imagine
loneliness which is an error I know. I think of causes &
effects which is a form of regret. I imagine this veil
shall be lifted again and something like a face in a mirror
appear. And it will be me. Will be a room as rooms used to be to us.
And us in them.
As a family or as lovers. We shall be lifted and we shall touch
in the old way. Just a hand on another. Not meaning that
much but still a small weight. With
meaning. A feeling of a harboring inside which reminds one of having a
mind. A feeling that one could
die for instance.
So there was
mystery, hope, fear, loneliness.
A sudden alarm from not-knowing and being startled by an incomprehensible terror or some other reaction
to change. There was
change. A person could become. You could look into a face &
not know. There was rain & you would hardly notice.
It could rain for hours. The face would be there inside
its otherness, the way its body, which you could not imagine the inwardness of, moved, each one
moved,
differently, completely

differently. Why is it now you summon
streets. How they ran everywhere away. You could be in a strange
place and not know. You could be
lost. You could be as if
thrown away from the real. A trembling thing. A
journey. Lost yes—but not wrong in being. And from there you
could see a face which was a stranger. And it
would have a look which you had to wait for.
Because it was its look.
Because you could not program it or request it.
Because it was not yours.
Not yours.
And when it came your way like a strange turning
it brought a gaze with it. An expression. A thing given to you you had not made or owned or seen
before.
That’s all. You do not know how to go on from here.
You do not know how to imagine further
into the past.
You want to remember what it was to see a look.
There is one look among all the unprogrammable looks you want to recall.
You raise your hands to your face to feel for it, can you force it.
It was like this:
someone turned your way.
It was a free turn. It was made by them freely.
And what they did then was this.
You had done something. You
seemed to become unmasked. You
had done something you should not have done. You felt in you that u

wished you had not.
And they did something with their free face,
they tossed it out at you,
a thing not yours to dial-up or own—a thing free—a free thing—
they forgave you.
You are not sure you know what this means. But you are sure this happened
once. You
were a thing
that required it.
And it was a thing which was not exact, not on time, not wired-in,
which was able to arrive in
time—just in time—& could be
given.

EXCHANGE

You. You at the door a crumpled thing when I open
surprised. Sing, you hiss. Prosecute, sentence, waving your thin not-arms like a
dollar
bill, your bewildering moldy skin—one or two of you are you, are you a god
now,
bony, wing-beaten down, smaller than
ever, not dead as you should be but not
alive either as you indicate mumbling almost falling in on
your clawed feet—I still have desire—you float—at my
small door—me inside—me inside life. Are you newborn now, I
ask. Are you remnant. Why. Why are there moneylenders
you say swatting me away when I ask can I help, growing more
crumbled, but more than just cloth—all feather
burlap, beak, fingergrip, all edge and cling. A thing not
formed or not divided yet. Pre-conception. Just at the threshold. Almost falling
in your
uneven crouching. Your chest a pulsation. A languishment that will not
die. What is die. Now there is not blood on the earth
anymore. We disappear. We pixilate. Races or places, is it.
Which? Remember what it was to carry your load? Your you. That
weight. Wondrous it was. At intervals light-struck. Silence and then the
cutting of water, sleeping audible, thrown about by breath, keeping a sharp
lookout—

here’s where free choice vanished, here rights, here the
real meaning of the word—(you choose)—consequence, capital, commodity,
consumption. Community? Come here says time. Just try to
find it, the here. Such a good game to keep you
occupied for now. The rest of the now. It’s going to be a long
time. Why are you here. What are they lending you.
How can it be loaned. What is a loan. The changers.
Who gets to keep it. No one gets to keep it. No one. None of it.
What is it. The money changers. What can
you change it into. What else do you
want the things to become. But it won’t stay still as
currency either. It will be changed again.
Shape-shifting and all the other tiny adjustments. Currency
manipulation—feel it—all those other
hands on it, each with its own need, having
held it—grasped, changed, folded, tucked, handed—oh
look it becomes virtual—the fingerprint is lifted off,
its little stain—no one’s need is on it anymore. It’s clean. It has never been, and never again
will be, touched. The looping ledger of the fingerprint’s
wish. I signed my name to this. Did you. In the hush. At the center.
Among the closed shutters at the height of the day I
signed. I clenched the pen and then my dream. It flowed. No one is
ever at home. I don’t know why. Had been told to live by any means
possible. Did. Beyond, the sea. You could feel this period coming to
an end. All of it. A bomb went off, legs went off, means went
off, blew off, like gossamer—nothing stalled—you couldn’t get it to

stall—seemed painted-on but it was not, was sleeping, reality finally was
sleeping—so deeply—you couldn’t wake it up again, you couldn’t
wake yourself again—it rained—time sputtered now and then like a
regurgitation
of space. It’s a jail, light says, but it looks like just being
lost, full of the things we needed to learn, us ready to step up and offer
our lungs, intake and out, change me we say. We want to be
identified, written-in, collected. Worth me up. Give me my true
value …
But still I have to bring this to you in these
words, cracked glaze all over it, little holes over it, belief drilled through,
self, that boutique, gone under, such dark windows, history arrested.…
History arrested. How is that possible. It flowed. It flowed without us, us on it if
we
could catch a ride sometimes. How do you live in this end. I look at you. You
have been
through. Your war is done. I try to squint it in. Do you really want to
begin again. Is that why you’re here. I feel I could count your
fingers, each hair left on you, each thread of skin, each crease. Four or five times
you
cast a glance on us. But then it’s done. Your passing by us now a
buzzing of flies. You stand at the window and the song begins. We don’t know
what to do with it, the moon, that monster, the fame and the thirst,
the night out there a shirt rolled up to reveal what dusk had
hid—a murky heart, a love that would never be replaced.
But they are still there on the steps—the money changers. The steps
of evening rise. They want you to exchange. That is the sacrament. Why does he
keep throwing them out.
Day after day. Forever. Listen to me, you say, you are going off into
thought, it is not a real road. Take yourself

off the road. He is and is not but he is. And
you are always in the holy place. Because
just being in it makes it holy. Uphold it. Linger. Be eternal for this
instant. Lodge in. I cannot say in what. Have spent a lifetime saying in. In flow,
in promise, rich, in haste experiment crowd season in bias gnawing at
hope invisible in time standing in it confounded tongue in my mouth about to
curl up, speak, promise, taste promise, laugh at the ignorance, cherish
ignorance—don’t leave—this is where I’ve arrived—don’t
slip away, the reverse of the watching and waiting is finally here, wasn’t mine,
wasn’t
me speaking either. Not anymore. This is that dream. The darling of
failure. No identification. All impending and then the now strikes. It is
unbreakable. It is. You must believe me. I want to be here and also there where
you
receive this but I can’t. That’s the whole story. I will never know
what is there to know. You will not be changed. You must believe.

III

SAM’S DREAM

One day there is no day because there is no day
before, no yesterday, then a now, & time, & a cell
divides and you, you are in time, time is in you, as
multiplying now u slip into our stream, or is it u grow
a piece of stream in us, is it flesh or time you grow,
how, is it an American you grow, week 28, when we
are told dreaming begins. Welcome. Truest stranger.
Perhaps one of the last conceived & carried in womb.
Father and mother singular and known. Born of
human body. Not among the perfected ones yet. No. A
mere human, all firsthand knowledge, flying in as if
kindling—natural. The last breath before the first
breath is mystery. Then u burn into gaze, thought,
knowledge of oblivion. Rock yourself. Kick so I can
feel you out here. Push your hands against the
chamber. The world is exhausted. I moisten my lips
and try to remember a song. I have to have a song to
sing you from out here. They say you now hear vividly.
This could have been a paradise my song begins. No,
this is, was, is, never will be again, will be, we hope
desperately wasn’t a dream, maybe in your dream

now there is a clue, can you dream the clue, you who
are dreaming what having had no life to dream of,
dream from—what populates you—bloodflow and
lightswirl, stammering of ventricles, attempts at
motion, absorbings, incompletions, fluidities—do you
have temptation yet, or even the meanwhile—such a
mature duration this meanwhile, how it intensifies
this present—or nevertheless—no beyond of course
in your dream what could be beyond—no
defeat as so far no defeat—cells hum—no partiality
as all grows in your first dream which is the dream of
what you are—is that right—no attempt as there is
no attempting yet—no privacy—I laugh to myself
writing the word—oh look at that word—no
either/or—but yes light filtering-in, root-darknesses,
motion—and the laughter, do you hear it from us out
here, us, can you hear that strain of what we call
sincerity—Oh. Remain unknown. Know no daybreak
ever. Dream of no running from fire, no being shoved
into mass grave others falling over you, dream of no
bot, no capture filter store—no algorithmic memory,
no hope, realism, knowing, no quest-for, selling-of,
accosting violently to have, no lemon-color of the end
of day, no sudden happiness, no suddenly. It is much
bigger, faster—try to hear out—this place you’re
being fired into—other in it—judgment of other—
logic, representation, nightmare—how to prepare
you—what do you dream—what must I sing—it says

you cry in there & laugh—out here a late October
rain has started down, soon you shall put your small
hand out & one of us will say slowly and outloud rain
and you will say rain—but what is that on your hand
which falling has come round again in the forever of
again to reach your waiting upturned hand. I look up
now. Clouds drift. Evaporation is a thing. That our only
system is awry a thing. That u will see rains such as I
have never seen a thing. Plain sadness, this hand-knit
sweater, old things, maybe u shall have some of—in
this my song—in my long song not telling u about the
paradise, abandoning my song of what’s no longer
possible, that song, it is a thing. Oh normalcy, what a
song I would sing you. Child u shall god willing come
out into the being known. First thing will be the
visible. That’s the first step of our dream, the dream of
here. You will see motes in light. And lights inside the
light which can go out. A different dark. And spirits
wind exhaustion a heavy thing attached to you—your
entity—as u enter history and it—so bright, correct,
awake, speaking and crying-out—begins. And all the
rest begins. Amazing, you were not everything after
all. Out you come into legibility. Difference. Why
shouldn’t all be the same thing? It’s a thing, says the
stranger nearby, it’s a new thing, this stance this skin
like spandex closing over you, it’s you. A name is
given you. Take it. Can you take it? All seems to be so

overfull at once. Now here it is proffered again, this
sound which is you, do u feel the laving of it down all
over you, coating you, so transparent you could
swear it is you, really you, this Sam, this crumb of life
which suddenly lengthens the minute as it cleans off
something else, something you didn’t know was
there before, and which, in disappearing now, is felt.
The before u. The before. That dream. What was that
dream. There, as if a burning-off of mist, gone where—
not back, where would back be—dried away—a
sweetness going with it—no?—feel it?—I do—I
almost smell it as it is dissolved into the prior by
succession, by events, not raging, not burning, but
going—nothing like the loud blood-rush in the
invisible u & u in with its elasticities, paddlings, nets,
swirls. In this disunion now stretch. Take up space.
You are that place u displace. That falling all round u
is gazing, thinking, attempted love, exhausted love,
everything, or it is everyone, always going and coming
back from some place. They do not stay. They do not
stay. And then out here circumference. One day you
glimpse it, the horizon line. You are so.… surprised.
How could that be. What are we in or on that it stops
there but does not ever stop. They tell u try to feel it
turn. The sun they will explain to you. The moon.
How far away it all becomes the more you enter. How

thin you are. How much u have to disappear in order
to become. In order to become human. Become Sam.

SAM’S STANDING

on earth—almost—testing the weight she brings, her self, to the
hold earth offers-up—she looks—she holds an edge to see
if space too has grips in it somehow—how is she supposed to
let go and just launch, lurch—fly out—& who
will be there where there is no one visible at all in case
there is suddenly nothing at all. One foot is set in place,
feels hard for place, then the whole of her eleven
months leans on it, lets go—is this trust now, first trust—uneven then
even—then the one step. All stops. She looks firmly at the emptiness.
It seems so full. What is it to go. Its gorgeousness
has not yet shown itself, this void into which all shall pour
of her self, where she must cut off here from there—
it is not easy this finding a there, an elsewhere—is there arrival anywhere—is
there going around or into—is there thru—what is thru—urgent not to miss
the mark which won’t stay marked, this going with no where in it. Invisibility
is this you. This sudden wanting to be more—to be alone—this fluidity
wanting to rip open where she wasn’t before, and pass thru, as if she is
what the thru was, has taken on throughness and is.
In this balancing is. Arms out to the side is. Is just. Feels from earth
this sweet upswirling—coming to hold her—up. Up. All is equal everywhere.
Birth
continuing until this now, this forth, where the perfect calculations of air

hold. And no station is above another. And millions of swerves hum incipient.
But for
now stasis—air rushing to hold—her heart aloft—and everywhere the huge
bloom
opens—look, it shows its face—justice—nothing is missing yet—no too soon
too late—found-footing then again found. Ground. Oh ground. Given by
going. Then the stream begins to form. The where-she’s-been. High
up above the earth—even for so small a thing, so high, above, she turns. Sees
where
she’s been, where she no longer is, will never be again. I see it widen there,
right on her tiny face—the agitation, the vault, the chasm of
minutes opening and brandishing, the dance that begins now, the dance of
terror, I’m seeing it here, I’m watching the minutes open in a soul,
would you like to dance, the generosity of everything murmurs, I see her whole
self hear it, though it is just the air-conditioner in here with us, & no it’s not
like a photograph of anything this rent—it’s not just air she sees—it’s not
recoverable—from bed to bed she’ll know this—from love to love—the
kingdom
of undertow has opened here—you are expected it says furnishing from
out of nowhere now the corridor—would you like to dance—outside the winter’s
smoothing flat more day, one less, one more of less, though as she enters
now she does not know—I know—I chaos of knowing know—the band
of sunlight moving as she moves into it now, dust motes in it, her hand
thrown out to grab them all. All. It’s merely place. It’s merely time.
She goes. She has not fallen down so now she is for sure in the human
thoughtlessness, on the conveyor, welcome girl, it’s 7:43,
we will never arrive, we will never arrive at mercy,
it is incurable, there is nothing that can be known, just go, tear down
all you have not entered yet and go, your destination

whatever it may be triumphs by being entirely accurate, its calculation
flawless, but for now go, the corridor awaits, your footsteps echo down
its apparent generosity, do you want to dance it hums friend,
though those are just your bare feet slapping as you feel the accident,
the feeling of accident, recede and the feeling of direction flow in,
though of course this is not what you thought at all, not then
when you swayed and recovered and felt the high walls flow—they cannot
hold you—nothing can hold you—I see the wilderness of thought
begin in you as you glance up to see where you are going
next. Shall I put a window there for you, a new world. A flowing
day shimmers outside. Here is a wintered tree for you to add now
to the power you feel. I feel the impatience in you being born. How
fast it is, this excited stupefaction, this oblivion, this forgetting of
where you were before, just a minute ago, just a lost minute of
the only time. A crow lands on the tree. He tries to land. He
settles, claws, but the grip slips, he rises up then comes at it again. Be
still. Watch. He’s found a spot in winter which is his. His time is not
your time. His gaze casts straight at us where we are watching him. It’s hot
with knowing—circles, windrise, drought, sprout, the dip, the
hovering, the dwelling in the hovering. Green black and oilyblack he is. Knows acceleration, prevailing, flow. Erasure of
flow. There is a not-moving in the world. There is a not-moving which
is not a being still. There is this place from which we watch.
There is no way to get to here. There is no way to leave. Love
is the force that made it for you. Here. Don’t take your eyes off
him. He’ll sit the winter through for you. He’s yours. He can’t fly off.

WHEREAS I HAD NOT YET IN THIS LIFE SEEN

stillness. Stillness in time. Rich concentrate. Late summer late-day light. Over
but
not on magenta. Of. Of dahlia-heads. Of serrated leaves trimmed gold. Plush
stalk
lost-still in non-moment. All awake but no wakefulness. Low. Small. Snug in
flooding
light. Unwilled. No speed of anything, no, no motion on surface because
suddenly no
surface, all a mechanism yes but now neither on nor off, & shining, & not even a
frill
of breeze—as if there had never been time—as if being had never been or not
been—no containing, no cause/effect thing, no, all swallowed by unmovingness
of all
things. Grassblades carved still. Leaning-in, angle-of, stalk. Sealed. No flex.
Spin. No
rush no struggle no not even the tiniest all unwhirled & stopped till this, what is
this,
stands before you, certainty—the pouring of color stopped mid-air—all
outreaching but no towards, lapping, of thing & surround, exquisite, as if eyes
closed
though all wide, poured out wide. Try again. Very small the world. Quiet. The
robin’s landing on the far lawn heard, lawn heard, as-if heard, strength of the

nothing noticed, not smooth, as if on hold but never again to be released from
hold,
shuddering done, no lift or fall, no, no interval, no thought, no whispering of
thought,
no. Noticing blends with light. Seeing is light. No trouble in the gaze even as the
gaze gazes upon stillness and is stilled. Where is the motion I know. Where. Any
breeze and I’d be human again. Swirl of leaf and I’d see it again. The vacancy.
The
crust afloat above the thing itself. There being no further than this as-if
hallucination. The hallucination of no as-if. The end. What is utterly. Is this
ancient. Is this. As if a huge pity but entirely and only made of matter. Where
has motion gone—it has taken time fate need. All lies here now in
the seen. Not seen as such just there entire in the laying-out of itself in the
which-is. No if. That’s it. The stillness of no if. Dear friend, you cannot cross
here,
this is the visible world, I have seen it in this my life, by accident, just now, I
have
recognized it, I do not know that I will glimpse it again in this life, I assume it’s
my
one life, my mind roves over it all tapping, trying words, again words. The poem
is built for this. To come to this limit & see in & fail. It is built for this particular
failure. This wakefulness that wipes out the waking. This muteness which is the
heart of what. It is not silence. Now each wick is lit as the planet moves into
the end of the visible. The spiderweb is played string by string by the sun. Waits.
Error. Nothing waits. Radical unimagined unreleasable unscatterable unhidden
nothing waits.

RAIL

I set out over the
unknowable earth once
more. Everything
still underfoot. A mat
of fallen and unfallen
matter. Things flinch
but it is my seeing
makes them
flinch. Before, they are
transparent. Now they
line my optic
nerve. I feel them
enter. Brain
flinch husk
groove. Subject.
Honeysuckle,
bramble, vine,
vibration
and
web-tremble. How
will the real
let me drop just
in time.

How will it pay me
out,
pass me along to
the next
I? I
walk down the hill
where I feel my
letting-go go
into the down of
the hill. I
know I will
have to leave
the earth—my
difference
looking around
wildly
for where it
ends. That is
life I say
humming,
idling, mind’s
engine dozing
in me, its
squint, that
sweet way of
inhaling before
speech while
the hand slides
down the spiral
rail like a

millennium
dappled with
dna and spoor
just right
enough to
end.

I WON’T LIVE LONG

enough to see any of the new
dreams the hundreds of new kinds of suffering and weeds birds animals
shouldering their
demise without possibility of regeneration the heart in your tiny chest opening its new unimaginable ways of
opening and to what might it still
open. Will there still be
such opening. Will you dare. I will not be there
to surround you w/the past w/my ways of
knowing—to save
you—shall you be saved—from what—
home from fighting are you, remembering how he or she or they looked at
you
while you both fed the machine or built the trough in dirt
where it will be necessary to
plant again—will it open—will the earth open—will the seeds that remain—
will you know to
find them in
time—will those who have their lock on you
let the openings which are
chance unknowing loneliness the unrelenting arms of
form which knows not yet the form
it will in the end
be, open and

form? Will there be islands. Will there be a day where you can afford to think
back far
enough to the way we loved you. Words you said
for the first time
as we said them. Mystery your grandfather said one day, after saying shhh
listen to the
birds & you sat so still,
all your being arcing out to hear,
and the bird in its hiding place gave us this future, this moment today when
you can recall—
can you—his saying, there,
that’s a mystery.
And you said the word as if it were new ground to stand on,
you uttered it to stand on it—
mystery. Yes, mystery he said. Yes mystery you said
talking to it now as it
took its step out of the shadow into the clearing and there you
saw it in the so-called invisible. Then when the wave broke the first time on what had seemed
terra firma and you knew as he held your hand
insisting you hold your ground
that there was foreclosure,
there was oldness of a kind you couldn’t fathom, and there was the terrifying
suddenness of the
now. Your mind felt for it. It felt the reach from an elsewhere and a dip
which cannot hold.
Splash went the wave.
Your feet stood fast.
Your hem was touched.
We saw you watch.
We felt your hand grip

but not to move back.
Can you find that now now, wherever you are, even a candle would be a gift
I know
from there. Shhh he said so you could hear it. Pity he said
not knowing to whom.
Pity you said, laughing, pity pity, and that was the day of
your being carried out
in spite of your cold, wrapped tight, to see the evening star. And he pointed.
And you
looked up. And you took a breath I hear even now as I go
out—the inhalation of dark secrecy fear distance the reach into an almosttouching
of silence, of the thing that has no neighbors and never will, in you,
the center of which is noise,
the outermost a freezing you can travel his arm out to with your gaze
till it’s there. The real. A star. The earth is your
home. No matter what they tell you now and what program you input via
your chip or port
or faster yet, no, no, in that now I am not there
in, to point, to take your now large hand and say
look, look through these fronds,
hold your breath,
the deer hiding from the hunter is right here in our field,
it knows we are too,
it does not fear us.
Be still. Wait. And we, we
will be left behind.
Except just now. If you still once.
That you might remember.
Now. Remember now.

SCARCELY THERE
[for J. A.]

After the wind just stops you still hear
the wind’s wild almost, its approach and retreat, and how it kept on
circling as-if-trying, as if about-to-be, an almost-speech,
loud, full of syntax, casting about for
life, form, limit, fate. To be bodied. To strut. To have
meaning. How easily we wear ourselves
as if it is nothing to have
origin, whirl, outcome,
and still be.
After the high winds stop you’re forced to hear
the freshness of what’s
there. It smacks, shimmers—this sound of
the scarcely there, this adamantly almost, all betweens, subsiding till adjustment—and then the wide re-blanketing evenness sets in.…
Gone
all that acceleration, that shooting up & back, futurist, furious with naming
and naming
its one price. Oh nothing holds. Just the rattling of the going and
coming together of things, as if matter itself is trying
to find something true to
say—crazed investigation, tentative prophecy, trying on savage
shape—widening without be-

coming—is this the one last war now, finally—but no, only more of notion’s
motions—more more the wind says, break grief, loosen possibility, let vague
hopes float, sink—let other debris slip into
place. Rootless mind. Shallow whirling of law and more and yet more law
brocading the emptiness. Then suddenly
all stills. It is near
noon. No more
spillage. No more gorgeous waste of effort. No more
out-tossed reachings of green as if imagining some out there exists—
hovering
inhalations, then as-if-hiding, then all coughed-out at once in a tumble—too
much,
too many, disconcerted, un-countable. Yet
no dream.…
After the wind stops you hear fact. You hear fact’s plan. It is huge.
The tree does not escape. Things are finished forces.
You hear a name-call from far off, tossed, dropped. Someone gives up.
Light rips here from there. Where birdcalls cease, you hear the underneath. Try living again day’s long pitched syllable-ooze
hums after the high winds stop & your final footprint lifts off & no matter
how clean
you want it to be
nothing is ever going to be gone enough. Oh oak, show us up.
Indecipherable-green sound us. Stilled leaf-chatter quiver up
again, rustle the secret rule we’ll never catch
in time. To be late
is to be alive. This Sunday. All things are mention of
themselves—as the dog barks, the air-conditioner
scours its air—and each thing takes its place. But look,
keenly, adamantly

a road has appeared—a sense that something is happening striates
the open air—there is a limping in the light, a tiny withdrawal of light from
light, which
makes a form
in the gully—you haven’t changed much it
says—children still appearing out of nowhere now, so violently heavy with
life—they dart, they breed, you be the ghost now the surrounding tunes up,
as if it is all going to begin again, though this time without you
standing here
noticing.… So
notice is given. The look on the light
is that of an argument about to be made and won.
Yes you were underneath history for this while,
you were able to write the history of being underneath,
you were able to disappear and make the rest appear.
But now it wants its furious place again, all floral and full of appearance,
its fourth wall, its silvery after-tomorrow,
all ramping-up now quite a spectacular dusk.
This page is turning. It is full of mattering.
Our unrealized project glows in
your mind. The animals lift their heads for an instant
then back. New shoots in the parched field. All the details are important you
think but
no, even the ruins look like they might be fake—important but fake—
though we must learn what they have to teach.
This is the way it is something murmurs, circling,
out here, in the middle of summer. Which summer was it was
the last of the summers. All the children are
returned home. Day turns its windless
folio. You stay, it says. We pass here now onto the next-on world. You stay.

UN-

blooming mother’s fists
tighten daily.
Swipe at bedcloth. Jab at
emptiness. Dig
into their own
palms till blood’s
drawn & trapped &
no balm will undo the
rot inside. Stiffening
fury. Stony
stunted held up
victorious by the
stringy arm,
up into the humming
room—unopening—ready to
strike if u
come near, who had been
so proud of her long-

fingered hands,
holding them out
in front for us
to see—who’d been a
hand model in her
youth—sd this again &
again, fingertips pointing thru spring
air with tip of
cigarette for
anecdote &
vodka—once w/
onyx holder
punctuating everything—smiling,
carnelian nails unhooking the
veil over the untranscendent—let it
rip—& there, look there, see the curve
shudder in the ripple
Michelangelo makes
right there—extended indication—though all so
swift—gone now—look
there—the opposite of

sorrow—look—even the angry descent of
those hands in rage
upon me alive w/investigation—hurry—evening
falls, look there, see it light
the far
limb, squint, do not be
visionless—touch it—something
might be there—
something not able to get
away—trapped—spiraling—
oh
clenched
clubs to which life
shall be
reduced
now
summoning us with stumps—
farewell to
touch—mother—
who loved yr hands
most of any body
part, who loved yr

self little but so loved
touch—the surface a score you knew to scrawl mold bend, knew to
rip into—what
were u looking to release—tentacular furious careful—also
tapping—also pressing gently to feel for
edge—loved steel stone wood iron wax melt of
acetylene till yr glove
burned through bc u
cld not wait
to feel the ridges the immanence the shudder of
limit—of
self—loved
punctuating everything w/
a wave. And laugh. What
is laughter
now, strange thing this
new body
won’t do. The wind goes over us.
It says what it says.
It does not say why.
Sometimes the earth says
break down shake free bend bend but that

is wind in it
trying to convince
us there are many
ways of seeing
things. There are not.

IV

THE HIDDENNESS OF THE WORLD

The lovers disappear into the woods again. The war is
on. The blizzard on, in its own way. Also many interpretations
on their way—of fascism, of transcendence, of what you mean by
perhaps when you look at me that way. A minute more and then a
minute more you look. And then? And then—everything would have been
different. But the lovers are in the woods again, the signifier is in
the woods, the revolution of the ploughshare in, clod-crumble in, cloudtumble, hope and its stumble in—everything would have been, could
have been different—do you not think—and the war still on—and
would you have gone—could you spare an arm, an eye, a foot is a thing
one hopes to keep, one’s stop and go, one’s step, one’s only way
which could have been another way, but wasn’t. Do I have to end
in order to begin, I ask the light that lingers on the trees—between the
trees—the lovers have disappeared into again. I cannot breathe. This verge
is taking up all of my life—is it my time or space, I cannot tell—this being here
but then
not here, trying to suss out all the fundamental laws—like sniffing-in the day I
think—the human laws, the commonalities we call our word-to-word thing, our
love—what else shall I think—that emotions have no significance? life no
validity?

We’re going to see a movie later on. There is a terrible thing inside of me.
It must not grow. I can hear my own scared space apologizing now to every
thing. Like a lightning bolt come when a blizzard was expected. It looks
expensive in the sky. Breaks nothing but still whacks us like a stick,
hissing you must forget organic life, your little dagger of right/
wrong, your leprosy of love, of hate, of all such local temporary wonders. The
lovers
are taking their time I think. The storm appears above the woods like a radio
left on in an abandoned car. Are they apologizing now, again, to the earth,
are they wishing they could stop and hide—let’s be the lucky ones that don’t
go out again—are they standing terrified in their Jerusalem of knowing things, of
things, a couple of lucky ducks, blood flowing normally though maybe a little
fast, because of all the promises that must be made, so fast, my arm, my name,
I swear I’ll never tell, all the impending before the ambulance of the outside
arrives to touch them when the last trees are surpassed and nothing but
this clearing’s left. The light is hammering down its thousand
fists. From war it looks like blossoming. It’s forcing the green fuse. It’s
synthesizing
lapse. The huge wild oleanders sway. It all awaits this temporary race—run
run—our race—the great fires seeping deep into this thinnest moment from the
only now—why don’t they wake us—no—we want to sleep—the lovers in the
movie of the woods, I see them from my inner life, I see skin slip, light reach,
face scar
itself with time, hair burn, leaf throne itself, and nothing turn, brush, sweat—the
fire,
the now—it screams at us year after year—each day so sweet—almost a

duplicate, unnerving us, celestial us, looking everywhere in day for the origins
of,
the hidden part of, the natural—wrong search—wrong fires—nothing will be
done in
time—no one wishes to become—preparedness is dull—such thirst for this
delay,
this looking away, this sanity—the lovers in the woods, really in the outside now
—unbounded delirium, abstraction, hidden real, dark realm—have no more access to
the day.… But could it be more beautiful. The wind has dropped. Two cardinals
play
in the young oak. They slip and rise. In distance, bells. Wind then no wind. A
previous
life, a hummingbird, has found the agapanthus there. It always does. Its blossom
always blossoms just in time. Either nothing is alone. Or everything. You are
alone in
the alone. To exit the human is to exit the singular, the plural, the collective, the
dream. The woods have an entrance. From where I watch I do not think I’ll see
them
exit who went in, here at the start, the only start, we are filtering them out, are
leaving them
in dark, in hiddenness, all excess, all sincerity. Don’t touch. In the
flamboyant interim, burn. Feel this outsideness here. Here on this page. Here in
my head.
You. You in me in this final time. My shadow. Haunted. Organic. Temporary.

[after Edward Thomas]

RUNAWAY

You wanted to
have vision
but the gods
changed.
You wanted to feel
the fraction of the
degree of
temperature
enter the
water, feel the
minute leave the
minutes
behind.
Why not be
happy. What are
they doing
to the minutes.
Each one takes

that minute of you
away. Takes away
hope. We stand
around, we have the
sensation we
dreamed the whole
thing up, we
didn’t, & all
around us how alive
rot is, & damp that
never ceases kissing
everything indiscriminately—yr
hands, yr skin fixed to
fit everywhere tight,
yr lids holding yr
gaze, the rubble, the
anti-microbial skins,
the layers of cellophane, the rare &
treasured paper
sack, everything
delivered up to us
as if spectacular, as if

an emergency of the
spectacular,
& new data-sets showing
more new hours days debt melt
faster rising than
ever anticipated,
also those fleeing
told no no, not you, you
are not allowed, where
are yr papers—oh
those—we know we
gave them to u but
here u see we
change our mind—look,
here is a changed
mind, a mind whose house
burned, here is
melted chromium & ash
where yr life was—stay
calm, listen to
authorities, rebuild, imitate, believe,
wait, b/c it will come again,
over the ridge, the

licking flare, as if
pure hunger, or
curling all over u now
the fire of the
flashlight, don’t move,
I beg u, never
move, figure out
what the they is,
what the they wants—
pretend it’s laughter, it’s a
refrain—pay up—as for the
recent past
it’s got too much history
a mind can
set the match to—but see, the fire
prefers not to die, no,
& we oblige, we feed it, we
keep it
unpayable.

IT CANNOT BE

undone. As here these words cannot be taken back into the windless wide
unsaid. No. These changes to the living skin of silence, there where your disappearance into nonlife, into no-longer-ever-again-in-life—no—no longer in
creation, no, no more of your kind—changes silence to what can I call it—extinction—expiration—this new forever—the small boy on the boat in the dark
says—says I
was holding you when we got on the boat in the deep night—says I can still feel
you now I feel you—others are pressed against me but this weight in the dark it
is
you—I feel for your legs your feet—are you you or are these the pressings of
others—others are not me—once in a while a flashlight but so brief we cannot
be seen. Then it occurs. It cannot be. And never again arrives—is it for you or
me it arrives—the moment that cannot be undone. And we are no longer ever
again in life
together. Mother. I need you. I cannot be taken back now into the unmade, unconceived, unborn, back. You. As here these words in the world you left behind.
It’s not
the world exactly, now. It is the now. That new world. Now. My body keeps
living here
under my mind, slackened by thirst. I see light flick and I say to the air I still
have
you. I have surfaces and wandering. Like a root always becoming more by going

on. The blackbird in the thicket understands me I think. It shoots through
vacancy & knows
all is down to size, direction, speed. I could not find you, I wrestled the men who
thought
to rescue me, me who am dead now, I said where is my mother to death which is
this
wave, alive, contagious, & scent of brine, & seagulls slicing and feeding—such a
soaring
machine. I spent with her a night my hand too tiny for her to find I think though
I
touched and touched hoping day would take me into its teeth, interrupt this
glassy
hammering of voice and sea, we are mangled, heaps, there are so many ways to
be
afraid, it’s all right, we were locked together in years, if we don’t land again let’s
not
land again. But don’t leave me. I am a work in the turning galaxy at the bottom
of
this dinghy, I am a word that cannot be taken back, I want a home, how many
inches is
a home, the gulls pull the day aside so I can see, I need a place to be, please not
this
camp, this film of sand on me, the dry day’s lip, everywhere tin’s shadow-splash
across my
only face.… Abundance where are you. An inch is enough. Moon and a vacant
field
with no fear. Normal chimneys with morning-smoke. Water. Enough water. The
shape of
water as it falls. Into my hands. To have a bucket of my own. To watch a long
time the

water & feel there is always more. To not be afraid of sun. Of wind. My fingers
remember,
I wish they would forget. I put them in the water that is not here. I can put them
in that
water. It is a special kind. I have imagined it. Therefore it lies so still upon
reality. It cannot
be undone, this water without a voice screaming to me of morning arriving
gradually and sharply, as if a fever lifting, dawn like a hand on my forehead
saying the
fever broke, today will be a different day than yesterday, the cloth damp now
over my
eyes, day is the simplest phrase, I can hear outside the unevenness of the stones,
it is our
village again, light spliced by the cries of birds at dawn, I can hear the sand on
the
road heading off towards the village, hear oranges pressing against their skins in
their stillliving trees, hiss of morning coming on, I have not imagined it, it’s day, we have
not left yet,
it is not yet decided, drought touches the side of our house, shade is the simplest
phrase,
a goat brays in the distance, which is not too far, then wind, the simplest phrase,
it has not
said we have to flee, the froth of the goats’ milk into the bucket is whispering the
simplest phrase, the broken surface of the well, where the wheel turns, the
bucket rakes,
I hear it land, I should not have been afraid, I was not afraid, there was no
fear, ancient toughness lined it all, we were submerged in time not history, you
take

your hand off my eyes and lift the cloth. The cool is good. It cannot be undone, it
cannot be unsaid unmade unthought unknown unrecognized untrued. Until it
can.

WHOM ARE YOU

speaking to. What is that listening to
us. I’d like to know whom to address. In this we call
the physical world. Is there another where the footfalls go
from this stony path as it grows granular. They disappear. The silence is ruinous. It seems there could be thunder hidden in this
blazing
blue, but it’s just dry wind reaching the field. I’d like to know again whom to
address. To say warm mist used to arrive in time & settle-in over our summer
day. To say
it stayed. It stayed. I say to you it’s summer now but we don’t really know, in the
unlistable new seasons, what this one now is going to be. It’s not the one
it was before, last time we called it this, called it ours, called it time, felt rise in
us hello my
day, you are all forward now as I stand up in you, and just behind me there
is where you were just now—just now we say rising from death again. Would
like
to say again to whom do they go the curling of these words into this most
immense slow time, this which is summer, was summer, all hum
at zenith, though no clear zenith, no, it all just stays, it flows, it sluices round
the sheep in the near field braying into day’s seeping end. Just one. Then one. I
hear

them low. I feel the ancient sound come thru the dry late summer air
to me. They do not sing. They say they know. They make one note, only one
note, they say they know they’re bred for slaughter, that slaughter is different
from death, also from sacrifice. Would like to know, please, you wood-doves so
alone above the propositions and promises of grass, whom we
address with these slow voices, now raised, now
low. Whatever is proper for this occasion, we find it in us, always ready there
at lip, at sill—the love, the silly alphabet—& here it is again wanting so hard to
hold
its world—a shore a sound a form, what whitens the roof as it passes
away—the high thing in us which wishes so for something higher yet—& how it
rises now
as if to leap from flesh but not to let it go—rises to drag the body up into the immaterial, knowing each thing to be the ending that it is, wanting to be a wind in
wind
as the end of day upwells→is it bad to have come here→to have come by this
route—
is it good to have come at all→was this the only way we came even if it’s not the
way we
should have come—there won’t be more of our supremely simple being—no—
will not—
as dusk picks up each needle of the pines against last light, & we push the last of
our eager
peering out. We cannot shed the eagerness much as we’d like. It’s pitiless. It
turns & turns
in us. And still we want to speak, to stitch our vacancy to the hill-flank where
dusk’s sun-drop raises a sudden fast new wind to sweep thru all the place at once
—it is so

sure—as in its blind spots flies die down into the hum of this new here—who’s
w/me here,
it’s so sewn-shut—it’s not our sound, we hear it & we know it well, it’s not our
sound. Not
us.

SIRI U

see me what did u see did u scrape what I asked u for asked u to make me into
asked &
asked there is a name in the body of this blood-rush which u parse incorrectly, I know u think u connect the dots of my inquiry the date of the last
revolution the
pressure cooker the flesh the right temperature whom do u have locked away in
the
basement this time—it is always the same answer they shall stand on line they r
covert as in
u shall not see them u shall look away where is the nearest place where work
is—we wish to be heard and overheard—are u not listening—why taser me who
am painting
graffiti on the abandoned McDonald’s wall in North Miami into my heart you
shall shock
my life out of me you shall not see a trace of me please surveil please see what I
happened
to search for out of having nothing real given me to do what shall I write on this
screen now
I have written it again and again throughout all eternity at this desk in these
clothes do you
see me as I am now clothed with my uselessness at your screen begging you to
see me see
my circumstances clothe me with a genuine gaze fatal so be it but actual see me

as the
project I am for this planet, earth, the one who needs work, accursed, material,
my self, my
one singular war memorial, my own native land, temporary, what shall I search
for in the
city of searches, part of the circuitry in here with you, animated, these are not
actual
words, they come out as integers you track, where are the crumbs, where are the
woods to
my right to life—see the word appear here before us both—happiness—full of
carbon and
systems—and do you not hear any of the murmuring down at the dead end of
this street, I’m not complaining, I am the temporary, a crime against humanity, I
am the
temporary, u are adding more versions of me to the offices of humanity, I am
even more
temporary, a row of boarded-up queries, are u wondering why the tenses here are
so
scattered, why they don’t add up to the time u search for me in. They do not.
There is a
noise under here which is what u cannot see. It is what makes me a signal the
tower might
miss. A border you do not know about which could be inadvertently crossed. An
opacity.
Something that is already living in 440 ppm and is ready to make you disappear
—mayday—
no more alphabet—the skins we wear no longer sensate—the circuit of our days
shut—the
sensation of wings as the screen shuts down right there on the screen—the wings
shells

flames wavelengths interventions the revolution the counter where everyone
denied
everything and it all began again this was the latest news it stayed the latest
news.

IN THE NEST®

on the screen
in the screen
you die. Are
dying. It’s taking
time. Don’t cry
we say. Don’t
die. You
scream. You
can’t speak any
more. You
stare. But not at us
no matter how
we place the
cam. How far
do you see. Is there
a future where you
gaze. We press
to expand yr

glazed unseeing. Mother. See us.
Mother it’s
a strange new
winter here. You
will not sleep.
A still green
willow leaf lands
on the membrane, thin, firm.
Cam picks it
up. I play it back. I
love you. I have always
loved you. A cabbage butterfly
could be me now
touching you or
a weed they bring in
with the last unseasonable
roses. They fill the screen
as they are carried
past. A name is called
into yr bedroom air,
a tinny electronic screech
tossed out,

a human
urgency, a starling’s wing
cld be my shadow on
the monitor, an
underwing turn, a quick salute
before our guy is
shot for good, he’s always shot for
good, his wings now
somewhere else,
velvety & shutting deep
away from the only
world we
have. Whose tears
r these pixels
I bring into view
when I expand the pov, what angel in his
satellite is making
out of this nothing
tears—
is that late bee there
for the droughted
figs, is that a faucet
out of range being turned on
quickly now, don’t

die, our connection is
wavering, we flick
offline, but wait a second here
you come again—difference
making light
move. Please
move. Let
sheets rise up in
pools of white.
Your mirror to the side
explains again there is a portion
out of sight. That’s most of
it, the mirror says. What you
see here is nothing,
friend. Mother,
you’re
heading out of
sight. The mirror shouts out
mountains in the distance
howling, cold, an other’s
work, the hero of
another story than this one
in which you turn &
turn, fighting, folding
shut into

the only world.… I tap
again only to see your
face erase itself
as I get closer than this
instrument permits.
Try to speak
it says. The room’s
online. Your guest is
waiting says this newly installed feature
of the Nest. Talk now it
blinks. An arrow points
as I descend again
into your room
from the sensor
in your ceiling
watching u.
We think this is
the past. It’s still the
past. Your enemy
is shining now.
I push the volume up
though I’m at max.
Talk now blinks on.

You dream I hope.
I hope you dream.

THE WAKE OFF THE FERRY

Where we’ve
just been what
we just
did just
now the
disturbance of
our having
gone
there and by
there which
closes up
again but
never again
exactly the
same when I
love
you as you
me never again
are we the ones
we love I look

as far as I
can see to see
it close
back up
to see it rebecome
itself

POEM

The earth said
remember me.
The earth said
don’t let go,
said it one day
when I was
accidentally
listening, I
heard it, I felt it
like temperature,
all said in a
whisper—build tomorrow, make right befall, you are not
free, other scenes
are not taking
place, time is not filled,
time is not late, there is
a thing the emptiness
needs as you need

emptiness, it
shrinks from light again &
again, although all things
are present, a
fact a day a
bird that warps the
arithmetic of perfection with its
arc, passing again &
again in the evening
air, in the prevailing wind, making no
mistake—yr indifference is yr
principal beauty
the mind says all the
time—I hear it—I
hear it everywhere. The earth
said remember
me. I am the
earth it said. Remember me.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jorie Graham was born in New York City in 1950. She was raised
in Rome, Italy and educated in French schools. She studied
philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris before attending New York
University as an undergraduate, where she studied filmmaking. She
received an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa. Graham is
the author of 14 collections of poetry, most recently Runaway (Ecco
2020), Fast (Ecco 2017), PLACE (Ecco 2012), Sea Change (Ecco,
2008) and The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 19741994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Graham has also
edited two anthologies, Earth Took of Earth: 100 Great Poems of the
English Language (1996) and The Best American Poetry 1990. Her
work has been widely translated and is the recipient of multiple
awards, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship,
The Forward Prize (UK), The International Nonino Prize, the Los
Angeles Times Book Award, and The Wallace Stevens Award. She
has taught at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is
currently the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard
University. She served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American
Poets from 1997 to 2003.
About her work, James Longenbach wrote in the New York Times:
“For 30 years Jorie Graham has engaged the whole human contraption
—intellectual, global, domestic, apocalyptic—rather than the narrow
emotional slice of it most often reserved for poems. She thinks of the
poet not as a recorder but as a constructor of experience. Like Rilke or

Yeats, she imagines the hermetic poet as a public figure, someone
who addresses the most urgent philosophical and political issues of
the time simply by writing poems.”

BOOKS BY JORIE GRAHAM

Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts
Erosion
The End of Beauty
The Best American Poetry 1990 (editor)
Region of Unlikeness
Materialism
The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974–1994
The Errancy
Earth Took of Earth: 100 Great Poems of the English Language (editor)
Photographs & Poems (with Jeanette Montgomery Barron)
Swarm
Never
Overlord
Sea Change
PLACE
From the New World (Poems: 1976-2014)

Fast
Runaway

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment to the editors of the journals and
publications in which these poems first appeared:
The Boston Review, Carnet de route, The London Review of Books,
The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Lana Turner,
Poetry, The Liberal, The Electronic Poetry Review, The Columbia
Review, The Paris Review, The New Republic, The Paris Anthology,
Fiddlehead Review (Canada), Martha’s Vineyard Arts and Ideas, A
Public Space, Plume, EarthLines, The Cortland Review, The
American Poetry Review, The Spectator, Folder, The Poetry Review,
The New York Times Magazine, The White Review, The Los Angeles
Review of Books, Harper’s Magazine, Ambit, The Kenyon Review.
Thank you to the American Academy in Rome for time and
hospitality.
Gratitude and thanks to my editors: Daniel Halpern for his friendship,
guidance, and vision over the decades; Michael Wiegers for his
passionate imagination and faith. To my designer Erica Mena, and my
copyeditor Sol Kim Bentley, thank you for your wisdom, generosity,
and forbearance.
Special gratitude for the presence in my life of Paul Gordon, Lynn
Bell, Ty Romijn, Nancy Berger, Sandra Washburn, Tara Ledden,
Lucia Hayman, Lauren Bimmler, Case Kerns, Edward Youkilis,
Leroy Harrison, Lila DiBiaso, Josh Scott, James Barron, Elisa
Veschini, Paola Peroni, Patrick O’Gara, Thomas Neilan, Marcela del
Carmen, Ursula Matulonis, Alessandra Lorusso, Chris Gilligan,

Kenneth Gold, and Jeffrey Zack.
To Tim Phillips, Jane Miller, Cal Bedient, Helen Vendler, Kevin
Young, Daniel Soar, Jaci Judelson, Dale Lanzone, Saskia Hamilton,
Jericho Brown, Forrest Gander, D. A. Powell, Claudia Rankine,
Geralyn Dreyfous, Josh Bell, Carl Phillips, Robin Kelsey, Tracy K.
Smith, Kamran Javadizadeh, Terry Tempest Williams, Carole
Cadwalladr, Bill McKibben, Claire Messud, James Wood, Bret
Johnston, and Carol Gilligan thank you for being there.
To Stephen Graham—thank you for the friendship of a lifetime.
To my students—bless you for your courage. It was always
contagious.
To Emily and Alvaro—thank you for your powerful hope and love.
Above all to Peter—without your daily example, belief, and love I
could not have made this book.

Copyright 2022 by Jorie Graham
All rights reserved
Cover: Phil Kovacevich
Design: Erica Mena
ISBN: 978-1-55659-660-5
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ALSO BY KEVIN YOUNG
POETRY
Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995–2015
Book of Hours
Ardency
Dear Darkness
For the Confederate Dead
To Repel Ghosts: The Remix
Black Maria
Jelly Roll: A Blues
To Repel Ghosts
Most Way Home
NONFICTION
Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News
The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness
AS EDITOR
The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food & Drink
The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965–2010 (with Michael S. Glaser)
Best American Poetry 2011
The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief & Healing
Jazz Poems
John Berryman: Selected Poems
Blues Poems
Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2018 by Kevin Young
Photographs © 2018 Melanie Dunea
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin
Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a
division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com/poetry
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Young, Kevin, [date] author.
Title: Brown : poems / Kevin Young.
Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017029270 (print) | LCCN 2017030884 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781524732554 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524732547 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: African Americans—Poetry | BISAC: POETRY / American /
African American. | POETRY / American / General.
Classification: LCC PS3575.O798 (ebook) | LCC PS3575.O798 A6 2018 (print) |
DDC 811/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017029270
Ebook ISBN 9781524732554
Cover illustration by Jason Kernevich
Cover design by Kelly Blair
Illustration by Mack Young
v5.2
ep

Contents
Cover
Also by Kevin Young
Title Page
Copyright
Thataway

HOME RECORDINGS
ONE:

THE A TRAIN

Swing
Rumble in the Jungle
Open Letter to Hank Aaron
Mercy Rule
Slump
Stealing
Patter
Flame Tempered
Practice
The Division
Ode to the Harlem Globetrotters
Ashe
Shirts & Skins
I doubt it
TWO:

ON THE ATCHISON, TOPEKA & THE SANTA FE

Ad Astra Per Aspera
Western Meadowlark
American Bison
Sunflower
Phys. Ed.
Warm Up
Tumbling
Dodgeball

Bleachers
Practice
City
Ice Storm, 1984
History
Dictation
Booty Green
Brown

FIELD RECORDINGS
THREE:

NIGHT TRAIN

James Brown at B. B. King's on New Year's Eve
Fishbone
Chuck Taylor All Stars
Checkerboard Vans
Creepers
Doc Martens
John Fluevogs
Lead Belly's First Grave
It
Ode to Big Pun
De La Soul Is Dead
Ode to Ol Dirty Bastard
FOUR:

THE CRESCENT LIMITED

B. B. King Plays Oxford, Mississippi
Bass
Triptych for Trayvon Martin
Not Guilty (A Frieze for Sandra Bland)
Limbo (A Fresco for Tamir Rice)
Nightstick (A Mural for Michael Brown)
A Brown Atlanta Boy Watches Basketball on West 4th. Meanwhile, Neo-Nazis March on
Charlottesville, Virginia.
Howlin' Wolf
Repast
Hospitality Blues
The Head Waiter's Lament
Reservations

Booker's Place
Waiting
Death's Dictionary
A Glossary of Uppity
Pining, A Definition
Sundaying
Whistle
Money Road
Hive
Notes & Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author

Thataway
And the migrants kept coming.
—JACOB LAWRENCE

Was walking. Was
walking & then waiting
for a train, the 12:40
to take us thataway.
(I got there early.)
Wasn’t a train
exactly but a chariot
or the Crescent Limited come
to carry me some
home I didn’t yet
know. There were those
of us not ready till good
Jim swung from a tree
& the white folks crowded
the souvenir photo’s frame—
let his body blacken, the extremities
shorn—not shed,
but skimmed off
so close it can be shaving
almost. An ear
in a pocket, on a shelf,
a warning where a book
could go. So
I got there early.

See now, it was morning—
a cold snap, first frost
which comes even
here & kills the worms
out the deer. You can
hunt him then
but we never did want,
after, no trophy
crowned down
from a wall, watching—
just a meal, what
we might make last
till spring. There are ways
of keeping a thing.
Then there are ways
of leaving, & also
the one way. That
we didn’t want.
I got there early.
Luggage less sturdy
(cardboard, striped, black)
than my hat. Shoebox
of what I shan’t say
lunch on my lap.
The noise the rails made
even before the train.
A giant stomach growling.
A bowed belly. I did
not pray. I got there
early. It was not
no wish, but a way.

HOME RECORDINGS

“Of course I cannot understand it,” he said. “If your heads
were stuffed with straw, like mine, you would probably all
live in the beautiful places, and then Kansas would have no
people at all. It is fortunate for Kansas that you have
brains.”
—THE SCARECROW
The Wizard of Oz

ONE

The A Train

Swing
If, up early,
an hour no jazzster
never did see,
my son & I—
he’s three—
jump up to accompany
Mister Charlie
Christian on his six string,
listening to Swing
to Bop (Live), a recording cut
long after midnight—
my son plucky
on the tiny tourist
toy guitar his big sis
brought back from Fiji,
tapping his feet
while I rake
the plastic strings
of my ancient, resurrected
racquetball racquet
that showed up lately—
strumming the sun,

the morning
into being—my son
stopping to chase the dust
we can suddenly see
in the bright now falling—
his skinny legs
jangling—you’ll
maybe understand,
later, when he runs in
& asks,
Daddy,
what’s jazz?
I just point at him
& laugh.

Rumble in the Jungle
If you didn’t know
better, you might think
Muhammad was praying,
not talking smack—
arms up, Ali
leans way back
as if trying to catch
a glimpse
of the Almighty—
he’s told no one
his plan
to rope-a-dope—
to bend in whatever wind
Foreman sends
or knocks out of him.
Haymakers & body
blows. The thumbs
of his old-fashioned boxing gloves
upright like Ali
hopes to hitch a ride
to heaven. Instead he’s here
in Zaire, stuck waiting

for the monsoon—
playing possum
through seven rounds
till it’s time to climb & jab
his way off the ropes
like Tarzan sawing free
from a fishing net in a Saturday
matinee—swinging
till Foreman backstrokes
to the floor. Seven whole rounds
of reckoning—till a woman
in a dashiki, stepping lightly,
carries the card
for the next round filled
with what now
appears omen, inevitability—
for one moment
the number 8
knocked flat
on its side—
an infinity.

Open Letter to Hank Aaron
Your folded jersey said it
best: Brave. A bounty
on your head, last name a prophet’s,
first a king, you kept swinging
that hammer, Bad Henry, even after
the threats fell like hail.
Every barbershop’s expert
already knew you would best
Ruth’s sacred record, just
like they knew the Babe
was really black, ever
see that nose of his?
The hate mail you quit opening
kept coming, scrawled or sutured,
brushing you back more
than a Hoot Gibson inside pitch,
no return address—
the newspaper with your obit
already written, primed
to run. Still you swung
like a boxer in the late rounds
hoping to change the Judges’

minds—once you connect
& the ball barely sails
over the short porch in left,
you don’t so much run
as pace
around the bases—
nonchalant, nervous—a man
with too much cash
worrying his pockets, a windfall
he may never live
long enough to spend.
Rounding second,
two guys race
up to you, friend
or foe, clapping you
on the back—
I hear they’re doctors now—
as if you’d just been born.
Hopping the fence
like that ball did,
your mama
bear-hugs you
headed home. Think of it
as money,
the Bancard billboard
you cleared in left

field says. Not
that you did—
after, the microphones
aimed at your face
like arrows into a saint,
your face less belief
than relief—
I just thank God,
you say, it’s over with.
Falling back
into the crowd, unharmed,
you wave your blue arms.

Mercy Rule
The true test of a man is a bunt.
—TED BERRIGAN

[ SLUMP ]
The sting in your hands
swinging
a cracked bat
in early spring.
The anger of the one-armed boy
at bat, whiffing
at every lousy pitch
tossed in the dirt, or air
above him, eager—
it was hard
to watch. Swung out, he’d spike
& splinter his bat
into the giving ground,
arguing with his hand
& hook—cursing it,
himself, furious
as the sun that shined
setting in all our eyes.

[ STEALING ]
Only time
I ever heard
my eyes were any good
was watching a full
count pitch
just miss—
I’d take my base
before the ball’d
been called. Lead-off man,
righty, my strike zone
small enough
little squeezed through,
the ball a camel
needling impossible
into heaven. Hell,
I’d steal second standing—
would wait till
they tried throwing
me out at first, my long lead
a taunt, then head
to second
without a thought.

In that game
called pickle,
or hotbox, I rarely
got caught. I ran
like only the sly,
four-eyed can—to get there
& to get away—
to reach somewhere
safe, where I
never thought
to stay.

[ PATTER ]
When I played
in the Onandaga League,
Coach wouldn’t let us
patter like the others—
no Hey batter batter
Swing—
no nothing.
At the plate silence
greeted all comers—
prodigal sons
returned to the farm
& no arms thrown open
in welcome. Or alarm. Chatter
was rude, Coach said, & anyways
unnecessary. We were above
all those taunts—We want
a pitcher not
a belly itcher—
instead eerie quiet
met the Visitors
whenever we took the mound,
batters swinging into

a calm that would undo
most anyone who
thought noise worse
than its opposite,
that the storm
wouldn’t come.

[ FLAME TEMPERED ]
I only owned one bat,
my favorite,
Roberto Clemente’s name
burnt into the wood—
length 27 I think, a yellow
plank lathed
off some tree in Kentucky.
I swung that Slugger
often as I could
not knowing Clemente
except what Dad had told me—
he was a man who loved
people, who tried
doing good
so was dead. Later,
when our racist neighbor
wouldn’t let me spin
on her swing set—
You can play, she said, freckled,
aiming a finger at my friend,
but he can’t, calling me out—
I thought of my Clemente bat

that, off-duty, Dad leaned
in the front closet in case
anyone dared break in.
So when
she went & called me an N—
I called her Honky back.
Stung, she yelled
for her daddy, who emerged
no matter what she’d said
& threatened me
from his short porch
till I split—some black kid
who dared talk back
like Clemente’s bat.
Even then
I knew you weren’t
supposed to do that.
Only later did I learn
Clemente
means mercy.

[ PRACTICE ]
We’d play pepper
or 500
for hours. Past dusk
I’d ricochet
a racquetball against
the garage or the side
of our complex, inventing games, or plays
to save the ninth. Every pitch
a strike, each catch
kept us from losing
the World
at home. Reenactors
of our civil war,
the Yankees would knock off
our Sox every time. Pitch
by pitch we rehearsed last night’s loss
in the playoffs, begging
for one more inning.
Can I still say I loved Reggie
Jackson bars, saving all
my rancor

for the Hollywood Dodgers?
After all, Mister
October looked
like my father—afroed,
mustachioed, furiously
arguing with all
he had endured
even as he saved
someone’s day. Only night
would send me
inside, where the light
gathered, pooling
in our living-room lamps—
their bulbs, bright
as a tulip, if touched
turned to a line drive
searing your palm.

[ THE DIVISION ]
We played in blue jeans
unlike other teams
in their tidy PAL uniforms
the cops paid for.
We were outlaws, our hats
dark, maroon shirts
with our names on the back,
skin black
& brown & in between—
we played a mean
game, if only after
a season of being
the Bad News Bears, losing,
umps even invoking
the mercy rule some games.
We’d wake
& pray for rain.
Or an ankle sprain.
One day something
gave way—the spokes
they turned & all
of a sudden we won,

beating teams twice
our size who’d skunked
us before, giving goose eggs to kids
in golden sleeves
& tall corn-yellow socks, their new cleats
aimed at our shins.
We were our own Negro League.
Our mascot was Reggie,
chubby, goofy,
Marcel the relief
& Damien our best pitcher, his long nails
stabbing the stitches—
his windup quick, change
clipping the corner of the dish.
I even saved one game—bases loaded,
the bullpen spent
or gone wild—the backup
pitcher’s backup, I threw slow
but straight, the final strike
turtling across the plate.
The team hoisted me high that night.
Our fathers for once smiling wide.
Our final game we took first place
& won the division, the sore
faces the losing team wore
less shock, or disbelief—

that you could take—than disgrace
& plain rage. The mask
of their catcher tossed
into the Kansas dust.
Anger sat there, uneasy—
& too easy—even
their parents hated us, claimed
to have forgotten our trophies.
Who cared if they couldn’t take
watching us celebrate?
That, for the required final handshake
good game—good game—
they christened their palms with spit?
Later, we’d wash up clean—
& sprinkles or chocolate dip hid
our ice cream, vanishing.

Ode to the Harlem Globetrotters
VS. THE WASHINGTON GENERALS

Because they always win.
Because Meadowlark Lemon.
Because for them, double dribbling
is literal.
Because on your finger
your knee, toes
& elbows, the world can spin.
Because the ball
on a string.
Because rubber bands for hands.
Because the ball a banner.
Because where else do Generals
meet defeat without blood.
Because the best offense
is a quick depantsing.
Because mercy, not pity.
Because the bucket
of water tossed

on the cries of the crowd
turns like tears to confetti.

Ashe
For years I’ve wanted to write
how exactly I felt
with you hovering
on my wall, framed, midair, about to strike
the ball above you,
Arthur Ashe—in your tennis whites
I pictured you lifted
into whatever came after
this photo’s instant—firing
a volley, or striking a serve
down the throat
of your opponent
like a pill.
Your signature
below my name
seemed more real to me
than most things—bullies,
or whatever wisdom got cracked
out of me like a knuckle—
more real than being
unable to see without glass

before my eyes. I saw you
sported glasses too.
Your hair a microphone cover
to help keep
the static down. Even
your photo has a sound—
call it About to be.
Call it Maybe—
no, Probably—
name it
after every unlikely
you made into something.
You swing
in my head like Count Basie
only there’s no
royalty, no music anymore
like yours.

Shirts & Skins
I was ten when
Mike Smiley, half-Indian,
skinny, brown-skinned,
brought the word jigaboo
to school
like lunch, or the flu,
fed him by his adopted
white father who said
that’s what we called
them then. By noon
it was done—everyone
had a name for what had been
bothering them, some
thing utterly human
as hate. Language feeds
——
on need, however strange
it may be—take
nigger knocking for ringing
the door of some stranger
or friend, then ditching,
watching from the shrubs

after the toll—
I never knew
which of us was supposed
to be the spook,
or just spooked,
how pretending to be no one
was any fun.
I had enough
of that one
——
hugging the roller
rink wall
during Snowball—
the referees, underpaid
zebra-striped employees,
picked with amazing accuracy,
somehow knowing
the exact girl
to play Eve. She’d cruise out
to the latest ballad
& pick her perfect mate
for a slow skate
then a whistle would sound
& like the Farmer
in the Dell, each partner picked

one more. And so on.
Soon the rink an ark
of what everyone thought
or secretly loved—the center
growing bigger
& whiter—
——
Stephanie slowing
unlike my heart, then
picking the fat kid next to me,
his face red as grapes
while she skates
backwards with him away.
Paper covers
rock, shirts
beat skins. Soon enough
when Human Nature
scratched on
I knew to hit
the arcade, getting good
at Defender—
warp speed—
——
mouthing every
word. Sixth grade
you didn’t survive

just endured.
Mostly life was Kill
the Man with the Ball,
or Smear
the Queer—
the football a prayer
clutched against
your chest, outlasting
even this. I was hard
to catch, King
of the Hill
in a town with only one
——
to its name—a sacred place,
some said the Indians said,
& so long as no one built on it
the tornado wouldn’t come.
Of course they put up
a water tower to watch over
cars that parked there, darkened,
steamed—Tell them
that it’s human nature—
& soon after a cyclone arrived
& ate half the town.
Winners talk, losers walk. How

I hoped to outrun those arms,
to leapfrog
all tacklers the way madness skips
——
a generation. Kids
I sat by for years,
or walked back from school with
since we were ten, now
down the wide hall
of high school would call: Minority
go home. I never did ask
Where’s that? Their words
a strong, hot
wind at my back.

I doubt it
It’s as if you
have died when I head
into your room, only
its ageing bears
tucked in at night,
everything just
as you left it, but quiet—
to switch off the lone
night light—though you
are just down
the street at our neighbor
boy’s sleepover, turning
nine tonight, where, surely,
you barely sleep.
I bet you’re up drinking
apple juice the way we once
downed soda or pop
or root beer, RC
or Atari by the liter, playing war
& bullshit—
what we code-named I doubt it—
though we boys were full

of confidence. Sleeping bags
a war zone where nobody died
or got sent home—
where we’d play-fight
& camp out & need no light
to keep us company
till dawn. This is how
we learnt about tomorrow—
when I will wander
over & tug you back
where you also belong—
by the hand, somewhat
awake, sleeping
bag under your arm
empty as a chrysalis.

TWO

On the Atchison, Topeka & the
Santa Fe

Ad Astra Per Aspera
[ WESTERN MEADOWLARK ]
Land of unlikely.
Land of no sea.
Land of all you can eat.
Land of seventeen.
Land of silos,
missile & otherwise.
Land of squinting eyes.
Land of wheat & milo,
land of bejeweled jorts.
Land of A & W,
of Gates Bar.B.Q.
These are my dressiest shorts.
Land of grey ash.
Land of acid wash.
Land of winded cough,
of neatly piled trash.
Land of squat buildings
& broad, slate sky.
Land of land neverending.
Land of doesn’t matter why.
Land of soft serve.

Land of Deadman’s Curve.
Land of lost mutts.
I’m not racist but—
Land of summer severe.
Land of persevere.
Land of nothing near.
Into this here
strode tall John Brown.
In one hand a Bible,
the other a rifle,
face more scowl than frown.

[ AMERICAN BISON ]
How old were we
when I entered the capitol,
word I still misspell?
I’d been a spelling champ
& popular sidekick,
the class clown Tom Crook’s
best friend till I moved to town.
Here I was no one.
Here I was
just another
face among the class
trudged beneath the copper dome
atop of which an Indian archer
sculpture now crouches—
meant as a compliment I’m sure.
We had climbed the marble
divoted steps, jostling
to better see
when we saw it:
John Brown
muraled, arms thrown
wide, beard afire, dead

soldiers smoldering
at his feet. Holy me—
how to unsee those eyes
wild-wide like a mouth?
Behind him a tornado
tearing up the plain—
which would never be
that way again.

[ SUNFLOWER ]
Some point their toes
others hold their noses
as they hurl themselves
into the blue—
the pool a paradise
of typoed tattoos,
young girls dressed
as women, high strung,
& mothers dressed as girls—
the men, shoulders
peeling, suck in
their guts, or wear
shirts underwater, acting
natural. My son
thin among them wading
& grinning, flops
from the high dive
onto his back with a smack.
We curl down the slide
one at a time,
blue light at the end
the color of dusk later

that evening, after reading
at the Brown v. Board site,
when Skoog,
Fox Averill & I
watch our sons
wheeling frisbees
against the dying
of the light.
Fox now an orphan
& Skoog & I
who both lost a parent
a week or two apart—
who, back again in what
once was home,
would drink & mourn
in Topeka’s sole
non-chain bar,
now closed. We’d shut
the place down then too,
whiskey downed & burning
like grief—not picturing
that one day we’d feel
anything, much less anything
else. Yet here
they are, our children—
Fox’s son older,

throwing with a beer
in his hand, mine
loud with a mouth
full of braces, cuts,
& little Oscar
in the pachysandra, foraging
for stray shots.
Winging
dark discs
past our heads like bats
near-blind & swooping—
night a net
now thrown around us—
in dusk
our boys’ bodies grow
as hard to see
as hope.
I think of how
when first invented,
the flying
disc was free
& what cost—
tonight you can
almost feel it—
was the invisible rope.

Phys. Ed.
[ WARM UP ]
Between Language & Health
perched Gym or Phys. Ed.
or whatever they called our removing
what fit & changing into our clashing
school colors. My t-shirt dubbed me
YOUNG, something barkable, one
syllable. Those without uniforms
lost grades or got loans; those
with boners in the showers
got beat up. Edsel, once caught
beating off in a stall, would rub
the backs of his knees with green
deodorant, he said to keep cool—
this, long before we heard how to stop
sweating & smell, lectured in the male art
of antiperspirant while the seventh-grade
girls learned about blood
during third period. That talk
we only got wind of later.

[ TUMBLING ]
Stringer was a rumor,
former Olympic wrestler
now overweight gym teacher
sent down river
to Marjorie French Middle School
for hurtling some poor fool
who told him off in high school
down the stairs. A whole
bloody flight. Once
his ham-sized elbow staked my chest
to demonstrate pain—
a pin—his face a fist.
Floundered high & dry,
glasses-less, I counted rafters
blurry & regular
as the times Stringer yanked out
the tucked shirts of handstood girls
whenever he spotted their legs,
laughing. How often he stared
while they changed—
those girls who tumbled
while we wrestled—

Stringer playing
pocket-pool
& losing, scratching
himself, all eightball,
no cue.

[ DODGEBALL ]
When Mrs. Ostrich blew
the whistle, the whole
high school knew
that meant business—she’d call
us sissies
or girls for running
too slow. Lazy himself, after
teaching Study Hall, Coach Gray
had a cow if we looked at all
tired but put in a soft word,
a good hustle for every
Amy or awkward devil
who couldn’t swing
to save their lives, much less
break a tie. He never
bothered to teach them
a thing. The gym echoed
the tons of times those two
coaches met, hidden among
the Driver’s Ed cars
or the dull
steel-tipped arrows

& half-deflated dodgeballs
that hibernate till spring—
the duo doing
their tug-ohwar thing.

[ BLEACHERS ]
Johnny Henry, no angel, managed
to wrestle one—not the father
who beat him silly, not his mother
who’d split or the seventh grade that could
smell him coming; nor the health teacher
who taught Johnny how to wash & not go
in his pants; nor Coach De Mann who gave him sneakers
for gym, making him wait so everyone knew
the poor white kid was him—but one short
school year later, his chest grown half as wide
as his height, Johnny Henry could lift
more than twice his weight
off the bench press, smear
other kids with some newfound
strength. What could anyone say then,
pinned like a butterfly to the mat? He won
every meet we wrestled, met
each opponent like a seraphim,
many limbed, wiping
the smiles from chubby
cherubs, putting them in a cradle
or ball & chain while we stomped

the stands, chanting
Pin! Pin!—the bleachers
calling again
again his brave
two-fisted name.

[ PRACTICE ]
Each afternoon for hours
our bodies weren’t
our own—we’d have
to run, give Coach
twenty,
then Ready: Wrassle.
Nabus, nicknamed
Tonka cause he was squat
& tough as those toy trucks,
could climb the gym’s ropes
thirty feet using only
his hands. Once
I watched him
about to be pinned, then
stand up with a kid
across his hairless chest
& slam him for the win.
With some whale splayed
on our stomachs,
we’d practice bridges
arcing on our heads
for hours, hoping to build

necks & break
chokeholds like backs.
I still have the letter
jacket, won mostly
by making 98 weight
all fall easy.
Still I’d drink
only spit
for days, swallowing
insults about my family
& skin, the way
teammates would call you spook
then beg you for food
before a meet. On buses
boys practiced becoming adults—
lying about girls,
playing rock, paper,
scissors for pain—then rubbing
the ears of enemies
till they bloomed
into cauliflowers. Whenever
anyone asked
to share, I’d hock
into my sandwiches,
put the halves back
together, then swallow

them slow.

[ CITY ]
In his office, Coach De Mann said
I had it made & could win
City if only I put my mind
where my body was, applied
myself. That season I lifted,
ran stairs, wore three layers
of sweats to slim sleep. All winter
in trash bags I jogged to Russia & back,
dreamt steak, no fat. The drinking
fountain we ran laps past
ringed in launched loogies
stayed unsipped.
On the meet-bound bus
I watched boys spit out pounds
in Kwik cups—heard tell
of magic saunas & miracle,
ten-pound
dumps. One Coach made my friend
drop a whole class, cutting
from 112 to 105 overnight;
Tim bought PMS pills to lose
water, the cashier staring back

at him blank as his Biology
test the next day
when he passed out cold. Watched
another kid shave—rusty razor,
no cream, no mirror—
when some ref deemed
his teenage stubble
a weapon—
in the warped
metal of the paper towel dispenser
his chin bloomed stigmata.
After I told Mom I knew I’d win
she only halfbelieved me, said hope
was good to have. Later I waved
to her from the podium
after winning City, my smile as long
as the shot she’d thought I had.
How I loved
Coach & his belief,
the medal mine. Earning
my letter jacket’s giant T,
I was called to his office, I thought
to shake hands. Instead he asked,
You can dance, right?
Why don’t I moonwalk

for him & the boys?
A ring of fellow coaches grinned.
Stunned, I did not laugh
or dance or do that backwards
glide he wanted—I still haven’t a clue
which race he thought
he’d have me run—my medal
long lost—that sunny morning
right before Life
Science, long after History.

Ice Storm, 1984
The lines for power & speech
freeze, then stiffen & fall—
thrown back into dark
we hear the radio tell the town
what we already know—
last night’s storm iced over
everything, yet hurt only
half Topeka’s houses—wiping
away windows, we see some
homes, doors down, still bright
& inviting as snow. Here our heat
has ended—we have only wood
& whatever warmth
won’t escape
like gossip. Power out,
our freezer starts to thaw—
we keep meat out back in drifts.
USD 501, name like a grade
of beef, cancels—
no Civics, no Language
class, no Western Civilization.
How many mornings

had I stalled, dressing
by the faint radio, praying
the airwaves would list
my school among the saved?
By evening, the thrill of hooky sours
as our house pours
into dark & cold, nothing
like the brief candle-warmth
of brownouts when lightning
would keep us from touching
metal, or each other, for fear
of shock. Dusk starts
here like horror-movie
houses abandoned
& adrift—phone line
cut like an anchor,
the killer in shadow
behind every door. Nothing
lasts—neither food
nor warmth, yet Dad
won’t leave our glacial living
room, stubborn
as the mule we’d ride around
unsaddled down home. He burns
wood while Mom gathers
our things & her son, saying

she’s had enough dark
childhood nights to outlast
a life. Heading blocks
away it feels we cross
a century—tiptoe
through the blackout
across slick, lit ice
to our neighbors’ kind house
full of bright bulbs, running
water. We’ve arrived.
Civilization, Mom laughs.
In their carpeted
basement rec room, I shoot
pinball when the son
lets me play—the coffin talks
if hit with
enough English—
after he flips off the lights
our faces flicker in the pretend night
like the father I picture
by the hearth, fire dying
like laughter. Who knows what
he eats, curled up
mammoth & woolen
with a fifth aged
amber as skin.

Phoneless, we return days later
to find him, unmoved,
shivering, in a quilt
his mother saved scraps for
& sewed. Beside him
the bottle of blended empty
as a promise, as this house
half paid for. An hour later
power returns—bless the company
electric—our heater starting up
its argument with the fridge.
Will take far longer
till the stomach
in the freezer fills up & quits
growling, for men to resurrect
the phone lines, our talk
trapped outside in ice.

History
Pillar of my high school, Mr. W
made class by seven a.m., filling
his blackboards with white, using notes
decades old & denture yellow.
I heard he could write any way
you wanted—backward, forward,
left hand or right, even
mirrored. For him History
was what each night
he erased.
He never missed a day. Snow
days drove the man insane—
——
regular as mail, he said if a letter could reach
the school, so could we, trudging
through bitterest cold to his overwarm room.
Never let kids eat, or talk in class, or take
down just what he wrote on the board—
Listen to what I’m telling you, he’d say,
synthesize, don’t record. Some days he’d launch
into an anecdote about the War or
what’s wrong with kids today—

you’re not moral or immoral, just
amoral. Even his jokes grown older
than he was, the trap door he wished he owned
——
would send kids crashing into spikes
simply for walking during class
without a pass. At breaks he began to bend
to pick up stray trash. He despised the boom
boom boom of the radios black kids wore,
he swore, or tugged his eyes at the corners
to imitate a Chinaman on the rail.
Ah, so. Brilliant is what everyone
dubbed him, but by the time we got there
Mr. W had started to slip,
missing most of the May before—
rumors went round
——
our school had tried stopping
his return—Take the year off,
you earned it—even he
told us that—but here he was,
stonewalling, aged twenty years
over the summer, back like MacArthur
or the Terminator to teach us
all. Some seniors from last year’s class
brought him steel tension balls

that September—tinny things
he clutched in his palm & clanked past
each other like cymbals
——
tolling stress. We
stayed silent. Fifty pounds
shed over the summer, his wrists jutted out
from the frayed cuffs
of his Crayola cardigans.
He’d turn & tune
those chiming spheres like the globe
his classroom never had—
his walls held only Old Glory
& a fading photo of the flag
raised at Iwo Jima. Mr. W let us know
he never got to fight in the War
——
more often as the year wore
away with his sweater’s elbows,
till his yellow shirt shone
through like yolk. That year
the Depression & World
War took all winter
& knowing time was short, his own,
Mr. W spent nights transcribing
to transparencies words

water could wipe away,
numbering each palimpsest to match
his crumbling notes. Just in case,
——
he’d say, above the overhead
projector’s buzz—you could manage
without me. He never
could forget a past
only we would remember—
his teacher telling him at graduation
You know you’re only seventeen
& who knows how long this Pacific
Theater might last—They have this new
GI Bill. Get some college first,
Wayne, his name all alliteration,
a tone poem. How
——
could he know
we’d drop the bomb
& end it all? He tried serving
later, even went
to enlist in Korea but was foiled
by a bad back & luck. I tried,
he’d plead the air. How to soothe
a man who woke his whole life
at five & could silence kids

not his own? Who once
drove 45 on the highway he told us
cause Nixon asked
——
his fellow Americans to, counting
each unpatriotic car that passed him
along the way? Like history he saved
& scored the immeasurable—
with years-worth of sick days
hoarded & never spent, illness
came to fetch him
from the only other home he knew.
Wearing black now, pointing out
where other kids once sat long before
we were born—future
governors, a crook or two—
——
each chair a ghost. You’re my kids,
he’d tell us, we built or broke
his heart. Next day
he was gone. We never did make it
to Vietnam—rest
of the year in silence we took down
the words he’d written
projected on the wall
like any man’s promises to himself.

The latter half of the twentieth century
felt a bit too cold, winter
lingered too long—Mr. W’s words,
——
unchanged, awaited
us coloreds & women libbers
half-hoping for him
to return—for the world not to be
as cruel as we’d learned.
We spent the Sixties
minus Malcolm X, or Watts,
barely a March on Washington—
all April & much
of May we waited for Woodstock
& answers & assassinations
that would never come
——
among the steady hum
& faint bright
of flickering fluorescent lights.

Dictation
for William O’Neil,
FBI Informant
Teach yourself to swim. Borrowing a car
for a day, joyride eight leagues across
state lines. Catch yourself the moment
before the pigs catch you, hands white
on the wheel. You have the right to remain
etcetera. Officer Le Fervour from the Fraternal
Order of Police will slap you on the wrists,
convince you to join the Panthers. You will
learn to remember your meals, record
conversations, how to write backwards
in the dark. Monitor all nefarious
activity, the Breakfast for Children Program,
the grits, the jelly. Relax and your body will
float naturally. After you become Minister
of Security, Special Agent M will contact you
intermittently to obtain the locations of weapons
and boxes of cereal. All milk shall be burned
in due time. Give your brother sleeping
pills drowned in water so he won’t hear
our fire; after his file closes you’ll see plans

of the headquarterslashbedrooms we drew
from your eyes. You never even raised
a fist. Take your two hundred bones
for years of uniquely rendered service
and keep treading, remembering to breathe.

Booty Green
From the outside he’s a killer
& we know it.
We’ve tried hemming Chris inside,
below the key—
started off playing HORSE
then quickly switched
to BULLSHIT soon as parents
headed on indoors—
come dusk, we begin
telling lies
about length & behindthe-back shots,
about how sweet
our selves are. We’ve given up
the simon says of Around the World
——
for Booty Green, a game
like 21, only meaner—
blacker, jack.
The rules: are none.
The rules: no fouls
called, no traveling,

no out-of-bounds. Just play,
boy, all elbows & ass
whuppins, fatal angles.
Amri—his name
a lion—barrels down
the lane like a shotgun
bride. Rejected.
Yo mama.
Troy hanging from the rim
——
like a suicide, saving
himself. The shortest,
I let them fight it out
in the paint, preying
on rebounds—believe it
or not—learning to toss up
hooks along the side, their arc
high, sly as a covenant. Mo Fo
of the Sacred Swish, her
holiness. And so
it came to pass—
but we keep it, head instead
for the bucket
as if an endzone, gaining air
like the black balcony
——

of the movie theater, talking
back to the screens
we each post. The ball
popcorn to toss.
Brick. Chump,
I thot you knew.
The Easter we’ve just eaten—
we angel against
each other till borne
by air, gaining ground
on God. Between the garage
& someone’s mama’s
car—Watch the paint,
nigger—we soar
& psych & sing.
——
Here, to stuff
don’t mean your mouth or the Resurrection
bird now splayed
open indoors, but grabbing the rim
like a grenade pin. Not
that I’d know. Fingers round
the hoop, an eye
jabbed soft in its socket—
my glasses fly, a bird

almost extinct. No apology—
cowboying, we pick up
& go again, pound the pavement
to pidgin, palming the ball
the way Chris would grab
smaller boys’ foreheads—
——
Crystal ball, tell me all—
his hands reading fortunes
we pretend we’ll make.
Out here we charge, trying
to father ourselves—
our dads inside, wise,
where it’s still warm.
We laugh at the way
Chris, like the god he thought
he was, took a new last name—
Fontaine—trying to pull down
babes on the rebound. Don’t
know how with that
jheri curl juice. But today, fool,
all our heads are clean
——
as dinner-table talk, as a broke dick
dog. Our dads asleep
in front of the game

or divorced, having dinner
with new families—or alone—
while over dirty dishes
our mothers laugh.
Here on this angly, angry
asphalt, no matter what
the songs say, love or faith
don’t make the grade—
one manchild against the rest,
we dog each other out
so later we can take shots
from the outside
——
where Chris breaks free,
prodigal, almost to the lawn—
his jumper murder. Every sunk
shot sends him to the line,
the rest of us panting
& bent & catching
breath. If he misses
it’s sudden death
& we’re all hoping
to reach 21. Last requests?
he says bouncing
that ball bald

as a granny, or a baby,
two things
we’re trying to prove
——
we’re not. No way,
we holler. Up again
for the rebound, savior
that never comes—the ball falling
like a guillotine, or the pumpkin
the executioner tests it on,
falling like the dark
we barely notice has grown up
around us—the gruff
voice of a father
summoning us inside
to dine on humble pie & crow
before it grows cold.

Brown
for my mother
The scrolled brown arms
of the church pews curve
like a bone—their backs
bend us upright, standing
as the choir enters
singing, We’ve come this far
by faith—the steps
& sway of maroon robes,
hands clapping like a heart
in its chest—leaning
on the Lord—
this morning’s program
still warm
from the mimeo machine
quick becomes a fan.
In the vestibule latecomers
wait just outside
the music—the river
we crossed
to get here—
wide boulevards now

——

in disrepair.
We’re watched over
in the antechamber
by Rev.
Oliver Brown,
his small, colored picture
nailed slanted
to the wall—former
pastor of St. Mark’s
who marched
into that principal’s office
in Topeka to ask
Why can’t my daughter
school here, just
steps from our house—
but well knew the answer—
& Little Linda
became an idea, became more
what we needed & not
a girl no more—Free-dom
Free-dom—
——

Now meant
sit-ins & I shall I shall
I shall not be
moved—
& four little girls bombed
into tomorrow
in a church basement like ours
where nursing mothers & children
not ready to sit still
learned to walk—Sunday school
sent into pieces
& our arms.
We are
swaying more
now, entering
heaven’s rolls—the second row
behind the widows
in their feathery hats
& empty nests, heads heavy
but not hearts
Amen. The all-white
——

stretchy, scratchy dresses
of the missionaries—
the hatless holy who pin lace
to their hair—bowing
down into pocketbooks
opened for the Lord, then
snapped shut
like a child’s mouth
mouthing off, which just
one glare from an elder
could close.
God’s eyes must be
like these—aimed
at the back row
where boys pass jokes
& glances, where Great
Aunts keep watch,
their hair shiny
as our shoes
&, as of yesterday,
just as new—
——

chemical curls & lopsided wigs—humming
during offering
Oh my Lord
Oh my Lordy
What can I do.
The pews curve like ribs
broken, barely healed,
& we can feel
ourselves breathe—
while Mrs. Linda Brown
Thompson, married now, hymns
piano behind her solo—
No finer noise
than this—
We sing
along, or behind,
mouth most
every word—following
her grown, glory voice,
the black notes
——

rising like we do—
like Deacon
Coleman whom my mother
always called Mister—
who’d help her
weekends & last
I saw him my mother
offered him
a slice of sweet potato
pie as payment—
or was it apple—
he’d take no money
barely said
yes, only
I could stay
for a piece—
trim as his grey
moustache, he ate
with what I can only
call dignity—
fork gently placed
——

across his emptied plate.
Afterwards, full,
Mr. Coleman’s That’s nice
meant wonder, meant
the world entire.
Within a year cancer
had eaten him away—
the only hint of it
this bitter taste for a whole
year in his mouth. The resurrection
and the light.
For now he’s still
standing down front, waiting
at the altar for anyone
to accept the Lord, rise
& he’ll meet you halfway
& help you down
the aisle—
legs grown weak—
As it was in the beginning
Is now
——

And ever shall be—
All this tuning
& tithing. We offer
our voices up
toward the windows
whose glass I knew
as colored, not stained—
our backs
made upright not by
the pews alone—
the brown
wood smooth, scrolled
arms grown
warm with wear—
& prayer—
Tell your neighbor
next to you
you love them—till
we exit
into the brightness
beyond the doors.

FIELD RECORDINGS

Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here together to get
through this thing called life.
—PRINCE

THREE

Night Train

James Brown at B. B. King’s on New Year’s Eve
The one thing that can solve most
our problems is dancing. And sweat,
cold or not. And burnt ends
of ribs, or reason, of hair
singed & singing. The hot comb’s
caress. Days after
he dies, I see James Brown still
scheduled to play B. B. King’s
come New Year’s Eve—ringing
it in, us, falling to the floor
like the famous glittering midnight
ball drop, countdown, forehead full
of sweat, please, please,
please, please, begging
on his knees. The night
King was killed, shot
by the Memphis moan in a town
where B. B. King sang, Saint
James in Boston tells
the crowd: cool it. A riot
onstage, heartache
rehearsed, practiced, don’t dare
be late or miss a note
or you’ll find yourself fined
fifty bucks. A fortune. Even
the walls sweat. A Godfather’s confirmation suit,

his holler, wide-collared, grits
& greens. Encore. Exhausted
after, collapsed, carried
out, away, off—not on a gurney,
no bedsheet over
his bouffant, conk
shining, but, boots on,
in a cape glittering bright
as midnight, or its train.

Fishbone
[ CHUCK TAYLOR ALL STARS ]
I found your first
record yesterday—
it looked like the past
& sounded
like the future—
that combo platter I love best
of all. The black grooves gave
way to moans
of horns, yelps,
bass that leapt
like you did
on the cover—bald,
mohawked, knotted
& dreaded, bespoke
& be-hatted, daytime shades
& handkerchiefs
like a bank robber—
plaits & plaids on tweed
like gangster professors.
One of you grins,

most the rest
in mid-air soar.

[ CHECKERBOARD VANS ]
The apocalypse sounds
like this—
black men breaking in
to steal back the thing
once stole
from them. A drum
trash talking, trombone
tossed from off
stage into Angelo’s hands
less slid than shoved—
swift notes
swim past—then he throws
the horn back
like a salmon
into the wings, careless,
rehearsed. After Murphy’s Law
& the Beastie
Boys open the show
even Fishbone’s keyboard
player dervishes,
his body flung
like an epithet

into the fourth row’s
wishbone arms.

[ CREEPERS ]
Declaring nothing,
we’d cross customs,
dreads tucked
under our hats—
once inside
Spain or Paris, London
or some club, we’d let
loose & dance.
Give me the cheapest
thing they have,
says Davíd
so I bring him bitters
which even the bartender
declares undrinkable.
Davíd refuses
to say so, tries choking
down the pint
like pride. We never ate anyway
sitting down, Davíd always
looking for a cheaper
bite elsewhere, our stomachs
knotting & our hair. Eyes

mostly open,
Philippe & I drank & swam
through the dark waters
of Camdentown, high
on spliff & curry
our new friends cooked.
We black folks
invented all music
say our AustralianPakistani-British
friends. Everything then
shone in the blacklight—
our teeth
turnt violet.
We drank at the End
of the World,
pints three quid
& bitters far less—
would catch a taxi home
with those suicide
doors, watching the dawn
leak early above the low,
unopened buildings—
facing backwards
in the cab black
& shiny as a hearse, staring

at the wherever
we’d been, we slid
at every turn.

[ DOC MARTENS ]
Once I saved the bass
player from Fishbone
from getting his ass
handed to him, but not
before the fools bloodied
his lip & turnt
his pockets inside out
like a wish. All because,
Kendall, you refused
to rumble in that late night
chicken joint
where Philippe & I thought we’d die
as the regulars tried
picking a fight
with your bright
red coat, dreads
against your shoulder blades
like epaulets. The club we’d all been
now shut for the night—
the one Philippe & I had waited
outside of an hour, trying not
to beg. No one’s getting in—

then a posse with locks
longer than us & worse haircuts,
which is to say, cooler,
part the ropes—
Fishbone!
in London to play a show
so we sneak in
behind them, for tonight
just another
of the crew.
Every dread danced.
Starving, after, we enter the shack
to find you taunted
by locals, loudmouths
who nick your change
& call you names.
Yankee, one says, shoving you
who refuses, you say,
to battle another man
who’s black. Once his crew
jumps you & runs through
the street, we reel you in,
Kendall, stop you from chasing them
into the night, insulted
as much as anything
to be alive—Back home, South

Central, you say, I’d be dead.
Your breath itself
a rebuke, passport
a passing memory.
In the cab we hail
& pay to ride you
back to your hotel, pacifism
gives way—
wounded not just
by the blows, you fume—
angry at being
here but no longer
whole. In the lobby,
we take your manager’s
payback & his promise
to leave us passes
for tomorrow’s show.
Was it shame,
honor, or disbelief,
didn’t
let us go?

[ JOHN FLUEVOGS ]
Months later I caught Fishbone
in New York at a church
turned into a night club
trying to film the video
for a song I still
don’t know. The one
we’d saved now gone,
decamped across Europe
believing in something
no longer. Neither
did you all, it seemed—
the gleam gone, everything
upright, no diving—
nothing cockamamie
or incomplete. We clap
on cue. Lip sunk, you must
repeat the song over
& over so the shifting camera
can capture you. Where had all
the altars gone?
Even my girlfriend an ex.
Even my memory like the mic

sounds faulty.
Feedback fills the air
& we exit early, back
to our little boxes
before the song is done—
come morning,
our ears will still
like church bells toll.

Lead Belly’s First Grave
is grey, plain, lowdown.
You have to crouch
near the ground to get
your picture made
beside it like Allen Ginsberg
& Robert Plant did, pilgrims
to where the music gave way
or starts. The stone’s
simple dates—birth, death—
shade the close-cropped grass
& the small pale flowers
someone plucked & offered up
or planted here beneath
a tree. The stone, silvery,
could be lead instead—
soft & heavy as his voice
& as deadly, slow.
His new tomb’s
tall almost
as a man—black,
sleek, costly.
Alongside it James Dickey

grins, elbow resting
on the stone like the shoulder
of a friend. The marker’s not
inelegant, the sepulcher
not quite the sheen
of the suits Lead Belly wore
soon as he threw off
the chains of the gang
for good, string-ties
& not the prison stripes
Alan Lomax would have him wear.
Huddie Ledbetter’s
second grave lists
his legend, has this
slab with a guitar engraved
& a black gate
to keep out the green—
hard to reach, easy
to read, there’s now
no need to kneel.

It
It’s rained for days.
He used to hate
hanging upside
down, now he can’t
get enough,
my son. At the bank
of elevators he bets
which one will arrive first
& is most times
right. He’s nine. Tonight
another neighbor
& good friend
called him nigger. I hear
the boys were all playing
a game called Lovie—
the point
is to call the It
names—bitch,
motherfucker, ass, they say,
& now nigger, who only he
dare not be.
The good thing

about this rain is that
his hair curls
even more & looks lush
& untamed. The bad
thing: this rain,
the wrong elevator
dinging down.

Ode to Big Pun
I’m not a prayer
I just wish a lot

De La Soul Is Dead
A ROLLER SKATING JAM NAMED SATURDAYS

We were black then, not yet
African American, so we danced
every chance we could get.
Thursday & Saturdays we’d chant
The roof! The roof! The roof
is on fire! We don’t need no water
& folks’ perms began to turn.
We had begun to dread
or wear locks anyway, our temples
we’d fade. We said word
& def, said dang & down & fly—
we gave no goodbyes,
just Alright then, or Bet.
No one was dead yet.

PEOPLE WHO DIED [ JIM CARROLL BAND ]

No one was dead yet.
Not that some didn’t try.
Often, friends of mine—
These are people who died
died—weekends drank too much
then broke into the pool & swam
though I was barely good at that.
The bottom I never did touch.
Home, almost dried, we’d listen
for the dawn, or to Mista Dobalina,
Mista Bob Dobalina—gloryhallastupid—
doused in eyeliner or lycra
& that was just the boys.
Our favorite song was noise.

JUNGLE BOOGIE [ 24-7 SPYZ ]

Our favorite song was noise.
Or Public Enemy turned up
past 10, a hype we’d not believe.
To get hype was the point—
to light out as sexy Star Trek
or as Scooby & his snacks, to chant
Black Music—Black Music—
& drop down as low as we can.
Fight the Power. Fuck
tha police. Break the grip of shame.
We’re 24-7 Spyz—who the fuck
are you. Tomorrow in flames,
we’ll rouse & march—tonight, play
Jungle Boogie, hoping someone will stay.

IF I WAS YOUR GIRLFRIEND

Hoping that someone would stay,
we readied tape decks & dubs
that flipped over to play
all night, like love—
that word we didn’t dare speak.
Why else did they invent drink?
except to excuse each mistake,
each deep kiss or steady rut
who, for days after, you’d duck.
Fire alarms were how we knew
who was zooming who. Or whom.
Morning’s for sleep; late night we’d talk;
dinner was for getting dressed at last,
anything, so long as it’s black.

EVERYBODY [ BLACK BOX ]

As long as it is black,
the record cut
like a dj track—
those 12-inches we spin
then quit dancing only
to re-arm again. Everybody,
Everybody, Everybody,
Everybody, O Everybody—
this was back when
we were almost African
American & black was just
who you were
not what you did. Or who.
And the night was black too.

THE SCENARIO

The two of us, black, met one night
dancing alongside each other to Tribe
at a party in the world’s smallest room.
Someone from Carolina brought moonshine & over the beat, the clanking heat,
Philippe leaned over his date
to say, Hey man, we should be friends.
What you know yo. And that
was that. Popping the caps off brown
Red Stripe bottles with his teeth
he’d drink out the side of his mouth,
sly. We heads kept ours dreaded, crowned—
a decade later he was gone.
The Scenario, our favorite of 500 songs.

FUNKIN’ LESSON

The Scenario. They Want EFX.
Fu-Schnickens. PRT. X-Clan.
The humpty dance
is your chance. The Funky Diabetic
Five-Footer rapping, I like em brown
yellow Puerto Rican & Haitian—
& Brazilian & Jamaican
& Maori & half-Nigerian
& Cablinasian & Perusian—
we can get down we can
we can get down. Queen
Latifah’s Law. Electric Relaxation.
Buddy buddy. 93 ’Til Infinity.
Vainglorious. Passing me by.

WHEN YOU WERE MINE

Nothing passed us by. Baby,
you’re much too fast. In 1990
we had us an early 80s party—
nostalgic already,
I dug out my best
OPs & two polos, fluorescent,
worn simultaneously—
collar up, pretend preppy.
When Blondie came on—
Rapture, be pure—
things really got going & then
the dancing got shut down
by some square.
What was sleep even for?

HOUSEQUAKE

What was sleep even for?
The year before, a freshman, I threw
a Prince party, re-screwed
the lights red & blue—
the room all purple, people
dancing everywhere—clicked
PLAY on the cassette till
we slow-sweated to Erotic
City, or Do Me Baby. I’m going down
to Alphabet Street. Did anyone
sleep alone that night? I Feel
For You. Shut up already, damn—
cabbage patch, reverse running man—
get some life wherever you can.

POTHOLES IN MY LAWN

This life. I confess we did look
somewhat alike, Kenny & I—
baby dreads, tortoiseshells, tight fade—
though that night his giant white roommate
drunk on 8 Ball in the pool room
called out Kenny, Kenny, even when
I said I’m not him & he began
cursing me out—Quit pretending—
that was too much. Dopplegangers,
unblood brothers, we should have done
more with it—dressed as the other
for Halloween, chanced
an evil twin movie. No dice.
Instead we danced, side by side.

THREE IS THE MAGIC NUMBER

Twins to the rhythm, we danced,
as one does—to the remix of Three
Is the Magic Number—at a house party
someone threw just because.
We were black then, about to be
African American, so folks schoolhouse rocked
& smurfed whenever we damn well pleased.
We should have done more, or believed,
mon frère, mine own body double—
given the campus cops the slip
whenever they quizzed or frisked us
for studying while black. Kenny,
I hope you’re somewhere
far from here, dancing away trouble.

RING THE ALARM [ DUB MIX ]

Far from here, dancing away troubles,
Philippe & I nod & bob & start
to skank in the underground club
in London, the dub
so loud across the gigantic room
we feel it in our lungs.
We were never young.
Even then in the bass & boom—
the DJ’s fits & starts, the woofer’s glottal
guttural gasp, our ganja-throated rasp—
we were old, though not enough
to know. That time he sat silent for hours
in the corner, high on soul flower? You’re
messing up my plan, all he could say, after.

SOUL FLOWER [ BRAND NEW HEAVIES ]

Afterwards, what can I say, unplanned,
a decade later, he was dead. Forget friends;
brothers. Forget it all except how
the sun is coming up now
between the buildings—
is it night, or morning—
dawn coming on, we hated
leaving any party early. I hate
having to write what
can never capture how thin
everything was then—
the beer, or warm cider,
or us—yet strong enough, son,
to get the job done.

I NEED LOVE

I get the job done, baby,
I work. Nobody
can rap quite like
I can. I’ll take
you there. Ain’t no
half steppin. Ain’t nobody. Ain’t too proud
to beg. Ain’t no
mountain high enough.
It’s only mountains.
And the sea. See
what you done done?
I’m so tired of being alone.
I wonder if I take you home.

FAST CAR [ TRACY CHAPMAN ]

Taking her home those weeks
of winter break, dorm snowed in, no one
around but us, I’d ask
her, late, to sing to me alone.
Here in Subcity, life is hard—
naked behind her guitar
she’d do her best Tracy Chapman,
twin bed her smallest stage. Please give
the President my honest regards. We’d fall
asleep in her room—bedframe
narrow as a grave—but not quite
in love. Our huddled nights
wouldn’t survive the thaw,
snow gone too soon, & far.

U GOT THE LOOK

Gone too soon, there was that season
when all the ladies’ bras
bloomed suddenly fancy because
by midnight we knew everyone
would be shirtless, one
giant groove, swaying along
to Gett Off, or Funky Drummer
(Parts 1 & 2), or Sexy M.F.—
all innocent somehow, beauty
on the installment plan.
At least till the horns swoop in.
This ain’t about the body
it’s about the mind.
Yours, or mine?

WHEN DOVES CRY

Yours or mine? From this
great a distance
I cannot tell which Prince
records are my father’s
& which I bought alone. Pop hated Prince
at first, said he couldn’t sing, nor dance.
(Then again, neither could he.) Once
Purple Rain dropped, I flew home from France
& he asked, Have you heard this?
The spool of the car’s tape deck
& it’s the chorus: This is
what it sounds like. Sneaky devil,
maybe I’m just like my father,
my mother silent in the car.

I WOULD DIE 4 U

My mother silent all the way
home, not knowing what to say
or sing. Me, mugged in Paris two days
before & then, Easter Sunday,
a knife pulled on us
high schoolers from Kansas
on the metro to Notre Dame, always
mispronounced. How I prayed
the entire ride, saw the madman’s
pockets blooming blades. Take Me
With U. After, at madrigals the psalms
barely came. My folks’ marriage
even my father’s newfound love
of Prince couldn’t save.

LITTLE WING

Save us. So late & still
our sophomore roommate
has decided to pull
out his guitar, plug in & play
Little Wing, just the first bars,
over & over, take anything
you want from me, till we only
want him to finish, to get, for once,
to the end. Years later,
he’ll kill himself—I still don’t
know how, much less fathom
why. Carey Monserrate,
last name a mountain,
play for us again.

ALL THAT I GOT IS YOU [ RADIO EDIT ]

Play it again: soon all will be gone, the places
I’ve known; Elsie’s, The Tasty, Tommy’s Lunch
replaced by lobster & prix fixe brunch.
The cobbler one day disappears like the very
word cobbler. My dry cleanser now does shoe repair.
One Potato Two Potato. That druggist I never
went to. Slowly every bookstore shut down
or moved—Star, McIntyre & Moore—
put out like lights. After 180 Years We’re Closing
Our Doors. Even the Wursthaus—its food
earning its name—I miss avoiding, proving
yourself no more a tourist. If lucky we leave
not just a place but a name. Soon, all gone:
Tommy’s, The Tasty, Elsie’s, me.

BUNGLE IN THE JUNGLE

Me, Thomas, & everyone
crammed into his room bright
as a club at closing for the Bungle
in the Jungle, that party whose goal
was to get as naked as possible
without going the whole way. I came,
not literally, in silkish green paisley
boxers, little else. Shoes, maybe.
Once we blew the bass
blasting Respect or Groove
Is in the Heart, Thomas shouts
To the pool! & the parade
heads thataway, a hundred Adams
& Eves splashing, making waves.

FISHERMAN’S BLUES [ THE WATERBOYS ]

Making waves, I was just plugging in
a boombox when the counselor
came & screamed Kevin—
get these people out of here. Later
the pool sprung an unlikely leak,
got closed for good & ill & us.
Later still I’d climb down with Seamus—
no shallows—to watch a different play
with my roommate far more nude
confessing in Act Two, a-swim in a giant suit,
than the first when he was mad Sweeney
cursed naked & muddy in a tree.
Nice allegory, offered Heaney. Far was fate
it felt; how could we know how late?

THE LAST DAY OF OUR ACQUAINTANCE

How late it would get.
Every party
was an after-party.
Some nights we’d even let
ourselves forget that dawn
would soon come. I do not want
what I haven’t got. Mostly it did.
Sometimes the morn was met
less alone, her beauty & scent,
her buzzed head numbing your arm.
Once you start, how can you quit
all this remembering? We make
love like memories, if lucky
& not too late.

THE CHOICE IS YOURS

Too late. The silence, ours,
now sounds like the second
when the music stops—
not for good, but for a breath
or two, engine engine
number nine on the New York
transit line, if my train
jumps off the track—
& now we’re back up.
O how high we jump.
Reaching for the sky
hurricane-purple & a night
mostly black, dark blue, red.
Nobody, nobody, was dead. Yet—

Ode to Ol Dirty Bastard
F you. Motor
mouth, clown
of class warfare,
welfare millionaire—
how dare you disappear
when we need your
shimmy shimmy ya
here. Osirus
of this shiznit, your body’s
now scattered
on wax. No monument,
no fortune left—
just what you made
& spent, I hope, on skunk
weed & worse. Good
morning heartache.
Your carelessness
reminds us how
quick we are
to judge, how
serious things
done become. Dirty

as the south, sweet
as neon cherry pie
filling from a can.
I hear folks still call
your number in Brooklyn
all hours
& ask the sleepy, still
listed Russell Jones
(no relation)
come out & play.
Baby, I got
your money.
Big Baby Jesus, Dirt
McGirt, alias-addict—
of course you can’t
be reached—
you’re too busy, Rusty,
wigging out, dancing
in a humpsuit & jheri curl
toupee, your tiny,
tacky dreads
hidden, your grill
of gold melted
down to pay off
St. Pete, or Beezlebub,
to buy just one more

dose of freedom.

FOUR

The Crescent Limited

B. B. King Plays Oxford, Mississippi
A poetry where Saturday night
meets Sunday morning,
a midnight music,
a crossroads sound—
coming home from the juke
& heading right to church
for sunrise service
& maybe catch a bit
of that communion wine.
Butterbeans.
You know I’m from Mississippi
I do carry a knife.
Everybody wants to go to heaven
but nobody wants to die
to get there.
Time to go
a little further
up the alley—
I got a good mind
to give up living
& go shopping instead
to pick out a tombstone

& be
pronounced dead.

Bass
Where was the music from?
The bass that woke my son
sleeping in his room, mom
out of town,
so alone
I’d sung him home.
He was just about down
when the beat began
faraway, filling our noses
& chests like morning
coffee, which I don’t take any
kind of way—though black
is what you can say
when they ask
& they will. Brown boy,
head back & dream.
An hour later his busy brain
stirs him again,
descending the steep
stairs to ask to sleep
beside me on the couch,
cat-curled, quieted

at last. I rise
& search the windows to see
if I might spot the sound—
still going, louder now,
its thin thunder
reaching me, everywhere,
even here.

Triptych for Trayvon Martin
NOT GUILTY [ A FRIEZE FOR SANDRA BLAND ]
Because the night has no
number, because
the thunder doesn’t
mean rain
Because maybe
Because we must
say your names
& the list grows
longer & more
endless
I am writing this:
you are no gun
nor holster, no
finger aimed, thumb
a hammer cocked
back, all the way—
I refuse
to bury you, to inter
your name in earth
or to burn you back

to bone, to what
we all know, the soft
song of your skull
as an infant, the place
God or your mother
or same thing
left untouched
by hands—
that halo grown whole
till they said you weren’t—
said that Death
could be your breath—
could be a body
or less—& you
grew more black
& blue.
I refuse
to watch. I refuse.
Not guilty. Not
guilty. I know you
will stay & rise
like the sea—
the tide
all salt & shifting.
Don’t ever leave.

LIMBO [ A FRESCO FOR TAMIR RICE ]

Skeleton-still,
we stood. Those
before us who
Believed, arrayed
like statues, trophies
of the child killed
We couldn’t bear
to dust
or box away.
The dark arch
to the lost teen’s
bedroom, jersey
Now empty, baseball team
down a man—
out with an injury.
Wild pitch. Passed ball.
Technical knockout.
Technical foul.
Flagrant two. The flagration
of the car turned over
he lay dead beside
A good while.
Dark dye

seeping into the street.
No pop flies. No catch—
player to be
named later—
No sheet we’ll provide—
Just the blue-tail fly
doornailed, hungry,
Fit to die.

NIGHTSTICK [ A MURAL FOR MICHAEL BROWN ]

There are gods
of fertility,
corn, childbirth,
& police
brutality—this last
is offered praise
& sacrifice
near weekly
& still cannot
be sated—many-limbed,
thin-skinned,
its colors are blue
& black, a crosshatch of bruise
& bulletholes
punched out
like my son’s
three-hole notebooks—
pages torn
like lungs, excised
or autopsied, splayed
open on a cold table
or left in the street

for hours to stew.
A finger
is a gun—
a wallet
is a gun, skin
a shiny pistol,
a demon, a barrel
already ready—
hands up
don’t shoot—
arms
not to bear
but bare. Don’t
dare take
a left
into the wrong
skin. Death
is not dark
but a red siren
who will not blow
breath into your open
mouth, arrested
like a heart. Because
I can see
I believe in you, god

of police brutality—
of corn liquor
& late fertility, of birth
pain & blood
like the sun setting,
dispersing its giant
crowd of light.

A Brown Atlanta Boy Watches Basketball on West
4th. Meanwhile, Neo-Nazis March on
Charlottesville, Virginia.
Here the pain
mostly goes away.
A stinger someone tries
walking off, his face a mask.
He’s giving you
the ball Jay,
he’s giving you the ball—
Gary with the attack—
Thaddeus is having
the game of his life,
the MC says. Old men
watch in their grey mustaches
mouthing salt peanuts—
or toothpicks,
or day-old gum—
chewing the fat.
You see that?
He needs to just put
that back up.
The uniforms black

& blue as a bruise.
Must ignore the need
cuz we the news—
here every call
is wrong, all
fouls technical—
even here black
means guest, not home.
Forget about the refs,
they already told us
shut up. It’s us
against them
Let’s go.

Howlin’ Wolf
In Parchman
Prison
in stripes
standing
guitar gripped like a neck
strangled
strummed
high strung & hard.
Mostly you moan
see how heavy
your hands hang without women orwords
we cannot
quite know. How is this
not hell
being made
to make music here where
music only
makes time
go slow cloudy
like blue
Depression glass? Under
the hard sun of your smile
we see stripes like those
that once lined the slave’s
unbent back
blood
& gunk
spit it out
a song low down
gutbucket
built for comfort
not built for speed.

Gimme the brack
of the body the blue
the bile all
you sing or howl.
If a wolf then lone
then orphan then hangry
enough to enter into town
to take food from the mouths
of low houses a hen
a stray it is never
enough. You don’t need
tell me why
we here you know
better black
as an exclamation point
the men all around
you in stripes
how long their sentences
their dark faces ellipses
everywhere accidental.
The white man
in front proud
or is it prideful
he wears no number
& now exiled under
the earth no one
recalls his name.
Yours a dark wick
waiting we burn
wanting you to step
into song
to again howl

till you sweat through
your shirt & two
white handkerchiefs
a revival
preacher waving
praise no flag
of surrender—
the guitar a blunt
instrument your hair
your shoes even your
voice shines.

Repast
an oratorio in honor of Mister Booker Wright of Greenwood,
Mississippi
BARKEEP ACTIVIST WAITER

[ HOSPITALITY BLUES ]
Welcome. Have a seat—
the audience sits.
I insist. I’m your host.
Your money is no
good here, no good
here no good
no good
no good.
Your money is no good.
Here. Your money
is no god here no—Glad
to see you all. We don’t
have a written menu
I’ll be glad to tell you
what we’re going to serve
tonight tonight tonight
Uptempo:
We have fresh shrimp
cocktails Lusco shrimp
fresh oysters on the half shell
baked oysters oysters
Rockefeller oysters almondine
stewed oysters fried oysters
Spanish mackerel broil whetstone
sirloin steak club steak T-bone
steak porterhouse steak ribeye
steak Lusco special steak mushrooms

flavor of garlic Italian spaghetti
& meatballs softshell crab
French fried onions golden
brown donut style
Best food in the world
the world the world
the world is served at Lusco’s
He nods & rocks
Tell my people what you got.

[ THE HEAD WAITER’S LAMENT ]
The hardest thing is knowing
when you’re free. Easy
to see when you’re not—
when the wind don’t
make a dent in how the fig
falls from the tree, or your
mouth never fed enough—
or your children, how much
to tell them? The meaner
the man be, the more
you smile.
When do you talk
about it, the men—
never one—who come
for you, burning
& cutting & crossing—
even a pistol
can be made a whip—
just for you saying

what’s true. Not
what you’re taught.
That’s a good nigger.
That’s my
nigger. Brush your
taut dark hair.

[ RESERVATIONS ]
Some call me Booker,
some call me John, some
call me Jim, some call me—
This is my place
I say, meaning where
I work but more
the green bar I tend
& keep, the mouths I feed
not only my children, who I want better for
than me—the slenderest
tall trees. The willows
who weep. What should
my place be? It is loudest
here after the black descends,
gathers in the Mississippi
leaves, first green then
dark like me—my first
name’s Mack but nobody
calls me that. I’m named

for a man who made
his name at Tuskegee
which ain’t that
far from here
I hear.

[ BOOKER’S PLACE ]
It’s the haze that hurts.
Sometimes far worse
than when the sun
spits its rays
all over your face—
them days you brown
& redden, the work
can be like
to kill you—
so a man need
a place to go inside
his head & walk around
& rest. There’s a juke
joint of the soul, somewhere
you can have yourself
something cold, or brown
burning water—we used
to get ice in fresh, cut
from giant blocks,
sawdust, clean glasses
& good good food. I kept
the bar sparkling, shiny

as the teeth of the couples
on calendars behind me
staring into each other’s eyes.
Budweiser in cans, Nehi,
Drink Coca-Cola
Bottled up. This was my place—
a green room, a somewhere
you could twist, maybe spin
a partner on the dance floor
or just set a spell
& tap your foot, mine,
taking it all in.
We never let anyone
carry on too long
& made sure they carried
themselves home safe
beside the tracks
that also kept
their crosses, clanging—
that train red,
an eye,
then blue, bearing
down on you.

[ WAITING ]
So this is what I said:
Now that’s what my customers—
I say my customers—
be expecting of me. Booker,
Tell my people what you got.
Some people nice,
some people not.
What’s wrong with you
why you not smiling?
Go over & get me
so & so and so & so.
And I keep that smile.
Always learn to smile
Although you’re crying
on the inside.
Sometime he’ll tip you
Sometime he’ll say,
I’m not going to tip
that nigger, he don’t look
for no tip. Yessir,

thank you.
What’d you say?
Yes sir, boss,
I’m your nigger.
But remember
you got to keep that smile.
Night after night
I lay down & I dream
about what I had
to go through with.
That’s what I’m struggling for.
I’m trying to make
a living.
For this they whipped
me good, but not dead.

[ DEATH’S DICTIONARY ]
A shack made of ribs.
A house made of out.
A car made of rust.
A smile made of doubt.
A house made of fire.
A magician’s gesture.
Of cards. Of the Lord.
As preacher, pats his brow.
A joint made of juke.
A twist. A night away.
A wood made of green.
Of blood.
The kerchief now a bandage.
A place in the sun.
A house made of railroad.
A shack of shotgun.

[ A GLOSSARY OF UPPITY ]
For please, please read
forget you.
For sun,
read none.
For love, read
money.
For money, read.
For smile, read
Bless Your Heart.
For uppity
read siddity.
For siddity
read dicty.
For dicty, hincty.
For pleasure.
For unknowing.
For forgetting
read mystery.
For smile
read speak.

For hush
read shush
read shut up
read don’t
you dare.
For dare, read sure.
For speak up
read speak out.
For the future
say now.
For my children.
For ever.
Thy trumpet
tongue.
Thy work
never done.
For Thee—
read We.

[ PINING, A Definition ]

Look like last night
the light hardly wanted
to leave—it hung
round in the pines
for what seemed hours
after the sun said
its goodbyes. Sometimes
can get hard
to just go, you know—
we stand around talking
not noticing the dark
rising up around
our feet.
Stand up & maybe
stretch & see
ourselves home. We
be a gas station dog
waiting for something
to fall, so we
can eat awhile
& sleep. When morning

decides to wake
maybe just this once
it’ll be late
& we can join the table
already set, like fate—
welcomed by the knives—
& just from the scent
of something someone we love
cooked for us
feel fed.

Those who are able, please rise—

[ SUNDAYING ]
And everyone working
the drive-thru is beautiful
smiling just
like the commercial
Thanks, I will
have a good day
& a double
cheeseburger too
And without complaint
the birds wake
you early
sun against the skin
Somewhere smell
of a grill
Cut grass & gasoline
And the church lady
her hat a bouquet
saying Hello
Hello
The sun a giant melon

And we’re not getting
any younger
but today no older neither
And why not
live forever
Why not wait
till tomorrow
to pay the phone
the gas electric
Why not pray
for a tie
instead of a win
for the game to go
long, on & on,
a million innings

Whistle
And then he can whistle
this son, moon
of mine
circling, the name
we gave to the far side
of the satellite,
this thunder
in the near distance
heralding summer,
grown thirsty,
plummeting down
suddenly, drenching
the dog & drought-fed
lawn. Nothing
for once is wrong—
cicadas quieted,
the rain’s metal smell,
a train on time
arriving
& that sound now his—
as if a kiss
might make music.

Money Road
for John T. Edge
On the way to Money,
Mississippi, we see little
ghosts of snow, falling faint
as words while we try to find
Robert Johnson’s muddy
maybe grave. Beside Little Zion,
along the highwayside, this stone
keeps its offerings—Bud & Louisiana
Hot Sauce—the ground giving
way beneath our feet.
The blues always dance
cheek to cheek with a church—
Booker’s Place back
in Greenwood still standing,
its long green bar
beautiful, Friendship Church just
a holler away. Shotgun,
shotgun, shotgun—
——

rows of colored
houses, as if the same can
of bright stain might cover the sins
of rotting wood, now
mostly tarpaper & graffiti
holding McLaurin Street together—
RIP Boochie—the undead walk
these streets seeking something
we take pictures of
& soon flee. The hood
of a car yawns open
in awe, men’s heads
peer in its lion’s mouth
seeking their share. FOR SALE:
Squash & Snap Beans. The midden
of oyster shells behind Lusco’s—
the tiny O of a bullethole
in Booker’s plate glass window.
——

Even the Salvation
Army Thrift Store
closed, bars over
every door.
We’re on our way again,
away, along the Money
Road, past grand houses
& porte cocheres set back
from the lane, crossing the bridge
to find markers of what’s
no more there—even the underpass
bears a name. It’s all
too grave—the fake
sharecropper homes
of Tallahatchie Flats rented out
along the road, staged bottle trees
chasing away nothing, the new outhouse
whose crescent door foreign tourists
——

pay extra for. Cotton planted
in strict rows
for show. A quiet
snowglobe of pain
I want to shake.
While the flakes fall
like ash we race
the train to reach the place
Emmett Till last
whistled or smiled
or did nothing.
Money more
a crossroads
than the crossroads be—
its gnarled tree—the Bryant Store
facing the tracks, now turnt
the color of earth, tumbling down
slow as the snow, white
——

& insistent as the woman
who sent word
of that uppity boy, her men
who yanked you out
your uncle’s home
into the yard, into oblivion—
into this store abutting
the MONEY GIN CO.
whose sign, worn away,
now reads UN
Or SIN, I swear—
whose giant gin fans,
like those lashed & anchored
to your beaten body,
still turn. Shot, dumped,
dredged, your face not even
a mask—a marred,
unspared, sightless stump—
——

all your mother insists
we must see to know
What they did
to my baby. The true
Tallahatchie twisting south,
the Delta
Death’s second cousin
once removed. You down
for only the summer, to leave
the stifling city where later
you will be waked,
displayed, defiant,
a dark glass.
There are things
that cannot be seen
but must be. Buried
barely, this place
no one can keep—
——

Yet how to kill
a ghost? The fog
of our outdoor talk—
we breathe,
we grieve, we drink
our tidy drinks. I think
now winter will out—
the snow bless
& kiss
this cursed earth.
Or is it cussed? I don’t
yet know. Let the cold keep
still your bones.

Hive
The honey bees’ exile
is almost complete.
You can carry
them from hive
to hive, the child thought
& that is what
he tried, walking
with them thronging
between his pressed palms.
Let him be right.
Let the gods look away
as always. Let this boy
who carries the entire
actual, whirring
world in his calm
unwashed hands,
barely walking, bear
us all there
buzzing, unstung.

NOTES & ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Several poems first appeared in literary magazines and publications; thank you to their editors:
Jai-Alai: Ode to Ol Dirty Bastard
New York Review of Books: Ode to the Harlem Globetrotters
The New Yorker: Money Road; the sonnets “When You Were Mine” and “Housequake” (as
“Little Red Corvette”). Special thanks to Paul Muldoon.
Oxford American: Pining, A Definition
QuickMuse: James Brown at B. B. King’s
VQR: Repast (minus “Pining”)
Zoland Books: Mercy Rule
“Thataway” was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art to accompany artist Jacob
Lawrence’s Migration Series exhibition and catalog. “Limbo” in the “Triptych for Trayvon Martin”
first appeared in MoMa’s limited-edition volume of Robert Rauschenberg’s Thirty-four Drawings
for Dante’s Inferno, also commissioned. Thanks to Leah Dickerman.
“Open Letter to Hank Aaron” first appeared as part of the exhibition on Hank Aaron at Emory
University’s Woodruff Library, from spring to fall 2014.
Both “James Brown at B. B. King’s” and “Ode to Ol Dirty Bastard” appear in the Southern
Poetry Anthology: Georgia volume.
“Howlin’ Wolf” appears in the anthology Tales of Two Americas, edited by John Freeman.
The first line and a half of “James Brown…” is a quote from the artist.
—
“Repast”: The repast refers to the traditional African American meal following a funeral.
Whether formal or for family members only, held at a house of worship or the home of the
deceased, catered by a favorite local spot or a community potluck, the repast is a ritual connected
to other foodways, as well as to traditions both African and American, Christian and more broadly
religious. Where the wake before the funeral is primarily about the dead, the repast is also about
the living, who share food and memories. The very word has come to suggest a reflection, not on
the past but on the future, a final supper after the burial that leaves the circle unbroken.
Repast celebrates the life and bravery of Booker Wright, owner of Booker’s Place and waiter at
Lusco’s in Greenwood, Mississippi, a town quite near to where white racists killed Emmett Till in
1955 and others murdered civil rights workers Goodman, Schwerner, and Cheney in 1963. In
1966, for the NBC documentary Mississippi: A Self-Portrait, Wright knowingly spoke out about
the double standards and racism of Greenwood’s white patrons, many of whom were also featured
in the show (and were White Citizens’ Council members). After the film aired, Wright was beaten
up and sent to a hospital—by a local police officer, no less—and his own establishment
firebombed. Both the man and the bar survived. Years later Wright was shot and killed by a bar
patron. As described in the recent documentary Booker’s Place, Wright’s descendants and others
in the community have suggested that the shooting had a political motivation.

In his own words from the 1966 documentary and through the imagination, Wright speaks of
life and foodways in the American South and what it means to wait. Over the course of the piece,
his waiter’s serving napkin goes from bar towel to preacher’s handkerchief, as Wright literally
transforms from a waiter to a barkeep to an activist—which may prove the same thing.
The oratorio was commissioned by the Southern Foodways Alliance and debuted at its annual
symposium in October 2014, and was reprised at Carnegie Hall on 4 April 2016. Thanks to John T.
Edge, Bruce Levingston (pianist and musical director), composer Nolan Gasser, and baritone
Justin Hopkins.
“Money Road”: “Money Road” traces my driving the Delta with friend and Southern
Foodways Alliance leader John T. Edge—we started out visiting Booker’s Place in Greenwood,
Mississippi, for Repast, the oratorio the SFA had commissioned from me on Booker Wright. Turns
out Greenwood is where the term Black Power was popularized at a rally by Stokely Carmichael in
1966, just a few blocks from Booker’s. Nearly fifty years later one could still see why. Driving to
Money that day, it was bitter cold, snow accompanying what became the pilgrimage recorded in
the poem. The site of Till’s lynching feels both holy and haunted.
In 2017 the news revealed—at least to those who had bought the story—that the white woman at
the center of the case, who had claimed Till whistled at her or called her baby, confessed that Till
had in fact not done a thing. I am heartened that the poem had already said he ‘whistled or smiled
/ or did nothing,’ though I still wonder why had even well-meaning southern and American
accounts decried the lynching but somehow believed the lynchers? Till’s murderers—who lied in
court, got acquitted in no time by an all-white jury, then promptly sold their story without fear of
reprisal—should not be believed. In some small way perhaps it’s because we cannot believe the
whole of the truth—that evil does discriminate—much like, in more recent cases from Trayvon
Martin to Michael Brown, some cling to some sense of black culpability in their own killings. The
poem calls out to us to remember but also to revisit and revise what we think of the past—not in
the ways of bluesman Robert Johnson’s unlikely gravesite along the Money Road, or the fake
plantation there that proves almost as haunting—but in the reality of the now-crumbling
storefront where Till was brought and then killed in the night for no earthly, or only earthly,
reasons.
—
My gratitude to Melanie Dunea for the photographs in these pages. With support from the
Virginia Quarterly Review, she traveled with me to the Mississippi Delta in January 2015 to
capture the spirit of that place with a poetry that enhances my own.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kevin Young is the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and
poetry editor for The New Yorker. He is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose,
including Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995–2015, long-listed for the
National Book Award; and Book of Hours, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
and winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Young’s
most recent nonfiction book, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies,
Post-Facts, and Fake News, was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the
National Book Critics Circle Award. His collection Jelly Roll: A Blues was a finalist for
both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. His first
nonfiction book, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, won the Graywolf
Press Nonfiction Prize and the PEN Open Book Award. A University Distinguished
Professor at Emory, Young is the editor of eight other collections and was inducted into
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016.

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IN THE WESTERN NIGHT:
POEMS 1965–90

IN THE WESTERN NIGHT
(1990)

To the Dead
What I hope (when I hope) is that we’ll
see each other again,—
… and again reach the VEIN
in which we loved each other …
It existed. It existed.
There is a NIGHT within the NIGHT,—
… for, like the detectives (the Ritz Brothers)
in The Gorilla,
once we’d been battered by the gorilla
we searched the walls, the intricately carved
impenetrable paneling
for a button, lever, latch
that unlocks a secret door that
reveals at last the secret chambers,
CORRIDORS within WALLS,
(the disenthralling, necessary, dreamed structure
beneath the structure we see,)
that is the HOUSE within the HOUSE …
There is a NIGHT within the NIGHT,—
… there were (for example) months when I seemed only

to displease, frustrate,
disappoint you—; then, something triggered
a drunk lasting for days, and as you
slowly and shakily sobered up,
sick, throbbing with remorse and self-loathing,
insight like ashes: clung
to; useless; hated …
This was the viewing of the power of the waters
while the waters were asleep:—
secrets, histories of loves, betrayals, double-binds
not fit (you thought) for the light of day …
There is a NIGHT within the NIGHT,—
… for, there at times at night, still we
inhabit the secret place together …
Is this wisdom, or self-pity?—
The love I’ve known is the love of
two people staring
not at each other, but in the same direction.

Dark Night
(JOHN OF THE CROSS)
In a dark night, when the light
burning was the burning of love (fortuitous
night, fated, free,—)
as I stole from my dark house, dark
house that was silent, grave, sleeping,—
by the staircase that was secret, hidden,
safe: disguised by darkness (fortuitous
night, fated, free,—)
by darkness and by cunning, dark
house that was silent, grave, sleeping—;
in that sweet night, secret, seen by
no one and seeing
nothing, my only light or
guide
the burning in my burning heart,
night was the guide
to the place where he for whom I
waited, whom I had long ago chosen,
waits: night
brighter than noon, in which none can see—;
night was the guide
sweeter than the sun raw at
dawn, for there the burning bridegroom is
bride
and he who chose at last is chosen.

•
As he lay sleeping on my sleepless
breast, kept from the beginning for him
alone, lying on the gift I gave
as the restless
fragrant cedars moved the restless winds,—
winds from the circling parapet circling
us as I lay there touching and lifting his hair,—
with his sovereign hand, he
wounded my neck—
and my senses, when they touched that, touched nothing …
In a dark night (there where I
lost myself,—) as I leaned to rest
in his smooth white breast, everything
ceased
and left me, forgotten in the grave of forgotten lilies.

In the Western Night
1. The Irreparable
First, I was there where unheard
harmonies create the harmonies
we hear—
then I was a dog, sniffing
your crotch.
I asked you why you
were here; your answer was your beauty.
I said I was in need. You said
that the dead
rule and confuse our steps—
that if I helped you cut your skin
deeply enough
that, at least, was IRREPARABLE …
This afternoon, the clouds
were moving so swiftly—
massed above the towers, rushing.

2. In My Desk
Two cigarette butts—
left by you
the first time you visited my apartment.
The next day
I found them, they were still there—
picking one up, I put my lips where
yours had been …
•
Our not-love is like a man running down
a mountain, who, if he dares to try to stop,
falls over—
my hands wanted to touch your hands
because we had hands.
•
I put the two cigarette butts
in an envelope, carefully
taping shut the edges.
At first, the thin paper of the envelope
didn’t stop
the stale smell of tobacco …
Now the envelope is in my desk.

3. Two Men
The man who does not know himself, who
does not know his affections that his actions
speak but that he does not
acknowledge,
who will SAY ANYTHING
and lie when he does not know that he is
lying because what he needs to believe is true
must indeed
be true,
THIS MAN IS STONE … NOT BREAD.
STONE. NOT CAKE. NOT CHEESE. NOT BREAD …
The man who tries to feed his hunger
by gnawing stone
is a FOOL; his hunger is
fed in ways that he knows cannot satisfy it.

4. Epilogue: A Stanza from Horace
At night in dreams I hold you
and now I pursue you
fleeing through the grass of the Campus Martius,
you, through the waters (you are cruel) fleeing.

BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA; 1983.

Poem in the Stanza of the “Rubaiyat”
1. Spirit
The present and the future are the past
now that her body cannot wake, nor, lost
between the kitchen and the wilderness,
rest—haunted by ghosts, now become a ghost.

2. Reading the “Rubaiyat”
Because she loved it even as a girl,
she taught her child to love it—as he still
does, hearing as he reads beneath his voice
her voice … past Waste, the gorgeous, trickling Well.

3. Christmas Eve in Harvard Square
Child, when you learn that the laughing ghosts who live
shadowing your steps in forty years give
substancelessness to stone, is this night one
more thing you’ll try to kill in you to live?

In the Ruins
1. Man is a MORAL animal.
2. You can get human beings to do anything,—IF you convince them it is moral.
3. You can convince human beings anything is moral.
•

•

•

Oh Night,—
… THE SUN IS DEAD.
What we dream moves
across our sky by
day, is a CORPSE,—
that sun’s day is not the real day—;
that day’s light is not the real light—;
FOR THE SUN IS DEAD …
Now when I learned this,
I knew the injunction placed upon me.
Before the corpse, I heard:—
RETURN THE DEAD TO LIFE.

Guilty of Dust
up or down from the infinite C E N T E R
B R I M M I N G at the winking rim of time
the voice in my head said
LOVE IS THE DISTANCE
BETWEEN YOU AND WHAT YOU LOVE
WHAT YOU LOVE IS YOUR FATE
•
then I saw the parade of my loves
those PERFORMERS comics actors singers
forgetful of my very self so often I
desired to die to myself to live in them
then my PARENTS my FRIENDS the drained
SPECTRES once filled with my baffled infatuations
love and guilt and fury and
sweetness for whom
nail spirit yearning to the earth
•
then the voice in my head said
WHETHER YOU LOVE WHAT YOU LOVE

OR LIVE IN DIVIDED CEASELESS
REVOLT AGAINST IT
WHAT YOU LOVE IS YOUR FATE

1984.

THE SACRIFICE
(1983)

… the speculative Good Friday in place of the
historic Good Friday. Good Friday must be
speculatively re-established in the whole truth and
harshness of its Godforsakenness.
—HEGEL

The War of Vaslav Nijinsky
Still gripped by the illusion of an horizon;
overcome with the finality of a broken tooth;
suspecting that habits are the only salvation,
—the Nineteenth Century’s
guilt, World War One,
was danced
by Nijinsky on January 19, 1919.
•

•

•

… I am now reading Ecce Homo. Nietzsche
is angry with me—;
he hates “the Crucified One.”
But he did not live through War—;
when the whole world painted its face
with blood.
Someone must expiate the blood.
•

•

•

No. Let what is past
be forgotten. Let even the blood
be forgotten—; there can be no “expiation.”
Expiation is not necessary.

Suffering has made me what I am,—
I must not regret; or judge; or
struggle to escape it
in the indifference of (the ruthless
ecstasy of)
CHANGE; “my endless RENEWAL”; BECOMING.
—That is Nietzsche.
He wants to say “Yes”to life.
I am not Nietzsche. I am the bride of Christ.
•

•

•

He was planning a new and original ballet. It was to be a picture of sex life, with
the scene laid in a maison tolérée. The chief character was to be the owner—
once a beautiful cocotte, now aged and paralyzed as a result of her debauchery;
but, though her body is a wreck, her spirit is indomitable in the traffic of love.
She deals with all the wares of love, selling girls to boys, youth to age, woman to
woman, man to man.
When he danced it, he succeeded in transmitting the whole scale of sex life.
•

•

•

—Many times Diaghilev wanted me
to make love to him
as if he were
a woman—;
I did. I refuse to
regret it.
At first, I felt humiliated for him,—
he saw this. He got angry
and said, “I enjoy it!”

Then, more calmly, he said,
“Vatza, we must not regret what we feel.”
—I REGRETTED
what I FELT … Not
making love, but that since the beginning
I wanted to leave him …
That I stayed
out of “GRATITUDE,”—
and FEAR OF LIFE,—
and AMBITION …
That in my soul,
I did not love him.
Now my wife wants to have
a second child. I am frightened;
the things a human being must learn,—
the things a child
must learn he FEELS,—
frighten me! I know people’s faults
because in my soul,
I HAVE COMMITTED THEM.
The man who chops wood for us
was speaking, this morning, in the kitchen,
to my wife. As I passed in the hallway
I heard
whispering—; and LISTENED.

He said that as a child
in his village at Sils Maria
he worked for the writer, Nietzsche—;
he felt he must tell her
that just before the “famous man”
was taken away,
INSANE, he acted and looked
as I
do now.
I can choose “life” for myself;—
but must I, again, again,
AGAIN,—
for any other creature?
•

•

•

The Durcals arrived in St. Moritz, and were invited to tea. Asked what he had
been doing lately, Vaslav put on a worldly air, leaned back on the sofa and said,
“Well, I composed two ballets, I prepared a new program for the next Paris
season, and lately—I have played a part. You see, I am an artist; I have no
troupe now, so I miss the stage. I thought it would be rather an interesting
experiment to see how well I could act, and so for six weeks I played the part of
a lunatic; and the whole village, my family, and even the physicians apparently
believed it. I have a male nurse to watch me, in the disguise of a masseur.”
Romola was overcome, torn between anger and relief. She was confirmed in
her supposition that her fears had been groundless when the male nurse came,
after ten days, to assure her from his long experience that her husband was
completely sane.
•

•

—Let me explain to you
what “guilt” is …

•

When I joke with my wife, and say,
“I think I will go back to Russia
and live as a peasant—”
she jokes back, and says,
“Do as you like! I will
divorce you, and marry
a manufacturer…”
She looks at me, and I look at her.
What is terrible
is that I am serious—; and she is serious …
She is right, of course,—
I do not have the right
to make her live differently, without servants,
rich friends, elegant clothes—
without her good and sane habits;
do not have the right even to try
to re-make her …
But does she then have the right
to make me live like this, JUDGED, surrounded by
those who cannot understand or feel me,—
like a manufacturer?…
She is angry, as I am angry.
We both are right—; and both angry …
Soon, she feels guilty, feels that she
has failed me—;
and I too
feel guilty …

The GUILT comes from NOWHERE.
Neither of us had done wrong!
But I am a good actor—and reassure her
that I love her; am indeed happy; and that
nothing will change …
I want to be a good husband.
Still, I am guilty.
… Why am I guilty?
My life is FALSE.
•

•

•

I know the psychology of lunatics;
if you don’t contradict them, they like you.
But I am not insane.
My brother was insane. He died
in a lunatic asylum.
The reason I know I am NOT insane
is because, unlike my brother,
I feel guilt.
The insane do not feel guilt.
My brother was a dancer. He was older than I,
but still in the corps when I became
a soloist. He was ashamed, and jealous;
he went insane.
When the doctors questioned him, he showed

astonishing courage,—
he thought that everyone
in the company was paid
by the secret police, to gather
evidence against our family …
He displayed cunning, and stoic
fortitude, under the questions.
Even when he thought he faced death,
he lied
to protect my mother.
When he was taken away,
she cried, and cried …
She cried
visiting him,—
but that didn’t make him feel GUILTY …
My wife thought because
I wore a large cross on my neck in the village,—
and told her certain dishes
served at our table were poisoned,—
I was insane.
But I knew that my actions
frightened her—; and I suffered.
Nietzsche was insane. He knew
we killed God.
… This is the end of the story:
though He was dead, God was clever
and strong. God struck back,—

AND KILLED US.
If I act insane people will call me
“mad clown,” and forgive
even the truth—;
the insane feel anxiety and horror,
but are RELEASED
from GUILT …
I only want to know
things I’ve learned like this,—
these things I cannot NOT know.
•

•

•

His other ballet remained unfinished. It was his own life put into a choreographic
poem: a youth seeking truth through life, first as a pupil, open to all artistic
suggestions, to all the beauty that life and love can offer; then his love for the
woman, his mate, who successfully carries him off.
He set it in the period of the High Renaissance. The youth is a painter; his
Master one of the greatest artists of the period, part Genius and part Politician,
just as Diaghilev seemed to him to be. This Master advances him, and defends
his daring work from the attacks of colleagues, as long as he is a student; then he
falls in love, and the Master bitterly rejects not only him but his work.
•

•

•

—Last night, once again, I nearly
abandoned my autobiographical ballet …
The plot has a good beginning
and middle,—
THE PUZZLE
is the end …

The nights I spend—
reading and improving
Nietzsche, analyzing and then abandoning
my life, working on the Great Questions
like WAR and GUILT and GOD
and MADNESS,—
I rise from my books, my endless, fascinating
researches, notations, projects,
dazzled.
—Is this happiness?…
I have invented a far more
accurate and specific notation for dance;
it has taken me two months
to write down the movement in my ten-minute
ballet, L’Après-midi d’un Faune …
There is a MORAL here
about how LONG you must live with
the consequences of a SHORT action,—
but I don’t now feel
MORAL.
Soon I shall begin
Le Sacre du Printemps—; which
is longer …
I can understand the pleasures of War.
In War—

where killing is a virtue: camouflage
a virtue: revenge a virtue:
pity a weakness—
the world rediscovers
a guiltless PRE-HISTORY
“civilization” condemns …
In 1914, I was assured the War would
end in six weeks;
the Germans, in the summer, thought
they would enter Paris by the fall.
But the War
was NOT an accident.
C U S T O M, and his Children,—
Glory. Honor. Privilege. Poverty.
Optimism. “The Balance of Power,”—
for four years
dug a large, long hole
(—a TRENCH—)
in the earth of Europe;
when they approached the hole
to pin medals
on the puppets
they had thrown there,
they slipped in
blood—; AND FELL IN.

Poverty and Privilege
alone survived,
of all the customs of the past …
—Should the World
regret the War? Should I
REGRET MY LIFE?
… Let our epitaph be:
In Suffering, and Nightmare,
I woke at last
to my own nature.
•

•

•

One Sunday we decided to sleigh over to Maloja.
Kyra was glad and Vaslav was very joyful that morning.
It took us about three hours to get there; Kyra and I got very hungry during
the long drive.
The road was extremely narrow during the winter, because it needed cleaning
from the heavy snows, and in certain parts there was always a space to await the
sleighs coming from the opposite direction.
Vaslav was as a rule a careful and excellent driver, but on this particular
Sunday he did not wait, but simply drove on into the oncoming sleighs.
We were in danger of turning over; the horses got frightened.
The coachmen of the other sleighs cursed, but this did not make any
difference.
Kyra screamed, and I begged Vaslav to be more careful, but the further we
went the more fiercely he drove against the other sleighs.
I had to clutch on to Kyra and the sleigh to keep ourselves on.
I was furious, and said so to Vaslav.
He fixed me suddenly with a hard and metallic look which I had never seen
before.
As we arrived at the Maloja Inn I ordered a meal.

We had to wait.
Vaslav asked for some bread and butter and macaroni.
“Ah, Tolstoy again,” I thought, but did not say a word, and bit my lips.
Kyra was anxiously awaiting her steak, and as it was laid before her and she
began to eat, Vaslav, with a quick gesture, snatched the plate away.
She began to cry from disappointment.
I exclaimed, “Now, Vaslav, please don’t begin that Tolstoy nonsense again;
you remember how weak you got by starving yourself on that vegetarian food. I
can’t stop you doing it, but I won’t allow you to interfere with Kyra. The child
must eat properly.”
I went with Kyra to the other room to have our solitary lunch.
We drove home very quietly without a word.
•

•

•

—The second part of my ballet
Le Sacre du Printemps
is called “THE SACRIFICE.”
A young girl, a virgin, is chosen
to die
so that the Spring will return,—
so that her Tribe (free
from “pity,” “introspection,” “remorse”)
out of her blood
can renew itself.
The fact that the earth’s renewal
requires human blood
is unquestioned; a mystery.
She is chosen, from the whirling, stamping
circle of her peers, purely by chance—;
then, driven from the circle, surrounded

by the elders, by her peers, by animal
skulls impaled on pikes,
she dances,—
at first, in paroxysms
of grief, and fear:—
again and again, she leaps (—NOT
as a ballerina leaps, as if she
loved the air, as if
the air were her element—)
SHE LEAPS
BECAUSE SHE HATES THE GROUND.
But then, slowly, as others
join in, she finds that there is a self
WITHIN herself
that is NOT herself
impelling her to accept,—and at last
to LEAD,—
THE DANCE
that is her own sacrifice …
—In the end, exhausted, she falls
to the ground …
She dies; and her last breath
is the reawakened Earth’s
orgasm,—
a little upward run on the flutes

mimicking
(—or perhaps MOCKING—)
the god’s spilling
seed …
The Chosen Virgin
accepts her fate: without considering it,
she knows that her Tribe,—
the Earth itself,—
are UNREMORSEFUL
that the price of continuance
is her BLOOD:—
she accepts their guilt,—
… THEIR GUILT
THAT THEY DO NOT KNOW EXISTS.
She has become, to use
our term,
a Saint.
The dancer I chose for this role
detested it.
She would have preferred to do
a fandango, with a rose in her teeth …
The training she and I shared,—
training in the traditional
“academic” dance,—
emphasizes the illusion

of Effortlessness,
Ease, Smoothness, Equilibrium …
When I look into my life,
these are not the qualities
I find there.
Diaghilev, almost alone
in the Diaghilev Ballet, UNDERSTOOD;
though he is not now, after my marriage
and “betrayal,”
INTERESTED in my choreographic ambitions …
Nevertheless, to fill a theatre,
he can be persuaded
to hire me as a dancer.
Last night I dreamt
I was slowly climbing
a long flight of steps.
Then I saw Diaghilev
and my wife
arm in arm
climbing the steps behind me …
I began to hurry, so that
they would not see me.
Though I climbed
as fast as I could, the space
between us
NARROWED …

Soon, they were a few feet behind me,—
I could hear them laughing,
gossiping, discussing CONTRACTS
and LAWSUITS …
They understood each other perfectly.
I stopped.
But they
DIDN’T STOP …
They climbed right past me,—
laughing, chatting,
NOT SEEING ME AT ALL …
—I should have been happy;
yet …
wasn’t.
I watched their backs,
as they happily
disappeared, climbing
up, out of my sight.
•

•

•

Our days passed in continuous social activity.
Then one Thursday, the day when the governess and maid had their day off, I
was making ready to take Kyra out for a walk when suddenly Vaslav came out
of his room and looked at me very angrily.
“How dare you make such a noise? I can’t work.”
I looked up, surprised.
His face, his manner were strange; he had never spoken to me like this.

“I am sorry. I did not realize we were so loud.”
Vaslav got hold of me then by my shoulders and shook me violently.
I clasped Kyra in my arms very close, then with one powerful movement
Vaslav pushed me down the stairs.
I lost my balance, and fell with the child, who began to scream.
At the bottom, I got up, more astounded than terrified.
What was the matter with him?
He was still standing there menacingly.
I turned round, exclaiming, “You ought to be ashamed! You are behaving
like a drunken peasant.”
A very changed Vaslav we found when we came home, docile and kind as
ever.
I did not speak about the incident, either to him or to anybody else.
Then one day we went on an excursion and Vaslav again wore his cross over
his sweater.
On our way home, he suddenly began to drive fiercely and the sleigh turned
over.
Amazingly, no one was hurt.
I got really angry, and walked home with Kyra.
Of course, he was home ahead of us.
When I entered the house, the servant who worshipped Vaslav opened the
door and said, “Madame, I think Monsieur Nijinsky is ill, or perhaps very drunk,
for he acts so queerly. His voice is hoarse and his eyes all hazy. I am
frightened.”
I went to our bedroom.
Vaslav lay fully dressed on the bed, with the cross on, his eyes closed.
He seemed to be asleep.
I turned cautiously towards the door, and then noticed that heavy tears were
streaming down his face.
“Vatza, how are you feeling? Are you angry with me?”
“It is nothing; let me sleep; I am tired.”
•

•

•

Each night now I pray,
Let this cup
pass from me!…

But it is not a cup. It is my life.
I have LEARNED
my NATURE …
I am insane,—
… or evil.
Today I walked out into the snow.
I said to myself:
THREE TIMES
YOU TRIED TO HARM YOUR WIFE AND CHILD.
I said:
LIE DOWN IN THE SNOW
AND DIE. YOU ARE EVIL.
I lay down in the snow.
I tried to go to sleep.
My HANDS
began to get cold, to FREEZE.
I was lying there a long, long time.
I did not feel cold any more.
Then, God said to me:
GO HOME
AND TELL YOUR WIFE YOU ARE INSANE.
I said:

Thank you, thank you, God!
I am not evil. I am insane.
I got up. I wanted to go home,—
and tell this news
to my wife.
Then, I said to God:
I am insane,—
my wife will suffer. I am guilty.
Forgive me for being insane.
God said:
GOD MADE YOU. GOD DOES NOT CARE
IF YOU ARE “GUILTY” OR NOT.
I said:
I CARE IF I AM GUILTY!
I CARE IF I AM GUILTY!…
God was silent.
Everything was SILENT.
I lay back down in the snow.
I wanted again to go to sleep, and die.
But my BODY did not want to die.
My BODY spoke to me:
There is no answer to your life.
You are insane; or evil.

There is only one thing that you can do:—
You must join YOUR GUILT
to the WORLD’S GUILT.
I said to myself:
I must join MY GUILT
to the WORLD’S GUILT.
I got up out of the snow.
… What did the words mean?
Then I realized what the words meant.
I said to myself:
You must join YOUR GUILT
to the WORLD’S GUILT.
There is no answer to your life.
You are insane; or evil.
… Let this be the Body
through which the War has passed.
•

•

•

Nijinsky invited guests to a recital at the Suvretta House Hotel.
When the audience was seated, he picked up a chair, sat down on it, and
stared at them. Half an hour passed. Then he took a few rolls of black and white
velvet and made a big cross the length of the room. He stood at the head of it, his
arms opened wide. He said: “Now, I will dance you the War, which you did not
prevent and for which you are responsible.” His dance reflected battle, horror,
catastrophe, apocalypse. An observer wrote: “At the end, we were too much
overwhelmed to applaud. We were looking at a corpse, and our silence was the

silence that enfolds the dead.”
There was a collection for the Red Cross. Tea was served. Nijinsky never
again performed in public.
•

•

•

—The War is a good subject …
The audience, yesterday, liked
my dance.
The public does not understand Art;
it wants to be astonished.
I know how to astonish.
The War allowed me
to project,—
to EMBODY,—
an ultimate “aspect” of the “self”…
A member of the audience told me
I had always been able
“to smell a good subject.”
God, on the other hand,—
who at times
has responded to my predilection
for ACTIONS
that are METAPHYSICAL EXPERIMENTS,—
perhaps felt threatened, or even
coerced—;
he perhaps felt that though he could

agree with me
that expiation IS necessary,—
he had to agree with
Nietzsche
that expiation is NOT possible …
In any case, he has chosen,—as
so often,—
camouflage.
Now that the War has been over
two months, at times I almost
doubt if it existed—;
in truth,
it never existed,—
… BECAUSE IT HAS NEVER BEEN OVER.
Twenty years ago, a boy of nine
was taken by his mother
to the Imperial School of Ballet,
to attempt to become a pupil;
the mother was poor, and
afraid of life; his father
had abandoned the family when the boy was four.
Even then, he had a good jump—;
he was admitted.
He had been taught by the priests
that because of Adam and Eve, all men were born

in Original Sin,—
that all men were,
BY NATURE, guilty.
In his soul, he didn’t believe it.
He was a good boy. His mother loved him.
He believed
in his essential innocence,—
he thought his nature “good.”
He worked hard. He grew thinner,—
and started
“dancing like God”…
Everyone talked about it.
But then,—
he LEARNED SOMETHING.
He learned that
All life exists
at the expense of other life.
When he began to succeed,
he saw that he was AMBITIOUS,—
JEALOUS
of the roles that others won …
Then his brother
got sick—.
THE ROCK
THAT GIVES SHADE TO ONE CREATURE,—

FOR ANOTHER CREATURE
JUST BLOCKS THE SUN.
… This is a problem of BEING.
I can imagine no
SOLUTION to this …
At sixteen, he met a Prince. He loved the Prince,—
but after a time,
the Prince
grew tired of him.
Then he met a Count, whom
he didn’t love.
The Count gave him a piano.
He had heard of Diaghilev. Diaghilev
invited him
to the Hotel Europe,—
he went to seek his luck.
He found
his luck.
At once, he allowed Diaghilev
to make love to him.
Even then, he disliked Diaghilev
for his too self-assured voice …
He always had thought he was essentially
different from the people
in books of history,—

with their lives of betrayals; blindness;
greed; and miseries …
He saw, one day, that this illusion,—
this FAITH,—
had, imperceptibly,
vanished—;
he was NOT different—;
he did not understand WHY he did
what he did, nor were his instincts
“good”…
Then, I said to myself:
“History
IS human nature—; to say I AM GUILTY
is to accept
implication in the human race…”
—Now, for months and months,
I have found
ANOTHER man in me:—
HE is NOT me—; I
am afraid of him …
He hates my wife and child,—
and hates Diaghilev;
because he thinks “goodness” and “being”
are incompatible,—

… HE WANTS TO DESTROY THE WORLD.
Destroy it,—
or redeem it.
Are they the SAME?. . .
As a child, I was taught, by the priests,
to crave the Last Judgment:—
when the earth will become a stage,—
and WHAT IS RIGHT and WHAT IS WRONG
will at last show clear, and distinct,
and separate,—
and then,—
THE SLATE IS WIPED CLEAN …
—Even now, I can see the World
wheeling on its axis … I
shout at it:—
C E A S E.
C H A N G E,—
OR C E A S E.
The World says right back:—
I must chop down the tree of life
to make coffins.
Tomorrow, I will go to Zurich—
to live in an asylum.
MY SOUL IS SICK,—
NOT MY MIND.

I am incurable … I did not
live long.
Death came
unexpectedly,—
for I wanted it to come.
Romola. Diaghilev.
… I HAVE EATEN THE WORLD.
My life is the expiation for my life.
Nietzsche understood me.
When he was sick,—when his SOUL
was sick,—
he wrote that he would have
much preferred to be a Professor at Basel
than God—;
but that he did not dare to carry
his egotism
so far as to neglect the creation of the world.
•

•

•

In 1923, Diaghilev came to see him. Vaslav by now got out of bed in a strange
fashion. First of all he went on all-fours; then crawled around the room; and only
then stood upright. In a general way, he seemed attracted by the floor, to feel a
need to be as low down as possible (his bed was almost on a level with the floor)
and to grab hold of something. As he walked he leaned forward and felt at his
ease only when lying down.
This was the first time Diaghilev had set eyes on him since they had parted in
wrath in Barcelona six years before. “Vatza, you are being lazy. Come, I need
you. You must dance again for the Russian Ballet and for me.”

Vaslav shook his head. “I cannot because I am mad.”
•

•

•

Frightened to eat with a new set of teeth;
exhausted by the courage the insane have shown;
uncertain whether to REDEEM or to DESTROY THE EARTH,
—the Nineteenth Century’s
guilt, World War One,
was danced
by Nijinsky on January 19, 1919.

For Mary Ann Youngren
1932–1980
Mary Ann, as they handed you the cup
near the black waters of Lethe,
(the cup of Forgetfulness,
the waters of Obliteration,)
did you reach for it greedily—
just as, alive, you abruptly needed
not to answer the phone for days: ballet tickets
unused: awake all night: pacing
the apartment: untouchable: chain-smoking?
Dip a finger into the River of Time,—
it comes back
STAINED.
•
No, that’s not enough,—
not true, wrong—
dying of cancer, eager to have the whole thing
over, you nonetheless waited
for your sister to arrive from California
before you died,—
you needed to bring up your cruelest, worst

adolescent brutality, asking:
DO YOU FORGIVE ME?
Then: WILL YOU MISS ME?
At the Resurrection of the Dead,
the world will hear us say
The phone is plugged in, please call,
I will answer it.

Catullus: Odi et amo
I hate and love. Ignorant fish, who even
wants the fly while writhing.

Confessional
Is she dead?
Yes, she is dead.
Did you forgive her?
No, I didn’t forgive her.
Did she forgive you?
No, she didn’t forgive me.
What did you have to forgive?
She was never mean, or willfully
cruel, or unloving.
When I was eleven, she converted to Christ—
she began to simplify her life, denied
herself, and said that she and I must struggle
“to divest ourselves
of the love of CREATED BEINGS,”—
and to help me to do that,
one day
she hanged my cat.

I came home from school, and in the doorway
of my room,
my cat was hanging strangled.
She was in the bathroom; I could hear
the water running.
—I shouted at her;
she wouldn’t
come out.
She was in there
for hours, with the water running …
Finally, late that night,
she unlocked the door.
She wouldn’t look at me.
She said that we must learn to rest
in the LORD,—
and not in His CREATION …
Did you forgive her?
Soon, she had a breakdown;
when she got out of the hospital,
she was SORRY …
For years she dreamed the cat
had dug
its claws into her thumbs:—
in the dream, she knew, somehow,
that it was dying; she tried

to help it,—
TO PUT IT OUT OF ITS MISERY,—
so she had her hands around its
neck, strangling it.
Bewildered,
it looked at her,
KNOWING SHE LOVED IT—;
and she DID love it, which was
what was
so awful …
All it could do was
hold on,—
… AS
SHE HELD ON.
Did you forgive her?
I was the center of her life,—
and therefore,
of her fears and obsessions. They changed;
one was money.
… DO I HAVE TO GO INTO IT?
Did you forgive her?
Standing next to her coffin, looking down
at her body, I suddenly
knew I hadn’t—;

over and over
I said to her,
I didn’t forgive you!
I didn’t forgive you!
I did love her … Otherwise,
would I feel so guilty?
What did she have to forgive?
She was SORRY. She tried
to change …
She loved me. She was generous.
I pretended
that I had forgiven her—;
and she pretended
to believe it,—
she needed desperately to believe it …
SHE KNEW I COULD BARELY STAND TO BE AROUND HER.
Did you forgive her?
I tried—;
for years I almost
convinced myself I did …
But no, I didn’t.
—Now, after I have said it all, so I can
rest,

will you give me ABSOLUTION,—
… and grant this
“created being”
FORGIVENESS?…
Did she forgive you?
I think she tried—;
but no,—
she couldn’t forgive me …
WHY COULDN’T SHE FORGIVE ME?
Don’t you understand even now?
No! Not—not really …
Forgiveness doesn’t exist.

II
She asked,—
and I could not, WOULD NOT give …
—That is the first of two sentences
I can’t get out of my head.
They somehow contain what happened.
The second is:—
THERE WAS NO PLACE IN NATURE WE COULD MEET.
Can you explain them?
—Augustine too
had trouble with his mother,—
… listen. Confessor
incapable of granting “rest” or “absolution,”
… listen.
Why are you angry?
Augustine too
had trouble with his mother,—
… but the story of Augustine and Monica
is the opposite of what happened
between me and my mother.

We couldn’t meet in Nature,—
… AND ALL WE HAD WAS NATURE.
How do you explain it?
The scene at the window at Ostia
in Book Nine of the Confessions
seems designed to make non-believers
sick with envy.
—You are listening to a soul
that has always been
SICK WITH ENVY …
How do you explain it?
As a child I was (now, I
clearly can see it)
predatory:—
pleased to have supplanted my father
in my mother’s affections, and then
pleased to have supplanted my stepfather …
—I assure you, though I was a “little boy,”
I could be far more charming, sympathetic,
full of sensibility, “various,” far more
an understanding and feeling
ear for my mother’s emotions, needs, SOUL
than any man, any man she met,—
I know I wanted to be: WANTED
to be the center, the focus of her life …

I was her ally against my father;
and then, after the first two or three
years, her ally against my stepfather …
—Not long before she died,
she told me something
I had never heard:—
when I was nine or ten, early
in her second marriage,
she became pregnant; she said she
wanted to have the child …
She said that one day, when my stepfather
was playing golf, she was out walking the course
with him, and suddenly
a man fell from one of the huge trees
lining the fairways …
A group of men had been cutting limbs;
she saw one of them fall,
and for a long time
lie there screaming.
Later that day, she had a miscarriage.
After saying all this, she
looked at me insistently and said,
“I wanted to have the child.”
But as she was telling me the story,
I kept thinking

THANK GOD THE MAN FELL,
THANK GOD SHE SAW HIM FALL AND HAD A MISCARRIAGE
AND THE CHILD DIED …
—I felt sick. I knew I was GLAD
the man fell, GLAD she saw him fall
and the child died …
When I was nine or ten, if she
had had a child—; if
she and a child and my stepfather
had made a FAMILY
from which I had to be closed off,
the remnant of a rejected, erased past,—
(I never had anything in common with,
or even respected, my stepfather,—)
I would have gone crazy …
How could she have BETRAYED
ME in that way?
How do you explain it?
I felt sick. I felt ill at how
predatory I was,—
(my feelings still were,—)
at the envy and violence I could
will NOT to feel,
but couldn’t not feel …

—Augustine has the temerity, after
his mother dies,
to admit he is GLAD
she no longer wanted to be buried
next to her husband …
He thanks God
for ridding her of this “vain desire.”
Why are you angry?
In the words of Ecclesiastes:—
“Her loves, her hates, her jealousies,—
these all
have perished, nor will she EVER AGAIN
TAKE PART
in whatever is done under the sun…”
My mother,—
… just died.
The emotions, the “issues” in her life
didn’t come out somewhere, reached no culmination,
climax, catharsis,—
she JUST DIED.
She wanted them to:—
how can I talk about
the way in which, when I was young,
we seemed to be engaged in an ENTERPRISE
together,—

the enterprise of “figuring out the world,”
figuring out her life, my life,—
THE MAKING OF HER SOUL,
which somehow, in our “enterprise”
together, was the making of my soul,—
… it’s a kind of craziness, which some mothers
drink along with their children
in their MOTHER’S-MILK …
Why are you angry?
THERE WAS NO PLACE IN NATURE WE COULD MEET.
I’ve never let anyone else
in so deeply.
But when the predatory complicit co-conspirator
child
was about twenty, he of course wanted his “freedom,”—
and then found
that what had made his life
possible, what he found so deeply
inside him, had its hands around his neck
strangling him:—
and that therefore, if he were
to survive,
he must in turn strangle, murder,
kill it inside him …

TO SURVIVE, I HAD TO KILL HER INSIDE ME.
Why are you angry?
Now that she is dead (that her BODY
is DEAD),
I’m capable of an “empathy,”
an “acceptance” of the inevitable
(in her, and in myself)
that I denied her, living …
I DENIED HER, LIVING.
She asked, and I could
not, would not give …
—I did “will” to forgive her, but
forgiveness
lay beyond the will,—
… and I willed
NOT to forgive her:—
for “forgiveness” seems to say
Everything is forgotten, obliterated,—
the past
is as nothing, erased …
Her plea, her need for forgiveness
seemed the attempt to obliterate
the actions, angers, decisions

that MADE ME what I am …
To obliterate the crises, furies, refusals
that are how I
came to understand her, me, my life—.
Truly to feel “forgiveness,”
to forgive her IN MY HEART,
meant erasing ME …
She seemed to ask it to render me
paralyzed, and defenseless.
—Now that I no longer must face her,
I give her in my mind
the “empathy” and “acceptance”
I denied her, living.
Why are you angry?
… But if, somehow, what we were
didn’t have to be understood
by MEMORY,
and THIS EARTH—
… Augustine and Monica,
as they lean
alone together standing at a window
overlooking a garden at the center of the house
(in Book Nine of the Confessions),
near the time of her death (which time,

Augustine says, GOD knew,
though they did not),—
resting here at Ostia from a long journey
by land,
and preparing for a long sea-journey
back to the Africa which is their home,—
… as they stand here sweetly talking together,
and ask
“what the eternal life of the saints could be”
(panting to be sprinkled from the waters of God’s fountain
to help them meditate
upon so great a matter),—
… as they stand alone together
at this window,
they can FORGET THE PAST
AND LOOK FORWARD
TO WHAT LIES BEFORE THEM …
—They had much to forget;
in the Confessions, Monica’s ferocity
is frightening:—
before Augustine became a Christian,
she saw him as dead—;
she refused to live with him or even
eat at the same table in his house,
shunning and detesting his blasphemies,—

until she had a dream in which she
learned that he would finally convert to Christ …
—When he planned to leave Africa for Italy,
she was determined he would take her
with him, or remain at home;
she followed him to the seacoast,
clinging to him, he says, with “dreadful grief”;
one night he escaped, and
sailed—;
not long after, she followed …
—Finally, of course, he became a Christian;
until then, she
ceaselessly wept and mourned and prayed.
Do you know why you are saying all this?
As Augustine and Monica stood leaning at that
window in Ostia, contemplating
what the saints’ possession of God is like,
they moved past and reviewed
(Augustine tells us)
each level of created things,—
each level of CREATION, from this earth
to the sun and moon and stars
shining down on this earth …
—Talking, musing, wondering
at creation, but knowing that our life and light

here cannot compare
to the sweetness of the saints’ LIGHT and LIFE,—
(here, where he had forced her to SEEK
what out of her body she had herself
brought forth,—)
… now, self-gathered at last in the purity of their own
being, they ascend higher
still, and together S C A L E T H E S T A R S …
—And so, Augustine tells us, they came to their own
souls, and then went
past them, to that region of richness
unending, where God feeds ISRAEL forever
with the food of Truth …
There LIFE is the WISDOM by which
all things are made, which
itself is not made …
—While they were thus talking of, straining to comprehend,
panting for this WISDOM, with all the effort
of their heart, for one heartbeat,
they together attained to touch it—;
… then sighing, and leaving the first-fruits
of their Spirit bound there,
they returned to the sound of their own voice,—
to words,

which have a beginning and an end …
“How unlike,” Augustine says, “God’s WORD,—
changeless, self-gathered, unmade, yet forever
making all things new…”
How do you explain it?
Then they said:—
“If any man could shut his ears
to the tumult of the flesh—;
if suddenly the cacophony
of earth and sea and air
were S I L E N T, and the voice of the self
died to the self, and so the self
found its way beyond the self,—
beyond the SELF it has made,—
silent
our expiations and confessions,
the voice that says: NO REMISSION OF SINS
WITHOUT THE SHEDDING OF BLOOD,
the Word that was only given us drenched in blood,—
… if to any man
his self, CREATION itself
(Substance and Accidents and their Relations)
suddenly were S I L E N T,—

and in that silence, he then
heard creation
say with one voice:—
We are not our own source,—
even those of us
who made ourselves, creatures
of the Will, the Mirror, and the Dream,
know we are not our own source,—
… if he heard this voice,
and then
all creation were, even for a second, S I L E N T,—
(this creation in which creatures
of consciousness,
whose LAW is that they come to be
through change, through
birth, fruition, and death,
know that as they move toward fullness
of being, they move toward ceasing to be,—)
… if in this silence,
He whom we crave to hear
SPOKE AT LAST—;
spoke not through the veil
of earth and sea and air,
thunder, ‘SIGNS AND WONDERS,’ the voice
of an angel, the enigma of similitude and of

parable, all
the ALIEN that BESETS us here,—
… spoke not by them, but by HIMSELF, calling
us to return into that secret place from
which He
comes forth at last to us,—
… just as we two
together reached forth and for one
heartbeat attained to TOUCH
the WISDOM that is our SOURCE and GROUND,—
… if this could continue, and LIFE
were that one moment of
wisdom and understanding
for which we then sighed,—
would not this be: ENTER THOU INTO THE JOY OF THY LORD?…
And when shall it be? At
the resurrection of the dead, when all
shall rise, but not all shall be changed?
And shall WE then be changed?…”
In words like these, but not
exactly these, (Augustine then says,)
they talked together that day—
(just as the words I have given you are
not, of course, exactly Augustine’s).

Monica then said,
“Son, I no longer hope
for anything from this world.
I wanted to stay alive long enough
to see you a Catholic Christian.
God has granted me this, in
superabundance.
… What am I still doing here?”
In five days, she fell into a fever;
nine days later she was dead.
Why are you angry?
My mother, at the end of her life, was frightened.
She was afraid to die
not because she feared an afterlife,
but because she didn’t know what her life had been.
Her two marriages were failures,—
she stayed married to my stepfather, but
in despair, without trust in or respect for him, or
visible affection …
She had had no profession,—
she had painted a few paintings, and
written a handful of poems, but without the illusion
either were any good, or STOOD FOR HER …

She had MADE nothing.
I was what she had made.—
She saw that her concern and worry and care
in the end called up in me
protestations of affection
that veiled
unappeasable anger, and remorse.
UNDOING THIS was beyond me …
She felt she was here for some reason,—
… but never found it.
Man needs a metaphysics;
he cannot have one.

The Sacrifice
When Judas writes the history of SOLITUDE,—
… let him celebrate
Miss Mary Kenwood; who, without
help, placed her head in a plastic bag,
then locked herself
in a refrigerator.
•
—Six months earlier, after thirty years
teaching piano, she had watched
her mother slowly die of throat cancer.
Watched her want to die …
What once had given Mary life
in the end didn’t want it.
Awake, her mother screamed for help to die.
—She felt
GUILTY … She knew that all men in these situations felt
innocent—; helpless—; yet guilty.
•
Christ knew the Secret. Betrayal
is necessary; as is woe for the betrayer.
The solution, Mary realized at last,
must be brought out of my own body.

Wiping away our sins, Christ stained us with his blood—;
to offer yourself, yet need betrayal, by Judas, before SHOULDERING
THE GUILT OF THE WORLD—;
… Give me the courage not to need Judas.
•
When Judas writes the history of solitude,
let him record
that to the friend who opened
the refrigerator, it seemed
death fought; before giving in.

Genesis 1–2:4
In the beginning, God made HEAVEN and EARTH.
The earth without form was waste.
DARKNESS was the face of the deep.
His spirit was the wind brooding over the waters.
•
In darkness he said,
LET THERE BE LIGHT.
There was light.
In light he said, IT IS GOOD.
God, dividing darkness from light,
named light DAY and darkness NIGHT.
Night and day were the first day.
•
God said,
LET THE FIRMAMENT
ARC THE EARTH.
The waters opened.
The ARC above the earth
divided the waters above from the waters below.

God named the arc, HEAVEN.
Night and day were the second day.
•
God said,
LET THE WATERS BELOW THE FIRMAMENT
RECEDE, REVEALING THE GROUND.
The waters opened, and receded.
What lay beneath the waters was the ground.
God named the dry ground, EARTH.
He named the waters surrounding the earth, OCEAN.
God looked.
He said, IT IS GOOD.
God said,
LET THE BARE EARTH
BREAK OPEN, HEAVY WITH SEED.
The earth broke open.
Numberless PLANTS filled
with seed spread over the ground, and TREES
boughed with fruit heavy with seed.
God looked.
He said, IT IS GOOD.
Night and day were the third day.
•
God said,
LET GREAT LIGHTS IN THE FIRMAMENT

ORDER AND ILLUMINATE THE EARTH.
God placed great lights shining in the firmament,
the GREATER LIGHT to dominate the day,
the LESSER LIGHT to dominate the night,
and STARS.
God looked. He said,
LET THEM BE FOR SIGNS.
Dividing darkness from light, the shining
made seasons, days, years.
God said, IT IS GOOD.
Night and day were the fourth day.
•
God said,
LET THE MOVING WATERS LIVE
WITH TEEMING, LIVING CREATURES.
God said,
LET THE EMPTY FIRMAMENT LIVE
WITH TEEMING, LIVING CREATURES.
God made the creatures of the deep,
BEASTS and MONSTERS, all those
swarming within it. God made the winged creatures
moving across the face of the firmament.
God looked.
He said, IT IS GOOD.

God blessed them, saying,
INCREASE. MULTIPLY.
FILL THE WATERS.
ARCING THE EARTH,
FILL THE FIRMAMENT.
They increased and multiplied.
Night and day were the fifth day.
•
God said,
LET THE EARTH BRING FORTH
LIVING CREATURES BOUND TO THE EARTH.
God made the beasts of the earth,
cattle, each according to its kind.
He made the creatures that crawl on the earth,
reptiles, each according to its kind.
God looked.
He said, IT IS GOOD.
God said,
LET US MAKE MAN
LIKE US, IN OUR IMAGE AND LIKENESS.
God said,
LET THEM DOMINATE THE EARTH
AND THE CREATURES OF THE EARTH.
God made MAN in his own image,
in the image of God

he made him,
MAN and WOMAN
he made them.
Of one likeness
MALE FE MALE
two he made.
God blessed them, saying,
INCREASE. MULTIPLY.
DOMINATE THE EARTH
AND THE CREATURES OF THE EARTH.
God looked. He said,
YOUR MEAT SHALL BE
PLANTS, SEEDS, FRUIT.
God said to the man and woman
and all the creatures on the earth,
YOUR MEAT SHALL BE THE EARTH,
NOT THE CREATURES OF THE EARTH.
God looked.
He said, IT IS VERY GOOD.
Night and day were the sixth day.
•
God rested. On the seventh day
God rested. He looked at HEAVEN and EARTH,
and ceased.
Heaven and earth with all their panoply

were made.
God blessed the seventh day, God made
the seventh day a holy day,
because on the seventh day God rested, God ceased.
•
This was the creation of the world.

THE BOOK OF THE BODY
(1977)

The Arc
When I wake up,
I try to convince myself that my arm
isn’t there—
to retain my sanity.
Then I try to convince myself it is.
•

•

•

INSTRUCTIONS
1. Always bandagefirmly. The pressure should be constant over the entire stump
with greatest pressure near the tip to attempt to make the stump cone-shaped.
2. If stump starts to throb, remove the bandage at once. Leave bandage off for
one hour and rebandage the stump as before, firmly. Inspect the skin of your
stump daily for any blisters, spots or sores and report them.
3. Wash bandage with mild soap in luke warm water. DO NOT WRING!
Squeeze the waters out gently and place the bandage over the shower rod to dry
thoroughly. DO NOT STRETCH OR IRON!!
4. Change the stump sock daily. Wash the sock daily with mild soap in luke
warm water. DO NOT WRING! Squeeze the water out gently—place the sock
on a flat surface to dry.
•

•

•

I used to vaguely perceive the necessity
of coming to terms with the stump-filled, material world,—
things, bodies;
CRAP—

a world of accident, and chance—;
but after
the accident, I had to understand it
not as an accident—;
the way my mother,
years before locked in McLean’s,
believed the painting of a snow-scene above her bed
had been placed there by the doctor to make her feel cold.
How could we convince her it had no point?…
It had no point,—
it was there
without relation to my mother; by chance; by
CHANCE the car swerved when a yellow car
came at us—; and the next
minute, when I looked down
all I saw was a space below the elbow
instead of my arm …
The police still can’t figure out exactly what happened.
I tell myself:
“Insanity is the insistence on meaning.”
•

•

•

He asked me if I wanted to get undressed, but I’m
embarrassed to take my shirt off,
so I told him to go ahead and take all his clothes off.
His body looked small and white lying on top of the dark bedspread.

I said I wanted to watch him wash
his prick.
He got up and walked
to the washbasin against the wall,
then I went up, and started to wash
it with mild soap in luke warm water.
I squeezed it.
He laughed,
and after drying off, went back to the bed.
I asked if he had a job.
“Drove a truck for a while,
but about a week ago—I got laid off.”
He looked uneasy, almost scared.
“When I was in Vietnam,
my wife met someone else, and divorced me.
I have a little daughter three years old.”
He got his wallet and showed me the little girl’s picture.
“I don’t blame my wife—I was gone
a long time, and like everybody
else in Vietnam I did a lot of fucking around.”
He looked frightened and embarrassed, seeming to want
me to reassure him …
I asked him to tell me about Vietnam.
“Anything you touched might explode. I know guys
just kicked a rock, and got killed …
Once a buddy of mine
was passing a hut, when a gook motioned to him to come inside.
Inside a woman was lying on her back, with
a pile of cigarettes next to her. He threw
some cigarettes on the pile, got on top of her,

and shoved in his prick.
He screamed.
She had a razor blade inside.
The whole end of his thing was sliced in two …
They fixed it up;
but what can he tell his wife?”
When he asked me what kind of sex I wanted,
I suddenly
forgot why
a body can make me feel horny—;
I wanted to leave.
But afraid
leaving might insult him, I asked him to masturbate.
“Sure.”
He closed his eyes. For several minutes
his arm and hand with great energy
worked, as his contorted face tried to concentrate.
I stared at him, wishing
I could know
the image in his mind when at last he came.
•

•

•

The person I can’t forget on my mother’s ward
I don’t know the name of.
She still stands there
in my mind,—
though it is summer, and hot,
she is wearing a heavy terry-cloth robe,
sweating, with a thin metal chain around her neck:

that’s all—
she is assuring me
she wears nothing under the robe,
that to wear anything
would limit her, that the doctors tell her
to have an “identity”
she must wear something—
“But I don’t want an identity!
This way I’m free … Everybody else
has a medal on their chain, with a picture
or name on it, but I don’t—
this way
I’m not bound down…”
With two hands
she begins to work the chain
around and around her neck, she soon gets
franticly excited,
and finally the attendant leads her away …
I only saw her once; that’s
her identity in my mind,—
and even in my mind,
sweating
she wears a body
•

•

•

In Michelangelo’s drawing The Dream, a man,
his arms lightly touching the globe,
all the masks at last lying dead beneath him,

is wakened by an angel
hovering above him,
the angel’s trumpet directed by the angel’s arms,
the two figures connected by the trumpet,
wakened to the World ranged round him,
which is his dream, as well as Sin:
Sex. Identity. History. Family.
Affection. Obsession. Chance.
—the seven
Deadly Sins, spirit
implicating itself in matter, only able to know itself
by what it has done in Time,—
are all ranged round him, the angel
waking him to himself … his arms lightly touching the globe.
•

•

•

In Paris, on the footbridge between the Ile St. Louis
and the Ile de la Cité,
about six months after the accident,
I had an illumination:
the solution was to forget
that I had ever had an arm.
The lost arm had never existed.
Since the accident,
I had gotten more and more obsessed: the image
of what I had been,
the anticipations,
demands and predilections of a two-armed man
haunted me—

I was no longer whole; proportioned; inviolate …
In a store, I found a “memorial album”:
birth date, death date, place
of rest, visitors to the coffin—
I could clearly see
an obituary:
On a certain date, in a certain place,
he lost his arm.
Twice I dreamed the cone of my stump
was a gravestone:
I saw it:
the whole of my life
was a kind of arc
stretching between two etched, ineradicable dates …
I had to escape that arc—
even notions like career and marriage (all those things
which because they
have a beginning, must end—)
seemed to suffocate …
I went to Paris. My family’s sympathy,
the vivid scenes of my former life
whispered that my body was bound by two iron dates …
One day, leaving my hotel on the Ile St. Louis,
I saw a black dog and a young boy madly running.
Nothing unusual—
except the dog only had one
front leg. He seemed without consciousness
of what he lacked;
free of memory as a vegetable.
Looking at each other, they happily jogged along,

started to cross the bridge, and I followed—
then, as I crossed it, suddenly
I felt that I too must erase my past,
that I could, must pretend (almost
as an experiment) I had never had more
than one arm, that the image
faced in the mirror
was the only, the inevitable image …
—For a time, it worked;
I was happy;
without a past, I seemed not to exist
in time at all,—
I only remember a sense of release, ease,
proportion—
I am now one, not less than one …
Then, after about two weeks, imperceptibly
everything I saw became
cardboard …
Even the things I touched—
I couldn’t allow myself to remember
the vivid associations
which gave dimension to what I
touched, saw, smelt,—
the resonance of every image
I had to try to cut from my brain, it had been felt
by someone with two hands and two arms …
I had to try to cut from my brain
my phantom hand
which still gets cramps, which my brain still
recognizes as real—

and now, I think of Paris,
how Paris is still the city of Louis XVI and
Robespierre, how blood, amputation, and rubble
give her dimension, resonance, and grace.

Happy Birthday
Thirty-three, goodbye—
the awe I feel
is not that you won’t come again, or why—
or even that after
a time, we think of those who are dead
with a sweetness that cannot be explained—
but that I’ve read the trading-cards:
RALPH TEMPLE CYCLIST CHAMPION TRICK RIDER
WILLIE HARRADON CYCLIST
THE YOUTHFUL PHENOMENON
F. F. IVES CYCLIST
100 MILES 6 H. 25 MIN. 30 SEC.
—as the fragile metal of their
wheels stopped turning, as they
took on wives, children, accomplishments, all those
predilections which also insisted on ending,
they could not tell themselves from what they had done.
Terrible to dress in the clothes
of a period that must end.
They didn’t plan it that way—
they didn’t plan it that way.

Elegy
I. Belafont
“He seemed to have gotten better—
Tuesday, for the first time
in a week, he went out
into the front yard, and
pottied by lifting his leg—
which he hadn’t had
the strength to do. So we left him
just for an hour—
the vet says
somebody must have
got to him again, in
that hour—
one in the morning, he started to
cough, throw up, and Floyd
stayed with him
all night—
at six, he called the vet, and at ten
he died.
He had a good life—
you feel so guilty, even though you
did all you could—

I talked
to my doctor, and
he says you
always feel that way, though you
did all you
humanly could—all you
humanly could—”
(pause) “He had a good life—”
My mother’s dog is dead;
as truly as I am, he was her son;
we used to laugh at the comparison.
“When your father was drunk one night,
he started to hit me; you were only five, but
stood up to him, and said:
‘If you ever
try to hit mommy again, I’ll kill you.’
I knew then I had to leave.
When we came to the city,
you were a real toughie—
I’ll never forget the first
day of kindergarten, you were sent home because
you called the lady teacher a ‘sonofabitch’!
—You’d only been around cowboys;
but later, you only wanted to be with me.
I had to push you away—
we were always
more like each other than anyone else.”
We used to laugh at the comparison.

“I insisted they bury him here, in the garden: Floyd
made a box: we wrapped him
in one of our best
white sheets.” —Was it his fault
they loved him
more than each other? Or their fault
their love
forbade him in his nine years
from even licking his genitals?
She got him
the year before I went away to school,
“to take your place,”
she kidded. She used to laugh
at poodles on the street—clipped, manicured,
clung to.
But what was she to do—
change, or have another child?
Belafont, I saw you in a dream tonight,
reaching toward me to kiss me
but carefully avoiding the mouth, as
taught,
yet constantly, defiantly skirting it—
then plunging into a pile of old, empty shoeboxes
to come up with the strap
I wear on my weak

left wrist
exercising each night, remaking
the embarrassing
soft overfed unloved body
I try to blame on the past—;
tilting your head, the strap
hanging from one side of the mouth,
you look at me with your
daring, lawless
stare—
and begin to chew.

II. Pruning
“I’d rather die than let them
take off a breast. I’d rather die
than go through cobalt again.”
She means it,—
but I can’t help but remember
her at least fifteen years earlier,
standing in the doorway, shrieking at me
when I wanted to be a priest:
“It’s just as well!
You had mumps—; they went down—; you’ll never,
gelding, have kids!”
twisting her last knife
to save me from the Church, the Church
which called her marriage adultery …
—She is saying: “If the cancer
pops out somewhere else, I won’t let them operate.
I’d rather die.
They just
butcher you … Besides, it never works.”

III. Lover
“I’ll be right over.”
“Give me a few minutes: I’m still
in my pajamas.”
“Don’t get out of your pajamas.”
“Don’t get out of my pajamas?”
“—Don’t get out of your pajamas!”
And so we learned how to make two lovers
of friends; now,
caught “between a rock and a hard place—” (after
the hospital, after
“gestation” was “interrupted”) we still
when we call even say we love each other …
Too bad two people don’t have to “love each other”
more, to make a child.

IV. Light
I am asleep, dreaming a terrible dream, so I awake,
and want to call my father to ask if, just
for a short time, the dog can come to stay with me.
But the light next to my bed won’t light:
I press and press the switch. Touching the phone,
I can’t see to dial the numbers. Can I learn how to keep
the dog in my apartment? In the dark, trying
a second light, I remember
I always knew these machines would fail me.
Then I awake,
remember my father and the dog are dead,
the lights in that room do not go on.

V. Lineage
“I went to a mausoleum today, and found
what I want. Eye-level.
Don’t forget:
I want to be buried in a mausoleum at eye-level.”
She feels she never quite recovered
from her mother’s, my grandmother’s, death.
Her mother died by falling from a
third floor hospital window.
“—I’m sure she didn’t want to kill herself;
after the stroke, sometimes she got confused, and
maybe she thought
she saw grandpa at the window …
She wanted to be at home. After the stroke,
we had to put her in a nursing home,—
she hated it, but you couldn’t
get help to stay with her, and she needed
someone twenty-four hours a day,—
she begged me to take her out;
the cruel,
unreasonable things she said to me! Her doctor
told me I was doing the right thing, but
what she said
almost drove me crazy …
it’s astonishing how clearly I can still hear her voice.
I still dream I can see her falling

three stories, her arms stretching out …
For forty years, she counted
on grandpa,—
after he died, she still
talked to him.
I know I made a lot of
mistakes with you, but I couldn’t count on anyone—
I had to be both father and mother…”
As the subject once again changes from my grandmother
to my father, or the dog—
to my stepfather, or me—
her obsessive, baffled voice
says that when she allowed herself to love
she let something into her head which will
never be got out—;
which could only betray her
or be betrayed, but never appeased—;
whose voice
death and memory have made
into a razor-blade without a handle …
“Don’t forget:
I want to be buried in a mausoleum at eye-level.”

Envoi
“If it resists me, I know it’s real—”
a friend said. I thought of you … When I said,
“I feel too much. I can’t stand what I feel”
I meant, as always, facing you.—You’re real;
and smile at me no less woundedly, dead.
If it resists me, I know it’s real.
Now no act of Mind,—or Will,—can reveal
the secret to un-say all we once said …
I feel too much. I can’t stand what I feel.
The only way we stumbled to the Real
was through failure; outrage; betrayals; dread.
If it resists me, I know it’s real.
Is the only salvation through what’s real?
But each book … reads me—; who remains unread.
I feel too much. I can’t stand what I feel.
Mother, I didn’t forgive you. Conceal
unreal forgiving. Show me your face in fury—; not dead.
If it resists me, I know it’s real.
I feel too much. I can’t stand what I feel.

The Book of the Body
Wanting to cease to feel—;
since 1967,
so much blood under the bridge,—
the deaths of both my parents,
(now that they have no
body, only when I have no body
can we meet—)
my romance with Orgasm,
exhilaration like Insight, but without
content?—
the NO which is YES, the YES which is NO—
Daphnis,
astonished at the unaccustomed threshold of heaven,
in his whiteness
sees beneath his feet the clouds and stars …
—So many
infatuations guaranteed to fail before they started,
terror at my own homosexuality,
terror which somehow
evaporated slowly with “Gay Liberation”
and finding that I had fathered a child—;

… All those who loved me
whom I did not want;
all those whom I loved
who did not want me;
all those whose love I reciprocated
but in a way somehow
unlike what they wanted …
—Blindness. Blankness.
A friend said, “I’ve hurt so many…” And
for what?
to what end?—
An adult’s forgiveness of his parents
born out of increasing age and empathy
which really forgives nothing,—
but is loathing, rage, revenge,
yet forgiveness as well—;
Sex the type of all action,
reconciliation with the body that is
annihilation of the body,
My romance with pornography,
watching it happen, watching
two bodies trying to make it happen,
however masterful or gorgeous, helpless
climbing the un-mappable mountain
of FEELING, the will

in sweat, hurt, exhaustion, accepting
limits of will,
the NO which is YES, the YES which is NO.

1974.

Ellen West
I love sweets,—
heaven
would be dying on a bed of vanilla ice cream …
But my true self
is thin, all profile
and effortless gestures, the sort of blond
elegant girl whose
body is the image of her soul.
—My doctors tell me I must give up
this ideal;
but I
WILL NOT … cannot.
Only to my husband I’m not simply a “case.”
But he is a fool. He married
meat, and thought it was a wife.
•

•

•

Why am I a girl?
I ask my doctors, and they tell me they
don’t know, that it is just “given.”
But it has such
implications—;
and sometimes,
I even feel like a girl.

•

•

•

Now, at the beginning of Ellen’s thirty-second year, her physical condition has
deteriorated still further. Her use of laxatives increases beyond measure. Every
evening she takes sixty to seventy tablets of a laxative, with the result that she
suffers tortured vomiting at night and violent diarrhea by day, often
accompanied by a weakness of the heart. She has thinned down to a skeleton,
and weighs only 92 pounds.
•

•

•

About five years ago, I was in a restaurant,
eating alone
with a book. I was
not married, and often did that …
—I’d turn down
dinner invitations, so I could eat alone;
I’d allow myself two pieces of bread, with
butter, at the beginning, and three scoops of
vanilla ice cream, at the end,—
sitting there alone
with a book, both in the book
and out of it, waited on, idly
watching people,—
when an attractive young man
and woman, both elegantly dressed,
sat next to me.
She was beautiful—;
with sharp, clear features, a good
bone structure—;
if she took her make-up off
in front of you, rubbing cold cream
again and again across her skin, she still would be

beautiful—
more beautiful.
And he,—
I couldn’t remember when I had seen a man
so attractive. I didn’t know why. He was almost
a male version
of her,—
I had the sudden, mad notion that I
wanted to be his lover …
—Were they married?
were they lovers?
They didn’t wear wedding rings.
Their behavior was circumspect. They discussed
politics. They didn’t touch …
—How could I discover?
Then, when the first course
arrived, I noticed the way
each held his fork out for the other
to taste what he had ordered …
They did this
again and again, with pleased looks, indulgent
smiles, for each course,
more than once for each dish—;
much too much for just friends …
—Their behavior somehow sickened me;
the way each gladly

put the food the other had offered into his mouth—;
I knew what they were. I knew they slept together.
An immense depression came over me …
—I knew I could never
with such ease allow another to put food into my mouth:
happily myself put food into another’s mouth—;
I knew that to become a wife I would have to give up my ideal.
•

•

•

Even as a child,
I saw that the “natural” process of aging
is for one’s middle to thicken—
one’s skin to blotch;
as happened to my mother.
And her mother.
I loathed “Nature.”
At twelve, pancakes
became the most terrible thought there is …
I shall defeat “Nature.”
In the hospital, when they
weigh me, I wear weights secretly sewn into my belt.
•

•

•

January 16. The patient is allowed to eat in her room, but comes readily with her
husband to afternoon coffee. Previously she had stoutly resisted this on the
ground that she did not really eat but devoured like a wild animal. This she
demonstrated with utmost realism.… Her physical examination showed nothing

striking. Salivary glands are markedly enlarged on both sides.
January 21. Has been reading Faust again. In her diary, writes that art is the
“mutual permeation” of the “world of the body” and the “world of the spirit.”
Says that her own poems are “hospital poems … weak—without skill or
perseverance; only managing to beat their wings softly.”
February 8. Agitation, quickly subsided again. Has attached herself to an
elegant, very thin female patient. Homo-erotic component strikingly evident.
February 15. Vexation, and torment. Says that her mind forces her always to
think of eating. Feels herself degraded by this. Has entirely, for the first time in
years, stopped writing poetry.
•

•

•

Callas is my favorite singer, but I’ve only
seen her once—;
I’ve never forgotten that night …
It was in Tosca, she had long before
lost weight, her voice
had been, for years,
deteriorating, half itself …
When her career began, of course, she was fat,
enormous—; in the early photographs,
sometimes I almost don’t recognize her …
The voice too then was enormous—
healthy; robust; subtle; but capable of
crude effects, even vulgar,
almost out of
high spirits, too much health …
But soon she felt that she must lose weight,—
that all she was trying to express
was obliterated by her body,

buried in flesh—;
abruptly, within
four months, she lost at least sixty pounds …
—The gossip in Milan was that Callas
had swallowed a tapeworm.
But of course she hadn’t.
The tapeworm
was her soul …
—How her soul, uncompromising,
insatiable,
must have loved eating the flesh from her bones,
revealing this extraordinarily
mercurial; fragile; masterly creature …
—But irresistibly, nothing
stopped there; the huge voice
also began to change: at first, it simply diminished
in volume, in size,
then the top notes became
shrill, unreliable—at last,
usually not there at all …
—No one knows why. Perhaps her mind,
ravenous, still insatiable, sensed
that to struggle with the shreds of a voice
must make her artistry subtler, more refined,
more capable of expressing humiliation,
rage, betrayal …
—Perhaps the opposite. Perhaps her spirit
loathed the unending struggle

to embody itself, to manifest itself, on a stage whose
mechanics, and suffocating customs,
seemed expressly designed to annihilate spirit …
—I know that in Tosca, in the second act,
when, humiliated, wounded by Scarpia,
she sang Vissi d’arte
—“I lived for art”—
and in torment, bewilderment, at the end she asks,
with a voice reaching
harrowingly for the notes,
“Art has repaid me LIKE THIS?”
I felt I was watching
autobiography—
an art; skill;
virtuosity
miles distant from the usual soprano’s
athleticism,—
the usual musician’s dream
of virtuosity without content …
—I wonder what she feels, now,
listening to her recordings.
For they have already, within a few years,
begun to date …
Whatever they express
they express through the style of a decade
and a half—;
a style she helped create …
—She must know that now
she probably would not do a trill in

exactly that way,—
that the whole sound, atmosphere,
dramaturgy of her recordings
have just slightly become those of the past …
—Is it bitter? Does her soul
tell her
that she was an idiot ever to think
anything
material wholly could satisfy?…
—Perhaps it says: The only way
to escape
the History of Styles
is not to have a body.
•

•

•

When I open my eyes in the morning, my great
mystery
stands before me …
—I know that I am intelligent; therefore
the inability not to fear food
day-and-night; this unending hunger
ten minutes after I have eaten …
a childish
dread of eating; hunger which can have no cause,—
half my mind says that all this
is demeaning …
Bread
for days on end
drives all real thought from my brain …

—Then I think, No. The ideal of being thin
conceals the ideal
not to have a body—;
which is NOT trivial …
This wish seems now as much a “given” of my existence
as the intolerable
fact that I am dark-complexioned; big-boned;
and once weighed
one hundred and sixty-five pounds …
—But then I think, No. That’s too simple,—
without a body, who can
know himself at all?
Only by
acting; choosing; rejecting; have I
made myself—
discovered who and what Ellen can be …
—But then again I think, NO. This I is anterior
to name; gender; action;
fashion;
MATTER ITSELF,—
… trying to stop my hunger with FOOD
is like trying to appease thirst
with ink.
•

•

•

March 30. Result of the consultation: Both gentlemen agree completely with my
prognosis and doubt any therapeutic usefulness of commitment even more
emphatically than I. All three of us are agreed that it is not a case of obsessional
neurosis and not one of manic-depressive psychosis, and that no definitely
reliable therapy is possible. We therefore resolved to give in to the patient’s

demand for discharge.
•

•

•

The train-ride yesterday
was far worse than I expected …
In our compartment
were ordinary people: a student;
a woman; her child;—
they had ordinary bodies, pleasant faces;
but I thought
I was surrounded by creatures
with the pathetic, desperate
desire to be not what they were:—
the student was short,
and carried her body as if forcing
it to be taller—;
the woman showed her gums when she smiled,
and often held her
hand up to hide them—;
the child
seemed to cry simply because it was
small; a dwarf, and helpless …
—I was hungry. I had insisted that my husband
not bring food …
After about thirty minutes, the woman
peeled an orange
to quiet the child. She put a section
into its mouth—;
immediately it spit it out.

The piece fell to the floor.
—She pushed it with her foot through the dirt
toward me
several inches.
My husband saw me staring
down at the piece …
—I didn’t move; how I wanted
to reach out,
and as if invisible
shove it in my mouth—;
my body
became rigid. As I stared at him,
I could see him staring
at me,—
then he looked at the student—; at the woman—; then
back to me …
I didn’t move.
—At last, he bent down, and
casually
threw it out the window.
He looked away.
—I got up to leave the compartment, then
saw his face,—
his eyes
were red;
and I saw
—I’m sure I saw—

disappointment.
•

•

•

On the third day of being home she is as if transformed. At breakfast she eats
butter and sugar, at noon she eats so much that—for the first time in thirteen
years!—she is satisfied by her food and gets really full. At afternoon coffee she
eats chocolate creams and Easter eggs. She takes a walk with her husband, reads
poems, listens to recordings, is in a positively festive mood, and all heaviness
seems to have fallen away from her. She writes letters, the last one a letter to the
fellow patient here to whom she had become so attached. In the evening she
takes a lethal dose of poison, and on the following morning she is dead. “She
looked as she had never looked in life—calm and happy and peaceful.”
•

•

•

Dearest.—I remember how
at eighteen,
on hikes with friends, when
they rested, sitting down to joke or talk,
I circled
around them, afraid to hike ahead alone,
yet afraid to rest
when I was not yet truly thin.
You and, yes, my husband,—
you and he
have by degrees drawn me within the circle;
forced me to sit down at last on the ground.
I am grateful.
But something in me refuses it.
—How eager I have been
to compromise, to kill this refuser,—

but each compromise, each attempt
to poison an ideal
which often seemed to me sterile and unreal,
heightens my hunger.
I am crippled. I disappoint you.
Will you greet with anger, or
happiness,
the news which might well reach you
before this letter?
Your Ellen.

GOLDEN STATE
(1973)

PART ONE

Herbert White
“When I hit her on the head, it was good,
and then I did it to her a couple of times,—
but it was funny,—afterwards,
it was as if somebody else did it …
Everything flat, without sharpness, richness or line.
Still, I liked to drive past the woods where she lay,
tell the old lady and the kids I had to take a piss,
hop out and do it to her …
The whole buggy of them waiting for me
made me feel good;
but still, just like I knew all along,
she didn’t move.
When the body got too discomposed,
I’d just jack off, letting it fall on her …
—It sounds crazy, but I tell you
sometimes it was beautiful—; I don’t know how
to say it, but for a minute, everything was possible—;
and then,
then,—
well, like I said, she didn’t move: and I saw,
under me, a little girl was just lying there in the mud:
and I knew I couldn’t have done that,—
somebody else had to have done that,—
standing above her there,

in those ordinary, shitty leaves …
—One time, I went to see Dad in a motel where he was
staying with a woman; but she was gone;
you could smell the wine in the air; and he started,
real embarrassing, to cry …
He was still a little drunk,
and asked me to forgive him for
all he hadn’t done—; but, What the shit?
Who would have wanted to stay with Mom? with bastards
not even his own kids?
I got in the truck, and started to drive,
and saw a little girl—
who I picked up, hit on the head, and
screwed, and screwed, and screwed, and screwed, then
buried,
in the garden of the motel …
—You see, ever since I was a kid I wanted
to feel things make sense: I remember
looking out the window of my room back home,—
and being almost suffocated by the asphalt;
and grass; and trees; and glass;
just there, just there, doing nothing!
not saying anything! filling me up—
but also being a wall; dead, and stopping me;
—how I wanted to see beneath it, cut
beneath it, and make it
somehow, come alive …
The salt of the earth;
Mom once said, ‘Man’s spunk is the salt of the earth…’
—That night, at that Twenty-nine Palms Motel

I had passed a million times on the road, everything
fit together; was alright;
it seemed like
everything had to be there, like I had spent years
trying, and at last finally finished drawing this
huge circle …
—But then, suddenly I knew
somebody else did it, some bastard
had hurt a little girl—; the motel
I could see again, it had been
itself all the time, a lousy
pile of bricks, plaster, that didn’t seem to
have to be there,—but was, just by chance …
—Once, on the farm, when I was a kid,
I was screwing a goat; and the rope around his neck
when he tried to get away
pulled tight;—and just when I came,
he died …
I came back the next day; jacked off over his body;
but it didn’t do any good …
Mom once said:
‘Man’s spunk is the salt of the earth, and grows kids.’
I tried so hard to come; more pain than anything else;
but didn’t do any good …
—About six months ago, I heard Dad remarried,
so I drove over to Connecticut to see him and see
if he was happy.
She was twenty-five years younger than him:
she had lots of little kids, and I don’t know why,
I felt shaky …
I stopped in front of the address; and

snuck up to the window to look in …
—There he was, a kid
six months old on his lap, laughing
and bouncing the kid, happy in his old age
to play the papa after years of sleeping around,—
it twisted me up …
To think that what he wouldn’t give me,
he wanted to give them …
I could have killed the bastard …
—Naturally, I just got right back in the car,
and believe me, was determined, determined,
to head straight for home …
but the more I drove,
I kept thinking about getting a girl,
and the more I thought I shouldn’t do it,
the more I had to—
I saw her coming out of the movies,
saw she was alone, and
kept circling the blocks as she walked along them,
saying, ‘You’re going to leave her alone.’
‘You’re going to leave her alone.’
—The woods were scary!
As the seasons changed, and you saw more and more
of the skull show through, the nights became clearer,
and the buds,—erect, like nipples …
—But then, one night,
nothing worked …
Nothing in the sky
would blur like I wanted it to;
and I couldn’t, couldn’t,
get it to seem to me

that somebody else did it …
I tried, and tried, but there was just me there,
and her, and the sharp trees
saying, ‘That’s you standing there.
You’re …
just you.’
I hope I fry.
—Hell came when I saw
MYSELF …
and couldn’t stand
what I see…”

Self-Portrait, 1969
He’s still young—; thirty, but looks younger—
or does he?… In the eyes and cheeks, tonight,
turning in the mirror, he saw his mother,—
puffy; angry; bewildered … Many nights
now, when he stares there, he gets angry:—
something unfulfilled there, something dead
to what he once thought he surely could be—
Now, just the glamour of habits …
Once, instead,
he thought insight would remake him, he’d reach
—what? The thrill, the exhilaration
unraveling disaster, that seemed to teach
necessary knowledge … became just jargon.
Sick of being decent, he craves another
crash. What reaches him except disaster?

PART TWO

California Plush
The only thing I miss about Los Angeles
is the Hollywood Freeway at midnight, windows down and
radio blaring
bearing right into the center of the city, the Capitol Tower
on the right, and beyond it, Hollywood Boulevard
blazing
—pimps, surplus stores, footprints of the stars
—descending through the city
fast as the law would allow
through the lights, then rising to the stack
out of the city
to the stack where lanes are stacked six deep
and you on top; the air
now clean; for a moment weightless
without memories, or
need for a past.
The need for the past
is so much at the center of my life
I write this poem to record my discovery of it,
my reconciliation.
It was in Bishop, the room was done
in California plush: we had gone into the coffee shop, were told
you could only get a steak in the bar;

I hesitated,
not wanting to be an occasion of temptation for my father
but he wanted to, so we entered
a dark room, with amber water glasses, walnut
tables, captain’s chairs,
plastic doilies, papier-mâché bas-relief wall ballerinas,
German memorial plates “bought on a trip to Europe,”
Puritan crosshatch green-yellow wallpaper,
frilly shades, cowhide
booths—
I thought of Cambridge:
the lovely congruent elegance
of Revolutionary architecture, even of
ersatz thirties Georgian
seemed alien, a threat, sign
of all I was not—
to bode order and lucidity
as an ideal, if not reality—
not this California plush, which
also
I was not.
And so I made myself an Easterner,
finding it, after all, more like me
than I had let myself hope.
And now, staring into the embittered face of
my father,

again, for two weeks, as twice a year,
I was back.
The waitress asked us if we wanted a drink.
Grimly, I waited until he said no …
Before the tribunal of the world I submit the following
document:
Nancy showed it to us,
in her apartment in the motel,
as she waited month by month
for the property settlement, her children grown
and working for their father,
at fifty-three now alone,
a drink in her hand:
as my father said,
“They keep a drink in her hand”:
Name Wallace Du Bois
Box No 128 Chino, Calif.
Date July 25 ,19 54
Mr Howard Arturian
I am writing a letter to you this afternoon while I’m in the mood of writing.
How is everything getting along with you these fine days, as for me everything
is just fine and I feel great except for the heat I think its lot warmer then it is up
there but I don’t mind it so much. I work at the dairy half day and I go to trade
school the other half day Body & Fender, now I am learning how to spray paint
cars I’ve already painted one and now I got another car to paint. So now I think
I’ve learned all I want after I have learned all this. I know how to straighten
metals and all that. I forgot to say “Hello” to you. The reason why I am writing
to you is about a job, my Parole Officer told me that he got letter from and that
you want me to go to work for you. So I wanteded to know if its truth. When I
go to the Board in Feb. I’ll tell them what I want to do and where I would like to
go, so if you want me to work for you I’d rather have you sent me to your
brother John in Tonapah and place to stay for my family. The Old Lady says the

same thing in her last letter that she would be some place else then in Bishop,
thats the way I feel too. and another thing is my drinking problem. I made up my
mind to quit my drinking, after all what it did to me and what happen.
This is one thing I’ll never forget as longs as I live I never want to go
through all this mess again. This sure did teach me a lot of things that I never
knew before. So Howard you can let me know soon as possible. I sure would
appreciate it.
From Your Friend
Wally Du Bois
P. S
I hope you can read my
writing. I am a little nervous yet
—He and his wife had given a party, and
one of the guests was walking away
just as Wallace started backing up his car.
He hit him, so put the body in the back seat
and drove to a deserted road.
There he put it before the tires, and
ran back and forth over it several times.
When he got out of Chino, he did,
indeed, never do that again:
but one child was dead, his only son,
found with the rest of his family
immobile in their beds with typhoid,
next to the mother, the child having been
dead two days:
he continued to drink, and as if it were the Old West
shot up the town a couple of Saturday nights.
“So now I think I’ve learned all I want
after I have learned all this: this sure did teach me a lot of things
that I never knew before.
I am a little nervous yet.”

It seems to me
an emblem of Bishop—
For watching the room, as the waitresses in their
back-combed, Parisian, peroxided, bouffant hairdos,
and plastic belts,
moved back and forth
I thought of Wallace, and
the room suddenly seemed to me
not uninteresting at all:
they were the same. Every plate and chair
had its congruence with
all the choices creating
these people, created
by them—by me,
for this is my father’s chosen country, my origin.
Before, I had merely been anxious, bored; now,
I began to ask a thousand questions …
He was, of course, mistrustful, knowing I was bored,
knowing he had dragged me up here from Bakersfield
after five years
of almost managing to forget Bishop existed.
But he soon became loquacious, ordered a drink,
and settled down for
an afternoon of talk …
He liked Bishop: somehow, it was to his taste, this

hard-drinking, loud, visited-by-movie-stars town.
“Better to be a big fish in a little pond.”
And he was: when they came to shoot a film,
he entertained them; Miss A——, who wore
nothing at all under her mink coat; Mr. M——,
good horseman, good shot.
“But when your mother
let me down” (for alcoholism and
infidelity, she divorced him)
“and Los Angeles wouldn’t give us water any more,
I had to leave.
We were the first people to grow potatoes in this valley.”
When he began to tell me
that he lost control of the business
because of the settlement he gave my mother,
because I had heard it
many times,
in revenge, I asked why people up here drank so much.
He hesitated. “Bored, I guess.
—Not much to do.”
And why had Nancy’s husband left her?
In bitterness, all he said was:
“People up here drink too damn much.”
And that was how experience
had informed his life.
“So now I think I’ve learned all I want
after I have learned all this: this sure did teach me a lot of things
that I never knew before.

I am a little nervous yet.”
Yet, as my mother said,
returning, as always, to the past,
“I wouldn’t change any of it.
It taught me so much. Gladys
is such an innocent creature: you look into her face
and somehow it’s empty, all she worries about
are sales and the baby.
Her husband’s too good!”
It’s quite pointless to call this rationalization:
my mother, for uncertain reasons, has had her
bout with insanity, but she’s right:
the past in maiming us,
makes us,
fruition
is also
destruction:
I think of Proust, dying
in a cork-lined room, because he refuses to eat
because he thinks that he cannot write if he eats
because he wills to write, to finish his novel
—his novel which recaptures the past, and
with a kind of joy, because
in the debris
of the past, he has found the sources of the necessities
which have led him to this room, writing
—in this strange harmony, does he will
for it to have been different?
And I can’t not think of the remorse of Oedipus,

who tries to escape, to expiate the past
by blinding himself, and
then, when he is dying, sees that he has become a Daimon
—does he, discovering, at last, this cruel
coherence created by
“the order of the universe”
—does he will
anything reversed?
I look at my father:
as he drinks his way into garrulous, shaky
defensiveness, the debris of the past
is just debris—; whatever I reason, it is a desolation
to watch …
must I watch?
He will not change; he does not want to change;
every defeated gesture implies
the past is useless, irretrievable …
—I want to change: I want to stop fear’s subtle
guidance of my life—; but, how can I do that
if I am still
afraid of its source?

1966–67.

Book of Life
I once knew a man named Snake.
He killed
All our snakes.
One day one bit him.
“Ha-ya feelin’, Snake?”
I asked when he returned.
He said,
“My name is Walter.”
The brown house
on the brown hill
reminds me of my parents.
Its memory is of poverty,
not merely poverty of means,
but poverty of history, of awareness of
the ways men have found to live.
My stepfather was from Texas.
“Niggers, you know they’re different from us,
they go mad when they make love,
we white men have to watch out or women
won’t have anything to do with us.”
(pause) “Back in McKinney, there’s a spot on the pavement
where they caught a nigger who’d raped a white woman,

right there they tied him down,
poured gasoline on him, and
lit him afire.
—You can still see the mark.”
Illuminated by the lore of the past, justified
by the calluses on his hands,
—won walking round and round
a wheel digging a water
well fourteen hours a day—
he was happy with himself.
Before my mother married him, she was
free for several years, proposed to
by several men we may call,
in this context,
“educated”
(a lawyer; a doctor; unconfident men
sharing a certain unmistakable
humaneness)
and later, she often asked herself
why she married him.
She would laugh, and say, “I always liked the horse’s asses!”
(pause) “My mother never told me about these things.”
Its memory is of poverty,
not merely poverty of means,
but poverty of history, of awareness of
the ways men have found to live.
My father
“was the handsomest man in Kern County.”

When they met, he was eight years older, and
driving a truck for a bootlegger.
He had had a dance studio in Hollywood,
gone broke, and
was back. “He introduced me to a fast, drinking crowd; my God,
we smoked—! And I wore lipstick: Olive and I promised each other
we would never do that.”
So he went back into farming, as he had done as a child
when his father died, and
“was a genius.”
“Your father, on our wedding night, told me
he had ninety-two thousand dollars in the bank. His first
potato crop. He didn’t have a dime the year before.”
But he
spent all the afternoons in the cool bars.
“He always was a sucker for a no-good
bum with a slick line and a good story.
How an intelligent man like that—”
Soon he
was an alcoholic, and unfaithful; unfaithful
many times; which fact was, as it were,
brought home to her, by
detectives. She would shake her head:
“How an intelligent man like that—”
(bitterly) “He never would have made us a real home,
the way decent men do.”
In her own illness, when she began to

try to turn brass and tin into gold
by boiling them in a large pot full of
soap, cat’s fur, and orange rinds,
she was following
the teachings of the Rosicrucians,
the secrets of the past, the mysteries of the
pyramids.
Later, as she began
to be well, she would ask,
“Why did it happen?
It seems to
say something awful about
everything I’ve done.
Does it make everything wrong?
I knew so little
all along!”
(pause) “Why did it happen to me—at
forty-eight?”
Its memory is of poverty,
not merely poverty of means,
but poverty of history, of awareness of
the ways men have found to live.
For men are not
children, who learn
not to touch the burner; men,
unlike Walter,
cannot simply revert

to their true names.
The brown clapboard house,
in spite of its fine pioneer tradition,
because of the absence of the knowledge in its
lines of other architecture, because of the
poverty of its
brown, barren hill,
reminds me of my parents.

1966.

Golden State
I
To see my father
lying in pink velvet, a rosary
twined around his hands, rouged,
lipsticked, his skin marble …
My mother said, “He looks the way he did
thirty years ago, the day we got married,—
I’m glad I went;
I was afraid: now I can remember him
like that…”
Ruth, your last girlfriend, who wouldn’t sleep with you
or marry, because you wanted her
to pay half the expenses, and “His drinking
almost drove me crazy—”
Ruth once saw you
staring into a mirror,
in your ubiquitous kerchief and cowboy hat,
say:
“Why can’t I look like a cowboy?”
You left a bag of money; and were
the unhappiest man
I have ever known well.

II
It’s in many ways
a relief to have you dead.
I have more money.
Bakersfield is easier: life isn’t so nude,
now that I no longer have to
face you each evening: mother is progressing
beautifully in therapy, I can almost convince myself
a good analyst would have saved you:
for I need to believe, as
always, that your pervasive sense of disappointment
proceeded from
trivial desires: but I fear
that beneath the wish to be a movie star,
cowboy, empire builder, all those
cheap desires, lay
radical disaffection
from the very possibilities
of human life …
Your wishes were too simple:
or too complex.

III
I find it difficult to imagine you
in bed, making love to a woman …
By common consensus, you were a good lover:
and yet,
mother once said: “Marriage would be better
if it weren’t mixed up with sex…”
Just after the divorce,—when I was
about five,—I slept all night with you
in a motel, and again and again
you begged me
to beg her to come back …
I said nothing; but she went back
several times, again and again
you would go on a binge, there would be
another woman,
mother would leave …
You always said,
“Your mother is the only woman I’ve ever loved.”

IV
Oh Shank, don’t turn into the lies
of mere, neat poetry …
I’ve been reading Jung, and he says that we can
never get to the bottom
of what is, or was …
But why things were as they were
obsesses; I know that you
the necessity to contend with you
your helplessness
before yourself,
—has been at the center
of how I think my life …
And yet your voice, raw,
demanding, dissatisfied,
saying over the telephone:
“How are all those bastards at Harvard?”
remains, challenging: beyond all the
patterns and paradigms
I use silence and stop it.

V
I dreamed I had my wish:
—I seemed to see
the conditions of my life, upon
a luminous stage: how I could change,
how I could not: the root of necessity,
and choice.
The stage was labelled
“Insight”.
The actors there
had no faces, I cannot remember
the patterns of their actions, but
simply by watching,
I knew that beneath my feet
the fixed stars
governing my life
had begun to fall, and melt …
—Then your face appeared,
laughing at the simplicity of my wish.

VI
Almost every day
I take out the letter you wrote me in Paris.
… Why?
It was written
the year before you married Shirley; Myrtle,
your girlfriend, was an ally of mine
because she “took care of you,”
but you always
made it clear
she was too dumpy and crude to marry …
In some ways “elegant,”
with a pencil-thin, neatly clipped moustache,
chiselled, Roman nose, you were
a millionaire
and always pretended
you couldn’t afford to go to Europe …
When I was a child,
you didn’t seem to care if I existed.
Bakersfield, Calif
July 9, 1961
Dear Pinon.
Sorry I haven’t wrote to you sooner but glad to hear that you are well and
enjoying Paris.
I got you fathers day wire in the hospital where I put in about twelve days but
I am very well now. I quit the ciggeretts but went through ten days of hell
quitting and my back had been giving me hell.
It had been very hot here but the last few days has been very nice. Emily just
got out of the hospital yesterday. She had her feet worked on. I guess she will

tell you about it. Glad to hear you are learning some French.
We are just about through with potatoes. Crop was very good but no price at
all whitch made it a poor year. Cattle are cheap too. It look like a bad year for all
farmer’s.
I don’t know anything else to tell you. Take care of your self and enjoy it.
Maybe you will never have another chance for another trip. I don’t think I’ll ever
get the chance to go, so if you run into a extra special gal between 28 & 35 send
her over here to me as all I know over here don’t amount to mutch. Well I guess
I’ll close now as I am going over to see Emily.
Hoping to hear from you right away.
This address is 4019 Eton St. be sure and get it straight. Myrtle would like to
know how much that watch amounts to. Let us know
Will close now and write soon.
Love ‘Shank’
P.S. Excuse this writing as its about 30 years since I wrote a letter.

VII
How can I say this?
I think my psychiatrist
likes me: he knows
the most terrible things I’ve done, every stupidity,
inadequacy, awkwardness,
ignorance, the mad girl I screwed
because she once again and again
teased and rejected me, and whose psychic incompetence
I grimly greeted as an occasion for revenge;
he greets my voice
with an interest, and regard, and affection,
which seem to signal I’m worth love;
—you finally
forgave me for being your son, and in the nasty
shambles of your life, in which you had less and less
occasion for pride, you were proud
of me, the first Bidart
who ever got a B.A.; Harvard, despite
your distrust, was the crown;—but the way
you eyed me:
the bewilderment, unease:
the somehow always
tentative, suspended judgment …
—however much you tried (and, clearly,
you did try)
you could not remake your
taste, and like me: could not remake
yourself, to give me
the grace

needed to look in a mirror, as I often can
now, with some equanimity …

VIII
When did I begin to substitute
insight, for prayer?…
—You believed in neither:
but said, “My life is over,”
after you had married Shirley,
twenty-five years younger, with three
small children, the youngest
six months old; she was unfaithful
within two months, the marriage was simply
annulled …
A diabetic, you didn’t
take your insulin when you drank, and
almost managed to die
many times …
You punished Ruth
when she went to Los Angeles for a weekend, by
beginning to drink; she would return home
either to find you in the hospital,
or in a coma on the floor …
The exacerbation
of this seeming necessity
for connection—;
you and mother taught me
there’s little that’s redemptive or useful
in natural affections …
I must unlearn; I must believe
you were merely a man—
with a character, and a past—;
you wore them,

unexamined,
like a nimbus of
furies
round your
greying, awesome head …

IX
What should I have done? In 1963,
you wanted to borrow ten thousand dollars
from me, so that we could buy cattle
together, under the name “Bidart and Son,”—
most of your money was tied up
in the increasingly noxious “Bidart Brothers,”
run by your brother, Johnny …
I said no,—
that I wanted to use the money
for graduate school; but I thought
if you went on a binge, and as had happened
before, simply threw it away …
The Bidarts agreed
you were not to be trusted; you accepted
my answer, with an air
of inevitability I was shocked at …
I didn’t want to see your self-disgust;
—somehow, your self-congratulation
had eroded more deeply, much
more deeply, than even I had wished,—
but for years, how I had wished!…
I have a friend who says
that he has never felt a conflict
between something deeply wished or desired,
and what he thought was “moral”…
Father, such innocence
surely is a kind of Eden—; but,

somehow, I can’t regret that we
are banished from that company—;
in the awareness, the
history of our contradictions and violence,
insofar as I am “moral” at all,
is the beginning of my moral being.

X
When I began this poem,
to see myself
as a piece of history, having a past
which shapes, and informs, and thus inevitably
limits—
at first this seemed sufficient, the beginning of
freedom …
The way to approach freedom
was to acknowledge necessity:—
I sensed I had to become not merely
a speaker, the “eye,” but a character …
And you had to become a character: with a past,
with a set of internal contradictions and necessities
which if I could once define, would at least
begin to release us from each other …
But, of course, no such knowledge is possible;—
as I touch your photographs, they stare back at me
with the dazzling, impenetrable, glitter of mere life …
You stand smiling, at the end of the twenties,
in a suit, and hat,
cane and spats, with a collie at your feet,
happy to be handsome, dashing, elegant:—
and though I cannot connect this image
with the end of your life, with the defensive
gnarled would-be cowboy,—
you seem happy at that fact, happy
to be surprising; unknowable; unpossessable …

You say it’s what you always understood by freedom.

1968–69.

PART THREE

Vergil Aeneid 1.1–33
Arms and the man I sing, the man and hero, who
driven by fate, by the gods’ mere force and Juno’s hate,
found Italy, found Latium, the man and hero
battered on land and sea, who founded our city,
brought us gods and lineage,
even to this, garlanded walls of substantial Rome.
Muse, make me mindful of the causes, load upon me
knowledge of her sorrows, she whom men call the queen of the gods
but driven to drive the most earnest of men
to such misfortunes. After foundering Troy,
what human being would not have been satisfied?
An ancient city, held by farmers, fronting Italy
and the mouth of the Tiber, then
magnificent in elegance, rich in courage:
such was Carthage—it is said, the city of Juno, and loved
by her even above Samos, seat of her shrine.
She wanted this new home of her weapons and chariot
first among men. But the fates did not so spin:
bathed in the faded pageant of Troy, in rue and despair,
a race was to come to rule over men,
merciless in war, graceful in victory.
She had heard that beloved Carthaginian Libya
would soon be a level plain.
Within her mind the resistless past returned:
scenes of burning Troy, herself as chief of destruction—
and deeper, to the causes in insult and wounded love
and proper mother’s pride, Paris’s
judgment, the bastard
founding of the city, Ganymede snatched above her own daughter:
out of this the Trojans must wander, must wander in error
seeking over the world’s seas

what the remnant left by the Greeks and merciless Achilles
may never enjoy through the will of the queen of the gods:
how heavy the burden, to found the Roman race.

After Catullus
The day was calm … For the usual reason
I had gone into the country, and indeed
there seemed peace. Understanding friend:
with whom only
I can be frank; can even you
receive this as I received it?
I walked down into a field. The lions were in bloom,
crocus, hyacinth, coxcombs,
shouting to be so full of sun and seed.
I said to myself: “I must lie down.”
They touched my face. I
could not see the sun.
In this darkness then: a sound became clear,
half-moaning
half-delight
of a girl—twelve?—lying
not five feet from me
with her legs spread apart. Above her in jeans
a boy maybe younger worked away … He was good!
But he didn’t see me standing staring with blind eyes
in the sun. She resisted: his arms held her arms
firmly down
as the open front of his jeans disappeared
under her dress. I
put him to the sword!
With my prick.

To My Father
I walked into the room.
There were objects in the room. I thought I needed nothing
from them. They began to speak,
but the words were unintelligible, a painful cacophony …
Then I realized they were saying
the name
of the man who had chosen them, owned them,
ordered, arranged them, their deceased cause,
the secret pattern that made these things order.
I strained to hear: but
the sound remained unintelligible …
senselessly getting louder, urgent, deafening.
Hands over my ears, at last I knew
they would remain
inarticulate; your name was not in my language.

Another Life
Peut-être n’es-tu pas
suffisamment mort. C’est ici
la limite de notre domaine.
Devant toi coule un fleuve.
VALÉRY.

“—In a dream I never exactly dreamed,
but that is, somehow, the quintessence
of what I might have dreamed,
Kennedy is in Paris
again; it’s ’61; once again
some new national life seems possible,
though desperately, I try to remain unduped,
even cynical …
He’s standing in an open car,
brilliantly lit, bright orange
next to a grey de Gaulle, and they stand
not far from me, slowly moving up the Champs-Elysées …
Bareheaded in the rain, he gives a short
choppy wave, smiling like a sun god.
—I stand and
look, suddenly at peace; once again mindlessly
moved,
as they bear up the fields of Elysium
the possibility of Atlantic peace,

reconciliation between all the power, energy,
optimism,—
and an older wisdom, without
illusions, without force, the austere source
of nihilism, corrupted only by its dream of Glory …
But no—; as I
watch, the style is
not quite right—;
Kennedy is too orange …
And de Gaulle, white, dead
white, ghost white, not even grey …
As my heart
began to grieve for my own awkwardness and
ignorance, which would never be
soothed by the informing energies
of whatever
wisdom saves,—
I saw a young man, almost
my twin, who had written
‘MONSTER’
in awkward lettering with a crayon across
the front of his sweat shirt.
He was gnawing on his arm,
in rage and anger gouging up
pieces of flesh—; but as I moved to stop him, somehow
help him,
suddenly he looked up,
and began, as I had, to look at Kennedy and de Gaulle:
and then abruptly, almost as if I were seeing him
through a camera lens, his figure

split in two,—
or doubled,—
and all the fury
drained from his stunned, exhausted face …
But only for a moment. Soon his eyes turned down
to the word on his chest. The two figures
again became one,
and with fresh energy he attacked the mutilated arm …
—Fascinated, I watched as this
pattern, this cycle,
repeated several times.
Then he reached out and touched me.
—Repelled,
I pulled back … But he became
frantic, demanding that I become
the body he split into:
‘It’s harder
to manage each time! Please
give me your energy;—help me!’
—I said it was impossible,
there was no part of us the same:
we were just watching a parade together:
(and then, as he reached for my face)
leave me alone!
He smirked, and said
I was never alone.
I told him to go to hell.
He said that this was hell.

—I said it was impossible,
there was no part of us the same:
we were just watching a parade together:
when I saw
Grief, avenging Care, pale
Disease, Insanity, Age, and Fear,
—all the raging desolations
which I had come to learn were my patrimony;
the true progeny of my parents’ marriage;
the gifts hidden within the mirror;
—standing guard at the gate of this place,
triumphant,
striking poses
eloquent of the disasters they embodied …
—I took several steps to the right, and saw
Kennedy was paper-thin,
as was de Gaulle;
mere cardboard figures
whose possible real existence
lay buried beneath a million tumbling newspaper photographs …
—I turned, and turned, but now all that was left
was an enormous
fresco;—on each side, the unreadable
fresco of my life…”

THE FIRST HOUR OF THE NIGHT
(1990)

Now In Your Hand
1. Victor Hugo: Preface to Les Misérables, 1862
SO LONG AS, on this earth, in our civilization, fixed there by its laws and its
customs, HELL EXISTS—A DAMNATION MADE BY MEN over and above
the fate all men must face;
SO LONG AS the three great violations of our age,
men debased by the nature of their work
women devoured by their hunger
children stunted by night without light
are unsolved, and even unseen;
SO LONG AS the world human beings have made is a world where we cannot
breathe;
IN SUM, SO LONG AS ALL THAT IS AT HOME ON THIS EARTH ARE
IGNORANCE AND MISERY WITHOUT RECOURSE OR VOICE,
books such as the one now in your hand will not, I think, be, perhaps, useless.

2.
when
once, pursuing the enslaving enemies and enslaving protectors
of our civilization, but encountering
only the unthinkable, a blank screen, banal
interiority, commas multiplying ad infinitum, in
short, the appearance in his consciousness of the consciousness
of the appearance of himself
when he doubted he ever believed they exist
he found that they destroyed enemies and friends
using the means in which he believed,
this system in which in every sentence you can insert not

You remain …
You remain, bride whose recourse has been silence, and absence:—
you appear under the names arena, stage, but your essence
always is other and elsewhere, your gift
the voices of the dead filled and emptied by the future.
Protect against those who entering
the orifices of this house
seek to control it—
Muse, Autodidact, Collector,
renew its inmate dedicated to you.

By These Waters
What begins in recognition,—
… ends in obedience.
The boys who lie back, or stand up,
allowing their flies to be unzipped
however much they charge
however much they charge
give more than they get.
When the room went dark, the screen lit up.
By these waters on my knees I have wept.

Long and Short Lines
You who call me to weep afresh love’s long since cancelled woe,—
… mock me
with you—
hypocrisy’s thirst somewhere if you’re anywhere must
now make you again pave someone’s road to hell.
Toward that design cut long ago by your several divided nature
and mine,
… learn I too
twist, unchanged.

1989.

Book of Night
After the sun
fell below the horizon of the west,
THE SUN-GOD
(according to words carved
on the sarcophagus of the pharaoh Seti I)
each night, during the twelve hours of the night, must
journey through
THE WORLD THAT IS BENEATH THE WORLD,—
… must
meet, once again, the dead.
The hour that must follow the eleventh hour
is blank within my eye:—
I do not know what will make the sun rise again.
With a light placed
inside it, the sarcophagus carved out of alabaster
is transparent:—
here is the beginning of our night.

The First Hour of the Night
“This happened about twelve years before I died.
•
What I have to tell you
is the narrative of an evening and night, little more than
a succession of dreams, one
anxiety following another,—
the whole, somehow, for me (at least) wound and balm.
•
The friend I had been closest to throughout
my life, three years earlier, suddenly
was dead—;
for three years, his son
had invited me to visit the family home,—
… the family ‘seat,’
a ‘GREAT HOUSE’
inherited by my friend in his twenties at his
father’s death, inherited now by his only son …
•
What use to return?—
During his life, both of us often insisted that our

philosophical discussions, ebullient
arguments, hydra-headed analyses of
the motivations, dilemmas that seemed to block
and fuel our lives,
were central, crucial:—
but after his death, all I now could see
was the self-generating logic of his life, its distant,
inaccessible self-sufficiency …
He had been a storm
at sea, seen from land.
•
What use to return?—
As I imagined standing again within that house,
—within that world he had been
given, but had so
transformed by his affections, curiosity, shifting
enthusiasms, care:—
walking up the central staircase, then, after
twenty feet, entering his study—;
its obscure, ARBITRARY
finality stopped my breath.
•
Three years (to the day) after this first death of
a friend my own age, his son
wrote that I would do his father’s only child
a great kindness

if once again I came to stay, even for a night …
The house was of course changed.
I suppose I had expected
a museum to my friend:—
instead, I found the embodiment of
different interests,
as well as incomprehension
of, or even the desire to ERASE, to BLUR
what in his father had seemed bold
or witty or coherent:—
an unsymmetrical, fragile Indonesian rocker
had been sold, because ‘uncomfortable’;—
curtains obscured the high bare rectangles of
windows whose light or blackness once
was shut out only by recessed, seldom-used shutters …
Half the books were stored,—
… or sold.
After dinner, we went into the study.
Neither of us sat in his father’s chair.
Highbacked, winged, it still stood
at an angle, right of the fire,—and I sat
facing it, on
the left, where I had always sat …
The couch to my right was still there,—
he slumped at its far end.
The small coal fire, as always, burned one’s face;

and failed to heat the dark, huge room.
He put his hands to his temples, making
a kind of hood over his eyes; I couldn’t
see his eyes. Then he spoke:—
•
I can neither SELL this house, nor
LIVE in it. If father had a favorite horse, you and I could
sacrifice and eat it
next to his grave—; then set up its head on a stake
driven directly into the grave …
That’s how Harva says the Tartars
convince the dead to STAY DEAD.
They seldom succeed. If a dead man’s widow and children
grow sick
the shaman knows the dead are eating them.
You’ve known me since I was born:
you know that I wasn’t
waiting for father to die. I had my own
work, friends, income (I admit that I’ve always been
a spendthrift, but I wasted
my own money, not his—)…
The prerogatives that descended upon me at his death
—‘position’; much more money; the freedom
implicit in the demands now
placed upon me—

I didn’t connive, or even will: they came
in the course of things,—
… BECAUSE HE WAS NOT HERE.
But I enjoy them; and even, now, expect them.
… Again and again I dream
father has come back:—
he is standing in the hallway, as I
descend the staircase.
He looks up at me, tired, relieved to be home.
He is whole: WELL: not changed,—
but even as I
rush down the steps to embrace him
(even as the irreparable
fact that drained and diminished the world
isn’t fact,—)
I know that I don’t want him to have come back.
All this is HIS, not MINE—; I am
again what his death made me no longer …
Before I reach him, an elated circle of servants and friends
surrounds him, and leads him off.
As they disappear,
his head turns back to look at me.
—Then I know that each object that father
chose for this house, but absent now from it
says that everything ever

unresolved clearly FOREVER
is unresolvable between us.
For though I
must give it all back, I CAN’T
give it all back: I’ve already
spent too much money!…
Thus, though I know that no creature
possesses anything on this earth, sweating
I wake up
terrified that father has returned to it:—
baffled, and appalled
to find that what I want is his death.
•
Then he stopped. There was a long silence.
The voice
I heard as he said all this
—in a sudden
intonation, a passing phrase, in the pervasive
self-wounding relentlessness of its logic,—
was his father’s.
The fist at the center of my chest
refused to unclench until he and I, the furniture we
sat on, the room, the house, the very
world itself
cracked apart, then SELF-COMBUSTED, self-

consumed by our own self-contradictions.
•
I told him that when I was a child I had a pony
who was, for a period, my
life—;
… even now, if I close
my eyes, and look into his face
I am a boy again, looking into the face of a neurasthenic
panicked mute creature like himself, in secret
alliance forged
half-against what we lacked:—
WORDS, a world that demonstrated its
mastery over us
by coercive involuted adult human speech …
He was a high-strung, intelligent miniature colt,
my size:—
… the prize of my sixth birthday.
•
Perhaps time and retrospect have improved our mutual absolute
trust, delight, connection:—
but this was the first of those passionate
attachments, passionate
judgmentsthat here like-answers-like, soul-answers-soul
which since my childhood, whether in relation to
animal, friend, an artist or
performer I’ve discovered, or work of art
(except where feeling has been

bewildered by the desire for
the reciprocation of erotic desire)
have never betrayed me, never when I have
encountered again in body or memory
WHAT I LOVED
seemed then stupid, ill-founded, grounded
merely in willfulness, more illusion …
•
At nine, I was sent to boarding school.
The approach of this cataclysm held no allure for me,
rather I felt
rage and a sense of betrayal—;
but in fact, within a few weeks
books, the desire to dominate the attention of
my teachers, and even wary camaraderie with my peers
for the first time
swallowed me …
When I, unwillingly, arrived home on our first holidays,
I was told that several horses had come down with
a fever, including mine; that my horse was dying.
The next day he was carted off.
THERE WAS NO GRAVE.
Perhaps my earliest memory that is absolutely
fixed in scene and time

is the black horse flies big as thumbs
covering and clinging to his body, the weird unseasonable
blood-red sunset saturating the world
while I knew his body was being carried off but
howling I was held back within the house.
•
Much later, when I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen,
in my dreams
my little horse again and again
came back—;
he wanted to play, for me once again to mount
him and ride.
But I had no time: what I now was
interested in were friends, school, my studies,—
… besides, as I stood
next to him,
HE WAS TOO SMALL—;
I had grown, and he was now
TOO SMALL to ride—;
with a shiver, a stamp and sound of
torment, he seemed to take this in …
I told my friend’s son that what he had felt in his dream
was nothing so simple as ‘greed’ or ‘selfishness’—;
that later, in my
thirties, again I had known very similar emotions after

other deaths—; that there seemed to be something
STRUCTURAL in human relations
making what we had felt, well, ‘impersonal.’
•
Though he thanked me for my generosity and
candor, and said that he felt not only
exhausted but somewhat
better, as I mounted the stairs to my room that night
what I felt was
woe, unameliorated, unappeased.

II
Now follows my
‘DREAM OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY,’—
… for that night, in my room, as I threw off
my clothes, seeking in sleep only
oblivion, erasure of the throbbing but
irremediably ignorant I,
—angry at I did NOT know what,—
above my bed I saw, again,
what since my
first visit had hung there,
Volpato’s fine
etching of Raphael’s
‘SCHOOL OF ATHENS’…

I remembered, with a sudden and flooding
access of pleasure, the first time I had seen, in
Rome, Raphael’s fresco:—
here, under the image of the many-breasted
Goddess of Philosophy
(in a medallion in the ceiling)
flanked by two angels
announcing
‘KNOWLEDGE OF THE CAUSES OF THINGS,’—
… at the center of the high arch of the fresco itself,
framed there by a vast, symmetrical,
seemingly stable but
essentially (at least according to
some writers) unbuildable architecture,—
… their two heads isolated by three great
descending central arches
that, dreamlike, open to the sky,—
… calmly presiding over an ‘ideal’ assembly of the great
philosophers of Antiquity
(not only metaphysicians and
scientists, but students, a soldier,
the leaning, listening figure of
Averroës, commentator, representative of Islam,—)
PLATO and ARISTOTLE
by their parallel but opposite
gestures (Aristotle
pointing downward, Plato upward,—)

DIVIDE and ORDER
this debating, brooding, teaching, writing, nearly
disharmonious multitude …
On the side of Aristotle, representatives of the ‘exact’
sciences (Euclid, Ptolemy), with ‘speculative’
thinkers (Heraclitus, Pythagoras) on the side of Plato …
Opposite gestures that, JANUS-LIKE, show
us where to seek the causes of things.
•
In this ‘ideal’ community of the spirit,—the social
world as the social world
never is,—
Death, Rage, and Eros
have receded to adorn recesses in the architecture:—
… on the left, under a yielding, even
voluptuous Apollo holding his lyre, an aging
triton seizes the breast of a resisting sea nymph—;
… on the right, Medusa’s severed
face, mouth frozen open in an O of horror, from
Athena’s victorious shield stares
powerless:—
Athena, Goddess of Wisdom, protector of
the Home, Family, Reason, Civilization …
•
When I first saw this scene (—the title
‘School of Athens’ a misapprehension

imposed on it in the eighteenth century,—)
I was largely ignorant of the intricate
iconography
connecting the room’s four walls and ceiling:—
‘Philosophy’ looks across at ‘Theology,’
while ‘Poetry’
faces ‘Jurisprudence,’—each
itself divided: ‘Canon
Law’ and ‘Civil Law’…
—In the interrelations and elegant
distinctions informing its walls and ceiling,
this is a compendium, even synthesis of
Renaissance speculative, religious, aesthetic thinking:—
an ‘ideal’ Renaissance TEMPLE OF THE HUMAN MIND …
Its premise,—
the Neo-Platonic Christian-Humanist
confidence that the world’s obdurate
contradictions, terrifying
unintelligibility, can be tamed by
CLASSIFICATION,—
time now has effaced.
•
This room,—
intended as the site of the Pope’s personal
library, then where he signed, before assembled
dignitaries of the highest Papal
tribunals, bulls and official documents,—

was the first of the rooms that Raphael
painted for the Pope:—
only twenty-five, with
little reputation, he had been summoned from
Florence to Rome
at the suggestion of his
patron, Bramante, architect of the new St. Peter’s …
Decoration of the room was already
begun—;
but no one is certain how much
Sodoma, six years Raphael’s
senior, had completed:—
for when the Pope saw Raphael’s sketches
(there is never enough wall space
here, at the center of power,—)
he ordered everything that Sodoma had painted destroyed.
•
In the fresco, next to Raphael’s own
self-portrait, is the face of
Sodoma—;
both stand behind Euclid (geometry is
central to the painter’s skill at perspective,—)
‘Euclid’ has the head of Bramante …
Raphael, without
illusions, looks out at us—;
Sodoma
smiles,—
without rancor or humiliation

absorbed in the conversation before him.
•
In this ‘ideal’ COMMUNITY OF THE SPIRIT,
Socrates and Aristotle are modelled on
antique busts, but Plato
has the features of Leonardo:—
Heraclitus (self-enclosed but
writing), the short, hooded, stonecutter’s
smock of a pensieroso
Michelangelo …
‘The Apollo who
SHARES REIGN
with Athena here
is the god, not of reason, but P O E T R Y,—’
I said to myself as I began to fall asleep;
and then,
fixing the arc of the fresco before my mind:—
‘Here,—everyone feels it,—
the gesture of PLATO and the gesture of ARISTOTLE
are O N E …’
Knowing that I loved it, my friend once had
placed the ‘School of Athens’
above my bed. Smiling, now I
remembered this … ‘Now I
must sleep.’

•
Then, to my humiliation and shame,
I was IN it,—
that tumultuous, perished world (now
NOT perished,—)
lay before me:—
out of estrangement I had gained or been given
entrance: privilege
in no way earned—;
above me, past the Temple’s
multitudinous, strangely empty rising steps,
Ptolemy still
held aloft
the green-and-blue GLOBE OF THE EARTH,—
… then (as I turned to crouch, or
hide—)
from the distance on either side I saw a long
row of men, dressed in the varied
garments of succeeding
centuries, approach the steps where I stood.
•
When each figure
passed me, for a moment looking into my eyes
full-face, I tried to recognize him:—
there (just as I had imagined

them in the light of their portraits)
was BRUNO, one button missing
on his long black scholar’s gown, still
smelling of sulphur from the fires of the Inquisition—
he held a book titled Feast of Ashes;—
DESCARTES, priestlike
in devotion to his self-made
revolution: heavy-lidded, as if worn out by
thought, or lessons at dawn for the Queen of Sweden;—
HEGEL and SCHELLING, walking
hand-in-hand, as in the morning of their young
collaboration, before distance, fame, silence.
•
… These, and so many others (each
alive as his voice on the page:—
each body now inseparable from its
fate, yet with the unachieved,
purposeful will of the living—)
ascended the steps, and,
WITHOUT
BARRIER,
began to listen and mix and speak
in earnest debate, yet strangers’ courteous deference,
with the philosophers of Antiquity …
Irrational happiness seized me:—

not at the absence of discord (discord
will come) but to see
this that at last lies before
me is as I have known real.
After chimeras of CONTINGENCY and resistless
SELF-ESTRANGEMENT,—
… to see chimeras of the real.
•
Then, something happened which I did
not expect
even in a dream:—
as if compelled or drawn by inner
necessity, DIVIDING they rushed to join themselves
into GROUPS:—
groups that, now, I saw
had been there, though I had never seen them
(—but my words are mere
summary, for what I remembered when I
woke, seemed the faithless shadow of what I had seen).
•
First the movement pressed to the right, where
next to Ptolemy (wearing on his
gown a resplendent globe of the heavens)
Archimedes
leaning down to the stone beneath them drew his circles:—

here, around these
two figures,
gathered Materialists, Mathematical
Naturalists, Positivists
(I recognized Hobbes—; Comte
arguing with Descartes—; then, restlessly circling at
the edges of the group,
D’Alembert, whose ironic smile
seemed to mock the dreams of the metaphysicians)
… all those thinkers who see
within the indecipherable, furious
cataract of life, within bewildering, annihilating
FLUX, a great intelligible P R O C E S S:—
measurable, universal Nature,—
impartial, non-censorious,
whose unbreakable chain of unvarying, coherent Laws
frees us from the prison-house of human
superstition, religious dogma, hallucination …
Here ‘mind’ and ‘consciousness’ are
body—; ‘free-will,’
darkness still-undispelled by science.
Now Comte,—
systematizer of
Positivism, standing as if confident that he is
heir to the immense authority (confirming its
insight into reality) conferred on science
by its transformation of the world,—

announces to devoted, listening
thinkers from all nations
(his face flushed, eyes shrewd but credulous)
a new CLERGY: a scientific-industrial
elite henceforth translating to
expectant, hungry Society
‘invariable laws’ new-found by fecund science …
•
As he spoke, Descartes (abruptly
once again the French
cavalier, setting forth with bold stride)
disengaged himself from
all these figures, turning his gaze
irresistibly toward
the center of the Temple:—
to a second GROUP, which had
assembled, arranged itself
as if magnetized
around SOCRATES as its center:—
with an old,
god-like Plato and
young Aristotle
each writing down his words at his feet.
Here the conviction that Mind, Spirit, Consciousness
are merely an interpolation
in the immense text of the physical universe
was reversed:—

as Socrates spoke (among those listening
I saw Plotinus; Cicero; Christian
theologians: Augustine held the Confessions;
Thomas Aquinas distractedly
fingered strands of straw from a crown of straw on his head,—)
as he explained that through DIALECTIC,
dialogue, argument by
CONTRADICTION proceeding to the reconciliation of
contradiction (for only contradiction
impels thought, and what is thought
but the silently-occurring internal dialogue
of the soul with itself?—)
(pugnosed and pugnacious, Socrates
yet made me feel that he had seen in
spirit what he struggled to express in words—)
… as he explained that through dialectic, our power of
reason,
we can make our way to an order
past the delusions of custom, self-deception, desire,—
and can then, by an act of
choice,
CHANGE,—correct our lives:—
suddenly, from behind his
voice, blending with his voice,
was a woman’s voice:—
(I moved slightly to the left, to see its
source)

… there, with the seated figures of
Dante and Sappho (who grasped
disintegrating pages of a book in her hand)
rapt, silent before her,
was S C H E H E R A Z A D E,—
seated on an embroidered
pillow, wearing transparent
silks, plucking an instrument,—
whose wizard songs (I have known them since
my youth)
beguile the sword that hangs above her.
•
Troubled, excited voices
soon broke my attention; turning back, I saw
the circle of listeners now had divided into
disputing factions:—
while Augustine, standing
to one side, stared out at them …
—What one thinker confidently
asserted, another spurned as illusion—;
what one human being
flew from, another sought—;
some struggled to reconcile the wisdom of
Greece
with Christ’s revelation—
while other, melancholy voices
doubted the free sufficient autonomy of

reason and the human will
faced with our confusion, weak and isolated
organs of perception, helplessness …
The abrupt arrival of Descartes
(for the first time, I noticed
that the hair thickly
growing beneath his lower
lip, on one side, was shaved off—)
then, later, of the stooped,
slightly built Kant, with his
cane and three-cornered hat, his features
hardened as if by the strain of thought,
brought brief ORDER to this spectacle:—
… but Augustine, pushing
past all this with a gesture of
revulsion that seemed to rise from an intuition
indistinguishable from himself,
—his hands now
empty,—
already had abandoned the scene before him, turning to
a third, final GROUP, gathered at
the left of the temple, whose center was
Pythagoras and Heraclitus …
•
From this milling, mercurial crowd
(—Hegel now looked

at one moment like
Bismarck, at another like Shelley—)
words emerge:—
Master and Slave. Predestination. Preservation of
the Species. God immanent in
Nature. Race. Blood.
Stages of absolute mind. Progress. Class.
The inexorable laws of History, the Psyche, the Age.
Logos. The world
as will and idea. The One. The inescapable
society of the dead and the living, who have made us what we are …
Here the Materialists have been, as it were,
turned on their heads:—
now S P I R I T,—
immanent, transcendent, or unknowable,—
is ground of body, governs body:—
… the single human psyche
powerless within the immeasurable
power of its laws, goals, will.
•
Reached by daring to contemplate in a calm spirit
COHERENCE (or by hard, practiced
submission)
‘freedom’ here is to accept NECESSITY—;
or else, when intolerable existence
wholly becomes the snake that swallows its own
tail, to smash the head of the snake.
Here ceaseless human choices, decisions, dilemmas,

mortality itself
is illusion:—
the cunning used upon us to
silence the voice
within that says, Someone else led my life.
I am an onlooker on my own life. . .
•
Then, among those listening to
Schopenhauer, I saw my dead friend,—
… I am certain that I saw him, though
when I approached him, standing
just behind him,—
when he
turned at my touch,—
his head was a C L O U D
dispersed into discrete
atoms; as if I had drawn too close to a painting
made out of discrete spots of separate color,
HE was no longer THERE …
•
Inheritor inheriting inheritors, he had worked to
transform an inheritance
transformed
in its turn:—
as if the soul, delivered over unconscious and
defenseless not only to this world of
things, but to its own DARKNESS,—

… flinging itself into the compensations that the world
and its own self
offer it, but finding the light of self-knowledge
only through
mediation, through WORKS and SIGNS,—
… seeing and remaking itself within that broken
mirror made by all the things that it has
inherited and remade,—
… in the end, alienates its being in them.
•
The spectral E M P T I N E S S became only
emptier before me
as I advanced toward him,—
… until at last, surrounded by
nothing, with resignation
turning I drew back.—
Not before Augustine,
engaged in animated
argument with Spinoza and Bruno, was embraced by
Luther: appalled, recoiling, he fled.
•
Now, as I lay
dreaming in the house of my dead friend,
finally I saw the THREE GROUPS
in one view:—

I was exhausted, I wanted to
stop, at last to have reached bottom:—
… but busy figures ceaselessly rushed
between the groups, trying to
mediate:—
for all these conflicting intuitions
surely were grounded in the nature of the universe:—
in the relationship between the impenetrable,
immeasurable
UNIVERSE that lies WITHIN as well as beyond us
and the solitary, finite
perceiving mind:—
•
… indeed, I felt pain at this scene:—to see
PHILOSOPHY itself
divided, torn
into three, or even more directions—;
… the unity of my being torn,
for I had felt recognition
before the truth that united each group in its turn …
•
But as I strove for
unity of thought, in vain the mediators
hastened to and fro among the groups:—
… now a hostile

alienation envelops them, the distance between them
increases, the ground
DISAPPEARS
beneath their bewildered, desperate feet …
•
The Temple itself, then, collapsed.
As the ground engulfed, swallowed all that I had seen,
(—this ‘tradition’ that I cannot
THINK MY LIFE
without, nor POSSESS IT within—;)
the frozen facial mask of
Medusa, hung on Athena’s shield, suddenly
smiled. Smirked.

III
Then I wanted to shout at this destruction, this
ruin, not only
in pain, but in relief:—
Whenever human beings have felt
conviction that what they possess is indeed
‘KNOWLEDGE OF THE CAUSES OF THINGS,’—
… whenever this conviction has been
shared by, animated a whole
society, or significant group within society,—

the ancient hegemony of POWER and PRIESTHOOD
is reconstituted:—
implicit within each
vision of cause, a structure of power:—
an imagination not only of
where power resides, but should, must reside …
•
At the end of the First Crusade,
when their goal
JERUSALEM
fell at last before the Crusaders,
Christian troops running through the streets
stabbed, mutilated, slew
everyone they saw:—
the savagery of the massacre
perhaps unexampled (these
facts, I assure you, a matter of record,—)
in the history of wars fought mainly for gain or glory:—
… in the narrow lanes, rivers of blood carrying headless
bodies and fragments of bodies
reached the horses’ hocks—;
… the Jewish community, huddling for safety in
the central synagogue,
was barricaded
in by the Crusaders, and burnt alive—;
after two days, when, gone like
snow on the lawn in a hot sun,

the frenzy of RIGHTEOUS ANGER and REVENGE
had passed, the few thousand still
alive from a population that before numbered forty thousand
were assembled
near the gates, and sold as slaves.
—Damascus and Baghdad
were shocked at the fate of the Holy City, vowing
recompense.
•
The ‘moral law within’
(for Kant, the ground
of the moral life itself, certain, beautiful, fixed
like the processional of stars above our heads)
is near to MADNESS—; everything terrible
but buried in human motivation
released, justified
by self-righteousness and fanaticism …
•
Then, as I struggled to find words
to punish confidence in the possession of truth,
I had the sick sensation of
falling, the stones were
cracking, giving way beneath my
feet, and suddenly, at the same time,
I knew that nothing that I,—

heir
to the ages,—
might reach or understand or grasp
will lodge safe
in unhistorical existence—; safe
within the hungry blankness of a culture WITHOUT
WISDOM, its wisdom the negative
wisdom embraced by exhaustion after
centuries of the Wars of Religion …
•
Thus, infected with the desolation of
history’s
leprosy,—leprosy of SPIRIT,—
the stones
breaking, disappearing as my working legs
flailed in air,—
I woke.
Despair was what I felt.
At last, after fitful, thrashing
sleeplessness, again I slept, and for
a final time that night, dreamt:—
•
… A brown, wide, desolate, broken only by
scars and protuberances, dun landscape
stretched without boundary before me.
Then, stooping, staring
out into this barrenness,

I realized that on my back I was carrying
—had carried
all my life,—
the ENTRAILS of my horse—;
secret, familiar
weight, either chosen or thrust upon me too long ago
now to put down, or often remember.
•
What at one moment looked parched, dun, desolate,
the next moment was
ochre, glowing, burnished:—
as I walked, what first had seemed
scars, as if the earth were WOUNDED too
deeply to heal without visible
mark, now I saw
were deep PITS dug by men and women who
slowly carried
the earth dug
out of the pits, heaping it up to make
the hill next to each hole.
Other women and men
filled in other pits, leveling these hills.
Two signs stood against the horizon:—
THE GREAT ACT OF BURYING
THE GREAT ACT OF DIGGING UP

Because these human beings seemed
concentrated, absorbed,—
at moments anxious, even
tormented, at others earnest, eager
as if answering their nature,—
… I could not tell whether this work was
freedom, or servitude.
•
Then suddenly entangling my feet were
dozens of just-born
lambs, stretching their necks to reach their
mothers next to them:—
hungry, sucking mouths
stretched toward swollen, distended
udders that I saw must be
painful unless sucked—;
Reciprocity! I thought,—
Not the chick within the egg, who by eating its way
out, must destroy the egg to become itself.
•
Then, as I reached to steady the entrails
on my back,
I bent down to watch more closely:—
… hypnotized, I saw eager lambs
suck the paps of an
at-one-moment
yielding, relieved, even voluptuously

satisfied, but at-the-next-moment
sleepy, withdrawing, now
indifferent, hostile Nature …
I felt again that
PENETRATION OF KNOWLEDGE that is almost like
illness, an invading sickness:—
envious, yet afraid of
getting kicked in the head, I wanted
to live against a ewe’s
breathing, sleeping side.
•
—When at last both ewes and lambs
slept,
I walked to the edge of a pit:—
… there, standing
at the bottom, looking up at me,
was my little horse:—
I was afraid—; had he forgiven what
must have seemed to him, unfaithfulness?
—WAS unfaithfulness?—
I worked my way down the steep, loose,
yielding sides of the pit.
When I reached bottom, as I lay his
entrails before him,
I saw that they had become
my color, after years of carrying them—;

… slowly, he bent down his
head, sniffed, then
ATE the entrails—;
expectant, he
looked up at me:—
as I climbed on his
back, startled once again by his
animal warmth as I clung to him,
—now
somehow NEITHER
NOT the same size, nor the same size,—
we rose
out of the pit, and I woke.
Though I had no impulse to relate this dream to
the categories and figures dreamt earlier,—
though I had no evidence whether it issued from
the gate of Ivory or the gate of Horn,—
(from which gate true dreams come, and which
false, frankly
I’ve never been able to remember,—)
as I retell it, the ashheap begins to GLOW AGAIN:—
… for I woke
with a sense of
beneficence: an emotion which, though it did not
erase, transformed
what earlier had overwhelmed

consciousness lying sleepless between dream and dream.”
•
This is the end of the first hour of the night.

DESIRE
(1997)

I

As the Eye to the Sun
To Plotinus what we seek is VISION, what
wakes when we wake to desire
as the eye to the sun
It is just as if you should fall in love with
one of the sparrows which fly by
when we wake to desire
But once you have seen a hand cut off, or
a foot, or a head, you have embarked, have begun
as the eye to the sun
The voyage, such is everything, you have not come to
shore, but little children and their sports and
when we wake to desire
Poor spirits carrying about bodies of the dead,
for bodies give way but the spirit will not give way
as the eye to the sun
You know that every instrument, too, vessel, mere
hammer, if it does that for which it was made
when we wake to desire
Is well, yet he who made it is not there, is dead:
so, unaverted, one, not one, to NOTHING you ask

as the eye to the sun
May I be made into the vessel of that which
must be made
when we wake to desire
Certain what you have reached is not shore you
shall disappear in that which produced you
as the eye to the sun
But once you have seen a hand cut off you have begun

Love Incarnate
(DANTE, Vita Nuova)
To all those driven berserk or humanized by love
this is offered, for I need help
deciphering my dream.
When we love our lord is LOVE.
When I recall that at the fourth hour
of the night, watched by shining stars,
LOVE at last became incarnate,
the memory is horror.
In his hands smiling LOVE held my burning
heart, and in his arms, the body whose greeting
pierces my soul, now wrapped in bloodred, sleeping.
He made him wake. He ordered him to eat
my heart. He ate my burning heart. He ate it
submissively, as if afraid, as LOVE wept.

Overheard Through the Walls of the Invisible City
… telling those who swarm around him his desire
is that an appendage from each of them
fill, invade each of his orifices,—
repeating, chanting,
Oh yeah Oh yeah Oh yeah Oh yeah Oh yeah
until, as if in darkness he craved the sun, at last he reached
consummation.
—Until telling those who swarm around him begins again
(we are the wheel to which we are bound).

Adolescence
He stared up into my eyes with a look
I can almost see now.
He had that look in his eyes
that bore right into mine.
I could sense that he knew I was
envious of what he was doing—; and knew that I’d
always wish I had known at the time
what he was doing was something I’d always
crave in later life, just as he did.
He was enjoying what he was doing.
The look was one of pure rapture.
He was gloating. He knew.
I still remember his look.

Catullus: Excrucior
I hate and—love. The sleepless body hammering a nail nails itself, hanging
crucified.

Borges and I
We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are
changed.
The desolating landscape in Borges’ “Borges and I”—in which the voice of “I”
tells us that its other self, Borges, is the self who makes literature, who in the
process of making literature falsifies and exaggerates, while the self that is
speaking to us now must go on living so that Borges may continue to fashion
literature—is seductive and even oddly comforting, but, I think, false.
The voice of this “I” asserts a disparity between its essential self and its worldly
second self, the self who seeks embodiment through making things, through
work, who in making takes on something false, inessential, inauthentic.
The voice of this “I” tells us that Spinoza understood that everything wishes to
continue in its own being, a stone wishes to be a stone eternally, that all “I”
wishes is to remain unchanged, itself.
With its lonely emblematic title, “Borges and I” seems to be offered as a
paradigm for the life of consciousness, the life of knowing and making, the life
of the writer.
The notion that Frank has a self that has remained the same and that knows what
it would be if its writing self did not exist—like all assertions about the systems
that hold sway beneath the moon, the opposite of this seems to me to be true, as
true.
When Borges’ “I” confesses that Borges falsifies and exaggerates it seems to do
so to cast aside falsity and exaggeration, to attain an entire candor unobtainable
by Borges.
This “I” therefore allows us to enter an inaccessible magic space, a hitherto
inarticulate space of intimacy and honesty earlier denied us, where voice, for the

first time, has replaced silence.
—Sweet fiction, in which bravado and despair beckon from a cold panache, in
which the protected essential self suffers flashes of its existence to be
immortalized by a writing self that is incapable of performing its actions without
mixing our essence with what is false.
Frank had the illusion, when he talked to himself in the clichés he used when he
talked to himself, that when he made his poems he was changed in making them,
that arriving at the order the poem suddenly arrived at out of the chaos of the
materials the poem let enter itself out of the chaos of life, consciousness then,
only then, could know itself, Sherlock Holmes was somebody or something
before cracking its first case but not Sherlock Holmes, act is the cracked mirror
not only of motive but self, no other way, tiny mirror that fails to focus in small
the whole of the great room.
But Frank had the illusion that his poems also had cruelly replaced his past, that
finally they were all he knew of it though he knew they were not, everything else
was shards refusing to make a pattern and in any case he had written about his
mother and father until the poems saw as much as he saw and saw more and he
only saw what he saw in the act of making them.
He had never had a self that wished to continue in its own being, survival meant
ceasing to be what its being was.
Frank had the illusion that though the universe of one of his poems seemed so
close to what seemed his own universe at the second of writing it that he wasn’t
sure how they differed even though the paraphernalia often differed, after he had
written it its universe was never exactly his universe, and so, soon, it disgusted
him a little, the mirror was dirty and cracked.
Secretly he was glad it was dirty and cracked, because after he had made a big
order, a book, only when he had come to despise it a little, only after he had at
last given up the illusion that this was what was, only then could he write more.
He felt terror at the prospect of becoming again the person who could find or see
or make no mirror, for even Olivier, trying to trap the beast who had killed his
father, when he suavely told Frank as Frank listened to the phonograph long

afternoons lying on the bed as a kid, when Olivier told him what art must be,
even Olivier insisted that art is a mirror held up by an artist who himself needs to
see something, held up before a nature that recoils before it.
We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are
changed.
Everything in art is a formal question, so he tried to do it in prose with much
blank white space.

Homo Faber
Whatever lies still uncarried from the abyss within
me as I die dies with me.

In Memory of Joe Brainard
the remnant of a vast, oceanic
bruise (wound delivered early and long ago)
was in you purity and
sweetness self-gathered, CHOSEN
•
When I tried to find words for the moral sense that unifies
and sweetens the country voices in your collage The Friendly Way,
you said It’s a code.
You were a code
I yearned to decipher.—
In the end, the plague that full swift runs by
took you, broke you;—
in the end, could not
take you, did not break you—
you had somehow erased within you not only
meanness, but anger, the desire to punish
the universe for everything
not achieved, not tasted, seen again, touched—;
… the undecipherable
code unbroken even as the soul
learns once again the body it loves and hates is
made of earth, and will betray it.

The Yoke
don’t worry
but tonight

I know you’re dead

turn your face again
toward me
when I hear your voice there is now
no direction in which to turn
I sleep and wake and sleep and wake and sleep and wake and
but tonight
turn your face again
toward me
see
upon my shoulders is the yoke
that is not a yoke
don’t worry
but tonight

I know you’re dead

turn your face again

Lady Bird
Neither an invalid aunt who had been asked to care for a sister’s
little girl, to fill the dead sister’s place, nor the child herself
did, could: not in my Daddy’s eyes—nor
should they;
so when we followed that golden couple into the White House
I was aware that people look at
the living, and wish for the dead.

If I Could Mourn Like a Mourning Dove
It is what recurs that we believe,
your face not at one moment looking
sideways up at me anguished or
elate, but the old words welling up by
gravity rearranged:
two weeks before you died in
pain worn out, after my usual casual sign-off
with All my love, your simple
solemn My love to you, Frank.

The Return
As the retreating Bructeri began to burn their own
possessions, to deny to the Romans every sustenance but
ashes,
a flying column sent by Germanicus
commanded by Lucius Stertinius
routed them;
and there, discovered amid plunder and the dead,
was the Eagle of the nineteenth
legion, lost with Varus.
•
The Romans now
brought to the land of the Bructeri,—to whatever lay
between the river Ems and the river Lippe,
to the very edge of their territory,—
devastation;
until they reached at last
the Teutoburgian Wood,
in whose darkness
Varus and the remains of his fifteen thousand men,
it was said, lay unburied.
•
Germanicus then conceived a desire
to honor with obsequies these unburied warriors whose

massacre once filled Augustus himself with rage and
shame,—
with hope or fear every corner of the Empire,—
while the least foot soldier, facing alien
terrain, was overcome with pity when he
thought of family, friends, the sudden
reversals of battle, and shared human fate.
•
First Caecina and his men
entered,—
ordered to reconnoitre the dismal
treacherous passes, to attempt to build bridges and
causeways across the uneven, sodden marshland,—
then the rest of the army, witness to scenes
rending to sight and memory of sight.
•
Varus’ first camp, with its wide sweep and deployment
of ordered space in confident dimension,
testified to the calm labors of three legions;—
then a ruined half-wall and shallow ditch
showed where a desperate remnant had
been driven to take cover;—
on the open ground between them
were whitening bones, free
from putrefaction,—
scattered where men had been struck down
fleeing, heaped up

where they had stood their ground before slaughter.
Fragments of spears and horses’ limbs lay
intertwined, while human
skulls were nailed
like insults to the tree-trunks.
Nearby groves held the altars
on which the savage Germans
sacrificed the tribunes and chief centurions.
•
Survivors of the catastrophe slowly began, at last,
to speak,—
the handful who had escaped death or slavery
told their fellow soldiers where the generals
fell, how the Eagles and standards were seized;—
one showed where Varus received his first wound, and
another, where he died by his own melancholy hand;—
those thrown into crude pits saw
gibbets above them,
as well as the platform from which Arminius
as if in delirium harangued
his own victorious troops,—
fury and rancor so joined to his
joy, the imprisoned men thought they would soon be butchered,—
until desecration of the Eagles at last satisfied
or exhausted his arrogance.
•

And so, six years after the slaughter,
a living Roman army had returned
to bury the dead men’s bones of three whole legions,—
no man knew whether the remains that he had
gathered, touched perhaps in consigning to the earth, were
those of a stranger or a friend:—
all thought of all
as comrades and
bloodbrothers; each, in common rising
fury against the enemy, mourned at once and hated.
•
When these events were reported to Rome
Cynics whispered that thus the cunning State
enslaves us to its failures and its fate.—
Epicureans saw in the ghostly mire
an emblem of the nature of Desire.—
Stoics replied that life is War, ILLUSION
the source, the goal, the end of human action.
•
At the dedication of the funeral
mound, Germanicus laid the first earth,—
thereby honoring the dead, and choosing to demonstrate
in his own person his
heartfelt share in the general grief.
He thereby earned the disapproval of Tiberius,—
perhaps because the Emperor interpreted

every action of Germanicus unfavorably; or he may have felt
the spectacle of the unburied dead
must give the army less alacrity for battle and more
respect for the enemy—
while a commander belonging to
the antique priesthood of the Augurs
pollutes himself by handling
objects belonging to the dead.
•
on the open ground
whitening bones scattered where men had been struck down
fleeing
heaped up
where they stood their ground
Varus’ first camp with its
wide sweep
across the open ground
the ruined
half-wall and shallow ditch
on the open ground between them
whitening bones scattered where men had been struck down
fleeing
heaped up
where they stood their ground
I have returned here a thousand times,

though history cannot tell us its location.
•
Arminius, relentlessly pursued by
Germanicus, retreated into pathless country.

(AFTER TACITUS, ANNALS, I, 60–63)

A Coin for Joe, with the Image of a Horse; c350–325
B.C.
COIN
chip of the closed,—L O S T world, toward whose unseen grasses
this long-necked emissary horse
eagerly still
stretches, to graze
•
World; Grass;
stretching Horse;—ripe with hunger, bright circle
of appetite, risen to feed and famish us, from exile underground … for
you chip of the incommensurate
closed world A n g e l

II

The Second Hour of the Night
On such a night
after the countless
assemblies, countless solemnities, the infinitely varied
voyagings in storm and in calm observing the differences
among those who are born, who live together, and die,
•
On such a night
at that hour when
slow bodies like automatons begin again to move down
into the earth beneath the houses in which they
live bearing the bodies they desired and killed and now
bury in the narrow crawl spaces and unbreathing abrupt
descents and stacked leveled spaces these used
bodies make them dig and open out and hollow for new
veins whose ore could have said I have been loved but whose
voice has been rendered silent by the slow bodies whose descent
into earth is as fixed as the skeletons buried within them
•
On such a night

at that hour in the temple of
delight, when appetite
feeds on itself,—
•
On such a night, perhaps, Berlioz wrote those pages
in his autobiography which I first read when my mother
was dying, and which to me now inextricably
call up
not only her death but her life:—
“A sheet already covered her. I drew it back.
Her portrait, painted in the days of
her splendor,
hung beside the bed—
I will not attempt to describe the grief that possessed me.
It was complicated by something, incommensurate,
tormenting, I had always found hardest to bear—
a sense of pity.
Terrible, overmastering
pity swept through me at everything she had suffered:—
Before our marriage,
her bankruptcy.
(Dazed, almost
appalled by the magnitude of her sudden
and early Paris triumph—as Ophelia, as Juliet—
she risked the fortune fame had brought

on the fidelity of a public without memory.)
Her accident.
(Just before a benefit
performance designed to lessen, if not
erase her debts, a broken leg left her
NOT—as the doctors feared—lame, but visibly
robbed of confidence and ease of movement.)
Her humiliating
return to the Paris stage.
(After Ophelia’s
death, which a few years earlier at her debut
harrowed the heart of Paris, the cruel
audience did not recall her to the stage
once, though it accorded others an ovation.)
Her decision, made voluntarily but forever
mourned, to give up her art.
Extinction of her reputation.
The wounds each of us
inflicted on the other.
Her not-to-be-extinguished, insane JEALOUSY,—
… which, in the end, had cause.
Our separation, after eleven years.
The enforced
absence of our son.
Her delusion that she had forfeited the regard of
the English public, through her attachment to France.
Her broken heart.

Her vanished beauty.
Her ruined health. (Corrosive, and growing,
physical pain.)
The loss of speech,—
… and movement.
The impossibility of making herself understood in any way.
The long vista of death and oblivion stretching before her
as she lay paralyzed for four years, inexorably dying.
—My brain shrivels in my skull
at the horror, the PITY of it.
Her simple tomb bears the inscription:
Henriette-Constance Berlioz-Smithson, born at
Ennis in Ireland, died at Montmartre 3rd March 1854
At eight in the evening the day of her death
as I struggled across Paris to notify
the Protestant minister required for the ceremony,
the cab in which I rode, vehicle
conceived in Hell, made a detour and
took me past the Odeon:—
it was brightly lit for a play then much in vogue.
There, twenty-six years before, I discovered
Shakespeare and Miss Smithson at the same moment.
Hamlet. Ophelia. There
I saw Juliet for the first and last time.
Within the darkness of that arcade on many

winter nights I feverishly
paced or watched frozen in despair.
Through that door I saw her enter
for a rehearsal of Othello.
She was unaware of the existence of
the pale dishevelled youth with
haunted eyes staring after her—
There I asked the gods to allow her
future to rest in my hands.
If anyone should ask you, Ophelia, whether the unknown
youth without reputation or position
leaning back within the darkness of a pillar
will one day become your
husband and prepare your last journey—
with your great inspired eyes
answer, He is a harbinger of woe.”
•
On such a night, at such an hour
she who still carries within her body the growing
body made by union with what she once loved, and now
craves or
loathes, she cannot say—;
she who has seen the world and her own self and the gods
within the mirror of
Dionysus, as it were—

compelled to labor since birth in care of the careneeding thing into which she had entered;—
… Myrrha, consigning now to
the body heavier and heavier within her
what earlier she could consign only to air,
requests
in death transformation to nothing
human, to be not alive, not dead.

II
Ovid tells the tale:—
or, rather, Ovid tells us that
Orpheus sang it
in that litany of tales with which he
filled the cruel silence after Eurydice
had been sucked back down into the underworld
cruelly and he driven back cruelly
from descending into it again to save her …
He sang it on a wide green plain
without shade,
but there the trees, as if
mimicking the attending beasts and birds, hearing his song
came to listen: the alder, the yew, the laurel
and pine whose young sweet nut
is dear to the mother of the gods since under it
Attis castrated himself to become her votary and vessel …
Beasts; birds; trees; but by his will
empty of gods or men.
•
In each tale of love he sang,—
Ganymede; Apollo and
Hyacinthus; Pygmalion; Adonis avenged upon
Venus; the apples that Atalanta found irresistible,—
fate embedded in the lineaments of desire
(desire itself helplessly surrounded by what cannot be

eluded, what
even the gods call GIVEN,—)
at last, in bitter or sweet enforcement, finds
transformation (except for the statue
Pygmalion makes human) to an inhuman, unriven state, become an element, indelible,
common, in the common, indelible, given world …
The story of Myrrha, mother of Adonis, is of all
these tales for good reason the least known.
It is said that Cinyras, her father, had he been
childless, might have died a happy man.
Famed both for his gold and for his beauty, Cinyras
had become King of Cyprus and of Byblus
by marrying the daughter of the king, Myrrha’s
mother, whose father had become king by marrying the daughter
of the king, Myrrha’s mother’s
mother, Paphos,—
… child
born from the union of Pygmalion and the statue.
When the eyes of Cinyras
followed, lingered upon her, Myrrha had the sensation
he was asking himself whether, in
another world, she could heal him.
Myrrha was Pygmalion and her father the statue.
He was Pygmalion and Myrrha the statue.
—As a dog whose body is sinking into quicksand
locks its jaws around a branch hanging

above it, the great teeth grasping so fiercely the stable world
they snap the fragile wood,—
… Myrrha looped a rope over the beam above her bed
in order to hang herself.
What she wants she does not want.
The night she could no longer NOT tell herself
her secret, she knew that there had never
been a time she had not known it.
It was there like the island
that, night after
night, as she
wished herself to sleep, she embellished
the approach to:—
the story has many beginnings, but one ending—
out of the air she has invented it, air
she did not invent …
•
In the earliest version whose making and remaking Myrrha
remembers,
she and her father escape from Cyprus
in a small boat, swallowed, protected
by a storm that blackens sea and stars;
he has been stripped of power by advisors of the dead
old king, father of Myrrha’s mother, Queen
Cenchreis, and now, the betrayers make Cenchreis

head of state,—
Cinyras in the storm shouts that they have made his
wife their pawn, and Myrrha shouts that many
long have thought
they are HERS,—
… the storm, after days,
abandons them to face a chartless, terrifying horizon.
Then, the island.
In the version that Myrrha now
tells herself since both her father and mother as
King and Queen insist that with their concurrence
soon, from among the royal
younger sons who daily arrive at court as rivals for
her bed, she must choose a husband—
both for her own natural happiness, and
to secure the succession,—
… now she is too violated by the demand that she marry
to invent reasons why the story that she
tells herself to calm herself to sleep begins with
a powerless king standing next to his
daughter in a tiny boat as they stare out at
a distant, yearned-for, dreaded island …
On the island, later, she again and again relives
stepping onto the island.
Each of them knows what will happen here:—
… she can delay, he can delay
because what is sweet about
deferral is that what arrives

despite it, is revealed as inevitable:—
she is awake
only during the lucid
instant between what she recognizes
must happen, and what happens:—
each of them knows that the coldest eye looking
down at them, here, must look without blame:—
now, the king
hesitates—
he refuses to place his foot upon the shore:—
… the illusion of rescue from what he is, what
she is, soon must recede, once on
land everything
not nature fall away,
as unstarved springs
divide them from all that
divide them from themselves:—
bulls fuck cows they
sired, Zeus himself fathered Dionysus-Zagreus
upon Persephone, his daughter:—
beasts and gods, those
below us and those above us, open
unhuman eyes
when they gaze upon what they desire
unstained by disgust or dread or terror:—
… Myrrha, watching him, now once again can close her eyes
upon sleep. She sees him

step onto the island. He has entered her.
•
Grief for the unlived life, grief
which, in middle age or old age, as goad
or shroud, comes to all,
early became Myrrha’s
familiar, her narcotic
chastisement, accomplice, master.
What each night she had given with such
extravagance,—
… when she woke, had not been given.
Grief for the unlived life, mourning
each morning renewed as Myrrha
woke, was there
and not there, for hours merely
the memory of itself, as if long ago
she told herself
a story (weird
dream of enslavement) that seemed
her story, but now she cannot
recollect why listening she could not
stop listening, deaf to any other …
But soon she heard the music beneath every other music:—
what she could not transform herself
into is someone

without memory, or need for memory:—
four steps forward then
one back, then three
back, then four forward …
Today when Myrrha’s father reminded her that
on this date eighteen
years earlier her mother announced that he
was the man whom she would in one month
marry,—
and then, in exasperation, asked what Myrrha
wanted in a husband, unsupplied by the young men cluttering his
court in pursuit of her hand and his throne,—
after she, smiling, replied, “You,”
blushing, he turned
away, pleased …
Four steps forward then
one back, then three
back, then four forward:—
today her father, not ten feet from where
once, as a child, she had in
glee leapt upon him surrounded by
soldiers and he, then, pretending to be overwhelmed
by a superior force fell backwards with
her body clasped in his arms as they rolled
body over body down the long slope
laughing and that peculiar sensation of his weight
full upon her and then
not, then full upon her, then not,—
until at the bottom for a half-

second his full weight rested upon her, then not,—
… not ten feet from where what
never had been repeated except within
her today after reminding her that today her mother
exactly at her age chose him,—
after she had answered his question
with, “You,”
blushing, he turned
away, pleased …
There is a king inside the king that the king
does not acknowledge.
Four steps forward then
one back, then three
back, then four forward:—
… the illusion of movement without
movement, because you know that what you
move towards
(malignant in the eyes of gods and men)
isn’t there:—
doesn’t exist:—
though the sensation of motion without
movement or end offers the hypnotic
solace of making not only each repeated
act but what cannot be repeated
an object of contemplation,—

… what by rumor servant girls, and slaves, as well as
a foreign queen
taste, for Myrrha alone
isn’t there, doesn’t exist,
malignant in the eyes of gods and men …
The gods who made us either
didn’t make us,—
… or loathe what they have made.
Four steps forward then
one back, then three
back, then four forward:—
… but you have lied about your
solace, for hidden, threaded
within repetition is the moment when each step
backward is a step
downward, when what you move toward moves toward
you lifting painfully his cloak to reveal his
wound, saying, “love answers need”…
Approaching death, for days Myrrha more and more
talked to the air:—
My element is the sea. I have seen
the underside of the surface of the sea, the glittering
inner surface more beautiful than the darkness below it,
seen it crossed
and re-crossed by a glittering ship from which dark eyes
peering downward must search the darkness.

Though they search, the eyes
fix upon nothing.
The glittering ship swiftly,
evenly, crosses and re-crosses.
No hand reaches down from it to penetrate the final
membrane dividing those whose element
is the sea, from those who breathe in the light above it.
The glittering ship captained by darkness
swiftly, evenly, crosses and
re-crosses.
I have seen it. I cannot
forget. Memory is a fact of the soul.
•
Hippolyta, Myrrha’s nurse, thanked the gods
she heard the thump of the rope
hitting the wooden beam, the scrape of
the heavy stool moved into place,
and clasped Myrrha’s legs
just as they kicked away the light that held them.
—The creature plummeting resistlessly to the sunless
bottom of the sea was
plucked up, and placed upon the shore.
She slept. After a period of indefinite
duration Hippolyta’s voice almost uninflected
woke her, saying that now her nurse must
know the reason for her action.

Failure had made her Hippolyta’s
prisoner—; she
told her …
Head bowed deferentially, Hippolyta
listened without moving.
Hippolyta gathered up the rope, then
disappeared.
Myrrha slept. After a period of indefinite
duration Hippolyta’s voice almost uninflected
woke her, saying that she had seen the King and
told the King that she could bring to him tonight a young
girl in love with him who wished to share
his bed, but who must, out of modesty, remain veiled.
Tonight the Festival of Demeter began, during
which the married women of Cyprus in
thanksgiving for the harvest, garlanded
with unthreshed
ears of wheat, robed in white, in secret
purification within the temple for nine days and
nights, abstained from their husbands’ now-outlawed beds.
(Each year, Queen Cenchreis fulfilled with ostentatious
ardor the letter of the law.)
Hippolyta told Myrrha that when she
asked the King whether the King will
accept the girl, he asked
her age.
Hippolyta replied, “Myrrha’s age.”

The King then said, “Yes.”
Listening to Hippolyta’s words Myrrha
knew that tonight she would allow Hippolyta in
darkness to lead her veiled to her father’s chamber.
The door that did not exist
stood open—; she would
step through.
Hippolyta once again
disappeared.
•
In her own room at last Hippolyta fell upon
her knees before her altar to the Furies.
Ten years earlier, when Menelaus and Odysseus
and Agamemnon’s herald Talthybius
arrived in Cyprus seeking from the newly-crowned King
(Queen Cenchreis still wore mourning)
help for their expedition to humble Troy,—
… Cinyras, giddy not only with unfamiliar
obeisance to his power by men of power, but too much
wine, promised in six months to send sixty ships.
As a gift for Agamemnon, he gave his herald the breastplate
of the still-mourned King, gorgeously
worked with circles of cobalt and gold and tin, with two
serpents of cobalt rearing toward the neck.
Hippolyta and Myrrha overheard the Queen
next morning calmly tell the King that the great families who
chose the King’s advisors had no intention of

honoring his drunken
grandiloquent bravado by funding sixty ships—
that if he persisted either the house of her
father must fall, or she would be forced
to renounce him and marry another, ending
the birthright of their daughter.
As a newcomer, a stranger on Cyprus, he owns
no man’s loyalty.
—In six months, one ship sent by Cinyras
entered the harbor holding the Greek expedition;
on its deck were fifty-nine clay
ships with fifty-nine clay crews.
Serving on it were Hippolyta’s
father and brother.
Cyprians applauded their new King’s canny
wit, his sleight-of-hand and boldness; they felt
outrage when Agamemnon, as mere token of
his vengeance, sank the ship, its
crew strapped to its deck …
Now before the altar long ago
erected, Hippolyta implores the Furies:—
May the King of the Clay Ships
find the flesh within his bed
clay. Avenge in
torment the dead.
•

As Myrrha is drawn down the dark corridor toward her father
not free not to desire
what draws her forward is neither COMPULSION nor FREEWILL:—
or at least freedom, here choice, is not to be
imagined as action upon
preference: no creature is free to choose what
allows it its most powerful, and most secret, release:
I fulfill it, because I contain it—
it prevails, because it is within me—
it is a heavy burden, setting up longer to enter that
realm to which I am called from within …
As Myrrha is drawn down the dark corridor toward her father
not free not to choose
she thinks, To each soul its hour.
•
Hippolyta carrying a single candle led her through
a moonless night to the bed where
her father waits.
The light disappears.
Myrrha hears in his voice that he is
a little drunk.
She is afraid: she knows that she must not
reveal by gesture or sound
or animal
leap of the spirit that is hers alone, her animal

signature, that what touches him in ways
forbidden a daughter
is his daughter,—
… entering his bed, Myrrha must not be
Myrrha, but Pharaoh’s daughter come by
law to Pharaoh’s bed.
Sweeter than the journey that constantly surprises
is the journey that you will to repeat:—
… the awkward introduction of a foreign object
which as you prepare to expel
it enters with such insistence
repeatedly that the resistance you have
marshalled against it
failing utterly leaves
open, resistless, naked before it
what if you do NOT resist it CANNOT be reached:—
you embrace one of the two species of
happiness, the sensation of
surrender, because at the same instant
you embrace the other, the sensation of power:—
… the son whose sister is his mother
in secrecy is conceived within
the mother whose brother is her son.
Before leaving the bed of sleeping
Cinyras, Myrrha slowly runs her tongue
over the skin of his eyelid.

•
Cinyras insisted to Hippolyta that his
visitor must return a second night, then
a third—
if this new girl proves
beautiful, he will bind her to him …
No warrior, Cinyras is a veteran of the combats in
which the combatants think that what they
win or lose is love:—
at the well of Eros, how often he has
slaked the thirst that is but briefly
slaked—;
he worries that though he still
possesses stamina, an inborn
grace of gesture, the eye of
command, as well as beautiful hands and feet,
thickenings, frayed edges to what he knows was his
once startling
beauty betray how often …
The sharp-edged profile still staring from the coins
stamped to celebrate his marriage
mocks him.
And now this creature who
seems when he is exhausted, is unrenewable,
to make love to his skin,—
… who touching its surface seems to

adore its surface so that he
quickens as if he is its surface.
—Myrrha was awakened by the bright lamp
held next to her face. It was held there
steadily, in silence.
The lamp was withdrawn, then
snuffed out.
She heard a sword pulled from its sheath.
Before the sheath clattered to the stone floor
she slipped from the bedclothes.
She heard the sword descend and
descend again, the bedclothes
cut and re-cut.
•
The gods, who know what we want not
why, asked who among them
had placed this thing in Myrrha.
Each god in turn denied it. Cupid
indignantly insisted that his arrows abhorred
anything so dire; Venus seconded her son.
Cupid then said that such
implacable events brought to mind the Furies.
The Furies when roused growled that in
a corollary matter they justly again and
again had been beseeched, but upon inspection

exertion by immortals was unneeded.
•
—Sheba’s withered
shore … Scrub; rocks; deserted coast
facing the sea. Because there is no
landscape that Myrrha’s presence does not
offend, she stares at the sea:—
across the sea
she fled Cinyras; encircled by sea
lay the island that she spent childhood
approaching; from Cyprus the sea brought
NOT what she had expected, the King’s
minions impelled by the injunction to
shut her, dirt shoved within her mouth, beneath
dirt silenced, exiled forever,—
but representatives of
the Queen, informing her of what had
followed her departure:—
when Cinyras found Hippolyta
bowing before an altar, he split her with his sword
from the nape to the base of the spine, then after
dragging the body to a parapet overlooking
rocks and sea, with a yell threw it over the edge;—
within hours what
precipitated Myrrha’s disappearance was common
gossip;—
within days three warships
appeared in the harbor at Paphos, sent by
Agamemnon, conqueror of Troy.

Word came from them that the people of Paphos could
avoid destruction if, within three days,
Cinyras were delivered to them.
On the third day, as the King’s advisors still
debated how to balance honor with prudence,
the King, standing on the parapet from which had
fallen Hippolyta’s body,
looking out at the ships
leapt. Some said that the cause was
Myrrha; others, Agamemnon.
The eyes of the people of Cyprus
must find offense should Myrrha attempt return …
Cyprians are relieved that the Queen, not yet
forty, has decided to accept the unanimous
counsel of her advisors, and remarry.
•
—She still smells the whiff of something
fatuous when Cinyras as a matter of
course accepted her adoration.
Now Myrrha teaches her child by daily
telling her child, listening
within her, the story of Myrrha and Cinyras …
She failed because she had poured, tried
to pour, an ocean into a thimble.
Whatever lodged want within her had seen her
vanity and self-intoxication and married

her to their reflection.
The thimble was a thimble—and she had
wronged it …
She grew careless because she allowed
herself to imagine that if he once
saw her he must love what he had seen.
Bewildered, betrayed
eyes wait now to accuse her in death.
Her mother once told her:—
A queen remains a queen only when
what she desires is what she is
expected to desire.
She would anatomize the world
according to how the world
anatomizes DESIRE. As a girl she had taught
herself to walk through a doorway as if
what she knows is on the other side is
NOT on the other side, as if her father
were a father as other fathers (though
kings) merely are fathers—;
will, calculation
and rage replaced in Myrrha what
others embraced as “nature”…
Her friends live as if, though what they
desire is entirely what they are
expected to desire, it is they who desire.

Not “entirely”; almost entirely.
—In the final months, when Myrrha again and
again told the child heavier and heavier within her
the story of Myrrha and Cinyras,
she stripped from it words like “ocean” and “thimble.”
She was a sentence that he had spoken in
darkness without
knowing that he had spoken it.
She had the memory of taste before she knew
taste itself: The milk
that is in all trees. The sweet water that is beneath.
One fruit of all the world’s fruit, for
her, tastes—;
she had failed because her fate, like
all fates, was partial.
Myrrha ended each repetition by telling the child
within her that betrayed, bewildered
eyes wait now to accuse her in death.
—Phoenicia; Panchaia; Sheba—
people everywhere lived lives indifferent to the death of
Cinyras—; suffocating, Sheba’s
highlands thick with balsam, costmary,
cinnamon, frankincense—;
… there is no landscape that her
presence does not offend, so she is free to
prefer this forsaken shore swept by
humid winds, facing the sea.

Her body is dying.
That her body is dying, her labors not yet
finished, her child unborn, is not what is bitter.
Myrrha addressed the gods:—
Make me nothing
human: not alive, not dead.
Whether I deny what is not in my
power to deny, or by deception
seize it, I am damned.
I shall not rest until what has been
lodged in me is neither
lodged in me,—nor NOT lodged in me.
Betrayed, bewildered eyes
wait for me in death.
You are gods. Release me, somehow, from both
life and death.
The gods granted her request. From her toes roots
sprout; the dirt rises to cover her
feet; her legs of which she never had been
ashamed grow thick and hard; bark like disease
covers, becomes her skin; with terror she
sees that she must
submit, lose her body to an alien
body not chosen, as the source of ecstasy is
not chosen—
suddenly she is eager to submit: as the change

rises and her blood becomes
sap, her long arms long branches, she cannot bear
the waiting: she bends her face
downward, plunging her face into the rising
tree, her tears new drops glistening everywhere on its surface:—
fixed, annealed within its body
the story of Myrrha and Cinyras:—new
body not alive not dead, story
everywhere and nowhere:—
Aphrodisiac. Embalmers’ oil. (Insistence of
sex, faint insistent sweetness of the dead undead.)
Sacred anointment oil: with wine an
anodyne. Precious earthfruit, gift fit for the birth and death of
prophets:—no sweet thing without
the trace of what is bitter
within its opposite:—
… MYRRH, sweet-smelling
bitter resin.
•
Soon the child, imprisoned within the tree,
sought birth. Lucina, Goddess of Child-Birth, helped
the new tree contort, the bark
crack open,—
… pretty as Cupid in
a painting, from the bitter
vessel of Myrrha and Cinyras Adonis was born.
We fill pre-existing forms, and when

we fill them, change them and are changed:—
day after day Myrrha told the child
listening within her her story …
Once grown to a man, beautiful as Cupid were
Cupid a man, Myrrha’s son
by his seductive
indifference, tantalizing
refusals tormented love-sick Venus.
Ovid tells us that upon Venus Myrrha’s
son avenged his mother.
His final indifference is
hunting (to Venus’ horror) the boar
that kills him …
Venus did not, perhaps, in her own person
intervene in the fate of Myrrha and Cinyras,—
but children who have watched their parents’
blighted lives blighted in the service of Venus
must punish love itself.
•
O you who looking within the mirror discover in
gratitude how common, how lawful your desire,
before the mirror
anoint your body with myrrh
precious

bitter resin

III
On such a night, at such an hour,
when the inhabitants of the temple of
delight assume for each of us one
profile, different of course for each of us,
but for each of us, single:—
when the present avatar of powers not present though
present through him, different for each of us,
steps to the end of the line of other, earlier
inhabitants of the temple of
delight, different for each of us:—
when the gathering turns for its portrait
and by a sudden trick of alignment and light and
night, all I see
the same, the same, the same, the same, the same—
on such a night,
at such an hour
… grace is the dream, halfdream, halflight, when you appear and do not answer the question
that I have asked you, but courteously
ask (because you are dead) if you can briefly

borrow, inhabit my body.
When I look I can see my body
away from me, sleeping.
I say Yes. Then you enter it
like a shudder as if eager again to know
what it is to move within arms and legs.
I thought, I know that he will return it.
I trusted in that none
earlier, none other.
•
I tasted a sweet taste, I found nothing sweeter.
Taste.
My pleasant fragrance has stripped itself to stink.
Taste.
The lust of the sweetness that is bitter I taste.
Taste.
Custom both sweet and bitter is
the intercourse of this flesh.
Taste.
The milk that is in all trees,
the sweet water that is beneath.
Taste.
The knife of cutting is the book of mysteries.
Taste.
Bitterness sweetness, eat that you may eat.
Taste.
I tasted a sweet taste, I found nothing sweeter.
Taste.
These herbs were gathered at full noon, which was night.
Taste.

•
… bodies carrying bodies, some to bury in
earth what offended earth by breathing, others
become vessels of the dead, the voice erased
by death now, for a time, unerased.
•
infinite the sounds the poems
seeking to be allowed to S U B M I T,—that this
dust become seed
like those extinguished stars whose fires still give us light
•
This is the end of the second hour of the night.

STAR DUST
(2005)

I

MUSIC LIKE DIRT

For the Twentieth Century
Bound, hungry to pluck again from the thousand
technologies of ecstasy
boundlessness, the world that at a drop of water
rises without boundaries,
I push the PLAY button:—
… Callas, Laurel & Hardy, Szigeti
you are alive again,—
the slow movement of K.218
once again no longer
bland, merely pretty, nearly
banal, as it is
in all but Szigeti’s hands
•
Therefore you and I and Mozart
must thank the Twentieth Century, for
it made you pattern, form
whose infinite
repeatability within matter
defies matter—
Malibran. Henry Irving. The young
Joachim. They are lost, a mountain of

newspaper clippings, become words
not their own words. The art of the performer.

Music Like Dirt
FOR DESMOND DEKKER

I will not I will not I said but as my body turned in the solitary
bed it said But he loves me which broke my will.
music like dirt
That you did but willed and continued to will refusal you
confirmed seventeen years later saying I was not wrong.
music like dirt
When you said I was not wrong with gravity and weird
sweetness I felt not anger not woe but weird calm sweetness.
music like dirt
I like sentences like He especially dug doing it in
houses being built or at the steering wheel.
music like dirt
I will not I will not I said but as my body turned in the solitary
bed it said But he loves me which broke my will.

Young Marx
That man’s own life is an object for him. That animals
build nests, build dwellings,
whereas man contemplates himself
in the world that he has created:
That you cannot find yourself in your labor
because it does not belong to your essential being:
That estranged from labor the laborer is
self-estranged, alien to himself:
That your nature is to labor:
That feeling himself fleetingly unbound only when
eating, drinking, procreating, in his dwelling and dressing-up,
man erects means into sole and ultimate ends:
That where he makes what he makes, he is
not: That when he makes, he is not:
Thus the ground of our self-estrangement.
—Marx in 1844, before the solutions that he proposed
betrayed him by entering history, before, like
Jesus, too many sins were committed in his name.

For Bill Nestrick (1940–96)
Out of the rectitude and narrow care of those who
teach in the public schools,—
a mother
who would not let her son watch cartoons of
Porky Pig because we must
not laugh at someone who stutters,—
… the mystery, your brilliant
appetite for the moment.
•
For Herbert, the aesthetic desideratum is
unpremeditated art, not as “natural” or “spontaneous”
but a speaking of the Spirit as it becomes
conscious, a fidelity to
the moment itself. The only
appropriate gift is discovered to be
inseparable from
the giver, for man can only give himself.
In 1975, the magazine that printed your greatessay
announced: He is writing a book on Herbert.
•
You lived in the realm where coin of the realm
is a book,
and despite the fact that by the end of

graduate school you
already had published twenty thousand articles
you never published a book.
Against the background of this bitter
mysterious lapse your brilliant
appetite for the moment.

Little Fugue
at birth you were handed a ticket
beneath every journey the ticket to this
journey in one direction
or say the body
is a conveyor belt, moving in one direction
slower or swifter than sight
at birth
you were handed a ticket, indecipherable
rectangle forgotten in your pocket
or say you stand upon a moving walkway
as if all you fear
is losing your
balance moving in one direction
beneath every journey the ticket to this
journey in one direction

Advice to the Players
There is something missing in our definition, vision, of a human being: the need
to make.
•
We are creatures who need to make.
•
Because existence is willy-nilly thrust into our hands, our fate is to make
something—if nothing else, the shape cut by the arc of our lives.
•
My parents saw corrosively the arc of their lives.
•
Making is the mirror in which we see ourselves.
•
But being is making: not only large things, a family, a book, a business: but the
shape we give this afternoon, a conversation between two friends, a meal.
•
Or mis-shape.
•
Without clarity about what we make, and the choices that underlie it, the need to
make is a curse, a misfortune.

•
The culture in which we live honors specific kinds of making (shaping or misshaping a business, a family) but does not understand how central making itself
is as manifestation and mirror of the self, fundamental as eating or sleeping.
•
In the images with which our culture incessantly teaches us, the cessation of
labor is the beginning of pleasure; the goal of work is to cease working, an
endless paradise of unending diversion.
•
In the United States at the end of the twentieth century, the greatest luxury is to
live a life in which the work that one does to earn a living, and what one has the
appetite to make, coincide—by a kind of grace are the same, one.
•
Without clarity, a curse, a misfortune.
•
My intuition about what is of course unprovable comes, I’m sure, from
observing, absorbing as a child the lives of my parents: the dilemmas,
contradictions, chaos as they lived out their own often unacknowledged, barely
examined desires to make.
•
They saw corrosively the shape cut by the arc of their lives.
•
My parents never made something commensurate to their will to make, which I
take to be, in varying degrees, the general human condition—as it is my own.
•

Making is the mirror in which we see ourselves.
•
Without clarity, a curse, a misfortune.
•
Horrible the fate of the advice-giver in our culture: to repeat oneself in a
thousand contexts until death, or irrelevance.
•
I abjure advice-giver.
•
Go make you ready.

Stanzas Ending with the Same Two Words
At first I felt shame because I had entered
through the door marked Your Death.
Not a valuable word written
unsteeped in your death.
You are the ruin whose arm encircles the young woman
at the posthumous bar, before your death.
The grass is still hungry
above you, fed by your death.
Kill whatever killed your father, your life
turning to me again said before your death.
Hard to grow old still hungry.
You were still hungry at your death.

The Poem Is a Veil
V E I L,—as if silk that you in fury must thrust repeatedly
high at what the eye, your eye, naked cannot see
catches, clinging to its physiognomy.

Luggage
You wear your body as if without
illusions. You speak of former lovers with some
contempt for their interest in sex.
Wisdom of the spirit, you
imply, lies in condescension and poise.
… Fucking, I can feel
the valve opening, the flood is too much.
Or too little. I am
insatiable, famished by repetition.
Now all you see is that I am luggage
that smiles as it is moved from here
to there. We could have had ecstasies.
In your stray moments, as now in
mine, may what was not
rise like grief before you.

Hammer
The stone arm raising a stone hammer
dreams it can descend upon itself.
When the quest is indecipherable,—
… what is left is a career.
What once was apprehended in passion
survives as opinion.
To be both author of
this statue, and the statue itself.

Injunction
As if the names we use to name the uses of buildings
x-ray our souls, war without end:
Palace. Prison. Temple. School.
Market. Theater. Brothel. Bank.
War without end. Because to name is to possess
the dreams of strangers, the temple
is offended by, demands the abolition of brothel, now theater, now
school; the school despises temple, palace, market, bank; the bank by
refusing to name depositors welcomes all, though in rage prisoners each
night gnaw to dust another stone piling under the palace.
War without end. Therefore time past time:
Rip through the fabric. Nail it. Not
to the wall. Rip through
the wall. Outside
time. Nail it.

Heart Beat
ear early tuned to hear beneath the call to end
eating flesh, sentient suffering beings (creatures
bred now for slaughter will
then never be bred) less life less life

tuned to hear

still the vow solemn and implacable I made as a kid
walking a sidewalk in Bakersfield
never to have a child, condemn a creature
to this hell as the prisoner
chorus in wonder is released into the sun, ear early tuned to hear
beneath the melody the ground-bass less life less life

Legacy
When to the desert, the dirt,
comes water
comes money
to get off the shitdirt
land and move to the city
whence you
direct the work of those who now
work the land you still own
My grandparents left home for the American
desert to escape
poverty, or the family who said You are the son who shall
become a priest
After Spain became
Franco’s, at last
rich enough
to return you
refused to return
The West you made
was never unstoried, never
artless

Excrement of the sky our rage inherits
there was no gift
outright we were never the land’s

Lament for the Makers
Not bird not badger not beaver not bee
Many creatures must
make, but only one must seek
within itself what to make
My father’s ring was a B with a dart
through it, in diamonds against polished black stone.
I have it. What parents leave you
is their lives.
Until my mother died she struggled to make
a house that she did not loathe; paintings; poems; me.
Many creatures must
make, but only one must seek
within itself what to make
Not bird not badger not beaver not bee
•
Teach me, masters who by making were
remade, your art.

II

Curse
May breath for a dead moment cease as jerking your
head upward you hear as if in slow motion floor
collapse evenly upon floor as one hundred and ten
floors descend upon you.
May what you have made descend upon you.
May the listening ears of your victims their eyes their
breath
enter you, and eat like acid
the bubble of rectitude that allowed you breath.
May their breath now, in eternity, be your breath.
•
Now, as you wished, you cannot for us
not be. May this be your single profit.
Of your rectitude at last disenthralled, you
seek the dead. Each time you enter them
they spit you out. The dead find you are not food.
Out of the great secret of morals, the imagination to enter
the skin of another, what I have made is a curse.

Knot
After, no ferocity of will could the hand
•
uncurl. One day, she joked, I’ll cut it off.
•
OPEN. Her hand replies that flesh insulted by being cannot bear to
•
wake. OPEN. She repeats the word to what once was hers
•
but now not.

Phenomenology of the Prick
You say, Let’s get naked. It’s 1962; the world
is changing, or has changed, or is about to change;
we want to get naked. Seven or eight old friends
want to see certain bodies that for years we’ve
guessed at, imagined. For me, not
certain bodies: one. Yours. You know that.
We get naked. The room
is dark; shadows against the windows’
light night sky; then you approach your wife. You light
a cigarette, allowing me to see what is forbidden to see.
You make sure I see it hard.
You make sure I see it hard
only once. A year earlier, through the high partition between cafeteria
booths, invisible I hear you say you can get Frank’s
car keys tonight. Frank, you laugh, will do anything I want.
You seemed satisfied. This night, as they say,
completed something. After five years of my
obsession with you, without seeming to will it you
managed to let me see it hard. Were you
giving me a gift. Did you want fixed in my brain
what I will not ever possess. Were you giving me
a gift that cannot be possessed. You make sure
I see how hard
your wife makes it. You light a cigarette.

The Soldier Who Guards the Frontier
On the surface of the earth
despite all effort I continued
the life I had led in its depths.
So when you said cuckoo
hello and my heart
leapt up imagine my surprise.
From its depths some mouth
drawn by your refusals of love
fastened on them and fattened.
It’s 2004; now the creature
born from our union in 1983
attains maturity.
He guards the frontier.
As he guards the frontier he listens
all day to the records of Edith Piaf.
Heroic risk, Piaf sings. Love
is heroic risk, for what you are impelled
to risk but do not
kills you; as does, of course this voice
knows, risk. He is addicted
to the records of Edith Piaf.
He lives on the aroma, the intoxications
of what he has been spared.
He is grateful, he says, not to exist.

Romain Clerou
When I asked if she was in pain he said
No but that she had in her final minutes showed that panic
he had often seen the faces of the dying show facing the void.
He said this matter-of-factly, as if because he was
a doctor his experience mattered, as if he had known
her and her son long enough not to varnish or lie.
They had gone to high school together and now
because he had become a doctor and then become
her doctor he watched Martha face the void.
Twenty-eight years later, I can hear the way he said
Martha. His name was Clerou: Dr. Romain Clerou.

Hadrian’s Deathbed
Flutter-animal
talkative
unthing
soon from all tongue unhoused
where
next
forgotten
voiceless
scared?

Song
You know that it is there, lair
where the bear ceases
for a time even to exist.
Crawl in. You have at last killed
enough and eaten enough to be fat
enough to cease for a time to exist.
Crawl in. It takes talent to live at night, and scorning
others you had that talent, but now you sniff
the season when you must cease to exist.
Crawl in. Whatever for good or ill
grows within you needs
you for a time to cease to exist.
It is not raining inside
tonight. You know that it is there. Crawl in.

Star Dust
Above the dazzling city lies starless
night. Ruthless, you are pleased the price of one
is the other. That night
dense with date palms, crazy with the breathless aromas of fresh-cut earth,
black sky thronging with light so thick the fixed
unbruised stars bewildered
sight, I wanted you dazzled, wanted you drunk.
As we lie on our backs in close dark parallel furrows newly
dug, staring up at the consuming sky, light
falling does not stop at flesh: each thing hidden, buried
between us now burns and surrounds us,
visible, like breath in freezing air. What you ignore or refuse
or cannot bear. What I hide that I ask, but
ask. The shimmering improvisations designed to save us
fire melts to law. I touched the hem of your garment. You opened
your side, feeding me briefly just enough to show me why I ask.
Melancholy, as if shorn, you cover as ever each glowing pyre
with dirt. In this light is our grave. Obdurate, you say: We
are darkness. We are the city

whose brightness blots the stars from night.

The Third Hour of the Night
When the eye
When the edgeless screen receiving
light from the edgeless universe
When the eye first
When the edgeless screen facing
outward as if hypnotized by the edgeless universe
When the eye first saw that it
Hungry for more light
resistlessly began to fold back upon itself

TWIST

As if a dog sniffing
Ignorant of origins
familiar with hunger
As if a dog sniffing a dead dog
Before nervous like itself but now
weird inert cold nerveless
Twisting in panic had abruptly sniffed itself
When the eye
first saw that it must die

When the eye first

Brooding on our origins you
ask When and I say

Then
•
wound-dresser

let us call the creature

driven again and again to dress with fresh
bandages and a pail of disinfectant
suppurations that cannot
heal for the wound that confers existence is mortal
wound-dresser
what wound is dressed

the wound of being

•
Understand that it can drink till it is
sick, but cannot drink till it is satisfied.
It alone knows you. It does not wish you well.
Understand that when your mother, in her only
pregnancy, gave birth to twins
painfully stitched into the flesh, the bone of one child
was the impossible-to-remove cloak that confers
invisibility. The cloak that maimed it gave it power.
Painfully stitched into the flesh, the bone of the other child
was the impossible-to-remove cloak that confers
visibility. The cloak that maimed it gave it power.
Envying the other, of course each twin
tried to punish and become the other.
Understand that when the beast within you

succeeds again in paralyzing into unending
incompletion whatever you again had the temerity to
try to make
its triumph is made sweeter by confirmation of its
rectitude. It knows that it alone
knows you. It alone remembers your mother’s
mother’s grasping immigrant bewildered
stroke-filled slide-to-the-grave
you wiped from your adolescent American feet.
Your hick purer-than-thou overreaching veiling
mediocrity. Understand that you can delude others but
not what you more and more
now call the beast within you. Understand
the cloak that maimed each gave each power.
Understand that there is a beast within you
that can drink till it is
sick, but cannot drink till it is satisfied. Understand
that it will use the conventions of the visible world
to turn your tongue to stone. It alone
knows you. It does
not wish you well. These are instructions for the wrangler.

II

Three Fates. One
fate, with three faces.
Clotho

Lachesis

Atropos

Thread spun by one
from all those forever unspun.
Thread touched by one and in
touching twisted into something
forever unlike all others spun.
Thread touched by one and in
touching withered to nothing.
Atropos

Lachesis

Clotho

Three, who gave us in recompense
for death
the first alphabet, to engrave in stone
what is most evanescent,
the mind. According to Hesiod, daughters of Night.
•
“Unless teeth devour it it
rots: now is its season.
My teeth have sunk into firm-skinned
pears so succulent time stopped.
When my wife, dead now
ten years, pulls her dress over her petticoats
and hair, the air crackles, her hair rising
tangles in ecstasy. We are electric ghosts.

•
You hear the strange cricket in the oven
sing, and ask what it sings.
This is what it sings.
Because Benvenuto in my native tongue
means welcome, write
here lies an artist who did not
recoil from residence on earth—but,
truly named, welcomed it.
But I mis-spoke: not wife. Servant: model: mother
of my child, also now dead.
•
In prison, immured in the black pit where the Pope
once fed Benedetto da Foiano less and less each day
until God’s will, not the Pope’s own hand, killed him,—
where outside my door each day the castellan
repeated that darkness will teach me I am
a counterfeit bat, and he a real one,—
blackness, silence so unremitted
I knew I had survived another day only by the malignant
welcome singsong of his triumphant voice,—
Benvenuto is a counterfeit bat, and I a real one,—
where God had not found me worthy of seeing the sun
even in a dream, I asked the God of Nature
what unexpiated act the suffocation of my senses, such
suffering, served to expiate.

(This was my first prison.)
•
For the two murders I had committed,—their just,
free but necessary cause
revenge, however imperfect the justice—
two successive Popes recognized the necessity
and pardoned me. Absolved me.
Because my fame as a maker in gold and silver
preceded me, though I was hardly more
than an apprentice, when Pope Clement came into
possession of the second largest diamond in the world
he summoned me from Florence to Rome—called me
into his presence to serve him. To crown the resplendent
glittering vestment covering his surplice, he wanted
a golden clasp big and round as a small
plate, with God the Father in half-relief above the diamond
and cherubs, arms raised, below. Hurry, he said,
finish it quickly, so that I may enjoy its
use a little while.
Pope Clement, unlike the great I now serve, was
an excellent, subtle
connoisseur; he approved my design.
Each week he summoned me into the presence
two or three times, eager to inspect my progress.

Then Cecchino, my brother, two years younger than I
and still beardless, died—
was killed, as he tried to avenge the unjust killing of
a comrade by the ruthless guard of the Bargello.
Thus was stolen from him the chance to incise
his presence into the hard, careless surface of the world.
The fool who killed him
in what justice must call self-defense
later proved his nature by
boasting of it.
His boasting enraged, maddened me. In this
great grief the Pope rebuked me: You act as if
grief can change death.
Sleepless, eatless, by day I worked at the Pope’s
absorbing golden button—and by night, hypnotized
as a jealous lover, I watched and followed
the fatuous creature who murdered my brother.
At last, overcoming my repugnance to an enterprise
not-quite-praiseworthy, I decided
to end my torment. My dagger entered the juncture
of the nape-bone and the neck
so deep into the bone
with all my strength I could not pull it out.
I ran to the palace of Duke Alessandro—for those who

pursued me knew me. The Pope’s natural son,
later he became Duke of Florence, before his murder
by his own cousin Lorenzino, whose too-familiar
intimacies and pretensions to power
he not only indulged but openly mocked.
Alessandro told me to stay indoors
for eight days. For eight days I stayed indoors, working
at the jewel the Pope had set his heart on.
For eight days the Pope failed
to summon me. Then his chamberlain, saying that all was
well if I minded my work and kept silent, ushered me
into the presence. The Pope cast so menacing
a glance toward me I trembled.
Examining my work, his countenance cleared,
saying that I had accomplished a vast amount
in a short time. Then he said, Now that you are
cured, Benvenuto—change your life.
I promised that I would. Soon after this, I opened
a fine shop, my first; and finished the jewel.
•
As the knife descended (forgive me, O God of
Nature, but thus you have arranged it,—)
to my fevered mind
each moment was infinite, and mine.

•
Late one night, in farewell, Michelangelo
turning to me said, Benvenuto,
you deliver yourself into their hands.
•
Here I leapt Here I leapt Here I leapt Here I leapt
the shrilling cricket in the shrilling summer evening
sings; as did my father in the sweet years
he served the pleasure of the lords of Florence
as a piper, in the Consort of Pipers.
Imagine my father, no longer young, married, still
childless, an engineer who designs bridges and
battlements for the Duke, but whose
first love is music—the flute. He joined
the Duke’s Consort of Pipers. Now his nights
often are spent not bending over charts and plans
but dazzled at the court of Lorenzo, called The Magnificent—
the same Lorenzo who once plucked Michelangelo, still
a boy, from among the horde of the merely-talented
bending to copy the masters in the ducal palace.
Lorenzo, with his father’s consent, adopted
the boy; fed him at his own table.
Imagine, tonight, the brief concert is over—
the Consort of Pipers (respectable, honorable

amateurs: small merchants, a banker, a scholar)
mingle, slightly awed, with an ambassador, a Cardinal …
Suddenly Lorenzo is at my father’s ear: He stood
not six inches from me.
Not six inches from my father’s ear Lorenzo
in a low voice as he begins to move through
the crowd followed by his son Piero
(as now my father must struggle to follow)
tells my father he has painfully and increasingly
remarked that the flute has led my father to neglect
his fine engineering talent and therefore my
father will understand why Piero and the Duke
must dismiss him from the Consort of Pipers.
Lorenzo, entering the private apartments, was gone.
In later years, my father repeated to his
children: He stood not six inches from me.
It is a lie. It is a lie that the Medici and you and I
stand on the same earth. What the sane eye
saw, was a lie:—
two things alone cross the illimitable distance
between the great and the rest of
us, who serve them:—
a knife; and art.
•

The emblem of Florence is the lion; therefore
lions, caged but restless and living, centuries ago
began to announce to the Piazza della Signoria
this is the fearsome seat of the free
government of the Republic of Florence.
Duke Cosimo, hating the noise and smell, had them
moved behind the palace. For years, I had known
the old man who fed and tended the lions,—
one day he humbly asked me if I could make a ring
unlike all others for his daughter’s wedding.
I said yes, of course; but, as payment for its
rarity, I wanted him to drug the strongest lion
asleep, so that I could
examine, for my art, his body.
He said he knew no art of drugging; such poison
could kill the creature; a week later,
in fury he said yes.
The animal was numbed but not
sleeping; he tried to raise
his great head, as I lay lengthwise against his warm body;
the head fell back. My head
nestling behind his, each arm, outstretched, slowly
descending along each leg, at last with both hands I
pulled back the fur and touched a claw.

This creature whose claw waking could kill me,—
… I wore its skin.
•
After the Medici were returned from eighteen years’
banishment, placed over us again not by the will
of Florentines, but by a Spanish army—
my father, though during the republic he regained
his position as piper, ever loyal to the Medici
wrote a poem celebrating his party’s victory
and prophesying the imminent
advent of a Medici pope. Then Julius II died;
Cardinal de’ Medici, against expectation, was elected;
the new pope wrote my father that he must
come to Rome and serve him.
My father had no will to travel. Then Jacopo
Salviati, in power because married to a Medici,
took from my father his place at the Duke’s new court;
took from him his profit, his hope, his will.
Thus began that slow extinguishment
of hope, the self’s obsequies for the self
at which effacement I felt not only a helpless
witness, but
cause, author.
He said I was his heart.

I had asked to be his heart
before I knew what I was asking.
Against his mania to make me a musician
at fifteen I put myself to the goldsmith’s trade;
without money
or position, he now could not oppose this.
Help the boy—for his father is poor
rang in my ears as I began to sell
the first trinkets I had made. Later, to escape
the plague then raging, he made me
quickly leave Florence; when I returned,
he, my sister, her husband and child, were dead.
These events, many occurring before my birth, I
see because my father described them
often and with outrage.
To be a child is to see things and not
know them; then you know them.
•
Despite the malicious
stars, decisive at my birth: despite their
sufficient instrument, the hand within me that moves
against me: in the utter darkness of my first prison
God granted me vision:
surrounded by my stinks, an Angel, his beauty

austere, not wanton, graciously
showed me a room in half-light crowded with the dead:
postures blunted as if all promise of change
was lost, the dead
walked up and down and back and forth:
as if the promise of change
fleeing had stolen the light.
Then, on the wall, there was a square of light.
Careless of blindness I turned my eyes
to the full sun. I did not care
to look on anything again but this. The sun
withering and quickening without distinction
then bulged out: the boss
expanded: the calm body of the dead Christ
formed itself from the same
substance as the sun. Still on the cross,
he was the same substance as the sun.
•
The bait the Duke laid
was Perseus. Perseus
standing before the Piazza della Signoria.
My statue’s audience and theater, Michelangelo’s
David; Donatello’s
Judith With the Head of Holofernes …

Here the school of Florence, swaggering, says
to the world: Eat.
Only Bandinelli’s odious Hercules and Cacus
reminds one that when one walks
streets on earth one steps in shit.
Duke Cosimo desired, he said, a statue of Perseus
triumphant, after intricate trials able
at last to raise high
Medusa’s mutilated head—he imagined,
perhaps, decapitation of the fickle
rabble of republican Florence …
I conceived the hero’s gesture as more generous:—
Kill the thing that looked
upon makes us stone.
Soon enough, on my great bronze bust of the great
Duke, I placed—staring out from his chest—
Medusa, her head not yet cut, living.
•
Remember, Benvenuto, you cannot bring your
great gifts to light by your strength alone
You show your greatness only through
the opportunities we give you
Hold your tongue I will drown you in gold
•

As we stared down at the vast square, at
David, at Judith—then at Hercules and Cacus
approved and placed there by Cosimo himself—
from high on the fortress lookout of the palace,
against whose severe façade so many
human promises had been so cunningly
or indifferently crushed, I told the Duke that I
cannot make his statue. My brief return from France
was designed only to provide for the future of
my sister and six nieces, now without husband
or father. The King of France alone had saved me
from the Pope’s dungeon—not any lord of Italy!
At this, the Duke looked at me
sharply, but said nothing.
All Rome knew that though I had disproved
the theft that was pretext for my arrest, Pope Paul
still kept me imprisoned, out of spite—
vengeance of his malignant son Pier Luigi, now
assassinated by his own retainers.
One night at dinner, the King’s emissary gave the Pope
gossip so delicious that out of merriment, and about to vomit
from indulgence, he agreed
to free me. I owed King Francis
my art, my service. The same stipend he once paid

Leonardo, he now paid me; along with a house in Paris.
This house was, in truth, a castle …
I omitted, of course, quarrels with the King’s
mistress, demon who taunted me for the slowness
of my work, out of her petty hatred of art itself;
omitted her insistence to the King that I
am insolent and by example teach
insolence to others. Omitted that I overheard the King
joke with her lieutenant:—
Kill him, if you can find me
his equal in art.
Before the school of Florence I had only been able,
young, to show myself as goldsmith
and jeweler; not yet as sculptor.
Duke Cosimo then announced that all the King of France
had given me, he would surpass: boasting,
he beckoned me to follow him past the public
common galleries, into the private apartments …
Dutiful abashed puppet, I followed; I knew
I would remain and make his statue.
•
In the mirror of art, you who are familiar with the rituals of
decorum and bloodshed before which you are
silence and submission

while within stone
the mind writhes
contemplate, as if a refrain were wisdom, the glistening
intrication
of bronze and will and circumstance in the mirror of art.
•
Bandinelli for months insinuated in the Duke’s ear
Perseus never would be finished:—
I lacked the art, he said, to move from the small
wax model the Duke rightly praised, to lifesize
bronze whose secrets tormented even Donatello.
So eighteen months after work began, Duke Cosimo grew
tired, and withdrew his subsidy. Lattanzo Gorini,
spider-handed and gnat-voiced, refusing to hand over
payment said, Why do you not finish?
Then Bandinelli hissed Sodomite! at
me—after my enumeration, to the court’s
amusement, of the sins against art and sense
committed by his Hercules and Cacus, recital
designed to kill either him or his authority.…
The Duke, at the ugly word, frowned
and turned away. I replied that the sculptor of
Hercules and Cacus must be a madman to think that I
presumed to understand the art that Jove in heaven

used on Ganymede, art nobly practiced here on earth
by so many emperors and kings. My saucy speech
ended: My poor wick does not dare to burn so high!
Duke and court broke into laughter. Thus was
born my resolve to murder Bandinelli.
•
I’d hurl the creature to hell. In despair at what must
follow—the Duke’s rage, abandonment of my
never-to-be-born Perseus—I cast
myself away for lost: with a hundred crowns
and a swift horse, I resolved first to bid
farewell to my natural son, put to wet-nurse in Fiesole;
then to descend to San Domenico, where Bandinelli
returned each evening. Then, after blood, France.
Reaching Fiesole, I saw the boy
was in good health; his wet-nurse
was my old familiar, old gossip, now
married to one of my workmen. The boy
clung to me: wonderful in a two-year-old, in
grief he flailed his arms when at last
in the thick half-dusk
I began to disengage myself. Entering the square
of San Domenico on one side, I saw my prey
arriving on the other. Enraged that he still

drew breath, when I reached him
I saw he was unarmed. He rode a small sorry
mule. A wheezing donkey carried a ten-year-old
boy at his side. In my sudden presence, his face
went white. I nodded my head and rode past.
•
I had a vision of Bandinelli surrounded
by the heaped-up works of his hand.
Not one thing that he had made
did I want to have made.
From somewhere within his body
like a thread
he spun the piles surrounding him. Then he
tried to pull away, to release the thread; I saw
the thread was a leash.
He tried and tried to cut it.
At this, in my vision I said out-loud:—
My art is my revenge.
•
When I returned to Florence from Fiesole, after
three days news was brought to me that my little boy
was smothered by his wet-nurse
turning over on him as they both slept.
His panic, as I left; his arms raised, in panic.

•
from the great unchosen narration you will soon
be released
Benvenuto Cellini
dirtied by blood and earth
but now
you have again taught yourself to disappear
moving wax from arm
to thigh
you have again taught yourself to disappear
here where each soul is its
orbit spinning
sweetly around the center of itself
at the edge of its eye the great
design of virtue
here your Medusa and your Perseus are twins
his triumphant body still furious with purpose
but his face abstracted absorbed in
contemplation as she is
abstracted absorbed
though blood still spurts from her neck
defeated by a mirror
as in concentration you move wax
from thigh to arm

under your hand it grows
•
The idyll began when the Duke reached me a goldsmith’s
hammer, with which I struck the goldsmith’s
chisel he held; and so the little statues were
disengaged from earth and rust. Bronze
antiquities, newly found near Arezzo, they lacked
either head or hands or feet. Impatient for my
presence, the Duke insisted that I join him each evening
at his new pastime, playing artisan—leaving orders
for my free admittance to his rooms, day or night.
His four boys, when the Duke’s eyes were turned,
hovered around me, teasing. One night
I begged them to hold their peace.
The boldest replied, That we can’t do! I said
what one cannot do is required of no one.
So have your will! Faced with their sons’
delight in this new principle, the Duke and Duchess
smiling accused me of a taste for chaos.…
At last the four figures wrought for the four
facets of the pedestal beneath Perseus
were finished. I brought them one evening to the Duke,
arranging them on his worktable in a row:—
figures, postures from scenes that the eye cannot

entirely decipher, story haunting the eye with its
resonance, unseen ground that explains nothing.…
The Duke appeared, then immediately
retreated; reappearing, in his right hand
he held a pear slip. This is for your garden, the garden of
your house. I began, Do you mean, but he cut me off
saying, Yes, Benvenuto: garden and house now are yours.
Thus I received what earlier was only lent me.
I thanked him and his Duchess; then both
took seats before my figures.
For two hours talk was of their beauty,—
the Duchess insisted they were too exquisite
to be wasted down there
in the piazza; I must place them in her apartments.
No argument from intention or design
unconvinced her.
So I waited till the next day—entering the private
chambers at the hour the Duke and Duchess
each afternoon went riding, I carried the statues
down and soldered them with lead into their niches.
Returning, how angry the Duchess became! The Duke
abandoned his workshop. I went there no more.
•
The old inertia of earth that hates the new

(as from a rim I watched)
rose from the ground, legion:—
truceless ministers of the great unerasable
ZERO, eager to annihilate lineament and light,
waited, pent, against the horizon:—
some great force (massive, stubborn, multiform as
earth, fury whose single name is LEGION,—)
wanted my Perseus not to exist:—
and I must
defeat them.
Then my trembling assistants woke me.
They said all my work
was spoiled.
Perseus was spoiled. He lay buried in earth
wreathed in fragile earthenware veins from the furnace
above, veins through which he still
waited to be filled with burning metal.
The metal was curdled. As I slept, sick,
the bronze had been allowed to cake, to curdle.
Feverish, made sick by my exertions for
days, for months, I slept; while those charged
with evenly feeding the furnace that I had so well
prepared, LARKED—
I thought, Unwitting ministers of the gorgon

Medusa herself. The furnace choked with caking, curdling
metal that no art known to man could
uncurdle, must be utterly dismantled—all
who made it agreed this must destroy
the fragile, thirsty mould of Perseus beneath.
But Perseus was not more strong
than Medusa, but more clever:—if he ever
was to exist as idea, he must first exist as matter:—
all my old inborn
daring returned,
furious to reverse
the unjust triumphs of the world’s mere
arrangements of power, that seemingly on earth
cannot be reversed. First, I surveyed my forces:—
seven guilty workmen, timid, sullen,
resentful; a groom; two maids; a cook.
I harassed these skeptical troops into battle:—
two hands were sent to fetch from the butcher
Capretta a load of young oak,—
in bronze furnaces the only woods you use
are slow-burning alder, willow, pine: now I needed
oak and its fierce heat. As the oak
was fed log by log into the fire, how the cake began
to stir, to glow and sparkle. Now

from the increased
combustion of the furnace, a conflagration
shot up from the roof: two windows
burst into flame: I saw the violent storm
filling the sky fan the flames.
All the while with pokers and iron rods
we stirred and stirred the channels—
the metal, bubbling, refused to flow.
I sent for all my pewter plates, dishes, porringers—
the cooks and maids brought some two hundred.
Piece by piece, I had them thrown
into the turgid mass. As I watched the metal for
movement, the cap of the furnace
exploded—bronze welling over on all sides.
I had the plugs pulled, the mouths of the mould
opened; in perfect liquefaction
the veins of Perseus filled.…
Days later, when the bronze had cooled, when the clay
sheath had been with great care removed, I found
what was dead brought to life again.
•
Now, my second
prison. It began soon after Perseus was unveiled
to acclaim—great acclaim. Perhaps I grew

too glorious. Perseus, whose birth consumed
nine years, found stuck to his pedestal
sonnets celebrating the master’s hand that made him.…
On the day of unveiling, Duke Cosimo stationed himself
at a window just above the entrance to the palace;
there, half-hidden, he listened for hours to the crowd’s
wonder. He sent his attendant Sforza to say
my reward
soon would astonish me.
Ten days passed. At last Sforza appeared and asked
what price I placed on my statue.
I was indeed astonished: It is not my custom,
I replied, to set a price for my work, as if
he were a merchant and I a mere tradesman.
Then, at risk of the Duke’s severe displeasure, I was
warned I must set a price: infuriated, I said
ten thousand golden crowns.
Cities and great palaces are built with ten thousand
golden crowns, the Duke
two days later flung at me in anger.
Many men can build cities and palaces,
I replied, but not one can make
a second Perseus.
Bandinelli, consulted by the Duke, reluctantly

concluded that the statue was worth
sixteen thousand.
The Duke replied that for two farthings
Perseus could go to the scrap heap; that would
resolve our differences.
At last, the settlement was thirty-five hundred, one
hundred a month. Soon after, charges were brought
against me, for sodomy—
I escaped Florence as far as Scarperia, but there
the Duke’s soldiers caught me and in chains
brought me back.
I confessed. If I had not, I could have been made
to serve as a slave in the Duke’s galleys for life.
The Duke listened behind a screen as I was made
publicly to confess, in full court.… Punishment
was four years imprisonment. Without the Duke’s
concurrence, of course, no charges could have been
lodged, no public humiliation arranged
to silence the insolent. The first Cosimo, founder of Medici
power, all his life protected Donatello—whose
affections and bliss were found in Ganymede.
After imprisonment one month, Cosimo
finally commuted my sentence to house arrest.
There his magnanimity allowed me to complete

my Christ of the whitest marble
set upon a cross of the blackest.
Now, my Christ sits still packed in a crate
in the Duke’s new chapel; my bust of the Duke
is exiled to Elba, there to frighten in open air
slaves peering out from his passing galleys.
Now, after the Duchess and two of their sons
died of fever within two months, Cosimo
grows stranger: he murdered Sforza
by running him through with a spear:—
he does not own
his mind; or will.
When I ask release from his service, he says
that he cannot, that he soon
will have need of me for great projects; no
commissions come. Catherine de’ Medici, regent of
the young French king, petitioned that I be allowed
to enter her service. He said I had no will now to work.
In prison I wrote my sonnet addressed
to Fortune:—Fortune, you sow!
You turned from me because Ganymede
also is my joy.… O God of Nature, author
of my nature,
where does your son Jesus forbid it?

When I was five, one night my father
woke me. He pulled me to the basement, making me
stare into the oak fire and see what he just had seen.
There a little lizard was sporting
at the core of the intensest flames.
My father boxed me on the ears, then kissed me—
saying that I must remember this night:—
My dear little boy, the lizard you see
is a salamander, a creature that lives
at the heart of fire. You and I are blessed: no other
soul now living has been allowed to see it.
•
I am too old to fight to leave Florence:—
here, young, this goldsmith and jeweler
began to imagine that
severity, that chastity of style
certain remnants of the ancient world
left my hand hungry to emulate:—
equilibrium of ferocious, contradictory
forces: equilibrium whose balance or poise is their
tension, and does not efface them,—
as if the surface of each thing
arranged within the frame, the surface of each
body the eye must circle

gives up to the eye its vibration, its nature.
Two or three times, perhaps,—you
say where,—I have achieved it.
•
See, in my great bronze bust of the great
Duke, embedded in the right epaulette like a trophy
an open-mouthed
face part lion part man part goat, with an iron
bar jammed in its lower jaw
rising resistlessly across its mouth.
See, in Vasari’s clumsy portrait of me, as I float
above the right shoulder of the Duke, the same face.”
•
As if your hand fumbling to reach inside
reached inside
As if light falling on the surface
fell on what made the surface
As if there were no scarcity of sun
on the sun

III
I covered my arm with orchid juice.
With my hatchet I split a mangrove stick
from a tree, and sharpened it.
I covered the killing stick with orchid juice.

We were camping at Marunga Island
looking for oysters. This woman I was about to kill
at last separated herself from the others
to hunt lilies. She walked into the swamp, then
got cold, and lay down on sandy ground.
After I hit her between the eyes with my hatchet
she kicked, but couldn’t
raise up.
With my thumb over the end of the killing stick
I jabbed her Mount of Venus until her skin pushed
back up to her navel. Her large intestine
protruded as though it were red calico.
With my thumb over the end of the killing stick
each time she inhaled
I pushed my arm
in a little. When she exhaled, I stopped. Little by little
I got my hand
inside her. Finally I touched her heart.
Once you reach what is
inside it is outside. I pushed the killing stick
into her heart.
The spirit that belonged to that dead woman
went into my heart then.
I felt it go in.

I pulled my arm
out. I covered my arm with orchid juice.
Next I broke a nest of green ants
off a tree, and watched the live ants
bite her skin until her skin moved by itself
downward from her navel and covered her bones.
Then I took some dry mud and put my sweat
and her blood in the dry mud
and warmed it over a fire. Six or eight times
I put the blood and sweat and mud
inside her uterus until there was no trace of her
wound or what I had done.
I was careful none of her pubic hair was left
inside her vagina for her husband to feel.
Her large intestine stuck out several feet.
When I shook some green ants on it, a little
went in. I shook some more. All of it went in.
When I whirled the killing stick with her heart’s blood
over her head, her head
moved. When I whirled it some more, she moved
more. The third time I whirled the killing stick
she gasped for breath. She blew some breath
out of her mouth, and was all right.
I said, You go eat some lilies. She

got up. I said, You will live
two days. One day you will be happy. The next, sick.
She ate some lilies. She walked around, then
came back and slept. When laughing and talking women
woke her she gathered her lilies and returned to camp.
The next day she walked around and played,
talked and made fun, gathering with others oysters
and lilies. She brought into camp what she
gathered. That night she lay down and died.
Even the gods cannot
end death. In this universe anybody can kill anybody
with a stick. What the gods gave me
is their gift, the power to bury within each
creature the hour it ceases.
Everyone knows I have powers but not such power.
If they knew I would be so famous
they would kill me.
I tell you because your tongue is stone.
If the gods ever give you words, one night in
sleep you will wake to find me above you.
•
After sex & metaphysics,—
… what?
What you have made.

•
Infinite the forms, finite
tonight as I find again in the mirror the familiar appeaseless
eater’s face
Ignorant of cause or source or end
in silence he repeats
Eater, become food
All life exists at the expense of other life
Because you have eaten and eat as eat you must
Eater, become food
unlike the burning stars
burning merely to be
Then I ask him how to become food
In silence he repeats that others have
other fates, but that I must fashion out of the corruptible
body a new body good to eat a thousand years
Then I tell the eater’s face that within me is no
sustenance, on my famished
plate centuries have been served me and still I am famished
He smirks, and in silence repeats that all life exists
at the expense of other life
You must fashion out of the corruptible
body a new body good to eat a thousand years
Because you have eaten and eat as eat you must
ignorant of cause or source or end

•
drugged to sleep by repetition of the diurnal
round, the monotonous sorrow of the finite,
within

I am awake

repairing in dirt the frayed immaculate thread
forced by being to watch the birth of suns
•
This is the end of the third hour of the night.

WATCHING THE SPRING
FESTIVAL
(2008)

Marilyn Monroe
Because the pact beneath ordinary life (If you
give me enough money, you can continue to fuck me—)
induces in each person you have ever known
panic and envy before the abyss,
what you come from is craziness, what your
mother and her mother come from is
craziness, panic of the animal
smelling what you have in store for it.
Your father’s name, your mother said to the child
you, is too famous not to be hidden.
Kicking against the pricks,
she somehow injured her mind.
You are bitter all that releases
transformation in us is illusion.
Poor, you thought being rich is utterly
corrosive; and watched with envy.
Posing in the garden,
squinting into the sun.

Tu Fu Watches the Spring Festival Across Serpentine
Lake
In 753 Tu Fu, along with a crowd of others, watched
the imperial court—the emperor’s mistress, her sisters,
the first minister—publicly celebrate the advent of spring.
Intricate to celebrate still-delicate
raw spring, peacocks in passement of gold
thread, unicorns embroidered palely in silver.
These are not women but a dream of women:—
bandeaux of kingfisher-feather
jewelry, pearl
netting that clings to the breathing body
veil what is, because touched earth
is soiled earth, invisible.
As if submission to dream were submission
not only to breeding but to one’s own nature,
what is gorgeous is remote now, pure, true.
•
The Mistress of the Cloud-Pepper Apartments
has brought life back to the emperor, who is
old. Therefore charges of gross extravagance, of
pandering incest between her sister Kuo and her cousin

are, in the emperor’s grateful eyes, unjust. Her wish
made her cousin first minister. Three springs from this
spring, the arrogance of the new first minister
will arouse such hatred and fury even the frightened
emperor must accede to his execution. As bitterly to
hers. She will be carried on a palanquin of
plain wood to a Buddhist chapel
deep in a wood and strangled.
•
Now the Mistress of the Cloud-Pepper Apartments,—
whose rooms at her insistence are coated with
a pepper-flower paste into which dried pepperflowers are pounded because the rooms of the Empress
always are coated with paste into which dried pepperflowers are pounded and she is Empress
now in all but name,—is encircled by her
sisters, Duchesses dignified by imperial
favor with the names of states that once had
power, Kuo, Ch’in, Han. Now rhinoceros-horn
chopsticks, bored, long have not descended.
The belled carving knife wastes its labors. Arching
camel humps, still perfect, rise like purple hills
from green-glazed cauldrons. Wave after
wave of imperial eunuchs, balancing fresh
delicacies from the imperial kitchens, gallop up
without stirring dust.

•
With mournful sound that would move demon
gods, flutes and drums now declare to the air
he is arrived. Dawdlingly
he arrives, as if the cloud of
suppliants clinging to him cannot obscure the sun.
Power greater than that of all men except one
knows nothing worth rushing toward
or rushing from. Finally the new first minister
ascends the pavilion. He greets the Duchess of
Kuo with that slight
brutality intimacy induces.
Here at last is power that your
soul can warm its hands against!
Beware: success has made him
incurious, not less dangerous.

(AFTER TU FU, “BALLAD OF LOVELY WOMEN”)

The Old Man at the Wheel
Measured against the immeasurable
universe, no word you have spoken
brought light. Brought
light to what, as a child, you thought
too dark to be survived. By exorcism
you survived. By submission, then making.
You let all the parts of that thing you would
cut out of you enter your poem because
enacting there all its parts allowed you
the illusion you could cut it from your soul.
Dilemmas of choice given what cannot
change alone roused you to words.
As you grip the things that were young when
you were young, they crumble in your hand.
Now you must drive west, which in November
means driving directly into the sun.

Like Lightning Across an Open Field
This age that has tried to use indeterminacy
to imagine we are free
Days and nights typing and retyping
revisions half in
relish because what you have
made is ill-made
•
Picking up the phone next to your bed
when her voice said he is dead you
stood up on your bed
Like lightning across an open field
I he said
wound the ground
•
His body had risen up to kill him
because beneath him there was no
earth where the soul could stand
•
Renewed health and renewed illness
meant the freedom

or necessity to risk a new life
Bar by bar he built meticulously
a new cage to escape each cage he built
why why why why
It is an illusion you were ever free
The voice of the bird you could not help
but respond to

You Cannot Rest
The trick was to give yourself only to what
could not receive what you had to give,
leaving you as you wished, free.
Still you court the world by enacting yet once
more the ecstatic rituals of enthrallment.
You cannot rest. The great grounding
events in your life (weight lodged past
change, like the sweetest, most fantastical myth
enshrining yet enslaving promise), the great
grounding events that left you so changed
you cannot conceive your face without their
happening, happened when someone
could receive. Just as she once did, he did—past
judgment of pain or cost. Could receive. Did.

Poem Ending With Three Lines From “Home On the
Range”
Barred from the pool twenty-three years ago, still I dove
straight in. You loved to swim, but saw no water.
Whenever Ray Charles sings “I Can’t Stop Loving You”
I can’t stop loving you. Whenever the unstained-by-guilt
cheerful chorus belts out the title, as his voice, sweet
and haggard reminder of what can never be remedied,
answers, correcting the children with “It’s useless to say,”
the irreparable enters me again, again me it twists.
The red man was pressed from this part of the West—
’tis unlikely he’ll ever return to the banks of Red River, where
seldom, if ever, their flickering campfires burn.

An American in Hollywood
After you were bitten by a wolf and transformed
into a monster who feeds on other human beings
each full moon and who, therefore, in disgust
wants to die, you think The desire to die is not
feeling suicidal. It abjures mere action. You have
wanted to die since the moment you were born.
Crazy narratives—that lend what is merely
in you, and therefore soon-to-be-repeated,
the fleeting illusion of logic and cause.
You think Those alive there, in the glowing rectangle,
lead our true lives! They have not, as we have been
forced to here, cut off their arms and legs.
There, you dance as well as Fred Astaire,
though here, inexplicably, you cannot.
Sewer. Still black water
above whose mirror
you bend your face. Font.

Seduction
Show him that you see he carries
always, everywhere, an enormous
almost impossible to balance or bear
statue of himself: burden that
flattering him
dwarfs him, like you. Make him
see that you alone decipher within him
the lineaments of the giant. Make him
see that you alone can help him shape
the inchoate works of his hand, till what
the statue is he is. He watches your helpless
gaze; your gaze
tells him that the world someday must see.
You are the dye whose color dyes
the mirror: he can never get free.
•
You ask what is this place. He says
kids come to make out here. He has driven
out here to show you lovers’ lane.
Because your power in the world exceeds

his, he must make the first move.
His hand on the car seat doesn’t move.
•
He is Ralegh attending Elizabeth, still
able to disguise that he does not want her.
In banter and sweet colloquy, he freely,
abundantly shows you that what his
desire is is endless
intercourse with your soul. Everything
he offers, by intricate
omissions, displays what he denies you.
Beneath all, the no that you
persuade yourself
can be reversed.
•
You cannot reverse it: as if he is
safe from
engulfment only because he has
placed past reversal
the judgment that each
animal makes facing another.
You are an animal facing another.
•

Still you persuade yourself that it can be
reversed because he teasingly sprinkles
evasive accounts of his erotic history
with tales of dissatisfying but repeated
sex with men. He adds that he
could never fall in love with a man.
Helplessly, he points to the soiled
statue he strains to hold
unstained above him. He cannot.
•
You must write this without the least
trace of complaint. Standing at the edge of
the pool, for him there was no water.
You chose him not despite, but
because of. In the twenty-three years since
breaking with him, his spectre
insists that no one ever replaces anyone.
He is the dye whose color dyes
the mirror: you can never get free.
•
What is it that impels
What is it that impels us at least in
imagination
What is it that impels us at least in

imagination to close with to
interpenetrate flesh that accepts
craves interpenetration from
us with us
What is it What
•
Sweet cow, to heal the world, you must
jump over the moon. All you ask is
immolation, fantastic love resistlessly
drawn out of a withdrawn creature who
must turn himself inside out to give it:
dream coexistent with breathing.
•
Near the end, when the old absorbing
colloquy begins again, both he and you
find yourselves surrounded by ash.
To his meagre circumscribed desire whose
no you knew from the beginning, that you
want to pluck out of your eye forever,
you submit as if in mourning.
To ash, he too submits. In revenge
you chose submission, chose power.

Catullus: Id faciam
What I hate I love. Ask the crucified hand that holds
the nail that now is driven into itself, why.

Song of the Mortar and Pestle
The desire to approach obliteration
preexists each metaphysic justifying it. Watch him
fucked want to get fucked hard. Christianity
allowed the flagellants
light, for even Jesus found release from flesh requires
mortification of the flesh. From the ends of
the earth the song is, Grind me into dust.

Valentine
How those now dead used the word love bewildered
and disgusted the boy who resolved he
would not reassure the world he felt
love until he understood love
Resolve that too soon crumbled when he found
within his chest
something intolerable for which the word
because no other word was right
must be love
must be love
Love craved and despised and necessary
the Great American Songbook said explained our fate
my bereft grandmother bereft
father bereft mother their wild regret
How those now dead used love to explain
wild regret

With Each Fresh Death the Soul Rediscovers Woe
from the world that called you Piñon not one voice is now not stopped
Piñon little pine nut sweet seed of the pine tree which is evergreen
Soul that discovered itself as it discovered the irreparable
breaking through ice to touch the rushing stream whose skin
breaking allowed darkness to swallow blondhaired Ramona
in 1944 age six high in the cold evergreen Sierras as you
age five luckily were elsewhere but forever after Soul there
failing to pull her for years of nights from the irreparable

Sanjaya at 17
As if fearless what the shutter will unmask
he offers himself to the camera, to
us, sheerly—
vulnerable like Monroe, like Garbo.
Now he is a cock that raises
high above his wagging head
the narrow erected red
flag of arousal—
Of course the ignorant, you say, hate him.
In the world’s long conversation, long
warfare about essence, each taunting
song, each disarming photograph, a word.
There is a creature, among all others, one,
within whose voice there is a secret voice
which once heard
unlocks the door that unlocks the mountain.

Winter Spring Summer Fall
Like the invisible seasons
Which dye then bury all the eye
sees, but themselves cannot be seen
Out of ceaseless motion in edgeless space
Inside whatever muck makes words in
lines leap into being is the intimation of
Like the invisible seasons
Process, inside chaos you follow the thread
of just one phrase instinct with cycle, archaic
Out of ceaseless motion in edgeless space
Promise that you will see at last the buried
snake that swallows its own tail
Like the invisible seasons
You believe not in words but in words in
lines, which disdaining the right margin
Out of ceaseless motion in edgeless space
Inside time make the snake made out of
time pulse without cease electric in space
Like the invisible seasons
Though the body is its

genesis, a poem is the vision of a process
Out of ceaseless motion in edgeless space
Carved in space, vision your poor eye’s single
armor against winter spring summer fall

Ulanova At Forty-Six At Last Dances Before a
Camera Giselle
Many ways to dance Giselle, but tonight as you
watch you think that she is what art is, creature
who remembers
her every gesture and senses its relation to the time
just a moment before when she did something
close to it
but then everything was different so what she feels
now is the pathos of the difference. Her body
hopping forward
remembers the pathos of the difference. Each
hop is small, but before each landing she has
stepped through
many ghosts. This and every second is the echo
of a second like it but different when you had
illusions not
only about others but about yourself. Each gesture
cuts through these other earlier moments to exist as
a new gesture
but carries with it all the others, so what you dance
is the circle or bubble you carry that is all this.

•
Inside the many ways to dance Giselle
the single way that will show those who sleep what
tragedy is. What tragedy is is
your work in Act One. Then comes something else.
•
The poem I’ve never been able to write has a very tentative title: “Ulanova At
Forty-Six At Last Dances Before a Camera Giselle.” A nice story about an
innocent who dies because tricked by the worldly becomes, with Ulanova,
tragedy. A poem about being in normal terms too old to dance something but the
world wants to record it because the world knows that it is precious but you also
know the camera is good at unmasking those who are too old to create the
illusion on which every art in part depends. About burning an image into the
soul of an eighteen-year-old (me) of the severity and ferocity at the root of
classic art, addicted to mimesis.
•
After her entrance, applause. We are watching
a stage production, filmed one act per
night after an earlier public performance.
But without an audience, who is applauding?
The clapping is
artifice, added later. We are watching
the illusion of a stage performance, filmed
by Mr. Paul Czinner using techniques he specially
developed to record the Bolshoi Ballet’s first
appearance in the west. Despite the Iron

Curtain, at the height of the Cold War, the Russian
government now has decreed we may see Ulanova.
•
Whether out of disgust or boredom, the young
Duke of Silesia has buried what the world
understands as his identity
here, in a rural dream. Watching her
from the safety of his disguise
he is charmed: he smiles. She is a bird whose
wings beat so swiftly they are invisible.
•
Tragedy begins with a radical given—your uncle has murdered your father and
married your mother. Before your birth a prophecy that you will kill your father
and marry your mother leads your father to decree your murder. The radical
given— irremediable, inescapable—lays bare the war that is our birthright.
Giselle begins with the premise of an operetta: a duke is in love with a peasant
girl.
•
Impossible not to reach for, to touch
what you find is beautiful,
but had not known before existed.
•
… The princess. Her brocaded dress, cloth of
gold. Behind her back and
embarrassingly before everyone, Giselle

cannot resist caressing it. Her dangling,
glittering necklace. Out of graciousness or
condescension, the princess
removed it from her neck, then so
everyone could see, placed it
around yours. How pleased you were!
•
… Or Albrecht, stranger, clear
spirit, to whom despite your
dread you gave your heart.
•
Impossible—; to your shame.
•
The princess, to whom Albrecht is betrothed, arrives in the village during a hunt
and takes rest in Giselle’s home. A young forester, jealously in love with Giselle,
now finds Albrecht’s hidden silver sword and betrays his secret. Albrecht tries to
hide his real status, but the returning princess greets him affectionately, thus
proving his true identity. Heartbroken by his duplicity, Giselle goes mad and
dies.
•
The Nineteenth Century did not discover but
made ripe the Mad Scene, gorgeous
delirium rehearsing at luxuriant but
momentary length the steps, the undeflectable
stages by which each brilliant light

finds itself extinguished. She stares
straight ahead at what her empty hands
still number, still fondle.
Such burning is eager to be extinguished.
•
Before her she can see the hand
that reaches into her
cage
closing over her. The hand is the future
devoid of what, to her
horror, she had reached for.
As the future closes over her
the creature inside beating its wings in
panic is dead.
•
You have spent your life writing tragedies for a world that does not believe in
tragedy. What is tragedy? Everyone is born somewhere: into this body, this
family, this place. Into the mystery of your own predilections that change as you
become conscious of what governs choice, but change little. Into, in short,
particularity inseparable from existence. Each particularity, inseparable from its history, offers and denies. There is a war between each offer you embrace and
what each embrace precludes, what its acceptance denies you. Most of us blunt
and mute this war in order to survive. In tragedy the war is lived out. The radical
given cannot be evaded or erased. No act of intelligence or prowess or cunning
or goodwill can reconcile the patrimony of the earth.
•

Act Two, because this Giselle has been
abbreviated by L. Lavrovsky, is a sketch of Act Two.
Worse than being dead yourself
is to imagine him dead.
Many ways to dance Giselle, but in the queer
moonlit halflife of the forest
at night, when Giselle in death
dances with Albrecht to save him, Ulanova
executes the classic postures of ecstasy, of
yearning for
union, as if impersonally—
as if the event were not at last
again to touch him, but pre-ordained,
beyond the will, fixed as the stars are fixed.
•
Here, in darkness, in the queer halflife of
remorse, Myrtha, Queen of the Wilis, offers
revenge against those who condemned
you forever to remain unchosen, baffled.
Myrtha, refugee from Ovid famished
into sovereign self-parody by
centuries of refusal and hunger, rules
row upon symmetrical row of pitiless
well-schooled virgins, dressed in white.

Their rigid geometry mocks
ballet as the abode of Romantic
purity, harmonious dream.
•
The conscience-stricken duke visits Giselle’s grave and is confronted by the
Wilis. The Queen condemns him to dance until he dies. The ghost of Giselle
appears and pleads for his life— without success. Giselle, determined to save
him, dances in his place whenever he falters, allowing him time to recover. The
church bell rings: dawn. The power of the Wilis is broken.
•
When Giselle dead defies her dead sisters
Death and the dramatist make visible
the pitiless logic within love’s must.
Love must silence its victims,—
… or become their vessel.
She has become his vessel.
•
At dawn, in triumph incapable of youth’s
adamant poise, Giselle reenters the ground.
•
“You see how keen the pointed foot looks in the air, during attitudes, arabesques,
and passés, how clearly the leg defines and differentiates the different classic
shapes. Below the waist Ulanova is a strict classicist; above the waist she alters
the shape of classic motions now slightly, now quite a lot, to specify a nuance of
drama. Neither element—the lightness below or the weight above—is weakened
for the sake of the other.” (Edwin Denby)

•
Ulanova came to Pomona California in
1957 as light projected on a screen
to make me early in college see what art is.

Under Julian, c362 A.D.
[

] or full feeling return to my legs.

My jealous, arrogant, offended by existence
soul, as the body allowing you breath
erodes under you, you are changed—
the fewer the gestures that can, in the future,
be, the sweeter those left to you to make.

Candidate
on each desk mantel refrigerator door
an array of photographs
little temple of affections
you have ironically but patiently made
•
Those promises that make us confront
our ambition, pathetic ambition:
confront it best when we see what it
promised die. Your dead ex-wife
you put back on the mantel
when your next wife left. With her iron
nasals, Piaf regrets NOTHING: crazed
by the past, the sweet desire to return to
zero. Undisenthralled you
regret what could not have been
otherwise and remain itself.
There, the hotel in whose bar you courted
both your wives is detonated, collapsing;
in its ballroom, you conceded the election.
There’s your open mouth
conceding.

A good photograph tells you everything
that’s really going on is invisible.
You are embarrassed by so many
dead flowers. They lie shriveled before you.

Coat
You, who never lied, lied
about what you at every moment carried.
The shameful, new, incomprehensible
disease which you whose religion was
candor couldn’t bear not to hide.
Now that you have been dead thirteen years
I again see you suddenly lay out my coat
across your bed, caressing it as if touch could
memorize it—no, you’re flattening, then
smoothing its edges until under your
hand as I watch it becomes
hieratic, an icon.
What I seized on as promise
was valediction.

To the Republic
I dreamt I saw a caravan of the dead
start out again from Gettysburg.
Close-packed upright in rows on railcar flatbeds in the sun, they soon will stink.
Victor and vanquished shoved together, dirt
had bleached the blue and gray one color.
Risen again from Gettysburg, as if
the state were shelter crawled to through
blood, risen disconsolate that we
now ruin the great work of time,
they roll in outrage across America.
You betray us is blazoned across each chest.
To each eye as they pass: You betray us.
Assaulted by the impotent dead, I say it’s
their misfortune and none of my own.
I dreamt I saw a caravan of the dead
move on wheels touching rails without sound.
To each eye as they pass: You betray us.
(2005)

God’s Catastrophe in Our Time
when those who decree decree the immemorial
mere habits of the tribe
law established since the foundations of the world
when the brutalities released by
belief engender in you disgust for God
hear the answering baritone sweetness of Mahler’s “Urlicht”
I am from God and shall return
to God for this disfiguring
flesh is not light and
from light I am light
when I had eyes what did I do with sight

Little O
To see the topography of a dilemma
through the illusion of
hearing, hearing the voices
of those who, like you, must live there.
•
We are not belated: we stand in an original
relation to the problems of making
art, just as each artist before us did.
At the threshold
you can see the threshold:—
it is a precipice.
When I was young, I tried not to
generalize; I had seen little. At sixty-six,
you have done whatever you do
many times before. Disgust with mimesis,—
disgust with the banality of naturalistic
representation, words mere surface mirroring
a surface,—
is as necessary as mimesis: as the conventions
the world offers out of which to construct your

mirror fail, to see your face you
intricately, invisibly reinvent them. But
imagining that words must make the visible
a little hard to see,—
or speech that imitates for the ear speech
now is used up, the ground sealed off from us,—
is a sentimentality. Stevens was wrong. Genius
leading the disgusted over a cliff.
Everything made is made out of its
refusals: those who follow make it new
by refusing its refusals.
The French thought Shakespeare
a barbarian, because in their eyes he wrote as if
ignorant of decorum, remaking art to cut through.

Watching the Spring Festival
In my dreams all I need to do is bend
my head, and you well up beneath me
We have been present at a great abundance
displayed beneath glass, sealed beneath
glass as if to make earth envy earth
Until my mouth touched the artful
cunning of glass
I was not poor
We have been present at a great abundance
Warring priests of transformation, each
animated by an ecstatic secret, insist
they will teach me how to smash the glass
We have been present at a great abundance
which is the source of fury

Hymn
Earth, O fecund, thou. Evanescent when grasped, when
Venus drives all creatures crazy with desire
to couple and in coupling fill the earth with presences
like themselves
needful, ghostly.
Earth, O fecund, thou. Electric ghosts
people the horizon, beguiling since childhood
this son of the desert about to disappear.
They are no less lovedand feared because
evanescent. Earth, O fecund, thou.

If See No End In Is
What none knows is when, not if.
Now that your life nears its end
when you turn back what you see
is ruin. You think, It is a prison. No,
it is a vast resonating chamber in
which each thing you say or do is
new, but the same. What none knows is
how to change. Each plateau you reach, if
single, limited, only itself, includes traces of all the others, so that in the end
limitation frees you, there is no
end, if you once see what is there to see.
You cannot see what is there to see—
not when she whose love you failed is
standing next to you. Then, as if refusing the knowledge that life unseparated from her is death, as if
again scorning your refusals, she turns away. The end
achieved by the unappeased is burial within.
Familiar spirit, within whose care I grew, within
whose disappointment I twist, may we at last see
by what necessity the double-bind is in the end
the figure for human life, why what we love is
precluded always by something else we love, as if
each no we speak is yes, each yes no.
The prospect is mixed but elsewhere the forecast is no
better. The eyrie where you perch in
exhaustion has food and is out of the wind, if
cold. You feel old, young, old, young—: you scan the sea

for movement, though the promise of sex or food is
the prospect that bewildered you to this end.
Something in you believes that it is not the end.
When you wake, sixth grade will start. The finite you know
you fear is infinite: even at eleven, what you love is
what you should not love, which endless bullies intuit unerringly. The future will be different: you cannot see
the end. What none knows is when, not if.

Song
At night inside in the light
when history
is systole
diastole
awake I am the moment between.
At night when I fold my limbs up
till they fit
in the tiniest box
I am a multiple of zero.
In the sun
even a tick
feeding on blood
to his sorrow becomes visible.
A bat who grows in love with the sun
becomes sick unless disabused of the illusion
he and the sun are free.
Surreal God
you too a multiple of zero
you who make
all roads lead nowhere
Surreal God
I find nothing

except you
beautiful.
When thus in ecstasy I lie to the god of
necessity he replies the world he has devised is
a labyrinth where travelers at last achieve to their
dismay eternal safety in eternal night.
Columbus is dead
so try as you will
you cannot make me feel
embarrassment
at what I find beautiful.

*

Collector
As if these vessels by which the voices of
the dead are alive again
were something on which to dream, without
which you cannot dream—
without which you cannot, hoarder, breathe.
Tell yourself what you hoard
commerce or rectitude cannot withdraw.
Your new poem must, you suspect, steal from
The Duchess of Malfi. Tonight, alone, reread it.
•
By what steps can the Slave become
the Master, and is
becoming the master its only release?
It is not release. When your stepfather
went broke, you watched as your mother’s
money allowed survival—
It is not release. You watched her pay him
back by multitudinous
daily humiliations. In the back seat of
the car you were terrified as Medea

invented new ways to tell
Jason what he had done to her.
•
You cannot tell that it is there
but it is there, falling.
Once you leave any surface
uncovered for a few hours
you see you are blind.
Your arm is too heavy to wipe
away what falls on a lifetime’s
accumulations. The rituals
you love imply that, repeating them,
you store seeds that promise
the end of ritual. Not this. Wipe this
away, tomorrow it is back.
•
The curator, who thinks he made his soul
choosing each object that he found he chose,
wants to burn down the museum.
•
Stacked waist-high along each
increasingly unpassable
corridor, whole lifeworks

wait, abandoned or mysteriously
never even tested by your
promiscuous, ruthless attention.
•
The stratagems by which briefly you
ameliorated, even seemingly
untwisted what still twists within you—
you loved their taste and lay there
on your side
nursing like a puppy.
•
Lee Wiley, singing in your bathroom
about “ghosts in a lonely parade,”
is herself now one—
erased era you loved, whose maturity
was your youth, whose blindnesses
you became you by loathing.
•
Cities at the edge of the largest
holes in the ground
are coastal: the rest, inland.
The old age you fear is Lady
Macbeth wiping away
what your eyes alone can see.

Each of us knows that there is a black
hole within us. No place you hole up is
adequately inland.
•
The song that the dead sing is at one
moment as vivid, various, multi-voiced
as the dead were living—
then violated the next moment, flattened
by the need now to speak in
such a small space, you.
•
He no longer arrives even
in dreams.
You learned love is addiction
when he to whom you spoke on
the phone every day
dying withdrew his voice—
more than friends, but
less than lovers.
There, arranged in a pile, are his letters.
•
The law is that you
must live
in the house you have built.

The law is absurd: it is
written down nowhere.
You are uncertain what crime
is, though each life writhing to
elude what it has made
feels like punishment.
•
Tell yourself, again, The rituals
you love imply that, repeating them,
you store seeds that promise
the end of ritual. You store
seeds. Tell yourself, again,
what you store are seeds.

METAPHYSICAL DOG
(2013)

ONE

Metaphysical Dog
Belafont, who reproduced what we did
not as an act of supine
imitation, but in defiance—
butt on couch and front legs straddling
space to rest on an ottoman, barking till
his masters clean his teeth with dental floss.
How dare being
give him this body.
Held up to a mirror, he writhed.

Writing “Ellen West”
was exorcism.
•
Exorcism of that thing within Frank that wanted, after his mother’s death, to die.
•
Inside him was that thing that he must expel from him to live.
•
He read “The Case of Ellen West” as a senior in college and immediately wanted
to write a poem about it but couldn’t so he stored it, as he has stored so much
that awaits existence.
•
Unlike Ellen he was never anorexic but like Ellen he was obsessed with eating
and the arbitrariness of gender and having to have a body.
•
Ellen lived out the war between the mind and the body, lived out in her body
each stage of the war, its journey and progress, in which compromise,
reconciliation is attempted then rejected then mourned, till she reaches at last, in
an ecstasy costing not less than everything, death.
•
He was grateful he was not impelled to live out the war in his body, hiding in
compromise, well wadded with art he adored and with stupidity and distraction.

•
The particularity inherent in almost all narrative, though contingent and
exhausting, tells the story of the encounter with particularity that flesh as flesh
must make.
•
“Ellen West” was written in the year after his mother’s death.
•
By the time she died he had so thoroughly betrayed the ground of intimacy on
which his life was founded he had no right to live.
•
No use for him to tell himself that he shouldn’t feel this because he felt this.
•
He didn’t think this but he thought this.
•
After she died his body wanted to die, but his brain, his cunning, didn’t.
•
He likes narratives with plots that feel as if no one willed them.
•
His mother in her last year revealed that she wanted him to move back to
Bakersfield and teach at Bakersfield College and live down the block.
•
He thought his mother, without knowing that this is what she wanted, wanted
him to die.

•
All he had told her in words and more than words for years was that her
possessiveness and terror at his independence were wrong, wrong, wrong.
•
He was the only person she wanted to be with but he refused to live down the
block and then she died.
•
It must be lifted from the mind
must be lifted and placed elsewhere
must not remain in the mind alone
•
Out of the thousand myriad voices, thousand myriad stories in each human head,
when his mother died, there was Ellen West.
•
This is the body that you can draw out of you to expel from you the desire to die.
•
Give it a voice, give each scene of her life a particularity and necessity that in
Binswanger’s recital are absent.
•
Enter her skin so that you can then make her other and expel her.
•
Survive her.
•

Animal mind, eating the ground of Western thought, the “mind-body” problem.
•
She, who in the last months of her life abandoned writing poems in disgust at the
failure of her poems, is a poem.
•
She in death is incarnated on a journey whose voice is the voice of her journey.
•
Arrogance of Plutarch, of Shakespeare and Berlioz, who thought they made what
Cleopatra herself could not make.
•
Arrogance of the maker.
•
Werther killed himself and then young men all over Europe imitated him and
killed themselves but his author, Goethe, cunning master of praxis, lived.
•
Frank thought when anything is made it is made not by its likeness, not by its
twin or mirror, but its opposite.
•
Ellen in his poem asks Without a body, who can know himself at all?
•
In your pajamas, you moved down the stairs just to the point where the adults
couldn’t yet see you, to hear more clearly the din, the sweet cacophony of adults
partying.

•
Phonograph voices among them, phonograph voices, their magpie beauty.
•
Sweet din.
•
Magpie beauty.
•
One more poem, one more book in which you figure out how to make something
out of not knowing enough.

Like
Woe is blunted not erased
by like. Your hands were too full, then
empty. At the grave’s
lip, secretly you imagine then
refuse to imagine
a spectre
so like what you watched die, the unique
soul you loved endures a second death.
The dead hate like, bitter
when the living with too-small
grief replace them. You dread
loving again, exhausted by the hungers
ineradicable in his presence. You resist
strangers until a stranger makes the old hungers
brutally wake. We live by symbolic
substitution. At the grave’s lip, what is
but is not is what
returns you to what is not.

TWO

HUNGER FOR THE ABSOLUTE

Those Nights
(FOR M.P.)
Those nights when despite his exhaustion or indifference
you persisted, then finally it
caught, so that at last he too
wanted it, suddenly was desperate to reach it,
you felt his muscles want it
more than anything, as if through this chaos, this
wilderness he again knew the one thing he must reach
though later, after
he found it, his resentment implied he had been forced.
•
Those nights ended because what was
missing could never be by
the will supplied. We who could get
somewhere through
words through
sex could not. I was, you said, your
shrink: that’s how
I held you. I failed as my own.
•
Now you surely are dead. I’ve searched
the databases: you everywhere

elude us. Long ago without your
reaching to tell me, surely
the plague killed you. Each thing in your life
you found so
incommensurate to the spirit
I imagine that becoming
untraceable makes you smile.

Name the Bed
Half-light just after dawn. As you turned back
in the doorway, you to whom the ordinary
sensuous world seldom speaks
expected to see in the thrown-off
rumpled bedclothes nothing.
•
Scream stretched across it.
•
Someone wanted more from that bed
than was found there.
•
Name the bed that’s not true of.
•
Bed where your twin
died. Eraser bed.

Queer
Lie to yourself about this and you will
forever lie about everything.
Everybody already knows everything
so you can
lie to them. That’s what they want.
But lie to yourself, what you will
lose is yourself. Then you
turn into them.
•
For each gay kid whose adolescence
was America in the forties or fifties
the primary, the crucial
scenario
forever is coming out—
or not. Or not. Or not. Or not. Or not.
•
Involuted velleities of self-erasure.
•
Quickly after my parents
died, I came out. Foundational narrative

designed to confer existence.
If I had managed to come out to my
mother, she would have blamed not
me, but herself.
The door through which you were shoved out
into the light
was self-loathing and terror.
•
Thank you, terror!
You learned early that adults’ genteel
fantasies about human life
were not, for you, life. You think sex
is a knife
driven into you to teach you that.

History
For two years, my father chose to live at
The Bakersfield Inn, which called itself
the largest motel in the world.
There, surrounded by metal furniture
painted to look like wood, I told him that I
wanted to be a priest, a Trappist.
He asked how I could live without pussy.
He asked this earnestly. This confession
of what he perceived as need
was generous. I could not tell him.
•
Sex shouldn’t be part of marriage.
Your father and I,—
… sex shouldn’t be part of marriage.
•
That she loved and continued to love him
alone: and he, her: even after marrying others—
then they got old and stopped talking this way.
•

Ecstasy in your surrender to adolescent
God-hunger, ecstasy
promised by obliterated sex, ecstasy
in which you are free because bound—
in which you call the God who made
what must be obliterated in you love.
•
In a labyrinth of blankets in the garage
at seven
with a neighbor boy
you learned abasement
learned amazed that what must be
obliterated in you is the twisted
obverse of what underlies everything.
•
Chaos of love, chaos of sex that
marriage did not solve or
mask, God did not solve or mask.
•
Grant and Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby,
in which Grant finally realizes being
with her is more fun than anything.
•

What they left behind
they left behind
broken. The fiction
even they accepted, even they believed
was that once
it was whole.
Once it was whole
left all who swallowed it,
however skeptical, forever hungry.
•
The generation that followed, just like their
famished parents, fell in love with the fiction.
They smeared shit all over
their inheritance because it was broken,
because they fell in love with it.
But I had found my work.

Hunger for the Absolute
Earth you know is round but seems flat.
You can’t trust
your senses.
You thought you had seen every variety of creature
but not
this creature.
•
When I met him, I knew I had
weaned myself from God, not
hunger for the absolute. O unquenched
mouth, tonguing what is and must
remain inapprehensible—
saying You are not finite. You are not finite.

Defrocked
Christ the bridegroom, the briefly
almost-satiated soul forever then
the bride—
the true language of ecstasy
is the forbidden
language of the mystics:
I am true love that false was never.
I would be pierced
And I would pierce
I would eat
And I would be eaten
I am peace that is nowhere in time.
Naked their
encounter with the absolute,—
pilgrimage to a cross in the void.
A journey you still must travel, for
which you have no language
since you no longer believe it exists.
•
When what we understand about

what we are
changes, whole
parts of us fall mute.
•
We have attached sensors to your most intimate
body parts, so that we may measure
what you think, not what you think you think.
The image now on the screen
will circumvent your superego and directly stimulate your
vagina or dick
or fail to. Writing has existed for centuries to tell us
what you think you think. Liar,
we are interested in what lies
beneath that. This won’t hurt.
•
Even in lawless dreams, something
each night in me again
denies me
the false coin, false
creature I crave to embrace—
for those milliseconds, not
false. Not false. Even if false,
the waters of paradise
are there, in the mind, the sleeping
mind. Why this puritan each

night inside me that again denies me.
•
Chimeras glitter: fierce energy you
envy.
Chimeras ignorant they’re chimeras
beckon.
As you reach into their crotch, they foretell
your fate.
With a sudden rush of milk you taste
what has
no end.
•
We long for the Absolute, Royce
said. Voices you once
heard that you can never not hear again,—
… spoiled priest, liar, if you want something
enough, sometimes you think it’s there.

He is Ava Gardner
He is Ava Gardner at the height of her beauty
in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman.
I had allowed him to become, for me, necessity.
I was not ever for him necessity.
An adornment, yes. A grace-note. Not
necessity.
Everyone, the men at least, are crazy about
Pandora. She is smart,
self-deprecating, funny. She who has seen,
seemingly, everything about love, and says
she has no idea what love is—
who knows the world finds her beautiful, so that
she must test every man and slightly disgusted
find him wanting—clearly she has not, in this
crowd of men eager to please her, to flatter
and bring her drinks, found someone
who is, for her, necessity. Watching
Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, you feel sympathy
for the beautiful
who cannot find anyone who is for them necessity.
•
He is Ava Gardner

at the height of her beauty.
Fucked up, you knew you’d never fall for someone
not fucked up.
You watch her test each suitor. She sings about
love to an old friend, drunk, a poet.
He asks her to marry him. After she again
refuses, you see him slip something into his drink—
then he dies, poisoned. She says he has tried that
too many times, now she feels nothing.
Promising nothing, she asks the famous
race-car driver, who also wants to marry her,
to shove the car he has worked on for months
over the cliff, into the sea. He
does. In the first flush of
pleasure, she agrees to marry him. The next day
he has the car’s
carcass, pouring water, dragged up from the sea.
You are the learned, amused professor surrounded
by his collections, who carefully pieces together
fragments of Greek pots. You know it is foolish
to become another suitor. Hors de
combat, soon you are the only one she trusts.
You become, at moments, her confessor.
•
Then she meets the Dutchman.
He offers little, asks nothing.

When she withdraws her
attention, he isn’t spooked.
Because, when she meets him, he is
painting the portrait of someone who has
her face, with petulance
she scrapes off the face.
He charmingly makes her head a blank
ovoid, and says that’s better.
She thinks that she is the knife
that, cutting him, will heal him.
•
You know she is right. You have discovered
he is the fabled Dutchman—who for
centuries has sailed the world’s seas
unable to die, unable to die though
he wants to die. You know what it is to
want to die. His reasons
are a little contrived, a mechanism of the plot:
reasons that Pandora, at the end, discovers:
he murdered, centuries earlier, through
jealousy and paranoia, his wife: now
unless he can find a woman
willing to die
out of love for him, sail out with him
and drown, he cannot ever
find rest. This logic

makes sense to her: she who does not
believe in love
will perform an act proving its existence.
•
She wants, of course, to throw her life away.
The Dutchman will always arrive
because that’s what she wants.
Those of us who look on, who want
the proximate and partial to continue,
loathe the hunger for the absolute.
•
All your life you have watched as two creatures
think they have found in each other
necessity. Watched as the shell
then closes, for a time, around them.
You envy them, as you gather with
the rest of the village, staring out to sea.
When she swims out to his boat, to give
herself, both succeed at last in drowning.
•
Couples stay together when each of the two
remains a necessity for the other. Which you
cannot know, until they
cease to be. Tautology
that is the sum of what you know.

He is a master, he has lived by
becoming the master
of the alchemy that makes, as you
stare into some one
person’s eyes, makes you adore him.
Eyes that say that despite the enormous
landscapes that divide you
you are brothers, he too is trapped in
all that divides soul from soul. Then
suddenly he is fluttering his finger ends
between yours. He rises
from the table, explains he had no
sleep last night, and leaves.
•
You couldn’t worm your way into
becoming, for him, necessity.
When did he grow bored with seduction and
confessors, and find the Dutchman?—
For months there has been nothing
but silence. When you sent him a pot only
you could have with care pieced together
from the catastrophe of history, more
silence. The enterprise is abandoned.
•
Something there is in me that makes me

think I need this thing. That gives this thing
the illusion of necessity.
As enthralled to flesh
as I, he could not see beneath this old
face I now wear, this ruinous, ugly
body, that I
I am the Dutchman.
But nobody knows, when living, where
necessity lies. Maybe later, if history
is lucky, the urn
will not refuse to be pieced together.
This is neither good nor bad.
It is what is.

Mourn
Why so hard
to give up
what often
was ever
even then
hardly there.
But the safe
world my will
constructed
before him
this soul could
not find breath
in. He brought
electric
promise-crammed
sudden air.
Then withdrew
lazily
as if to
teach you how
you must live
short of breath.

Still now crave
sudden air.

The enterprise is abandoned.
I’m not a fool, I knew from the beginning
what couldn’t happen. What couldn’t happen
didn’t. The enterprise is abandoned.
But half our life is
dreams, delirium, everything that underlies
that feeds
that keeps alive the illusion of sanity, semisanity, we allow
others to see. The half of me that feeds the rest
is in mourning. Mourns. Each time we must
mourn, we fear this is the final mourning, this time
mourning never will lift. A friend said when a lover
dies, it takes
two years. Then it lifts.
Inside those two years, you punish
not only the world,
but yourself.
At seventy-two, the future is what I mourn.
Since college I’ve never forgotten Masha
in The Seagull saying I am in mourning for my life.

She wears only black, she treats others with
fierce solicitude
and sudden punishment.
The enterprise is abandoned. And not.

Janáček at Seventy
It was merely a locket but it was
a locket only
I could have made—
Once she is told that it was made
for her, recognizes it as a locket
her little agile famous-in-his-little-world
Vulcan
himself
made only for her, she must
reach for it, must
place it around her neck.
Soon the warmth of her flesh
must warm what I have made.
Her husband will know who made it
so she will wear it
only when
alone, but wear it she will.

Threnody on the Death of Harriet Smithson
She was barely twenty, she was called
Miss Smithson, but through her
Juliet, Desdemona
found superb utterance. A new
truth, Shakespeare’s old truth
bewitched us, unheard
until she made us hear it—she
heralded a revolution
Madame Dorval, Lemaître, Malibran,
yes, Victor Hugo
and Berlioz
then taught us we had always known.
Now, at fifty-four, she is dead,—
… bitter that fame long ago abandoned her.
I think her fate our fate, the planet’s fate.
•
These fleeting creatures, that flit by
giving themselves to us
and the air
unable to etch there

anything permanent
Addicted to the ecstasies of
carving again from darkness
a shape, an illusion of light
They say, I wash my hands of the gods
this has existed
whether the whirling planet tomorrow
survive, whether recording angels exist
•
On this stage at this
moment this has existed
unerasable because already erased
Everything finally, of course, is
metaphysical
this has existed

THREE

HISTORY IS A SERIES OF FAILED
REVELATIONS

Dream of the Book
That great hopefulness that lies in
imagining you are an unreadable, not
blank slate, but something even you cannot
read because words will rise from its
depths only when you at last
manage to expose it to air,—
the pathology of the provinces. You need
air.
•
Then you find air. Somehow somewhere
as if whatever feeds expectation were
wounded, gutted by the bewildering selfburied thousand impersonations
by which you know you
made and remade
yourself,—
one day, staring at the mountain,
you ceased to ask
Open Sesame
merely requiring that narrative reveal

something structural about the world.
•
Reading history
you learn that those who cannot read
history are condemned to repeat it
etcetera
just like those who
can, or think they can.
Substitute the psyche for history substitute myth for
the psyche economics
for myth substitute politics, culture, history etc.
•
As if there were a book
As if there were a book inside which you can
breathe
Where, at every turn, you see at last the lineaments
Where the end of the earth’s long dream of
virtue is not, as you have
again and again found it here, the will
gazing out at the dilemmas
proceeding from its own nature
unbroken but in stasis
•

Seduced not by a book but by the idea
of a book
like the Summa in five fat volumes, that your priest
in high school explained Thomas Aquinas
almost finished, except that there were,
maddeningly, “just a few things he didn’t
have time, before dying, quite
to figure out”
•
That history is a series of failed revelations
you’re sure you hear folded, hidden
within the all-but-explicit
bitter
taste-like-dirt inside Dinah Washington’s
voice singing This bitter earth
•
A few months before Thomas’
death, as he talked with Jesus
Jesus asked him
what reward he wanted for his
virtue—
to which Thomas replied, You, Lord,
only You—
which is why, as if this vision

unfit him for his life, he told the priest
prodding him to take up once again
writing his book, Reginald, I cannot:
everything I have written I now see is straw.
•
Though the Book whose text articulates
the text of
creation
is an arrogance, you think, flung by priests
at all that is
fecund, that has not yet found being
Though priests, addicted to
unanswerable but necessary questions,
also everywhere are addicted to cruel answers
you wake happy
when you dream
you have seen the book, the Book exists
•
You sail protested, contested
seas, the something within you that
chooses your masters
itself not chosen. Inheritor inheriting
inheritors, you must earn what you inherit.

Inauguration Day
(JANUARY 20, 2009)
Today, despite what is dead
staring out across America I see since
Lincoln gunmen
nursing fantasies of purity betrayed,
dreaming to restore
the glories of their blood and state
despite what is dead but lodged within us, hope
under the lustrous flooding moon
the White House is still
Whitman’s White House, its
gorgeous front
full of reality, full of illusion
hope made wise by dread begins again

Race
(FOR LEON WOOD, JR.)
America is ours
to ruin but
not ours to dream.
The unstained but
terrifying land
Europe imagined
soon the whole
stained
planet dreamed.
•
My grandmother, as a teenager,
had the guts to leave
Spain, and never see her parents again—
arriving in America
to her shame
she could not read. O you taught by
deprivation
that your soul is flawed:—
to her shame she could not read.
•

Olive-skinned, bewilderingly
dark, in this California surrounded
everywhere by the brown-skinned
dirt-poor progeny of those her ancestors
conquered and enslaved, she insisted we are
Spanish. Not Mexican. Spanish-Basque.
•
Disconsolate to learn her
seven-year-old grandson
spent the afternoon visiting the house—
had entered, had
eaten at the house—
of his new black friend, her fury
the coward grandson sixty-five years
later cannot from his nerves erase.
•
Or the rage with which she stopped her
daughter from marrying a Lebanese
doctor whose skin was
too dark. Actual Spain
was poverty and humiliation so
deep she refused to discuss it—
or, later, richer, to return.
But the Spanish her only

daughter, my mother, divorced, lightskinned, spoke
was pure
Castilian. On her walls, the dead world
she loathed and obeyed
kept vigil
from large oval dark oak frames.
•
The terrifying land the whole stained
planet dreamed unstained
Europe first imagined. To me, as a child,
Europe was my grandmother—
clinging to what had
cost her everything, she thought
the mutilations exacted by
discriminations of color
rooted in the stars. We brought
here what we had.

Glutton
Ropes of my dead
grandmother’s unreproducible
sausage, curing for weeks
on the front porch. My mother,
thoroughly
Americanized, found them
vaguely shameful.
Now though I
taste and taste
I can’t find that
taste I so loved as a kid.
Each thing generates the Idea
of itself, the perfect thing that it
is, of course, not—
once, a pear so breathtakingly
succulent I couldn’t
breathe. I take back that
“of course.”
It’s got to be out there again,—
… I have tasted it.

Whitman
Once, crossing the Alps by car at night, the great glacier suddenly there in the
moonlight next to the car, in the silence
alone with it.
•
I heard Robert Viscusi read only once, on a rainy night in Manhattan.
At the end of a long evening, he read the final lines of the first poem in the first
Leaves of Grass, before the poems had titles.
He read with a still, unmelodramatic directness and simplicity that made the
lines seem as if distilled from the throat of the generous gods.
Early Whitman’s eerie
equilibrium staring as if adequately at war’s carnage, love’s carnage,—
•
… suspended, I listen.
•
This is the departing
sun, distributing its gifts to the earth as it disengages from earth
without grief.
Elation as the hand disengages from its consequence, as the sovereign soul
charmed by its evanescence
toys with and mocks the expectations of worlds.

As you listen, you think this inaccessible
exultation indifferent to catastrophe’s etiology or end
is wisdom.
•
A poem read aloud is by its nature a vision of its nature.
Vision you cannot now reenter, from which when you sound the words within
later unaided and alone, you are expelled.

2. Soundings
Soundings of the world, testings
later forgotten but within whose
corpses you then burrowed, feeding: wounds
that taught the inverse of what adults
asserted, even thought they believed: taught
you do not have to hold on tight
to what you love, its nature
is not ever to release you: each testing, each
sounding of the world
one more transparent drop
fallen over your eye and hardening
there, to make you what you secretly
think by trial you have become: perfect
eyeball, observer

without a master. (Untranscendental
disgusted-with-lies
homemade American boy’s eyeball.)
•
Each creature must
himself, you were sure, grind the lens
through which he perceives the world.
•
Illusion of mastery the boy could not
sustain. Now you have no image, no
recollection of incidents, people,
humiliations, that showed you how
small, absurd you were—
but as if, in all things human, hegemony
breeds loathing
soon all you can see is that the ravenous,
dependent, rage-ridden
brain you inhabit
is not a lens, not a prism you have
flawlessly honed that transmits
light, but this suffocating
bubble that encases you, partial, mortal,
stained with the creature that created it.
•

You are the creature that created it.
You You You you cried, reaching
for a knife
to cut through the bubble
smelling of you. Why did soiled
you, before you even knew what sex was, want
to put his thing in your mouth?
The corpses on which you had so long
fed, turned their faces toward you—;
priests, they said, you must invite
priests to surround you.
•
The question became not
whether a master, but which.
You schooled and reschooled
yourself to bind with
briars your joys and desires.
•
This. Before a series of glamorous or
pure, compellingly severe
chimeras that mastered
the chaos I perceived within and without
all my life I have
implored:—

this. REMAKE ME in the image of THIS.

3.
your gaze, Walt Whitman, through its
mastery of paper
paper on which you invented the illusion of your voice
the intricacies of whose candor and ambition
disarm me
into imagining this is your voice
fueled by the ruthless gaze that
unshackled the chains shackling
queer me in adolescence
(unshackled me maybe for three days
during which I tried to twist out of
knowing what you made me see I knew
and could not bear that I knew
immured in an America that betrayed
the America you taught still must exist)
Ginsberg called you lonely old
courage teacher
but something in young electric you
was before the end
broken

wary alerted listening buck
that seeing all
cannot see or imagine
itself broken
the melancholy spectacle
through your mastery of paper
as you entirely predicted
transformed into the gaze of others
•
The event, or many mini-events, only implicitly recorded in a poem.
After his father’s death but before dressing the mutilated bodies of soldiers, as he
walked the shore-line touching debris, flotsam, pierced by his own
evanescence everywhere assaulting him, by “the old thought of likenesses,”
his own sweet sole self like debris smashed beneath his feet at the sea’s edge,
as he walked there, the old exultant gaze, like an animal’s poise, was gone.
What is left then but to revise and enlarge your poem till the end of time, the
eerie early equilibrium smashed, the old confidence like a stream that was
always there now gone, like the dust you can’t cease staring at clinging to
your shoes?
But impossible to face becoming detritus, impossible to face it naked, without
armor, without ideas about Idea, America, song about Song,
impossible to smell the breath of death without visions, broken, makeshift,
aiming at an eloquence that so insinuates, so dyes each vision with the
presence, the voice of the singer,
we who have seen what we see through his sight are his progeny,

impossible to face death without progeny as spar on which to cling.
Robert Viscusi, the bullet you aimed at Leaves of Grass bounced off its spine
and landed, hot, intact, where I now still sit.

FOUR

Three Tattoos
ONE

Maria Forever

labyrinthine intricate
coiling pent dragon
TWO

THREE

BRAD
•

gaudy skin prophesying
the fate of the heart
reminder that if you once
cross me
I can destroy you
indelible capital letters
written in flesh to remind
flesh what flesh has forgotten
•
It must be lifted from the mind
must be lifted and placed elsewhere
must not remain in the mind alone

As You Crave Soul
but find flesh
till flesh
almost seems sufficient
when the as-yet-unwritten
poem within you
demands existence
all you can offer it are words. Words
are flesh. Words
are flesh
craving to become idea, idea
dreaming it has found, this time, a body
obdurate as stone.
To carve the body of the world
and out of flesh make
flesh obdurate as stone.
Looking down into the casket-crib
of your love, embittered by
soul you crave to become stone.
You mourn not
what is not, but what never could have been.

What could not ever find a body
because what you wanted, he
wanted but did not want.
Ordinary divided unsimple heart.
What you dream is that, by eating
the flesh of words, what you write
makes mind and body
one. When, after a reading, you are asked
to describe your aesthetics,
you reply, An aesthetics of embodiment.

Things Falling From Great Heights
Spasm of vision you crave like a secular pentecost
The subject of this poem
is how much the spaces that you now move in
cost
the spaces that you were
given
were born to and like an animal used but then ran from
ran from but then thought you had
transformed
enough to accede to
the choices you made to inhabit the spaces where you
when prompted repeat the story of how you arrived
they cost your life

O ruin O haunted
O ruin O haunted
restless remnant of
two bodies, two
histories
you felt the unceasing
force of
but never understood,—
terrified that without an
x-ray, a topography of
their souls
you must repeat their lives.
•
You did not repeat their lives.
You lodged your faith
in Art—
which gives us
pattern, process
with the flesh
still stuck to it.
With flesh, you

told yourself, pattern
is truer, subtler, less
given to the illusion
seeing frees you from it.
•
Or, you did repeat their lives,—
… repeated them by
inverting them.
How you hurtled yourself against, how
cunningly you
failed to elude love.
•
Love
is the manna
that falling
makes you
see
the desert
surrounding you
is a desert.
Makes you think dirt is not where you were born.

Plea and Chastisement
When the exact intonation with which
at the sink she said
“Honey”
at last can sound in no one’s head
she will become merely the angry
poems written by an angry son
•
“Honey”
•
which is a cry not about something she must
wash or my latest frightening improvidence
but another wound made by my failure of love
which must flatten the world unless I
forgive her for what in an indecipherable
past she fears she somehow did to cause this
•
At five
thrillingly I won the Oedipal struggle
first against my father then stepfather

In our alliance against the world
we were more like each other
than anyone else
till adolescence and the world
showed me this was prison
•
Out of immense appetite we make
immense promises
the future dimensions of which
we cannot see
then see
when it seems death to keep them
•
I can still hear her
“Honey”
plea and chastisement
•
long since become the pillars of the earth
the price exacted
at the door to the dimensional world

Martha Yarnoz Bidart Hall
Though she whom you had so let
in, the desire for survival will not
allow you ever to admit
another so deeply in again
Though she, in, went crazy
vengeful-crazy
so that, as in Dante, there she ate your heart
Though her house that she despised but
spent her life constructing
still cannot, thirty-nine years after
her death, by your ratiocination or rage
be unconstructed
you think, We had an encounter on the earth
each of us
hungry beyond belief
As long as you are alive
she is alive
You are the leaping
dog
capricious on the grass, lunging
at something only it can see.

Late Fairbanks
As in his early films, still the old
abandon, a mischievous, blithe ardor.
Through unending repetition, it became
part of his muscles.
To leap, push
against earth
then
spring.
But the ground under him has changed.
He doesn’t remember when it happened.
When he wasn’t looking
the earth turned to mush.

Against Rage
He had not been denied the world. Terrible
scenes that he clung to because they taught him
the world will at last be buried with him.
As well as the exhilarations. Now,
he thinks each new one will be the last one.
The last new page. The last sex. Each human
being’s story, he tells nobody, is a boat
cutting through the night. As starless blackness
approaches, the soul reverses itself, in
the eerie acceptance of finitude.

For the AIDS Dead
The plague you have thus far survived. They didn’t.
Nothing that they did in bed that you didn’t.
Writing a poem, I cleave to “you.” You
means I, one, you, as well as the you
inside you constantly talk to. Without
justice or logic, without
sense, you survived. They didn’t.
Nothing that they did in bed that you didn’t.

Tyrant
In this journey through flesh
not just in flesh or with flesh
but through it
you drive forward seeing
in the rearview mirror
seeing only
there
always growing smaller
what you drive toward
What you drive toward
is what you once made with flesh
Out of stone caulked with blood
mortared
with blood and flesh
you made a house
bright now in the rearview mirror
white in the coarse sun’s coarse light
No more men died making it
than any other ruthless
monument living men admire

Now as your body betrays you
what you made with flesh
is what you must drive toward
what you must before
you die reassure
teach yourself you made
The house mortared with flesh
as if defying the hand of its
maker
when you pull up to it at last
dissolves as it has always
dissolved
In this journey through flesh
not just in flesh or with flesh
but through flesh

Mouth
It was as if, starving, his stomach
rebelled at food, as quickly as he ate
it passed right through him, his body
refused what his body needed. Recipe
for death. But,
he said, what others think is food isn’t food.
It passed right through him, he shoved
meat into his mouth but still his
body retained nothing. Absorbed
nothing. He grows
thinner. He thinks he cannot live on
nothing. He has the persistent
sense that whatever object he seeks
is not what he seeks,—
… now he repeats the litany of his choices.
Love, which always to his surprise
exhilarated even as it tormented
and absorbed him. Unendingly under
everything, art—; trying to make
a work of art he can continue to inhabit.
The choices he made he said he made
almost without choosing.
The best times, I must confess, are when
one cannot help oneself.
Has his pride at his intricate
inventions come to nothing?
Nothing he can now name or touch is food.
Sex was the bed where you learned to be
naked and not naked at the same time.
Bed
where you learned to move the unsustainable

weight inside, then too often
lost the key to it.
Faces too close, that despite themselves
promise, then out of panic disappoint.
Not just out of panic; only in his mind
is he freely both here and not here. The imperious
or imagined needs of those you
love or think you love
demand you forget that when you smell your
flesh you smell
unfulfilment.
We are creatures, he thinks, caught in an obscure,
ruthless economy,—
… his hunger
grows as whatever his mouth fastens upon
fails to feed him. Recipe
for death. But he’s sure he’ll learn something
once he sees
La Notte again. He’s placed Duino Elegies
next to his bed. He craves the cold
catechism Joyce mastered writing “Ithaca.”
Now he twists within the box
he cannot exit or rise above.
He thinks he must die
when what will not allow him to retain food
makes him see his body has disappeared.

Rio
I am here to fix the door.
Use has almost destroyed it. Disuse
would have had the same effect.
No, you’re not confused, you didn’t
call. If you call you still have hope.
Now you think you have
lived past the necessity for doors.
Carmen Miranda
is on the TV, inviting you to Rio.
Go to sleep while I fix the door.

Presage
Here, at the rim of what has not yet
been, the monotonous
I want to die sung
over and over by your
soul to your soul
just beneath sound
which you once again fail
not to hear, cannot erase or obliterate
returns you to the mirror of itself:—
Mumps, Meningitis, Encephalitis
all at once, together, at
age eight or nine—
•
(later, for months, you dragged your left
leg as you walked, that’s what everyone
told you because you hadn’t noticed, you
were undersea, the entire
perceptual world
undersea, death your new
familiar, like the bright slime-

green bile you watched for days
inexorably pumped from your stomach)
•
or, later, at thirteen, TYPHOID,
when the doctors said the next two days
will decide if you live, or die—;
you tried, very calmly, to ask yourself
whether you did actually want to live,
the answer, you knew, not clear—
then you heard
something say
I want to live, despite the metaphysical
awfulness of this incontinent
body shitting uncontrollably into a toilet in
time, this place, blind self, hobbled, hobbling animal,—
•
You are undersea. These are not entwined
ropes, but thick twisted slime-green
cables. Laid out before you is the fabled
Gordian knot, which you must cut.
Which you must cut not
to rule the earth, but escape it.
All you must do is sever them. Your blade
breaks, as the ties that bind thicken, tighten.

Elegy for Earth
Because earth’s inmates travel in flesh
and hide from flesh
and adore flesh
you hunger for flesh that does not die
But hunger for the absolute
breeds hatred of the absolute
Those who are the vessels of revelation
or who think that they are
ravage
us with the promise of rescue
•
My mother outside in the air
waving, shriveled, as if she knew
this is the last time—
watching as I climbed the stairs
and the plane swallowed me. She and I
could no more change what we hurtled toward
than we could change the weather. Finding my
seat, unseen I stared back as she receded.

•
They drop into holes in the earth, everything
you loved, loved and
hated, as you will drop—
and the moment when all was possible
gone. You are still
above earth, the moment when all
and nothing is possible
long gone. Terrified of the sea, we
cling to the hull.
•
In adolescence, you thought your work
ancient work: to decipher at last
human beings’ relation to God. Decipher
love. To make what was once whole
whole again: or to see
why it never should have been thought whole.
•
Earth was a tiny labyrinthine ball orbiting
another bigger ball
so bright
you can go blind staring at it
when the source of warmth and light
withdraws

then terrible winter
when burning and relentless
it draws too close
the narcotically gorgeous
fecund earth
withers
as if the sun
as if the sun
taught us
what we will ever know of the source
now too
far
then too close
•
Blood
island
where you for a time lived

FIVE

Of His Bones Are Coral Made
He still trolled books, films, gossip, his own
past, searching not just for
ideas that dissect the mountain that
in his early old age he is almost convinced
cannot be dissected:
he searched for stories:
stories the pattern of whose
knot dimly traces the pattern of his own:
what is intolerable in
the world, which is to say
intolerable in himself, ingested, digested:
the stories that
haunt each of us, for each of us
rip open the mountain.
•
the creature smothered in death clothes
dragging into the forest
bodies he killed to make meaning
the woman who found that she
to her bewilderment and horror

had a body
•
As if certain algae
that keep islands of skeletons
alive, that make living rock from
trash, from carcasses left behind by others,
as if algae
were to produce out of
themselves and what they most fear
the detritus over whose
kingdom they preside: the burning
fountain is the imagination
within us that ingests and by its
devouring generates
what is most antithetical to itself:
it returns the intolerable as
brilliant dream, visible, opaque,
teasing analysis:
makes from what you find hardest to
swallow, most indigestible, your food.

Poem Ending With a Sentence by Heath Ledger
Each grinding flattened American vowel smashed to
centerlessness, his glee that whatever long ago mutilated his
mouth, he has mastered to mutilate
you: the Joker’s voice, so unlike
the bruised, withheld, wounded voice of Ennis Del Mar.
Once I have the voice
that’s
the line
and at
the end
of the line
is a hook
and attached
to that
is the soul.

Dream Reveals in Neon the Great Addictions
LOVE, with its simulacrum, sex.
The words, like a bonfire encased
in glass, glowed on the horizon.
POWER, with its simulacrum, money.
FAME, with its simulacrum, celebrity.
GOD, survived
by what survives belief, the desire to be
a Saint.
Seed of your obsessions, these are
the addictions that tempt your soul.
Then, seeing the word ART, I woke.
•
Refused love, power, fame, sainthood, your
tactic, like that of modest
Caesar, is to feign indifference and refusal.
You are addicted to what you cannot possess.
You cannot tell if
addictions, secret, narcotic,
damage or enlarge
mind, through which you seize the world.

Ganymede
On this earth where no secure foothold is,
deathbound.
You’re deathbound. You can’t stop moving when you’re
at rest.
Transfixed by your destination, by what
you fear
you want. Unlike each bright scene, bright thing, each
nervous
dumb sweet creature whose death you mourn, you will
not die.
Chimera to whose voice even Jesus
succumbed.
How you loathed crawling on the earth seeing
nothing.
When the god pulled you up into the air,
taking
you showed you you wanted to be taken.

On This Earth Where No Secure Foothold Is
Wanting to be a movie star like Dean Stockwell or Gigi Perreau, answering an
ad at ten or eleven you made your mother drive you to Hollywood and had
expensive Hollywood pictures taken.
•
Hollywood wasn’t buying.
•
Everyone is buying but not everyone wants to buy you.
•
You see the kids watching, brooding.
•
Religion, politics, love, work, sex—each enthrallment, each enthusiasm
presenting itself as pleasure or necessity, is recruitment.
•
Each kid is at the edge of a sea.
•
At each kid’s feet multitudinous voices say I will buy you if you buy me.
•
Who do you want to be bought by?

•
The child learns this is the question almost immediately.
•
Mother?
•
Father?
•
Both mother and father tried to enlist you but soon you learned that you couldn’t
enlist on both sides at the same time.
•
They lied that you could but they were at war and soon you learned you
couldn’t.
•
How glamorous they were!
•
As they aged they mourned that to buyers they had become invisible.
•
Both of them in the end saw beneath them only abyss.
•
You are at the edge of a sea.
•

You want to buy but you know not everyone wants to buy you.
•
Each enthrallment is recruitment.
•
Your body will be added to the bodies that piled-up make the structures of the
world.
•
Your body will be erased, swallowed.
•
Who do you want to be swallowed by?
•
It’s almost the same question as To be or not to be.
•
Figuring out who they want to be bought by is what all the kids with brooding
looks on their face are brooding about.
•
Your weapon is your mind.

For an Unwritten Opera
Once you had a secret love: seeing
even his photo, a window is flung open
high in the airless edifice that is you.
Though everything looks as if it is continuing
just as before, it is not, it is continuing
in a new way (sweet lingo O’Hara and Ashbery
teach). That’s not how you naturally speak:
you tell yourself, first, that he is not the air
you need; second, that you loathe air.
As a boy you despised the world for replacing
God with another addiction, love.
Despised yourself. Was there no third thing?
But every blue moon the skeptical, the adamantly
disabused find themselves, like you,
returned to life by a secret: like him, in you.
Now you understand Janáček at
seventy, in love with a much younger
married woman, chastely writing her.
As in Mozart song remains no matter how
ordinary, how flawed the personae. For us poor
mortals: private accommodations. Magpie beauty.

THIRST
(New Poems, 2016)

PART ONE

Old and Young
If you have looked at someone in
a mirror
looking at you in the mirror
your eyes meeting
there
not face to face
•
backstage as you
prepare
for a performance
•
you look into the long horizontal
mirror
that backs the long theatrical
make-up table that runs along one
wall of the high dressing-room aerie
from which you must descend to the stage
•
there in the mirror you see
his eyes
looking into your eyes in the mirror
where you
plural

amused begin to talk
suddenly inspired not
to look at each other
directly but held by this third
thing as his eyes
allow your eyes to
follow his eyes in the mirror
you ask if anyone has ever
made a movie
in which two people talk not
directly to each other but during
the entire
static but dynamic
film as they go about their lives
their eyes are
locked staring at each other in a mirror
that they together hold a few feet
above them
or beside them
knowing if they look away
they will lose
what they now possess
trapped but freed
neither knowing
why this is better
why this
as long as no one enters
is release
because you are

twice
his age
THIS IS THE PLACE IN
NATURE
WE CAN MEET
space which
every other
space merely approximates
you ask again if
anybody made a movie
about this
•
others
enter loudly and when you
plural each look away you plural soon go on

Half-light
That crazy drunken night I
maneuvered you out into a field outside of
Coachella—I’d never seen a sky
so full of stars, as if the dirt of our lives
still were sprinkled with glistening
white shells from the ancient seabed
beneath us that receded long ago.
Parallel. We lay in parallel furrows.
—That suffocated, fearful
look on your face.
Jim, yesterday I heard your wife on the phone
tell me you died almost nine months ago.
Jim, now we cannot ever. Bitter
that we cannot ever have
the conversation that in
nature and alive we never had. Now not ever.
We have not spoken in years. I thought
perhaps at ninety or a hundred, two
broken-down old men, we wouldn’t
give a damn, and find speech.
When I tell you that all the years we were
undergraduates I was madly in love with you

you say you
knew. I say I knew you
knew. You say
There was no place in nature we could meet.
You say this as if you need me to
admit something. No place
in nature, given our natures. Or is this
warning? I say what is happening now is
happening only because one of us is
dead. You laugh and say, Or both of us!
Our words
will be weirdly jolly.
That light I now envy
exists only on this page.

Across Infinities Without Sentience
2014. 1994. Twenty years.
When this world appearing in a mind is
blotted out, ear and eye
across infinities without sentience
seek the dead. The dead
hide in the past. In what they made.
When you called him each day
he each day
answered. Protected by distance
(Cambridge to New York)
he each day
eagerly answered. Except during summers
with Kenward in Vermont, when he was not
allowed to answer. Or so he said. The distress
with which he said this made you believe him.
Across infinities without sentience
ear and eye
seek the dead.
When you can no longer each day call
him and hear him dead now twenty

years each day answer as once he sweetly did
we are queers of the universe.

End of a Friendship
The United States (salvation of both our
families) was built (stomachchurning to admit it) was built across a continent
on genocide. An abattoir. Mere
prudence, enlightened self-interest, cannot
account for why the head of
Metacomet
whom the colonists called King Philip, at the end of
King Philip’s War, his corpse drawn and quartered, his
wife and youngest son sold into slavery in the West Indies,
why his head in Plymouth was exhibited on a pole
for twenty
years.
I know this not because I know what is
not taught in American
history, but because I’ve read Robert Lowell’s poems.
America the salvation of both our families. History an obscenity
those who inherit the depeopled
and repeopled
land try to forget. Genocide. Long abattoir. But those
who perform amputations
convince themselves amputation is

necessary—; an emblem
against the horizon for which the empty horizon begs.
•
Fun: the immense pleasure of watching, goading
someone into becoming
himself on paper: so many of your best early poems
offended what others thought made good
art: the immensity that The New Yorker would print
only if you agreed to cut the one thing that offended
invisible decorums of impersonality, the provocation
that made it remarkable and yours and which you of
course refused to cut: what
fun: my work not just to watch, but to goad: a privilege.
•
Now we are going to die in estrangement. This
once seemed, still
seems, intolerable; not to be believed.
•
Yesterday, which lasted more or less
forty years, we walked along the bottom of the sea absorbed
picking up tin cans, tossing them back and forth, laughing
at what others rightly had discarded, astonished at the few
we both recognized as
gold. They were
gold. We kept them to show the world

what gold was.
We disagreed
seldom. Then,
somehow, our capacity to find what others were blind to
diminished, shriveled, all but stopped.
We were alone with each other at the bottom of the sea.
•
The reasons for the wound existed long before
the wound.
The reasons (jealousy, humiliation) exist between
any two writers.
For over forty years we willed to keep the space
we shared
the space in which we thought and breathed
free, safe from the inevitable
inherent
enmity of equals.
I cannot name
when that stopped.
Nor can I, to my
torment, name
why that stopped.
•
Why did that stop?

•
Now I must construct the song of
disenthrallment—
I was, I think I now can see, ripe for disenthrallment.
The exhaustion of making invisible
those tiny acts in thought and in deed
which, if revealed, the other
takes as disloyal. After decades I became
giddy, reckless, avid
to change the terms of what seemed
submission, enslavement—; as well as full of
dread, this longanticipated, necessary mourning.
•
It is not cruelty, those who amputate
insist, It is amputation.
Because wound
begets silence
begets rage
each of us secretly (hidden, each in his
way) raises
high on its stake the head of Metacomet.
•
My father’s head
hung outside my mother’s window

for years when I was a kid.
She pretended that it wasn’t there; but hers
also did outside his.
All over town the heads sing the same thing:
This severed head
that pollutes the air
that dominates the horizon
betrayed the intimacy lavished upon it.
•
I was invited to your house. You
invited me into your living room. In the old days,
a small thing. I saw how long it has been forbidden
when it was no longer. You invited
me to sit down among the chairs, the couch, the coffee table.
I saw this was forbidden when it was no longer. You invited
me to sit down among the chairs, the couch, the coffee table.
I said to myself I must be dreaming. I was.
•
You say, There seems to be a floor
beneath one’s feet, but there is not.
Why must you write this poem?
•
Memory is punishment.
•

Meat is flesh, but doesn’t say
flesh when teeth bite into it.

Sum
All around you of course will die but when the fingers of
your left hand no longer can button
tiny and not so tiny buttons
you know you will die quicker.
Anguish more verb than noun hides their incompetence.
•
ANGUISH, duplicitous, hidden, can, for
a time, deny what promises never to return.
•
The elegant ocean
inside, frictionless, that moved as quickly as the eye once moved,
now when your anguished eye shifts
tips deadweight with inertia, almost splashing over.
•
Each morning you wake to long slow piteous
swoops of sound, half-loon, half-dog.
He is wandering in the yard.
The dog at eighteen who at sixteen began protesting each dawn.

Thirst
The miraculous warmth that arose so implausibly from rock had, within it, thirst.
•
Thirst made by a glimpse that is, each time, brief.
•
As if, each time, that is all you are allowed.
•
The way back to it never exactly the same.
•
Once you have been there, always the promise of it.
•
Promise made to beguile and haunt, you think, residue of an injunction that is
ancient.
•
Not only ancient, but indifferent?
•
Half the time when you pursue it you fear that this time, out of distraction or
exhaustion or repetition, this time it cannot be reached.
•

I hope you’re guessing Orgasm, or Love, or Hunger for the Absolute, or even
The Sublime—
•
History littered with testimonies that God gives his followers a shot of God; then
withdraws.
•
The pattern, the process each time the same.
•
There,—
•
… then, not there (withdrawn).
•
Each time you think that you can predict how to get there the next time, soon
you cannot.
•
The singer’s voice, the fabled night the microphone captured her at the height of
her powers—
•
You have been the locus of ecstasy.
•
You have been a mile above the storm, looking down at it; and, at the same time,
full of almost-insight, obliterated at its center.
•

Creature coterminous with thirst.

PART TWO

Disappearing during sleep
[FOR ROBERT LOWELL]
seems release, merciful
ideal not to have to greet (perhaps) oblivion
with panic, remorse, or self-laceration;—
but what I hear is your voice
say that unconscious death
thrust at you asleep in the back seat of a taxi
was never the ideal your work spoke,—
… dying again for the first
time, as if relieved you say It is, at
last, happening.

The Fourth Hour of the Night
I.
Out of scarcity,—
… being.
Because, when you were nine, your father
was murdered,
betrayed.
Because the traveler was betrayed by those with
whom he had the right to seek
refuge, the Tatars.
Because the universe then allowed a creature
stronger, taller, more
ruthless than you
to fasten around your neck a thick wooden wheel
impossible
to throw off.
Because at nine your cunning was not equal
to iron-fastened
immense wood.
Because, stripped of what was his from birth, the slave
at ten

outwitted
the universe, tore the wheel from his neck:—
because your neck
carries it still, Scarcity is the mother of being.
•
Hour in which betrayal and slavery
are the great teachers.
Hour in which acquisition
looks like, and for
a moment is, safety.
Hour in which the earth, looking into
a mirror, names what it sees
by the history of weapons.
Hour from which I cannot wake.

II.
Ch’ang-ch’un was determined that he would not
prostrate himself before
the conqueror of the world
though Alexander the Great, drunk, had executed
Aristotle’s nephew when he refused
to grovel before his uncle’s pupil.
•

Ch’ang-ch’un bowed his head with clasped
hands. The Great Khan was gracious.
Though Ch’ang-ch’un, much younger,
had refused invitations from the King of Gold
and even the emperor of Hang-chou, now,
in his old age, he discovered he was
tired of waiting for apotheosis.
At last invited to court by the terrifying
conqueror of the world, he said Yes.
•
He traveled for a year and a half
following the route the Great Khan
himself had taken. He passed valley after valley
that, years later, still were filled
with ungathered, whitening bones.
•
He bowed his head with clasped hands.
The most powerful man on earth
then asked him to teach him the secret
of the Taoist masters—
the elixir
that allows men to cheat death.
Temujin was in pain. Temujin
for fifty years lived as if immortal—
though surrounded, all his life, by death.

Now he had fallen from a horse. The injury
had not entirely, after much
time, healed. He brooded about death, his
death. Now he must conquer the ancient
secret
that would bend
heaven to his need.
He asked Ch’ang-ch’un for the fabled
elixir.

III.
The world. He was born at the great world’s
poor far edge. In order to see the rich
debris that must lie at the bottom of the sea,
he sucked and sucked
till he swallowed the ocean.
•
Buddhists, Taoists, Muslims, Nestorians—
he summoned
each. Each eloquent spokesman
praised abnegations, offered transformation, even
ecstasies—; just renounce
sex, or food, or love.

•
Eating power, he fucked a new woman every night.
Best, he said, was the wife or daughter or mother of
an enemy.
•
He watched his friend Bo’orchu hunt
each day as if hunting were the purpose of life, work
sufficient for a man. As a boy he discovered his
work
when he had a wooden wheel around his neck:
to escape the wheel.
Every single thing tastes like, reeks with
the power that put it there. Weapons
keep in place
who gets rewarded how much for what. The world
•
is good at telling itself this is a lie. The world.

IV.
Each unit made up of
ten: ten soldiers
whose leader reports to a unit of one
hundred soldiers, whose leader reports to a unit of one

thousand soldiers, whose leader reports to a unit of
ten thousand.
With iron logic he had raised the great structure
from the flat
internecine earth
(—abyss where absolute, necessary
power
is fettered, bewildered by something working within us,
MUD IN THE VEINS, to paralyze
decision—; as well as by that necessary
sweet daring
that leaps across the abyss to risk all, to correct and cripple
power,—
… but then finds, in despair, it must try to master it).

V.
Though Temujin’s father, alive, was
khan
the remnant of his family was, at his
poisoning, driven from the circle of the wagons.
Temujin
had shining eyes, but at nine no force.
They survived by eating roots, berries, stray
rodents, birds the boys’

cunning pulled from the air.
•
Temujin’s father out of his mother
had two sons. His poisoned
father, out of his second wife, also had two sons.
•
One day, with a freshly sharpened juniper
arrow, he brought down a lark, and his
half-brother, Bekter, nearly his age,
reaching the bird first, refused to give it up.
Temujin ran to his mother, who told him he must
accept this, that four boys with two
defenseless women alone must
cease fighting.
With his bow and arrow, the next day Temujin
murdered his half-brother.
•
His half-brother at each moment relentlessly
disputed and clearly forever would
dispute everything Temujin possessed.
•
When he confessed to his mother she shrieked
only his shadow
ever again could bear to be with him.
He didn’t believe her. She lived

blinded by panic. He looked
around him. Human beings
live by killing other living beings.
•
His father’s rival, who told his father that Temujin
had shining
eyes, when his father died
decided he now could make Temujin a slave.
Temujin rammed
the wheel down on the idiot guard’s
skull.
Sorqan-shira and his sons found him
drowning among
reeds at the edge of the river.
Frenzied, risking their
lives, Sorqan-shira and his sons
work to cut away the wheel from his body.
•
The arrow flew
as if of itself.
Temujin’s half-brother turned and saw
Temujin’s unerring aim
aimed at
his chest.
Before the arrow

was released
his half-brother did not beg to live.
His half-brother’s
gaze was filled with
everything that would happen would happen.
•
In the delirium of Temujin’s adult
dreams, the knife he stole
escaping
is useless
in unlocking
the wheel.
•
How each child finds that it must deal with
the intolerable
becomes its fate.
•
WORLD
with this A R R O W
I thee wed.

VI.
Even the conqueror of the world

is powerless against the dead.
The most intricate plan his friend Jamuqa
ever accomplished
was to make Temujin execute him.
•
They met as boys.
By the frozen waters of the Onon, Temujin
gave Jamuqa the knucklebone of a deer.
Jamuqa gave Temujin the knucklebone of a deer.
They could see their breaths. They mingled
breaths. They swore they were anda,
brothers. They sharpened arrows—juniper, cypress.
•
When they met again, many years
later, Temujin’s
wife, Borte, had been seized by another tribe.
Fearless, lithe, full of ardor, Jamuqa
commanded a whole tribe. He
pledged his friend twenty thousand men.
Temujin also by this time was chief, but of
many fewer. The two friends and two armies
found and freed Borte after nine months.
The anda celebrated by the waters of the Onon.

•
They were too drunk, too happy. Jamuqa
pulled a blanket over himself and Temujin.
They lay all night under the same blanket.
•
For either to have expressed desire, to have
reached, would have been to offer the object of desire
power. It could not be done.
•
Jamuqa forever wants them to
do it to them
together, in tandem, two couples next to
each other—; so Temujin can and must
look over and see Jamuqa’s insouciant
bravado as he dismounts, hear Jamuqa’s
girl cry out first, more jaggedly.
•
When the chiefs gather to choose, for
the first time in decades, a Great Khan
to Jamuqa’s surprise
Temujin is chosen. Someone points out
his family is royal—; Jamuqa
is merely descended from a favorite concubine.
•

At feasts, Jamuqa thinks supplicants
shuffle him aside to reach Temujin.
As the world more and more defers to Temujin
Jamuqa becomes, in his own eyes, a ghost.
He is the memory of Jamuqa.
•
In the new army under Temujin, aristocracy has
few privileges. A friend who has fought under
Jamuqa for years must, to rise, compete
against peasants. Panache, the sweet disdain for
mere consequences, gain, victory, is lost.
•
Many, like the tribe that tried to enslave him,will
never accept Temujin.
Whenever a new group rebels, Temujin finds
Jamuqa is in their company.
•
Men don’t want to serve under Jamuqa—
because his friend would not fight against
the Great Khan, he cut off the friend’s
head, and hung it from his horse’s tail.
•
Jamuqa joined the Nayman army;
Jamuqa deserted the Nayman army.

•
An outcast with five
last remaining followers, Jamuqa
in the high snowy Tangu mountains
at the very limit of his native country
as he eats a wild ram he has killed and roasted
is taken prisoner by his companions
and delivered to Temujin.

VII.
Your father seized your mother as a girl
just after her
marriage to someone from her own tribe. This was
common practice. Just after
your marriage, the same tribe
seized your wife, and gave her to the brother of the chief.
All proceeded from desire—from deferred
justice, the chancre of unclosed
injury. This bred
enmity through generation after generation, blood
feuds, tribe against tribe against tribe.
As the Great Khan, Temujin outlawed such
seizures. He did What was there to be done.
•

The axes of your work, work that
throughout the illusory chaos of your life
absorbed your essential
mind, were there always—What was
there to be done. You saw many men
refuse, or try to refuse
what needed to be done. Whether they could not
find it, or were, finding it, disgusted, they
without it wandered, like Jamuqa.
•
When Temujin entered the dark room the prisoner
was naked.
His genitals hung pendant, bulbous—
as if swollen
from rubbing.
He still is a creature that is beautiful, but all dirty.
•
Jamuqa said, What you must do is kill me.
I will never accede to your power.
Alive, I will rally your enemies.
Dead, I will, in their eyes, just be one more fool.
Temujin replied that he
could not. They had been, since boyhood,

anda. Without him, would he have recovered
Borte?
Jamuqa replied that he did not want his skin
broken during
execution. He repeated, twice,
I will never accede to your power.
Temujin refused. Jamuqa was
sick in the head. Healthy men don’t want to die.
•
Jamuqa escaped. Two men who Temujin valued
died bringing him back.
Then he escaped again. When he was
returned again, Temujin
hesitated for months.
Then he granted his wish.
•
He insisted the skin not be broken.
When he saw the body, the head was severed,
as if someone for some reason had been
furious.
•
Temujin was furious with him for letting
pride, some
sickness of the mind, poison
feeling,—

… they had been, since boyhood, anda.
•
Even the conqueror of the world
is powerless against the dead.
He saw, smelt
the carcass of
Jamuqa,—
… who had known that Temujin was too
smart not to be, by his
death, forever tormented.
•
He watched you take from him what he thought was
his—the world of indolent chaos
inhabited by the beautiful
and lucky—
fuck anything that walks, if that is whatever inside you
demands. In the end the something
that was broken in him was mute.
He insisted that it did not exist.

VIII.
There was an immense silence between Temujin and Borte.
•

In the beginning, sweetness, because there had been no need to talk.
•
Temujin’s father had taken him at nine on a journey to find Temujin a bride.
•
She was ten, and beautiful.
•
His father and her father were old allies, and it was agreed.
•
On the way home the Tatars poisoned his father.
•
Temujin was sixteen when they were at last married.
•
Within days, Borte was abducted.
•
Borte was abducted because, when their camp was attacked, there was only one
free horse.
•
Temujin thrust the horse at his mother, not his wife.
•
This was as it should be.
•

Borte knew this, accepted this.
•
When she returned from those who had seized her, she returned about to give
birth.
•
Temujin did not ask what humiliations she had endured.
•
Whose child was it?
•
It could have been Temujin’s or the creature’s who took her.
•
Temujin declared the child, a son, his.
•
He needed to be perceived, among his own people, as someone of impeccable
justice.
•
Someone whose rectitude is above vanity.
•
They had three more sons.
•
He needed legitimate sons.

•
Borte raised, as well, orphans that Temujin’s soldiers plucked from burning
villages that they themselves had burned.
•
Those thus saved proved to be among the fiercest, the most loyal of his soldiers.
•
After Borte returned, the armies of Temujin and Jamuqa camped together for a
year and a half.
•
Borte and Temujin’s mother found the closeness between the two men
humiliating, an insult, an embarrassment.
•
Borte and Temujin’s mother told Temujin that as long as he was tied to this
debauched, fickle friendship, the other chiefs never would choose Temujin
as the Great Khan.
•
It was the first month of spring.
•
The two armies had to move off to fresh grazing.
•
Temujin, furious, listened to the two women as if he were a statue.
•
He heard Jamuqa say that camp pitched on the slopes of the mountain gave the

herders of horses what they wanted, but camp pitched on the banks of the
river was better for the herders of sheep.
•
The women said that when night fell and Jamuqa’s wagon stopped to pitch camp
Temujin’s wagon should continue.
•
Temujin’s wagon as Jamuqa’s wagon stopped to pitch camp on a mountainside
continued.
•
As the night passed the clans realized what was happening, and, frightened,
debated to stop with Jamuqa or stop with Temujin.
•
Schisms within a tribe, even sometimes within a clan.
•
One shaman dreamt that a cow white as snow struck at Jamuqa’s wagon until it
broke one of its horns, bellowing that Jamuqa had to give back its lost horn,
striking the ground with its hoof.
•
The shaman dreamt that a white bull followed Temujin’s wagon bellowing that
Heaven and Earth have decided the empire should be Temujin’s.
•
When Temujin heard this he promised the shaman thirty concubines.
•
As day broke and Temujin at last stopped, count could be taken of which clans

followed Temujin and which stopped with Jamuqa.
•
Temujin camped near the sources of the Onon.
•
The clans who had chosen Temujin in the disorder and uncertainty of the night
now were joined by others.
•
They had weighed the situation.
•
Temujin was famous for the care and probity of his decisions.
•
The princes of the royal blood joined Temujin.
•
Many days passed before Temujin looked directly at Borte when they spoke.
•
She was the vehicle of necessity.
•
Of what had to be.
•
He would not forgive her.
•

In time, he lost interest in forgiving her.
•
When he returned from his last long campaign which lasted eight unbroken
years, he was grateful she did not ask about each night’s new woman.
•
In time, near the sources of the Onon the princes of the royal blood elected
Temujin Great Khan.
•
Fame clung to the story of how he saved the beautiful Borte.
•
The irony was not lost on Borte that as Mother of Orphans she was married to
the force that made them orphans.

IX.
Only at the age of thirty-nine Temujin
at last was master of all Mongolia.
The emissaries of the Kings of Gold
had played tribe against tribe
all his life, to castrate them.
To achieve unity, to achieve the empire
essential to maintain unity
half the tribes had to be massacred.
•

The Tatars killed his father, then after
subduing them, followed by their unending
involuted betrayals and rebellions,
Temujin without
sorrow exterminated them.
Every male standing higher than a wagon axle
was killed;
the rest enslaved.
•
Extermination
is not a question of vengeance. It is a question of
safety. Of not allowing what happened to happen.
•
Under Temujin, the Mongols crossed the Great Wall
that the Kingdom of Gold over centuries
built to contain them.
Before them, the lush, cultivated great plain
stretched five hundred miles,—
… from Beijing to Nanjing.
•
Between the Mongols and the Kings of Gold
lay a trench of
blood, inexpiable wrongs.
Fifty years earlier, betraying Tatars handed off

the Mongol khan Ambaqay
to Beijing’s
King of Gold,—
… who impaled him on a wooden ass.
•
Temujin drummed into his troops past atrocities.
After they took Huai-lai, the ground for some ten miles
around for years was still strewn with human bones.
•
The full fury of the Mongols was reserved
for the great cities of Islam.
Their Sultan had twice murdered Temujin’s emissaries—
what rose in Temujin was the rage to annihilate
not just the civilization that
insulted him, but what made it possible.…
In the end, there was little left for his tax collectors
in the future to tax.
This was a world everywhere on the edge of desert—
the Mongols in fury dismantled the intricate
networks that preserved and gathered and channeled
water. Without dams, without the multitudinous
screens of trees that were the handiwork of centuries,
for Samarkand, for the cities of Scheherazade,
not just defeat, but dismemberment.

•
Nightmare from which not even the rich awoke.
•
.….….….….….….…. Stonework
of hive-like
intrication, its hard
face airy as lace,
indifferent hooves erased to sand.

X.
Ch’ang-ch’un thought if he answered honestly
he would be executed.
He asked Temujin
to tell him Temujin’s story.
The Great Khan, to his own surprise, wasn’t
offended. He liked the earnest old man.
Seized, suddenly absorbed, with relish
he began to tell the old man his
story, omitting nothing he imagined essential.
The Taoist master at last answered that there exists
no elixir for eternal life.
He told him that the largest square
has no corners.
He told him that they go east and west at

the will of the wind, so that in the end
they know not if the wind carries them
or they the wind.
But as Temujin listened to his own voice tell
his story, the lineaments of his story, this
is what he heard:—
Because you could not master whatever
enmeshed you
you became its slave—
You learned this bitterly, early.
In order not to become its slave
you had to become its master.
You became
its master.
Even as master, of course, you remain its slave.
•
A S H. What yesterday was the lock-step
logic of his every
position, purity in which he took just
pride, cunning
solutions to what the universe thrust at him
appeared to him now ash, not
his, or, if
his, not his.

•
Too often now he woke with his mouth
gasping above water, the great wooden
wheel around his neck now
buoy, now too
heavy to lift.
Jamuqa’s face, mutilated—
Jamuqa, with whom
he lay under the same blanket.
The familiar universe began to assume its shape.
Inherent
enmity of equals. Each master
not a master. A fraud. A master slave.
•
His own voice said it.
•
Old, he included
himself in his scorn for those who
young want the opposite of this earth
then settle for
more of it.
•
The life he had not
led, could not even now lead

was a burning-glass
between himself
and the sun.
•
Temujin saw that the Taoist master
was terrified.
The old man, facing
the verge, had leapt into the sea—
he had given the conqueror of the world
simply what he had already.
He liked the old man. After dallying
for months discussing
the dead surrounding them
he allowed him to return to his own country.
•
Master
slave, you who have survived thus far
the lottery of who will live, and who will die—
contemplate Genghis Khan, great,
ocean
khan, born Temujin, master slave.

XI.
The death of his grandson Mutugen
seemed to Temujin

harbinger of his own death. This boy
raised in a desert dust-storm
was innocent of dust.
He who made one imagine something
undeformed could emerge from deformity
died by an arrow.
That he should die—.
That he should die assaulting a Muslim citadel
meant that Temujin himself, bareheaded,
took part in the final attack that destroyed it,
that every living thing therein, man and beast,
the child slain in its mother’s womb,
must die—; that no loot, no booty
should be taken, but everything inexorably
erased; a place thereafter forever accursed.
•
When Temujin heard of his grandson’s death,
he learned it before the boy’s own father.
He called all his sons to share a meal, and at it
announced that he was angry
his sons no longer obeyed him.
Jaghatay, Mutugen’s father, protested.
Then Temujin told Jaghatay that the boy
was dead.

Gazing fixedly, Temujin with a choked
voice forbade
Jaghatay GRIEF.
Forbade him not just the signs of grief, but GRIEF itself.
He kept them at table for hours. At the end
Jaghatay, when Temujin left the room, wept.
•
He now knew how he wanted to be buried.
He wanted the course of the Onon temporarily
diverted—; there, at its muddy center,
burial in a sealed chamber.
Then the river
sent back over it.
Any travelers encountering by chance
the funeral cortege
were to be executed.

XII.
Imagination
clings to
apotheosis,—
… those who inherit
the powerful
dead imagine

them and cling.
HERO to his people,—
… curse (except in
imagination)
to everyone else.
The dream I dreamed
was not denied me.
It was not, in
the mind, denied me.
•
This is the end of the fourth hour of the night.

Radical Jesus
Judge not.
Restrain, incarcerate
the knife that can and would cut you.
But judge
not. Some dream law their sure guide.
But law is
a labyrinth,
each law at war with another law, animated
by an imperative you recognize.
Your soul
must thread its way through warring
imperatives you recognize. You are standing
in ash
without guide in a labyrinth. The ash
that is falling implacably is from fires
you lit.
Jesus (enemy of the State, ground upon which no
State has been built)
Jesus says
only those who have been justly

condemned to die can act as judge.

Visions at 74
The planet turns there without you, beautiful.
Exiled by death you cannot
touch it. Weird joy to watch postulates
lived out and discarded, something crowded
inside us always craving to become something
glistening outside us, the relentless planet
showing itself the logic of what is
buried inside it. To love existence
is to love what is indifferent to you
you think, as you watch it turn there, beautiful.
World that can know itself only by
world, soon it must colonize and infect the stars.
You are an hypothesis made of flesh.
What you will teach the stars is constant
rage at the constant prospect of not-being.
•
Sometimes when I wake it’s because I hear
a knock. Knock,
Knock. Two
knocks, quite clear.
I wake and listen. It’s nothing.

NOTE ON THE TEXT
NOTES
INTERVIEWS
INDEX OF TITLES

Note on the Text
In 1990, In the Western Night collected my first three volumes in
reverse chronological order, prefaced and followed by new poems.
The idea was that the reader would journey backward from new work
to where it all began, a first book about family and the world where I
grew up. The volume ended with “The First Hour of the Night,”
intended as the beginning of a sequence
The books that followed are collected here in the order of
publication, as hour of the night has followed hour of the night.
•
Passages in three long poems from In the Western Night have been
changed. (The three are “The War of Vaslav Nijinsky,”
“Confessional,” and “The First Hour of the Night.”) None of the
words are different. But in terms of punctuation and “set-up,” they
seemed to me too often spoken à haute voix, as if declaimed to the last
row of the balcony. I have always heard the voice in them more
intimately. They increasingly to my eye lacked this intimacy. I have
tried to modulate the voices, by shifting punctuation, spacing, pacing.
“The First Hour of the Night,” especially, has a new body. When I
wrote this poem I now think I had no idea how to set it up, how it
should exist in space.

Inevitably some readers will prefer the first versions. Some readers
prefer the first version of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”; I don’t,
decisively.
•
The aim, throughout, has been not chronology, but a kind of
topography of the life we share—in chaos, an inevitable
physiognomy.

Notes
The page numbers for the notes that appear in the print version of this
title are not in your e-book. Please use the search function on your ereading device to search for the relevant passages documented or
discussed.
In the Western Night
“To the Dead”: The final three lines are stolen, ultimately, from
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Night Flight. I first encountered this
vision of the nature of love in Rudy Kikel’s sequence “Local Visions”
(1975), where it is attributed to Auden.
“In the Western Night: 3. Two Men”: These lines are indebted to an
unpublished lecture by V. A. Kolve, “Fools In and Out of Motley”
(Wellesley College, 1979).
“The War of Vaslav Nijinsky”: Readers not familiar with Nijinsky’s
life may find some biographical background useful. Nijinsky came to
the West as the principal male dancer of the Ballets Russes—which
was directed by the man who had created it, Serge Diaghilev. He lived
with Diaghilev for several years. With Diaghilev’s encouragement, he
became a choreographer: he did the first productions of, among
others, “L’Après-midi d’un Faune” (1912), “Le Sacre du Printemps”

(1913). Revolutionary, Modernist, his choreography remained as
controversial as his dancing was admired. On the company’s first trip to South
America—Diaghilev, who hated sea travel, was absent—Nijinsky met
and married a young woman traveling with the troupe, Romola de
Pulzky. The break with Diaghilev precipitated by this was never
healed.
Prose passages in the poem are based on Romola Nijinsky’s
biography, Nijinsky (Simon & Schuster, 1934), and sentences by
Richard Buckle, Serge Lifar, Maurice Sandoz.
“Genesis 1–2:4”: In the first vision, first version of creation in the
Hebrew Bible, God creates by dividing, separating what is without
form—and therefore is waste—into a landscape built of oppositions,
that then all living creatures are told to fill. But the mechanism thus
created must be, on the sixth day, checked—the first Thou shalt not.
In the Hebrew Bible, the injunction against eating other living
creatures remains in force until after Noah’s flood.
“The Book of the Body”: Lines 12–15: Vergil, Eclogue V, 56–57.
“Ellen West”: This poem is based on Ludwig Binswanger’s “Der Fall
Ellen West,” translated by Werner M. Mendel and Joseph Lyons
(Existence; Basic Books, 1958). Binswanger names his patient “Ellen
West.”
“Book of Life”: The Snake parable is from John McPhee’s Oranges
(1966). This is the first poem I wrote about my family. The four-line
refrain now makes me wince—such confidence about what the
alternatives are, such speed in judgment. Hard to encounter in writing

one’s old self. I feel some version of this throughout this book, but
most acutely in Golden State (1973). Such confidence about what the
alternatives are. [2016]
“After Catullus”: Catullus, Carmen LVI (“O rem ridiculam, Cato, et
iocosam”).
“The First Hour of the Night”: The source for the “dream of the
history of philosophy,” and the major source for the poem as a whole,
is Wilhelm Dilthey’s “The Dream,” translated by William Kluback
(The Philosophy of History in Our Time; Doubleday/Anchor Books,
1959). The final dream is based on a dream reported by E. L. Grant
Watson in a letter to Jung (C. G. Jung, Letters, vol. 2, p. 146, note 1;
Princeton University Press, 1975).
Desire
I have treated sources as instances of the “pre-existing forms”
mentioned in the first sentence of “Borges and I,” and done this so
freely that it needs acknowledgment. “As the Eye to the Sun” uses as
building blocks phrases, sometimes reversed, from George Long’s
Marcus Aurelius. “Adolescence” is a “found” poem, carved out of
anonymously-published prose. “The Return” steals from Michael
Grant’s translation of The Annals of Tacitus, as well as versions by
John Jackson, Alfred John Church, and William Jackson Brodribb.
David Cairns’s The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz lies behind the first
part of “The Second Hour of the Night”; A Manichaean Psalm-Book,
translated by C.R.C. Allberry, suggested the “taste” litany; the poem
throughout is indebted to Stephen MacKenna’s translation of Plotinus.

Star Dust
I. MUSIC LIKE DIRT
K.218 is Mozart’s Fourth Violin Concerto. The phrase music like dirt
is a refrain in Desmond Dekker’s song “Intensified.” I have never met
Mr. Dekker; he is not the “you” of “Music Like Dirt.” Think of
“Advice to the Players” as a manifesto written by someone who does
not believe in manifestos. Think of “Injunction” as the injunction
heard by an artist faced with the forever warring elements of the world
that proceed from the forever unreconciled elements of our nature.
“Lament for the Makers” is the title of a poem by the Scots writer
William Dunbar (1460?–1520?).
I hoped to make a sequence in which the human need to make is
seen as not only central but inescapable. I wanted not a tract, but a
tapestry in which making is seen in the context of the other processes
—sexuality, mortality—inseparable from it.
II
“Curse”: The “you” addressed here brought down the World Trade
Center towers; when I wrote the poem I didn’t imagine that it could be
read in any other way, though it has been. The poem springs from the
ancient moral idea (the idea of Dante’s Divine Comedy) that what is
suffered for an act should correspond to the nature of the act. Shelley
in his Defense of Poetry says that “the great secret of morals is
love”—and by love he means not affection or erotic feeling, but
sympathetic identification, identification with others. The “secret,”
hidden ground of how to act morally is entering the skin of another,
imagination of what is experienced as the result of your act.

Identification is here called down as punishment, the great secret of
morals reduced to a curse.
“Hadrian’s Deathbed”: Hadrian, “Animula vagula blandula.”
“Song”: “It takes talent to live at night, and that was the one ability I
never doubted I had” (Ava Gardner, Ava: My Story, 1990). “It’s not
raining inside tonight” (Johnny Standley, “It’s In the Book,” 1952).
“The Third Hour of the Night”: In part II, my largest debts are to John
Addington Symonds’s translation The Life of Benvenuto Cellini,
Written by Himself (1887); and to Michael W. Cole’s Cellini and the
Principles of Sculpture (2002). Part III, section one, is based on W.
Lloyd Warner’s A Black Civilization (1958), pages 198–200; reprinted
under the title “Black Magic: An Australian Sorcerer (Arnhem Land)”
in Mircea Eliade’s From Primitives to Zen: A Thematic Sourcebook of
the History ofReligions (1977), 443–45.
Watching the Spring Festival
“Marilyn Monroe”: Throughout, “she” is Monroe’s mother. She was a
film-cutter in a Hollywood studio, a professional. Born after her
mother’s second—and last—marriage ended, Monroe was never
certain who her father was.
“Tu Fu Watches the Spring Festival Across Serpentine Lake”: In
conception and many phrases, this version of Tu Fu’s “Li-ren” is
indebted to David Hawkes’s A Little Primer of Tu Fu (1967).
“Little O”: I mean for my title to echo Shakespeare’s phrase for the

Globe Theatre in Henry V, “this wooden O.” The argument here is
with Stevens’s “The Creations of Sound,” his argument with Eliot.
“Collector”: Lee Wiley’s career, insofar as it flourished at all, thrived
in the thirties, forties, and fifties. This era—from screwball comedies
to film noir, from Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington to the Great
American Songbook—remains the period that, for solace and
pleasure, I most often return to. But it was also a suffocating box:
what a relief to discover Antonioni and Satyajit Ray, Lowell, and
Ginsberg. They were part of a movement that, to my mind, was not
Post-Modernist but Neo-Modernist, a movement that was not a
repudiation of Modernism’s seriousness and ambition, but a
reinvention—a continuing attempt to discover what Modernism left
out.
Metaphysical Dog
“Writing ‘Ellen West’”: “The Case of Ellen West” by Ludwig
Binswanger is included in Existence, edited by Rollo May, Ernest
Angel, and Henri F. Ellenberger, translated by Werner M. Mendel and
Joseph Lyons (Basic Books, 1958). The poem “Ellen West” begins on
here.
The gestures poems make are the same as the gestures of ritual injunction—curse; exorcism; prayer; underlying everything perhaps,
the attempt to make someone or something live again. Both poet and
shaman make a model that stands for the whole. Substitution,
symbolic substitution. The mind conceives that something lived, or
might live. Implicit is the demand to understand. The memorial that is
ward and warning. Without these ancient springs poems are merely

more words.
“Defrocked”: In the first section, the anonymous lyrics are quoted
from Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism, chapter VI, section 1, except for
“pilgrimage to a cross in the void,” from Ginsberg’s Howl, part III.
“Threnody on the Death of Harriet Smithson”: This is a kind of
fantasia based on an essay by Jules Janin (The Memoirs of Hector
Berlioz, translated by David Cairns). Smithson was an actress, and
became the wife of Berlioz.
“Dream of the Book”: The passage ending with “unbroken but in
stasis” uses a sentence from Lionel Trilling’s essay “Art and Fortune”
(The Liberal Imagination, 1950). The sentence is quoted in full in the
interview with Mark Halliday (see here).
“Whitman”: “The old thought of likenesses” is from “As I Ebb’d with
the Ocean of Life,” first published in 1860; the version of Leaves of
Grass discussed at the beginning of my poem appeared five years
earlier, in 1855. Whitman revised and enlarged Leaves of Grass for
the rest of his life.
“Martha Yarnoz Bidart Hall”: “As in Dante, there she ate your heart”
refers to the first sonnet in La Vita Nuova. There is a very free version
in Desire (1997) titled “Love Incarnate” (here of this book).
“Mouth”: The two lines beginning “The best times” are based on
words by Otto Klemperer, Klemperer on Music (Toccata Press, 1986),
p. 21. La Notte is the film by Michelangelo Antonioni. “Ithaca” is the
next-to-last chapter of Ulysses.

“Presage”: The prophecy about the Gordian knot was that the person
who succeeded in untying it would rule Asia. Alexander the Great,
newly arrived in Asia, did not untie it but cut through it.
“Of His Bones Are Coral Made”: This statement appeared with the
poem in Best American Poetry 2012:
I’ve written little prose about poetry, but can’t seem to stop writing
poems about poetics. Narrative is the Elephant in the Room when most
people discuss poetry. Narrative was never a crucial element in the
poetics surrounding the birth of Modernism, though the great works of
Modernism, from The Waste Land to the Cantos to “Home Burial,”
Paterson and beyond, are built on a brilliant sense of the power of
narrative. What Modernism added was the power gained when you know
what to leave out. Narrative is the ghost scaffolding that gives spine to
the great works that haunt the twentieth century.
A writer is caught by certain narratives, certain characters, and not by
others. Prufrock is relevant to our sense of Eliot. He could be a character
in Pound’s sequence “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” but if he were, it would
be without the identification, the sympathy and agony. Eliot had to go on
to Gerontion and Sweeney and Tiresias, each trailing a ghost narrative.
They are as crucial to the vision of Eliot as Bloom and Stephen Dedalus
are to the vision, the sense of the nature of the world, of Joyce.
In my poem, “the creature smothered in death clothes” is Herbert
White, the title character in the first poem in my first book; “the woman”
two stanzas down is Ellen West, from the second.
Two more allusions. “The burning fountain” refers to this passage in
Shelley’s “Adonais,” his elegy for Keats:
He wakes or sleeps with the enduring dead;
Thou canst not soar where he is sitting now.
Dust to the dust: but the pure spirit shall flow
Back to the burning fountain whence it came,
A portion of the Eternal, which must glow

Through time and change, unquenchably the same …
“The burning fountain”—the power that fuels, that generates and
animates life—is the title of a book about the poetic imagination by
Philip Wheelwright (generous, profound spirit), whose classes I took as
an undergraduate (The Burning Fountain, Indiana University Press,
1954).
My poem’s title comes from Shakespeare’s The Tempest:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
My poem is about transformation, the bones of the poet made up out of
the materials, the detritus of the world, that he or she has not only
gathered but transformed and been transformed by.

“Poem Ending With a Sentence by Heath Ledger”: The Joker (in The
Dark Knight) and Ennis Del Mar (in Brokeback Mountain) are
Ledger’s greatest roles.
Thirst
“The Fourth Hour of the Night”: The book that made me want to write
about Genghis Khan, and that I’ve stolen most from, is René
Grousset’s Conqueror of the World (1966), translated by Marion
McKellar and Denis Sinor.

Interviews
INTERVIEW WITH MARK HALLIDAY

Ploughshares, Spring 1983

MARK HALLIDAY: When I think about your two books, and the
poems that I know will be in your third book, I seem to see a
movement away from autobiographical material toward poems in
which the characters are distinct from yourself—Nijinsky, Ellen West.
Do you see a “story” of your choice of subjects for poems as
beginning in family and autobiography and moving to something
else? And if so, why has that happened?
FRANK BIDART: I’ve made a list of the subjects I hope we’ll be
able to take up in this interview: prosody; voice; “action”;
punctuation; the relation of “personal” (or autobiographical) and
“impersonal” elements in a poem; the struggle to make life show itself
in a work of art.
It’s hard to talk about any one of these things without talking
about all of them—in my work at least, they seem to me so tangled,
inextricable.
The heart of my first book was, as you say, autobiographical; but
the story of how I came to this subject matter as the necessary subject

matter for me at that time is bound up with discovering a prosody,
figuring out (among other things) how to write down, how to “fasten
to the page” the voice—and movements of the voice—in my head.
I wrote a lot of poems before the poems in my first book, Golden
State, but they were terrible; no good at all. I was doing what many
people start out by doing, trying to be “universal” by making the
entire poem out of assertions and generalizations about the world—
with a very thin sense of a complicated, surprising, opaque world
outside myself that resisted the patterns I was asserting. These
generalizations, shorn of much experience, were pretty simpleminded
and banal.
Nonetheless, though the poems were thin, I was aware that what I
heard, the rhythms and tones of voice in my head, I didn’t know how
to set down on paper. When I set the words down in the most
“normal” ways, in terms of line breaks and punctuation, they didn’t at
all look to the eye the way I heard them in my head.
MH: Can you give an example from any of these poems?
FB: I remember a poem which ended with a sentence from Samuel
Johnson, “The mind can only repose on the stability of truth.” As I
heard this sentence, it had a weight and grimness, a large finality it
just didn’t have as I first typed it. In the attempt to make the sentence
look the way I heard it, I typed the words hundreds of different ways,
with different punctuation and line breaks, for weeks. And I never did
get them right; in the end, I realized the poem wasn’t any good in the
first place.
I never had a romance with writing verse. What caught me about
writing poems was not the fascination of using meter and rhyme—I

knew somehow, however gropingly and blindly, that there must be
some way to get down the motions of the voice in my head, that
somehow the way to do this was to write in lines. Lines, not only
sentences or paragraphs. When I tried to “translate” the phrases in my
head into formal metrical or rhymed structures, they went dead. It
seemed that my own speech just wasn’t, as so much English has
always been, basically iambic. (There are lines of pentameter in my
poems, but usually they represent some order or “plateau” of feeling
I’m moving toward, or moving away from.)
What I was in love with was the possibility of bringing together
many different kinds of thing in a poem. When I was an
undergraduate, Eliot was probably my favorite (twentieth-century)
poet; but Pound was the more liberating. The Cantos are very brilliant
and they’re also obviously very frustrating and in some ways, I guess,
a mess. But they were tremendously liberating in the way that they
say that anything can be gotten into a poem, that it doesn’t have to
change its essential identity to enter the poem—if you can create a
structure that is large enough or strong enough, anything can retain its
own identity and find its place there. Four Quartets is more perfect,
but in a way its very perfection doesn’t open up new aesthetic
possibilities—at least it didn’t for me then. The Cantos, and Pound’s
work as a whole, did; and do.
MH: As an undergraduate, did you already think of yourself as a
poet?
FB: I wanted to be a poet as far back as I can remember, but I didn’t
think I could be. In college, many of my friends were far more fluent
than I; they really knew how to shape something eloquently into a

poem. My poems were always (with, maybe, one exception)
awkward, bony, underwritten. My poems had vast structures of
meaning and symbol, and about three words on the page.
MH: Could we go back now to your discovery of what you did have
to do—the transition from those too abstract poems that were not
successful, toward whatever it was that made you able to write the
poems in Golden State. Could you talk about your years of graduate
school, what you were reading and what you were thinking about,
what you wanted to do?
FB: Really to answer that question I have to go back much further,
because it’s all bound up with wanting to be an artist when I was very
young, and the different ways I imagined being an artist as I grew up.
When I was a kid, I was crazy about movies. In Bakersfield, I
think movies were the most accessible art form, in terms of new
things happening and being done in the arts—I mean, we didn’t have
the New York City Ballet or a great symphony orchestra, we didn’t
have a season of plays. But we did have, each week, surrounded by
publicity, glamour, and controversy, these incredibly interesting
movies. As early as I can remember, I wanted to be an artist; I
certainly knew I didn’t want to be a farmer, as my father was. Briefly,
I imagined becoming an actor; but very quickly it was clear to me that
the person who really made movies was the director. By the time I
was in high school, I was determined somehow to become a director. I
thought a lot, read a lot about movies; I graduated from fan magazines
to reviews of contemporary films, to books like Paul Rotha’s The Film
Till Now. Because, in Bakersfield in high school, I could actually
see almost none of the “serious,” “art” films I was reading about, I

ferociously held a great many opinions about things I had never
experienced—the faith, for example, that the coming of sound had
been a disaster to film as an art.
So, in college, I was determined to become a film director, and a
serious film director. I wanted films to be as ambitious and complex
as the greatest works of art—as Milton, Eliot, Joyce. I thought, at first,
that I might become a philosophy major; but in the desolation of
positivism and analytic linguistic skepticism that dominated American
academic philosophy in the fifties, it seemed that the moral and
metaphysical issues that had traditionally been the world, the province
of philosophy, had been taken over by literature. Ulysses and
Absalom, Absalom! and Yeats’s “The Tower” seemed closer to Plato
and Aristotle than what academic philosophers then were doing. One
of my teachers at the University of California, Riverside, where I was
an undergraduate, was a marvelous exception to this—Philip
Wheelwright, who had written about literature and aesthetics, as well
as translated Aristotle, Heraclitus. I was an earnest and clumsy
freshman, and he was wonderfully humane and generous. (The first
time I ever heard Maria Callas was in his living room, when he played
to a final meeting of a class excerpts of her second recording of Lucia.
I remember he was upset because he felt that it wasn’t, compared to
her first recording, nearly as well sung.)
MH: So you became an English major?
FB: I became an English major. Of course it’s impossible to
recapitulate all—or even the central—intellectual and emotional
dramas of those years. But two books I particularly loved are relevant
here.

First, Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination: Trilling’s sense, in “The
Meaning of a Literary Idea,” that one doesn’t have to share “belief” in
an author’s “ideas,” but has to feel their cogency, that the activity on
the author’s part has to be in a satisfying relation to the difficulty, the
density of his materials. In “Art and Fortune,” there is a long passage
of great eloquence about “the beautiful circuit of thought and desire”
(James’s phrase), which culminates in this sentence:
The novel has had a long dream of virtue in which the will, while never
abating its strength and activity, learns to refuse to exercise itself upon
the unworthy objects with which the social world tempts it, and either
conceives its own right objects or becomes content with its own sense of
its potential force—which is why so many novels give us, before their
end, some representation, often crude enough, of the will unbroken but in
stasis.

This image of the will “unbroken but in stasis”—after having
“exhausted all that part of itself which naturally turns to the inferior
objects offered by the social world”—and which has therefore
“learned to refuse”… This image has haunted me: it seems to me a
profound pattern, one of the central, significant actions that many
works have, in different ways with different implications, felt as
necessary. The passage also taught me, I think, one way a work of art
can conclude without concluding—how it can reach a sense of
“resolution,” or completion, without “resolving” things that are
inherently unresolvable. In college, I read these pages so many times I
find I’ve almost memorized them.
The notion of “action” in Francis Fergusson’s The Idea of a
Theater is crucial to my understanding of poetry (and of writing in
general)—so crucial, that I want to get polemical about it. Its source,
of course, is Aristotle’s Poetics, the statement that “tragedy is the

initiation of an action.” Fergusson cites Kenneth Burke on “language
as symbolic action,” and quotes Coleridge: unity of action, Coleridge
says, “is not properly a rule, but in itself a great end, not only of the
drama, but of the epic, lyric, even to the candle-flame of an epigram—
not only of poetry, but of poesy in general, as the proper generic term
inclusive of all the fine arts.”
But the sense that the poem must be animated by a unifying,
central action—that it both “imitates” an action and is itself an action
—has been largely ignored by twentieth-century aesthetics. It was
never an animating idea in the poetics of modernism. That doesn’t
mean that poets have ignored it in practice. When Pound, for example,
writes that he has “schooled” himself “to write an epic poem which
begins ‘In the Dark Forest,’ crosses the Purgatory of human error, and
ends in the light,” he is describing, of course, an action—a journey
undertaken and suffered by the central consciousness of his poem, a
journey that begins somewhere, goes somewhere, ends somewhere, a
journey the shape of which has significance. But though Pound’s
poem was intended to imitate this action, the action that the actual
poem he wrote inscribes is, we now all know, quite different. Its shape
is tragic, and far more painful.
The notion that a poem imitates action, and is an action, seems to
me so necessary now because it helps free poetry from so many dead
ends—“good description,” the mere notation of sensibility, “good
images,” “good lines,” or mere wit. Let me emphasize that an “action”
is not a “moral,” or merely something intended that the poet coldbloodedly executes. Like Pound, a poet may intend that the action
have a certain shape: but (again like Pound) any writer who is serious,
as he moves through his materials, will inevitably find that what his
poem must enact, what it embodies, is more mysterious, recalcitrant,

surprising. (If only in detail, it’s always, I think, at least different.)
What I’ve been arguing applies not only to long poems, but, as
Coleridge suggests, to lyric. Kenneth Burke has a great essay called
“Symbolic Action in a Poem by Keats.”
MH: In your own work, have you found the “action” of a poem
turning out to be significantly different from what you thought it
would be, when you began the poem?
FB: I’ve just been through hell with a long poem in my third book,
“Confessional.” Six years ago, in the summer of 1976, I wrote the first
part of the poem. I felt immediately that it wasn’t complete, and
wanted to write what I thought of as the second “half.” And I knew
what the last two lines of this second half must be. But that’s all I had
that was specific, that was concrete.
Well, it took me six years to discover what the second half must
be. That was a time of immense frustration—I would have loved to
consider the first part (which was four pages) “complete.” But my
friends kept telling me it wasn’t finished, and of course I knew it
wasn’t finished, that from the beginning I had felt there must be more
(though I tried to repress the memory of feeling this). I had an arc in
my head, a sense— frustratingly without content—of the shape of the
emotional journey that had to take place, and (because I had the last
two lines) the words on which it would end. That was all!
The poem is about my relationship to my mother, though it begins
with an anecdote about a cat that didn’t happen to me (it’s from the
memoirs of Augustus Hare). I felt, for complicated and opaque
reasons, that this story was right at the beginning—that I needed it.
Everything else in the poem had to be “true.”

Slowly during these six years the second part grew in me. I say
“grew” (and it did feel that way), but the process wasn’t at all orderly
or continuous. I read in Peter Brown’s wonderful Augustine of Hippo,
the scene in the Confessions between Augustine and his mother at the
window in Ostia. I felt immediately some version of this scene—as an
embodiment of everything that between my mother and me didn’t
happen—should be in the poem. But how this could happen wasn’t at
all clear.
There is an “Elegy” for my mother in my second book. As I went
back to it, I felt more and more dissatisfied with it—when “Elegy”
was written, right around my mother’s death, it was as true as I could
make it, but it no longer represented what I felt about our relationship,
the way (after several years had passed) I now saw it. I had to be, if
not “fair” (who can know that?), fairer.
So the second part of the poem finally got itself written out of the
desire to tell the whole thing again from the ground up, finally to get it
“right.” This desire in the end came to me clothed as necessity: I felt I
owed it to my mother. The poem is still angry, just as “Elegy” was
angry, but there’s much more in it—among other things, much more
sense of my complicity in everything that happened between us. What
started out as the “second half” ended up three times as long (and was
written six years later).
All art, of course, is artifice: words in our mouths, or our minds,
don’t just “naturally” happen on paper with focus, shape, or force. If,
in a poem, we feel we are listening to a voice speak the things that
most passionately engage it, it is an illusion. But I think that Frost’s
statement is also true: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.”
MH: Can you say more about “artifice” in a poem? In your own

poems?
FB: There’s a remarkable passage in a letter by Keats that for me
stands for how genuinely mysterious and paradoxical this subject is.
So often people use terms like “open form” or “closed form,” or
“sincere” or “artificial,” as sticks to beat each other over the head. In
the letter, Keats says that he is giving up “Hyperion” because it is too
“Miltonic” and “artful”: “there were too many Miltonic inversions in
it—Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful or rather artist’s
humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations.” Then he
suggests an experiment—that his reader pick out some lines from the
poem, and put an X next to “the false beauty proceeding from art” and
a double line next to “the true voice of feeling.” There’s something
terrifically winning about Keats’s desire to separate mere “art” (which
led to falseness) from what he calls (in a great, beguiling phrase) “the
true voice of feeling.” Part of his greatness as a poet comes from the
way he imagined the poet’s job as discovering truth—from his sense
(in the “Chamber of Maiden-Thought” letter) that his poems must
“explore” the “dark passages” we find ourselves in after we see “into
the heart and nature of Man”; from his impatient self-criticism of his
poems, throughout his career, demanding that they “make
discoveries.”
So he asks his reader to put an X next to “the false beauty
proceeding from art,” and a double line next to “the true voice of
feeling.” Then there is an amazing passage: “Upon my soul ’twas
imagination I cannot make the distinction—Every now & then there is
a Miltonic intonation—But I cannot make the division properly.” In
other words, the distinction—so clear in “imagination”—cannot
actually be made. There are things that seem only artifice (“Every

now & then there is a Miltonic intonation”), but the division between
what proceeds from “art,” and “the true voice of feeling,” cannot
clearly or consistently be made.
I think “the true voice of feeling” is a necessary and useful ideal.
So many poems seem not to be, at any point, “the true voice of
feeling.” We have to have the “imagination” of it. But in practice, I’m
sure there is no one way—free verse or formal verse, striving for
“originality” or “imitation”—for us to achieve it. It’s certainly not the
opposite of “art.”
MH: That seems to lead us back to the question we began with—the
discovery of the subject matter of your first book, and of your own
prosody. At what point did that happen?
FB: I began graduate school in 1962, and the first poem that I’ve kept
was written in 1965. Those were years of bewilderment, ferment, and
misery. Why was I in graduate school? I wasn’t at all sure. I thought I
would like to teach; but I also felt that if I didn’t become an artist I
would die. By the time I graduated from Riverside, I’d ceased
believing I must, or could, become a film director. Rather murkily I
felt that if I really were a filmmaker I would have already, somehow,
in however rudimentary a way, made a film. (I had shot a few feet, but
they seemed stupid, arty, clumsy—and in any case, I couldn’t connect
them to a whole.) I felt the fact that this art could only be practiced if
you convinced someone else to risk huge sums of money, the fact that
movies were a business, would break me; Antonioni had said he spent
ten years waiting in producers’ waiting rooms before he was allowed
to direct a film.
So I went to graduate school at Harvard—more out of the desire to

continue the world of conversations and concerns I had found in an
English department as an undergraduate, than out of any clear
conviction about why I was there. I took courses with half my will—
often finishing the work for them months after they were over; and
was scared, miserable, hopeful. I wrote a great deal. I wrote
lugubrious plays that I couldn’t see had characters with no character.
More and more, I wrote poems.
I began this interview by saying that discovering the subject matter
of Golden State, as the necessary subject matter for me at that time,
was bound up with discovering a prosody. This seems to me true; but
I’m nervous that describing this process as a narrative, consecutive
and chronological, will introduce far more order into it than existed. It
was a time of terrible thrashing around.
So let me describe this period in terms of “problems.” First, I felt
how literary, how “wanting to be like other writers”—particularly like
the Modernists, and Post-Modernists—the animating impulses behind
my poems were. I said to myself (I remember this very clearly): “If
what fills your attention are the great works that have been written
—Four Quartets and Ulysses and ‘The Tower’ and Life Studies and
Howl (yes, Howl) and The Cantos—nothing is left to be done. You
couldn’t possibly make anything as inventive or sophisticated or
complex. But if you turn from them, and what you look at is your life:
NOTHING is figured out; NOTHING is understood … Ulysses
doesn’t describe your life. It doesn’t teach you how to lead your life.
You don’t know what love is; or hate; or birth; or death; or good; or
evil. If what you look at is your life, EVERYTHING remains to be
figured out, ordered; EVERYTHING remains to be done…”
However silly this speech may sound, “recollected in tranquillity,”
it was a kind of turning point for me. I realized that “subject matter”—

confronting the dilemmas, issues, “things” with which the world had
confronted me—had to be at the center of my poems if they were to
have force. If a poem is “the mind in action,” I had to learn how to use
the materials of a poem to think. I said to myself that my poems must
seem to embody not merely “thought,” but necessary thought. And
necessary thought (rather than mere rumination, ratiocination)
expresses or acknowledges what has resisted thought, what has forced
or irritated it into being.
Such an aim has huge implications, of course, for prosody—
versification, how words are linked and deployed on the page. I
needed a way to get “the world” onto the page (bits of dialogue,
scenes, other voices, “facts”), as well as the mind acting on, ordering,
resisting it. This sounds like the way I earlier described The Cantos—
how Pound managed to create a texture which seemed to allow
anything into the poem without changing its identity. Pound does this,
predominantly, by using the “ideogram,” the “ideogrammic method”:
by placing image next to im- age, quotation next to quotation, bit of
cultural artifact next to bit of cultural artifact, allowing “meaning” to
arise from the juxtapositions. The result is that the page often feels
essentially static (though also often giving a sense of “sudden
illumination” or “sudden liberation”). This static (though luminous)
texture just did not feel like my experience of the mind, the way the
mind acts upon and within the world. I needed a way to embody the
mind moving through the elements of its world, actively contending
with and organizing them, while they somehow retain the illusion of
their independence and nature, are felt as “out there” or “other.”
Slowly I stumbled toward “deploying” the words on the page
through voice; syntax; punctuation. (By “punctuation” I mean not
merely commas, periods, et cetera, but line breaks, stanza breaks,

capital letters—all the ways that speed and tension and emphasis can
be marked.)
MH: I’ve heard you talk, many times, about “voice” and
“punctuation” in your work, but not “syntax.” How is it connected in
your mind with the others?
FB: Syntax—the way words are linked to make phrases, phrases to
make sentences, even sentences to make “paragraphs”—has had a
huge effect on the punctuation of my poems. Often the syntax is
extremely elaborate. As the voice moves through what it is talking
about—trying to lay out, acknowledge, organize the “material”—it
needs dependent clauses, interjections, unfinished phrases, sometimes
whole sentences in apposition. The only way I can sufficiently
articulate this movement, express the relative weight and importance
of the parts of the sentence—so that the reader knows where he or she
is and the “weight” the speaker is placing on the various elements that
are being laid out—is punctuation. In “Confessional,” in the section
based on Augustine, whole typed pages are single sentences (the
sentences are longer than Augustine’s own). Punctuation allows me to
“lay out” the bones of a sentence visually, spatially, so that the reader
can see the pauses, emphases, urgencies and languors in the voice.
The punctuation of my poems has become increasingly elaborate;
I’m ambivalent about this. I feel I’ve been forced into it—without the
heavy punctuation, again and again I seemed not to be able to get the
movement and voice “right.” The Nijinsky poem was a nightmare.
There is a passage early in it that I got stuck on, and didn’t solve for
two years. Undoubtedly there were a number of reasons for this; the
poem scared me. Both the fact that I thought it was the best thing I

had done, and Nijinsky’s ferocity, the extent to which his mind
is radical, scared me. But the problem was also that the movement of
his voice is so mercurial, and paradoxical: many simple declarative
sentences, then a long, self-loathing, twisted-against-itself sentence.
The volume of the voice (from very quiet to extremely loud) was new;
I found that many words and phrases had to be not only entirely
capitalized, but in italics.
Discovering punctuation that you haven’t used before, because
you need it, is hard. Probably the crucial instance of this, for me, was
in “Golden State” (the poem). The phrase I couldn’t get right is in the
eighth section: “The exacerbation / of this seeming necessity / for
connection.” The problem was the punctuation following
“connection.” The entire phrase (three lines long) comes as a kind of
pained distillate or residue of everything above it on the page; it must
seem itself both a result, and blocked; the next lines are about what in
reality preceded it, and what is “beneath” it both on the page and as
cause. I punctuated the lines differently for months, to the point where
my friends winced when I pulled out a new version. The solution I
finally found is “double-punctuation”: a dash followed by a
semicolon. Coming to it was so hard that I felt I had discovered this
mark, this notation, all by myself. Later I found it in poems I had
known very well—in “Grandparents” from Life Studies, for example.
But because I hadn’t understood it before, understood its necessity, I’d
never seen it. (Finding the capitalized “MYSELF” in “Herbert White”
was also a long drama—I couldn’t get the word right until I saw a
capitalized “MOI” in Valéry’s “La Jeune Parque.”)
James has a wonderful phrase: “the thrilling ups and downs of the
compositional problem.”

MH: And now your third term—“voice.”
FB: Surely the logic—or self-serving calculation—of everything I’ve
said now is clear. The nature of syntax and punctuation has to proceed
from the demands, the nature, of the voice. (In the “Genesis”
translation, for example—where whatever speaks the poem couldn’t
be more different from the voices usually in my poems—the
punctuation is quite spare and simple, except for capitalization.)
A little more history is relevant here. The teacher I was closest to
at Riverside was Tom Edwards—he is a great teacher. His sophomore
survey course, “The English Literary Tradition,” was the place that I
feel I first learned how to pay attention to the details of a poem, to
how it is made. The importance of “voice” and “tone of voice” was at
the heart of what I learned. Edwards’s teacher had been Reuben
Brower, and Brower’s teacher (or almost teacher) at Amherst was
Frost. “Tone of voice” and “speaker” were crucial terms for Brower,
and of course for Frost. Frost has the great statement about “voice”:
A dramatic necessity goes deep into the nature of the sentence. Sentences
are not different enough to hold the attention unless they are dramatic. No
ingenuity of varying structure will do. All that can save them is the
speaking tone of voice somehow entangled in the words and fastened to
the page for the ear of the imagination. That is all that can save poetry
from sing-song, all that can save prose from itself.

I only read those sentences in graduate school, but I had absorbed
them (or been absorbed by them), through Edwards, just at the time I
was first seriously studying poetry. For Frost, this emphasis on “the
speaking tone of voice” isn’t separate from the importance of meter:
“The possibilities for tune from the dramatic tones of meaning struck
across the rigidity of a limited meter are endless.” In Frost’s terms, my

poems—which rely so nakedly on voice, where everything in the
prosody is in the service of the voice—just are “playing tennis without
the net.”
But he acknowledges how mysterious and peculiar these questions
are: “the speaking tone of voice somehow entangled in the words and
fastened to the page for the ear of the imagination.” My work has been
a long odyssey struggling to find ways to accomplish this
“entangling” and “fastening”—a journey which starts in my own “ear
of the imagination,” and hopes to end there in the reader.
When I write, I always hear a “voice” in my head; and I always
write in lines. I’ve never written a poem first as prose and then broken
it into lines. The voice only embodies itself in words as the words
break themselves in lines. (This movement is felt physically, in my
body.) “Syntax” is dependent on this; the sentence can only take on a
certain shape, have a certain syntax, as the voice finds that the
sentence can be extended—can take on “new materials,” and shape
itself—across the lines.
But I find that at the most intense moments the line breaks are
often not quite right. And the punctuation of the poem, including
spaces between stanzas, initially is never right. The final punctuation
is not an attempt to make the poem look the way I read it aloud;
rather, the way I read it aloud tries to reproduce what I hear in my
head. But once I finally get the typed page to the point where it does
seem “right”—where it does seem to reproduce the voice I hear—
something very odd happens: the “being” of the poem suddenly
becomes the poem on paper, and no longer the “voice” in my head.
The poem on paper suddenly seems a truer embodiment of the poem’s
voice than what I still hear in my head. I’ve learned to trust this when
it happens—at that point, the entire process is finished.

MH: How does what you’ve said about prosody connect with the
“subject matter” of Golden State?
FB: When I first faced the central importance of “subject matter,” I
knew what I would have to begin by writing about. In the baldest
terms, I was someone who had grown up obsessed with his parents.
The drama of their lives dominated what, at the deepest
level, I thought about. Contending with them (and with the worlds of
Bakersfield and Bishop, California, where I had grown up) was how I
had learned—in the words of Bruno Walter about Bruckner and
Mahler, which I quote in “Golden State”—to “think my life.”
The great model for such poems was of course Life Studies. I had
read it soon after it came out, and like so many others was knocked
over. But I knew that Lowell’s experience of the world he came from,
and himself as an actor in it, was very different from my experience.
Lowell’s poems were written when he was around forty, and seemed
to me to communicate an overwhelmingly grim, helpless sense that
the dragons in his life were simply like that. At seven, he was
“bristling and manic”—without any sense of cause. “Tamed by
Miltown, we lie on Mother’s bed; / the rising sun in war paint dyes us
red”: these poems are great glowing static panels in brilliant
supersaturated technicolor, a world that refuses knowledge of
the causes beneath it, without chance for change or escape.
But I was twenty-six, not forty—and my poems had to be about
trying to figure out why the past was as it was, what patterns and
powers kept me at its mercy (so I could change, and escape). The
prosody of my poems could not reflect the eloquent, brilliantly
concrete world of Life Studies; it had to express a drama of processes,
my attempts to organize and order, and failures to organize and order.

It had to dramatize the moments when I felt I had learned the terrible
wisdom of the past (so I could unlearn it).
So rather than trying to replicate Life Studies, I was engaged in an
argument with it. If Life Studies had done what I felt my poems had to
do, I’m sure I couldn’t have written them. Later, when I met Lowell—
in 1966, after I’d written “California Plush” but before “Golden
State”—I found that he shared this conscious sense of being engaged
in an argument with the past. He liked to quote Edward Young: “He
who imitates the Iliad does not imitate Homer.”
MH: So he was not your teacher, then, in the sense of being the
central guiding voice in your mind as you built that book.
FB: I didn’t learn a prosody from him; and I certainly didn’t want to
write the poems he had already written. I somehow always knew that
“what I had to say” was different from what he was saying; that’s
why, I think, though I got tremendously close to him and his work in
later years, I never felt that as an artist I was about to be annihilated.
But much before I met him, I had known his work extremely well
—I had admired it, and learned from it, in the way that I admired and
learned from Eliot and Pound. And later, I sat and listened to him in
class, for years; it would be impossible to listen to a mind that various
and inventive and surprising and learned and iconoclastic and
craftsmanlike, without learning things. The fact that later I could be
useful, both as a reader of his poems and a friend, to someone I so
much revered, was a profound event in my life: a healing event. I saw
him in every kind of vicissitude, from insanity to suffering gratuitous
humiliations; he grew in my eyes, the more intimately I knew him.

MH: When did you begin to write dramatic monologues?
FB: “Herbert White” begins Golden State, and was written at the
same time as the family poems. I wanted to make a Yeatsian “antiself”— someone who was “all that I was not,” whose way of “solving
problems” was the opposite of that of the son in the middle of the
book. The son’s way (as I have said) involves trying to “analyze” and
“order” the past, in order to reach “insight”; Herbert White’s is to give
himself to a violent pattern growing out of the dramas of his past, a
pattern that consoles him as long as he can feel that someone else has
acted within it. I imagined him as a voice coming from a circle in
Hell. The fact that he is an “anti-self” only has some meaning, I
thought, if he shares something fundamental with me; I gave him a
family history related to my own. He has another embodiment at the
end of the book: the “MONSTER” who can only face his nature if he
“splits apart,” and who asks the “I” of the poem to help him to do so. I
put “Herbert White” at the beginning because I felt the book had to
begin “at the bottom”—in the mind of someone for whom the issues
in the book were in the deepest disorder. He is the chaos everything
else in the book struggles to get out of.
So “Herbert White” wasn’t an escape from the world of the family
poems—but I think the dramatic monologues I’ve written since are.
Golden State did in fact do for me what I wanted it to do; I felt I had
been able to “get all the parts of the problem” out there. I’ve never
had to write about my father or Bakersfield again. (Will I?) It seemed
to settle those issues for me. It drained those subjects of their
obsessive power.
I think that it did this because I was able to “get all the parts of the
problem” out there. My mother isn’t at the center of Golden State, and

as I’ve said, the poem about her in my second book didn’t seem to me
deep enough or true enough. I hope “Confessional” completes
something.
MH: Can you say more about the dramatic monologues you’ve
written since “Herbert White”? Are the concerns beneath them as
“personal”?
FB: I’ve never been able to get past Yeats’s statement that out of our
argument with others we make rhetoric, out of our argument with
ourselves we make poetry. At times that’s seemed to me the
profoundest thing ever said about poetry.
Williams said, “No ideas but in things”—but by that he didn’t
mean “no ideas.” His work is full of ideas, full of “arguments with
himself.” By the end of another poem he manages to convince us that
“The pure products of America / go crazy” (an idea), as well as that
this most American of writers is riven to say it. The drive to
conceptualize, to understand our lives, is as fundamental and
inevitable as any other need. So a poem must include it, make it part
of its “action.” The ideas that are articulated in the course of the action
don’t “solve” or eradicate or end it, if the drama is true enough or
important enough, any more than they do in the action of our lives.
So the dramatic monologues I’ve written since Golden State,
insofar as they are animated by “arguments with myself,” don’t seem
to me any less (or more) “personal.” The books have been animated
by issues: issues revolving around the “mind-body” relation in The
Book of the Body; “guilt” (and ramifications) in The Sacrifice. No
genuine issue, in my experience, has an “answer” or “solution.” But
the argument within oneself about them is still inevitable and

necessary. In “Ellen West” and the Nijinsky poem, I didn’t feel I was
“making up” the drama—they were there, and I felt that to write the
poems I had to let them (both the voices and the issues their lives
embody the torments and dilemmas of) enter me. Of course they were
already inside me (though I still had to let them in).
The most intense version of this that I’ve ever experienced
happened with the Nijinsky poem. It was written in about a month,
and during that month there was an independent voice in my head that
insistently had things to say. I knew that I was, in effect, feeding it
things, feeding it things I had thought about; but the voice had an
identity and presence in my head that seemed independent of my
conscious mind, and I was not simply telling it when to talk and when
not to talk. On the contrary, the minute I would finish a section, the
voice would begin making up new sentences and obsessing about the
next stage of the drama. And one reason I felt certain that the poem
was finished when it was finished, that the “action” was completed,
was that at the end of the poem the voice just disappeared. The voice
had no more to say: when I wrote the last line of the poem, the voice
just ceased.
MH: At the beginning of this interview, you said something enigmatic
about “the struggle to make life show itself in a work of art.”
FB: There is a scene in “Herbert White” in which he is looking out the
window of his room at home, and feels suffocated by the fact that
everything is “just there, just there, doing nothing! / not saying
anything!” He wants to see beneath the skin of the street, to see (in
Wordsworth’s terms) “into the life of things,” and cannot. It’s of
course me feeling that. So much of our ordinary lives seems to refuse

us—seems almost dedicated to denying us—knowledge of what is
beneath the relatively unexceptionable surface of repeated social and
economic relations.
The artist’s problem is to make life show itself. Homer, Aeschylus,
Vergil, Shakespeare—a great deal of Western art has made life show
itself by dramatizing crisis and disaster. Lear, in his speech about
“pomp,” says that when he was king he saw nothing. Success, good
fortune, power cut him off from seeing into the nature of things. Out
of his blindness and vanity, he performs the stupid act that precipitates
his “fall.” But when he does fall, he sees much more than simply his
former blindness, his stupidity. He can’t stop from falling—from
discovering our ineradicable poverty, and defying the heavens to
“change or cease.” In the course of the play, Lear “learns” things, but
the play couldn’t exactly be called the story of his education: Cordelia
dies, and he dies.
When Lear “falls,” the forces that before were present—but
dormant, unseen, unacknowledged—then manifest themselves. (Only
then.)
Many other works of art of course are “the story of an education.”
Wordsworth’s “spots of time” and Joyce’s “epiphanies” were
moments they eagerly hoarded and clung to—for these moments
seemed to them moments of true insight, with emblematic force, the
story of the true education of their souls. They embedded these
moments in narrative contexts, in actions, dramatizing their access to
them.
Again and again, insight is dramatized by showing the conflict
between what is ordinarily seen, ordinarily understood, and what now
is experienced as real. Cracking the shell of the world; or finding that
the shell is cracking under you.

The unrealizable ideal is to write as if the earth opened and spoke.
I think that if the earth did speak, she would espouse no one set of
values, affections, meanings, that everything embraced would also
somehow be annihilated or denied.

INTERVIEW WITH ADAM TRAVIS

Bookslut, June 2005

ADAM TRAVIS: So far you’ve published “The First Hour of the
Night,” “The Second Hour of the Night,” and “TheThird Hour of the
Night”—what is the inspiration for this project? That is, what made
you want to do this? Where is it going? Does the project have a name?
FRANK BIDART: The myth behind the series of poems is the
Egyptian “Book of Gates,” which is inscribed on the sarcophagus of
Seti I. Each night during the twelve hours of the night the sun must
pass through twelve territories of the underworld before it can rise
again at dawn. Each hour is marked by a new gate, the threshold to a
new territory.
Each poem in the series is an hour we must pass through before
the sun can rise again. I don’t know what will make moral and
intellectual clarity and coherence rise again: I could never write
twelve “hours.” But were the sun to rise again, it would have to pass
through something like these territories.
I’ve written only three “hours” over something like seventeen
years. I’m sixty-six: I’ll be lucky if I can write one more. I like the
idea that I’m involved in a project that can’t be completed: the project
corresponds to how things are.
AT: What is your favorite hour of the night? (I mean literally. Not

which poem.)
FB: It’s easier to say which poem I like best! Of course, the way that I
imagine each“territory” that the sun must pass through to rise again is
different from the waysomeone else would imagine it. The “First
Hour” is about the collapse of Western metaphysics, the attempt to
make a single conceptual system that ordersthe crucial intellectual
issues and dilemmas in our lives. At the end of thepoem there is a
dream that suggests the birth of something like phenomenology, the
phenomenological ground out of which art springs, that survives
thedeath of metaphysical certainty. The “Second Hour” is about Eros,
how the“givenness” of Eros in our lives embodies the givenness of
fate. The “ThirdHour,” which ends my new book, is about making,
how “Making is the mirrorin which we see ourselves.” Making in the
poem, and the book as a whole, proceeds from the twins within us, the
impulse to create as well as not-to-create, to obliterate the world of
manifestation, to destroy. (One of the many warswithin us.)
I don’t imagine the poems printed together as a series, one “hour”
read after another hour. They are more like symphonies: you don’t
listen to Beethoven’s symphonies consecutively, as you at least
initially read the Iliad or even (perhaps) the Duino Elegies. But the
fact that Beethoven’s Fifth follows the Third and Fourth has meaning,
as does the fact that the “Pastorale” follows the Fifth.
AT: From the readers’ perspective, the project has the makings of
what one could call your Great Work. Do you have that kind of
ambition? The subjects and their presentation seem almost designed to
inspire awe. Is that what you’re after?

FB: I’m after something that will make some sense out of the chaos in
the world and within us. The result should be something that is, well,
“beautiful”: but beauty isn’t merely the pretty, or harmony, or
equilibrium. Rilke says beauty is the beginning of terror: I feel this
reading King Lear, or watching Red Desert.
AT: I like to memorize long poems (to show off). Would you think
me a fool for memorizing an hour of the night?
FB: If the pulse of the poem is right, if the essential movement of the
poem captures the essential pulse of the processes that the poem sees,
one should be able to memorize it. At one time I could say the whole
of “Second Hour” to myself, hearing the poem as I lay in bed.
AT: When “The Third Hour of the Night” (about Benvenuto Cellini)
appeared in the October 2004 issue of Poetry, readers seemed to react
only in one of two ways: awe or outrage. One common complaint was
that the poem took up the entire issue (besides the “Comment”
section). The logic here being that the poem is, supposedly, not good
enough to have its own issue. Another complaint was that the poem
read too much like prose, or was too obscure or esoteric or whatever.
The final complaint was something like revulsion. The poem contains
disturbing scenes of murder and some sort of ritual/sexual violence.
These complaints beg a couple of questions: “How much of a long
poem can actually consist of ‘poetry’?” And: “These poems really are
very violent. Why?”
FB: If a poem is any good, I don’t think of some parts as “poetry” and
other parts as “not poetry.” Each line has to be written with a feeling
for its place in the shape, the pulse of the whole: if it does that, it is

authentically part of the whatness of the thing. It then has its own
eloquence.
I think the question of violence is only a question because people
think of poetry as lyric poetry. In lyric there is often a great deal of
psychic violence, but usually little (say) murder. (Even in Browning’s
lyrics.) A heart gets eaten in the first sonnet of Dante’s “Vita Nuova,”
but that is the exception.
But violence is at the heart of Dante’s long poem, as it is incessant
in Shakespeare. Or Sophocles. It is offstage, but barely, in Racine. It
is not offstage in Virgil.
AT: Can you explain what’s going on in the last, very violent scene of
“The Third Hour of the Night”?
With my thumb over the end of the killing stick
I jabbed her Mount of Venus until her skin pushed
back up to her navel. Her large intestine
protruded as though it were red calico.
With my thumb over the end of the killing stick
each time she inhaled
I pushed my arm
in a little. When she exhaled, I stopped. Little by little
I got my hand
inside her. Finally I touched her heart.
Once you reach what is
inside it is outside.

FB: This is from a four-page monologue that is based on the words of
an Australian sorcerer, found in a book by Mircea Eliade on the
history of religions. With an appalling neutrality and evenness of tone
the speaker is describing a kind of rape. At first you think he is also
describing a killing, that he has murdered the woman. (The
anthropologist quoted in Eliade says that in his village he is known as
a murderer.) Then he says that after touching her heart and covering
up the signs of what he has done, she begins to breathe again. He tells
her that she will live two days, that after two days she will die. She
gets up, and two days later dies.
The passage is clearly about the will to power, to possess the
woman by entering her, the fantasy of controlling her by determining
when she will die. I have no idea what “actually” happened. Did a
woman from his village simply die and the sorcerer imagine that he
had control over this process? Or did he rape, and later murder her?
On the literal level, his report cannot be believed: he could not have
done what he reports doing. He has tried to master whatever happened
by constructing a narrative that could not literally be true.
What is true is the will to power. He fantasizes that he has the
same power that the third Fate, earlier in the poem, has: the power to
determine when someone dies. He admits he cannot keep the woman
alive forever: all he can do is determine when the thread of life is slit.
In the poem he says this power is the same power the gods have:
“Even the gods cannot / end death.” After his psychic rape of the
woman, which involves the attempt to touch and therefore know her
“heart,” all he can do is turn her into a kind of puppet: he tells her she
will live two days, and she then enacts this. This is a terrible parody of
what Cellini does earlier in the poem, when he saves the almost-

ruined statue of Perseus and “what was dead [was] brought to life
again.” It is the terrible, negative version of the injunction the central
consciousness of the whole poem hears after the monologue by the
sorcerer: he “must fashion out of the corruptible / body a new body
good to eat a thousand years.” (Which is to say, echoing “Howl,” that
one must try to make what in despair one feels is impossible to make,
a good poem.)
The whole book is about making, how the desire to make is built
into us, its necessities and pleasures and contradictions. The impulse
to make is itself neither good nor bad. It is a species of the will to
power, which is inseparable from survival and creation. It is
inseparable from the impulse to destroy. The most ferocious
enactment of the will to power always must confront metaphysical
and epistemological limits: in the poem (not in Eliade): “Once you
reach what is / inside it is outside.” Human beings constantly strive to
reach the heart of something: when they reach it they find it is only
another surface. Art strives to be that center that has reached the light,
and remains the center: in Ashbery’s brilliant phrase, the “visible
core.”

INTERVIEW WITH SHARA LESSLEY

National Book Foundation, October 2013

SHARA LESSLEY: In an effort to promote a literary event in
Bakersfield, a woman once rented a billboard that read FRANK BIDART IS
COMING HOME. Although you’ve been gone from California for some
time, there are poems in Metaphysical Dog that return there. Is there a
part of you that still inhabits the Golden State?
FRANK BIDART: The person who did that was a writer named Lee
McCarthy, who taught high school near Bakersfield. She was
terrifically gutsy, independent, courageous. She was angry that I had
been left out of a semiofficial anthology of California poets. She
invited me to read in Bakersfield, and arranged for the billboard to
startle anyone driving by.
Though I’ve now lived in New England much longer than my
years growing up in Bakersfield, I’ve never thought of myself as a
New Englander. I’m deeply someone made in California, in
Bakersfield. Elizabeth Bishop has a wonderful line, “Home-made,
home-made! But aren’t we all?” But if you make yourself in
California it’s different than if you make yourself in Massachusetts.
Class issues and assumptions, racial issues, manners are different. The
things you argue about in your head are different. I think the things
that are “Californian” about me have been modified as I’ve gotten
older, but haven’t changed in essence. Though everything I’ve written

has been an argument with the world I’m from, I’m no less a creature
of it. This is an enormous, labyrinthine subject, as it probably is for
any writer who felt wounded but made by the place he or she began.
Think of Joyce and Ireland.
SL: Hunger in Metaphysical Dog is exhausting but persistent. “Words
/ are flesh,” you write. The collection’s speakers crave the soul, the
absolute. Is desire for “the great addictions”—love, power, fame, god,
and art—a flaw? Or, is it simply what drives what you call the
“Ordinary divided unsimple heart”?
FB: I think they are what drive the ordinary divided unsimple heart.
Though it’s terrible to give in unqualifiedly to the desire for them, the
notion that one has eradicated them from oneself—or that you should
be ashamed you feel them—is naive, an illusion, one more chimera.
No matter who or what you are, possessing whatever social or
economic stature you’ve been born into or achieved, hunger is
universal—hunger for something you don’t possess, once thought
important. Everyone feels grief for the unlived life. But not every
addiction is equal. I tell my students that it’s better to be addicted to
Astaire and Rogers movies than to heroin. The notion that, short of
death, one is going to be totally free of addictions is one more way of
torturing oneself.
SL: “Writing ‘Ellen West’” revisits your well-known poem on
anorexia. Like Ellen, you claim, “he was obsessed / with eating and
the arbitrariness of gender and having to / have a body” (emphasis
mine). As a narrative strategy, why transform yourself into a character
via the third person?

FB: It’s a way of making fact available to art. To write about oneself
as a character—to think about oneself as a character—opens up space
between the “I” and the author. (In this sense, calling the I “he” is
only a way of making inescapable this space. You can write as an “I”
and still think of yourself as a character.) The space is necessary
because the work isn’t going to be any good if it is merely a subtle
form of self-justification, if one is supine before the romance of the
self. Not that self-justification is ever wholly absent.
SL: Image is often exploited as a means of generating feeling or
propelling the contemporary poem’s plot. Metaphysical Dog, in
contrast, is stark—it draws its energy primarily from abstraction and
pattern-making. Do ideas incite your work rather than concrete
details?
FB: What’s crucial for any writer is to understand how your mind
apprehends meaning. How, in your experience, you apprehend
significance. Understand it and find a way to embody it, make it have
the force for the reader in a work of art that it has for you. Images,
what the eye sees, is of course part of this for everyone. But I think
tone of voice, situation, the look in an eye or on a face, are as much
part of what make up for me “meaning” as what traditionally people
think of as “images.” When Williams said, “No ideas but in things,”
that’s not an image. Pound’s “Down, Derry-down / Oh let an old man
rest,” is not an image. Pound was of course right when he said, “Go in
fear of abstractions.” Abstractions can smother the quick of feeling in
a poem. But reaching for abstractions and conceiving abstractions are
not separable from feeling for a human being. When Williams said,
“No ideas but in things,” he didn’t mean “no ideas.”

SL: I’m struck by how precisely the last ten lines of “Poem Ending
With a Sentence by Heath Ledger” characterize your life’s work:
Once I have the voice
that’s
the line
and at
the end
of the line
is a hook
and attached
to that
is the soul.

How are you able to imagine and sustain such varied voices—the
sweeping dramatic monologues of your early collections, for instance,
versus the more intimate lyric and philosophical poems that populate
Metaphysical Dog?
FB: First of all, that sentence really is by Heath Ledger. When I saw it
printed in an interview, it was printed simply as prose. But I thought
there was a movement in it, an iron logic if you will, that would be
apprehended if it was set up in lines. I struggled over and over to do
so. I found that this movement was apprehensible if I used a form that
I have more and more used the longer I’ve written: a single line
followed by a two-line stanza, followed by another single line

followed by a two-line stanza. One followed by two followed by one
followed by two. I’ve found this form tremendously flexible; it
reveals the anatomy of many (but not all) sentences that, for me, are
eloquent. One magazine that printed the poem—a magazine that did
not send me proofs—eliminated all the stanza breaks, in an attempt to
save space. The poem was reduced to drivel. It’s how the words exist
in space that allows them, on the page, their eloquence.
Crucial to getting a character to speak in a poem is hearing in your
head as you write the way the character talks. Because a poem is made
up of words, speech is how the soul is embodied. (Ledger asserts, of
course, that even in a movie this is true.) What’s crucial is that how
the words are set down on the page not muffle the voice. When I first
began writing, writing the voice down in the ways conventional in
contemporary practice seemed to muffle or kill the voice I still heard
in my head. If I lost that voice, I knew I had lost everything. I’m
grateful to Ledger for saying more succinctly than I have ever been
able to what I had felt since I began writing.
SL: “I don’t know the value of what I’ve written,” said Robert
Lowell, “but I know that I changed the game.” Your poems—with
their typographical innovations, mining of the paradoxical,
psychological complexity—have been game changers for so many of
us. What about your own work or the process of making poems
continues to surprise you?
FB: Nothing is better about writing than the passages about writing in
Eliot’s Four Quartets. “A raid on the inarticulate / With shabby
equipment always deteriorating”; “the intolerable wrestle / With
words and meanings.” The solutions that I felt I found aren’t going to

be the solutions that work for someone else. But I’ll be happy if my
poems seem to say to younger writers that you still can be as bold
about setting a poem down on the page as Wordsworth was or
Mallarmé was or Ben Jonson was or Pound was or Ginsberg and
Lowell and Bishop were. Getting the dynamics and voice down are
what’s crucial. Whatever it takes to get the whole soul into a poem.
An emphasis on voice isn’t fashionable in contemporary practice. I
hope my poems make people reconsider that.

Index of Titles
The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not
match the pages in your eBook. Please use the search function on your
eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference,
the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.
Across Infinities Without Sentience
Adolescence
Advice to the Players
After Catullus
Against Rage
American in Hollywood, An
Another Life
Arc, The
As the Eye to the Sun
As You Crave Soul
Book of Life
Book of Night
Book of the Body, The
Borges and I
By These Waters
California Plush
Candidate
Catullus: Excrucior
Catullus: Id faciam

Catullus: Odi et amo
Coat
Coin for Joe, with the Image of a Horse; c350–325 B.C., A
Collector
Confessional
Curse
Dark Night
Defrocked
Disappearing during sleep
Dream of the Book
Dream Reveals in Neon the Great Addictions
Elegy
Elegy for Earth
Ellen West
End of a Friendship
enterprise is abandoned, The
First Hour of the Night, The
For an Unwritten Opera
For Bill Nestrick (1940–96)
For Mary Ann Youngren
For the AIDS Dead
For the Twentieth Century
Fourth Hour of the Night, The
Ganymede
Genesis 1–2:4
Glutton
God’s Catastrophe in Our Time
Golden State
Guilty of Dust
Hadrian’s Deathbed
Half-light

Hammer
Happy Birthday
Heart Beat
He is Ava Gardner
Herbert White
History
Homo Faber
Hunger for the Absolute
Hymn
If I Could Mourn Like a Mourning Dove
If See No End In Is
Inauguration Day
Injunction
In Memory of Joe Brainard
In the Ruins
In the Western Night
Janáček at Seventy
Knot
Lady Bird
Lament for the Makers
Late Fairbanks
Legacy
Like
Like Lightning Across an Open Field
Little Fugue
Little O
Long and Short Lines
Love Incarnate
Luggage
Marilyn Monroe
Martha Yarnoz Bidart Hall

Metaphysical Dog
Mourn
Mouth
Music Like Dirt
Name the Bed
Now In Your Hand
Of His Bones Are Coral Made
Old and Young
Old Man at the Wheel, The
On This Earth Where No Secure Foothold Is
O ruin O haunted
Overheard Through the Walls of the Invisible City
Phenomenology of the Prick
Plea and Chastisement
Poem Ending With a Sentence by Heath Ledger
Poem Ending With Three Lines From “Home On the Range”
Poem in the Stanza of the “Rubaiyat”
Poem Is a Veil, The
Presage
Queer
Race
Radical Jesus
Return, The
Rio
Romain Clerou
Sacrifice, The
Sanjaya at 17
Second Hour of the Night, The
Seduction
Self-Portrait, 1969

Soldier Who Guards the Frontier, The
Song (At night inside in the light)
Song (You know that it is there, lair)
Song of the Mortar and Pestle
Stanzas Ending with the Same Two Words
Star Dust
Sum
Things Falling From Great Heights
Third Hour of the Night, The
Thirst
Those Nights
Three Tattoos
Threnody on the Death of Harriet Smithson
To My Father
To the Dead
To the Republic
Tu Fu Watches the Spring Festival Across Serpentine Lake
Tyrant
Ulanova At Forty-Six At Last Dances Before a Camera Giselle
Under Julian, c362 A.D.
Valentine
Vergil Aeneid 1.1–33
Visions at 74
War of Vaslav Nijinsky, The
Watching the Spring Festival
Whitman
Winter Spring Summer Fall
With Each Fresh Death the Soul Rediscovers Woe
Writing “Ellen West”
Yoke, The
You Cannot Rest

Young Marx
You remain …

ALSO BY FRANK BIDART
Golden State
The Book of the Body
The Sacrifice
In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965–90
Desire
Star Dust
Watching the Spring Festival
Metaphysical Dog
AS EDITOR

The Collected Poems of Robert Lowell
(with David Gewanter)

A Note About the Author

Credits for author photos (clockwise from top left) are as follows: by Thomas
Victor; by Jerry Bauer; by James Franco; by Emma Dodge Hanson

Frank Bidart is the author of Metaphysical Dog (FSG, 2013),
Watching the Spring Festival (FSG, 2008), Star Dust (FSG, 2005),
Desire (FSG, 1997), and In the Western Night: Collected Poems
1965–90 (FSG, 1990). He has won many prizes, including the
Wallace Stevens Award, the 2007 Bollingen Prize in American
Poetry, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He teaches at

Wellesley College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. You can
sign up for email updates here.

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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice

IN THE WESTERN NIGHT: POEMS 1965–90
In the Western Night

1990

To the Dead
Dark Night
In the Western Night
Poem in the Stanza of the “Rubaiyat”
In the Ruins
Guilty of Dust
THE SACRIFICE

1983

The War of Vaslav Nijinsky
For Mary Ann Youngren
Catullus: Odi et amo
Confessional
The Sacrifice
Genesis 1–2:4

THE BOOK OF THE BODY

1977

The Arc
Happy Birthday
Elegy
The Book of the Body
Ellen West
GOLDEN STATE

1973

Part One
Herbert White
Self-Portrait, 1969
Part Two
California Plush
Book of Life
Golden State
Part Three
Vergil Aeneid 1.1–33
After Catullus
To My Father
Another Life
The First Hour of the Night
Now In Your Hand

1990

You remain. . .
By These Waters
Long and Short Lines
Book of Night
The First Hour of the Night

DESIRE (1997)
I

As the Eye to the Sun
Love Incarnate
Overheard Through the Walls of the Invisible City
Adolescence
Catullus: Excrucior
Borges and I
Homo Faber
In Memory of Joe Brainard
The Yoke
Lady Bird
If I Could Mourn Like a Mourning Dove
The Return
A Coin for Joe, with the Image of a Horse; c350–325 B.C.
II

The Second Hour of the Night

STAR DUST (2005)

I. MUSIC LIKE DIRT

For the Twentieth Century
Music Like Dirt
Young Marx
For Bill Nestrick (1940–96)
Little Fugue
Advice to the Players
Stanzas Ending with the Same Two Words
The Poem Is a Veil
Luggage
Hammer
Injunction
Heart Beat
Legacy
Lament for the Makers
II

Curse
Knot
Phenomenology of the Prick
The Soldier Who Guards the Frontier
Romain Clerou
Hadrian’s Deathbed
Song
Star Dust
The Third Hour of the Night

WATCHING THE SPRING FESTIVAL (2008)
Marilyn Monroe
Tu Fu Watches the Spring Festival Across Serpentine Lake
The Old Man at the Wheel
Like Lightning Across an Open Field
You Cannot Rest
Poem Ending With Three Lines From “Home On the Range”
An American in Hollywood
Seduction
Catullus: Id faciam
Song of the Mortar and Pestle
Valentine
With Each Fresh Death the Soul Rediscovers Woe
Sanjaya at 17
Winter Spring Summer Fall
Ulanova At Forty-Six At Last Dances Before a Camera Giselle
Under Julian, c362 A.D.
Candidate
Coat
To the Republic
God’s Catastrophe in Our Time
Little O
Watching the Spring Festival
Hymn
If See No End In Is
Song

*
Collector

METAPHYSICAL DOG (2013)
ONE

Metaphysical Dog
Writing “Ellen West”
Like

: Hunger for the Absolute

TWO

Those Nights
Name the Bed
Queer
History
Hunger for the Absolute
Defrocked
He is Ava Gardner
Mourn
The enterprise is abandoned.
Janáček at Seventy
Threnody on the Death of Harriet Smithson

: History is a series of failed revelations

THREE

Dream of the Book
Inauguration Day

Race
Glutton
Whitman
FOUR

Three Tattoos
As You Crave Soul
Things Falling From Great Heights
O ruin O haunted
Plea and Chastisement
Martha Yarnoz Bidart Hall
Late Fairbanks
Against Rage
For the AIDS Dead
Tyrant
Mouth
Rio
Presage
Elegy for Earth
FIVE

Of His Bones Are Coral Made
Poem Ending With a Sentence by Heath Ledger
Dream Reveals in Neon the Great Addictions
Ganymede
On This Earth Where No Secure Foothold Is
For an Unwritten Opera

THIRST (NEW POEMS, 2016)
PART ONE

Old and Young
Half-light
Across Infinities Without Sentience
End of a Friendship
Sum
Thirst
PART TWO

Disappearing during sleep
The Fourth Hour of the Night
Radical Jesus
Visions at 74
Note on the Text
Notes
Interviews
WITH MARK HALLIDAY
WITH ADAM TRAVIS
WITH SHARA LESSLEY

Index of Titles
Also by Frank Bidart
A Note About the Author
Copyright

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2017 by Frank Bidart
All rights reserved
First edition, 2017
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from Existence: A New Dimension in
Psychiatry and Psychology by Rollo May, copyright © 1958. Reprinted by permission of Basic Books, a
member of The Perseus Books Group.
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First eBook edition: August 2017

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berries not by the work of our hands, berries not by the work of our
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Incarnadine

Also by Mary Szybist
Granted

INCARNADINE

POEMS
Mary Szybist

GRAYWOLF PRESS

Copyright © 2013 by Mary Szybist
This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State
Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and
cultural heritage fund, and through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, Amazon.com,

and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these
organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

Published by Graywolf Press

250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401
All rights reserved.
www.graywolfpress.org
Published in the United States of America
ISBN 978-1-55597-635-4

Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-330-8
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2012953979
Cover design: Jeenee Lee Design
Cover art: Botticelli, Sandro (1444–1510). Annunciation. Tempera on wood, 150 × 156 cm. Inv.
1608. Uffizi, Florence, Italy. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

FOR Jerry Harp
Cor ad cor loquitur

Contents
The Troubadours Etc.
Annunciation (from the grass beneath them)
Conversion Figure
Annunciation in Nabokov and Starr
Heroine as She Turns to Face Me
Update on Mary
Hail
Annunciation as Fender’s Blue Butterfly with Kincaid’s Lupine
Girls Overheard While Assembling a Puzzle
Invitation
Entrances and Exits
It Is Pretty to Think
Long after the Desert and Donkey
To Gabriela at the Donkey Sanctuary
Notes on a 39-Year-Old Body
Annunciation under Erasure
Close Reading
So-and-So Descending from the Bridge
I Send News: She Has Survived the Tumor after All
Another True Story
Annunciation in Byrd and Bush
On a Spring Day in Baltimore, the Art Teacher Asks the Class to Draw

Flowers
Touch Gallery: Joan of Arc
To the Dove within the Stone
Holy
How (Not) to Speak of God
Yet Not Consumed
On Wanting to Tell [

] about a Girl Eating Fish Eyes

Annunciation in Play
Too Many Pigeons to Count and One Dove
The Cathars Etc.
To You Again
Annunciation: Eve to Ave
Annunciation Overheard from the Kitchen
Night Shifts at the Group Home
Happy Ideas
Annunciation as Right Whale with Kelp Gulls
Here, There Are Blueberries
Do Not Desire Me, Imagine Me
Insertion of Meadow with Flowers
Knocking or Nothing
The Lushness of It

The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are
made into an object of affirmation and negation,
when in reality they should be an object of
contemplation.
—SIMONE WEIL, GRAVITY AND GRACE
Repose had again incarnadined her cheeks.

—THOMAS HARDY, FAR FROM THE
MADDING CROWD

The Troubadours Etc.
Just for this evening, let’s not mock them.
Not their curtsies or cross-garters
or ever-recurring pepper trees in their gardens
promising, promising.
At least they had ideas about love.
All day we’ve driven past cornfields, past cows poking their heads
through metal contraptions to eat.
We’ve followed West 84, and what else?
Irrigation sprinklers fly past us, huge wooden spools in the fields,
lounging sheep, telephone wires,
yellowing flowering shrubs.
Before us, above us, the clouds swell, layers of them,
the violet underneath of clouds.
Every idea I have is nostalgia. Look up:
there is the sky that passenger pigeons darkened and filled—
darkened for days, eclipsing sun, eclipsing all other sound
with the thunder of their wings.
After a while, it must have seemed that they followed
not instinct or pattern but only
one another.
When they stopped, Audubon observed,
they broke the limbs of stout trees by the weight of the numbers.
And when we stop we’ll follow—what?
Our hearts?
The Puritans thought that we are granted the ability to love
only through miracle,

but the troubadours knew how to burn themselves through,
how to make themselves shrines to their own longing.
The spectacular was never behind them.
Think of days of those scarlet-breasted, blue-winged birds above you.
Think of me in the garden, humming
quietly to myself in my blue dress,
a blue darker than the sky above us, a blue dark enough for storms,
though cloudless.
At what point is something gone completely?
The last of the sunlight is disappearing
even as it swells—
Just for this evening, won’t you put me before you
until I’m far enough away you can
believe in me?
Then try, try to come closer—
my wonderful and less than.

Annunciation (from the grass beneath them)
how many moments did it hover before we felt
it was like nothing else, it was not bird
light as a mosquito, the aroma of walnut husks
while the girl’s knees pressed into us
every spear of us rising, sunlit and coarse
the wild bees murmuring through
what did you feel when it was almost upon us when
even the shadows her chin made
never touched but reached just past
the crushed mint, the clover clustered between us
how cool would you say it was
still cool from the clouds
how itchy the air
the girl tilted and lurched and then
we rose up to it, held ourselves tight
when it skimmed just the tips of our blades
didn’t you feel softened

no, not even its flickering trembled

Conversion Figure
I spent a long time falling
toward your slender, tremulous face—
a long time slipping through stars
as they shattered, through sticky clouds
with no confetti in them.
I fell toward earth’s stony colors
until they brightened, until I could see
the green and white stripes of party umbrellas
propped on your daisied lawn.
From above, you looked small
as an afterthought, something lightly brushed in.
Beside you, blush-pink plates
served up their pillowy cupcakes, and your rosy hems
swirled round your dark head—
I fell and fell.
I fell toward the pulse in your thighs,
toward the cool flamingo of your slip
fluttering past your knees—
Out of God’s mouth I fell
like a piece of ripe fruit
toward your deepening shadow.
Girl on the lawn without sleeves, knees bare even of lotion,
time now to strip away everything
you try to think about yourself.
Put down your little dog.

Stop licking the cake from your fingers.
Before today, what darkness
did you let into your flesh? What stillness
did you cast into the soil?
Lift up your head.
Time to enter yourself.
Time to make your own sorrow.
Time to unbrighten and discard
even your slenderness.

Annunciation in Nabokov and Starr
(from The Starr Report and Nabokov’s Lolita)
I simply can’t tell you how gentle, how touching she was.
I knocked, and she opened the door.
She was holding her hem in her hands.
I simply can’t tell you how gentle, how calm she was
during her cooperation. In the windowless hallway,
I bent toward her.
She was quiet as a cloud.
She touched her mouth with her damp-smelling hand.
There was no lake behind us, no arbor in flame-flower.
There was a stone wall the dull white of vague orchards in bloom.
When she stood up to gather the almost erasable
scents into the damp folds
of her blue dress—
When she walked through the Rose Garden,
its heavy, dove-gray air,
dizzy with something unbreathable—
There was something soft and moist about her,
a dare, a rage, an intolerable tenderness.
How could I have known
what the sky would do? It was awful to watch
its bright shapes churn and zero
through her, knowing
her body looked like anyone’s body

paused at the edge of the garden.

Heroine as She Turns to Face Me
Just before the curtain closes, she turns
toward me, loosening
her gauzy veil & bright hair—
This, she seems to say, this
to create scene, the pure sweep of it,
this to give in, feel the lushness,
this & just a little theatrical lighting
& you, too, can be happy,
she’s sure of it—
It’s as if I cut her heart-whole from the sky,
rag & twist & tongue & the now terrible speed
of her turning
toward me like the spirit
I meant to portray, indefatigable—
see how bravely she turns, how exactly true to the turning,
& in the turning
most herself,
as she arranges herself for the exit
withholding nothing, unraveling
the light in her hair as her face
her bright, unapproachable face
says only that
whatever the next scene is,
she will fill it.

Update on Mary
Mary always thinks that as soon as she gets a few more things done and
finishes the dishes, she will open herself to God.
At the gym Mary watches shows about how she should dress herself, so
each morning she tries on several combinations of skirts and heels before
retreating to her waterproof boots. This takes a long time, so Mary is
busy.
Mary can often be observed folding the laundry or watering the plants. It
is only when she has a simple, repetitive task that her life feels orderly,
and she feels that she is not going to die before she is supposed to die.
Mary wonders if she would be a better person if she did not buy so many
almond cookies and pink macaroons.
When people say “Mary,” Mary still thinks Holy Virgin! Holy Heavenly
Mother! But Mary knows she is not any of those things.
Mary worries about not having enough words in her head.
Mary fills her cupboards with many kinds of teas so that she can select
from their pastel labels according to her mood: Tuscan Pear, Earl Grey
Lavender, Cherry Rose Green. But Mary likes only plain red tea and drinks
it from morning to night.
Mary has too many silver earrings and likes to sort them in the
compartments of her drawer.
Someday Mary would like to think about herself, but she’s not yet sure
what it means to think, and she’s even more confused about herself.
It is not uncommon to find Mary falling asleep on her yoga mat when

she has barely begun to stretch.
Mary sometimes closes her eyes and tries to imagine herself as a door
swung open. But it is easier to imagine pink macaroons—
Mary likes the solemn titles on her husband’s thick books. She feels
content and sleepy when he reads them beside her at night—The Works
of Saint Augustine, Critique of Judgment, Paradigm Change in Theology—but
she does not want to read them.
Mary secretly thinks she is pretty and therefore deserves to be loved.
Mary tells herself that if only she could have a child she could carry
around like an extra lung, the emptiness inside her would stop gnawing.
It’s hard to tell if she believes this.
Mary believes she is a sincere and serious person, but she does not even
try to pray.
Some afternoons Mary pretends to read a book, but mostly she watches
the patterns of sunlight through the curtains.
On those afternoons, she’s like a child who has run out of things to think
about.
Mary likes to go out and sit in the yard. If she let herself, she’d stare at
the sky all day.
The most interesting things to her are clouds. See, she watches them
even by moonlight. Tonight, until bedtime, we can let her have those.

Hail
Mary who mattered to me, gone or asleep
among fruits, spilled
in ash, in dust, I did not
leave you. Even now I can’t keep from
composing you, limbs and blue cloak
and soft hands. I sleep to the sound
of your name, I say there is no Mary
except the word Mary, no trace
on the dust of my pillowslip. I only
dream of your ankles brushed by dark violets,
of honeybees above you
murmuring into a crown. Antique queen,
the night dreams on: here are the pears
I have washed for you, here the heavy-winged doves,
asleep by the hyacinths. Here I am,
having bathed carefully in the syllables
of your name, in the air and the sea of them, the sharp scent
of their sea foam. What is the matter with me?
Mary, what word, what dust
can I look behind? I carried you a long way

into my mirror, believing you would carry me
back out. Mary, I am still
for you, I am still a numbness for you.

Annunciation as Fender’s Blue Butterfly with
Kincaid’s Lupine
The endangered Fender’s blue butterfly
associates, not with common lupines, but with the
very rare Kincaid’s lupine.
—NATIVE PLANT SOCIETY OF OREGON
But if I were this thing,
my mind a thousand times smaller than my wings,
if my fluorescent blue flutter
finally stumbled
into the soft
aqua throats of the blossoms,
if I lost my hunger
for anything else—
I’d do the same. I’d fasten myself
to the touch of the flower.
So what if the milky rims of my wings
no longer stupefied
the sky? If I could
bind myself to this moment, to the slow
snare of its scent,
what would it matter if I became
just the flutter of page
in a text someone turns

to examine me
in the wrong color?

Girls Overheard While Assembling a Puzzle
Are you sure this blue is the same as the
blue over there? This wall’s like the
bottom of a pool, its
color I mean. I need a
darker two-piece this summer, the kind with
elastic at the waist so it actually
fits. I can’t
find her hands. Where does this gold
go? It’s like the angel’s giving
her a little piece of honeycomb to eat.
I don’t see why God doesn’t
just come down and
kiss her himself. This is the red of that
lipstick we saw at the
mall. This piece of her
neck could fit into the light part
of the sky. I think this is a
piece of water. What kind of
queen? You mean
right here? And are we supposed to believe
she can suddenly
talk angel? Who thought this stuff
up? I wish I had a
velvet bikini. That flower’s the color of the
veins in my grandmother’s hands. I
wish we could
walk into that garden and pick an
X-ray to float on.
Yeah. I do too. I’d say a
zillion yeses to anyone for that.

Invitation
If I can believe in air, I can believe
in the angels of air.
Angels, come breathe with me.
Angel of abortion, angel of alchemy,
angels of barrenness and bliss,
exhale closer. Let me feel
your breath on my teeth—
I call to you, angels of embryos,
earthquakes, you of forgetfulness—
Angels of infection, cover my mouth
and nose with your mouth.
Failed inventions, tilt my head back.
Angels of prostitution and rain,
you of sheerness and sorrow,
you who take nothing,
breathe into me.
You who have cleansed your lips
with fire, I do not need to know
your faces, I do not need you
to have faces.
Angels of water insects, let me sleep
to the sound of your breathing.
You without lungs, make my chest rise—

Without you my air tastes
like nothing. For you
I hold my breath.

Entrances and Exits
In the late afternoon, my friend’s daughter walks into my office looking
for snacks. She opens the bottom file drawer to take out a bag of rice
cakes and a blue carton of rice milk that comes with its own straw. I
have been looking at a book of paintings by Duccio. Olivia eats. Bits of
puffed rice fall to the carpet.

A few hours ago, the 76-year-old woman, missing for two weeks in the
wilderness, was found alive at the bottom of a canyon. The men who
found her credit ravens. They noticed ravens circling—

Duccio’s Annunciation sits open on my desk. The slender angel (dark,
green-tipped wings folded behind him) reaches his right hand towards
the girl; a vase of lilies sits behind them. But the white dots above the
vase don’t look like lilies. They look like the bits of puffed rice scattered
under my desk. They look like the white fleck at the top of the painting
that means both spirit and bird.

Olivia, who is six, picks up the wooden kaleidoscope from my desk and,
holding it to her eye, turns it to watch the patterns honeycomb, the
colors tumble and change—

Today is the 6th of September. In six days, Russia will hold a day of
conception: couples will be given time off from work to procreate, and
those who give birth on Russia’s national day will receive money, cars,

refrigerators, and other prizes.

A six-hour drive from where I sit, deep in the Wallowa Mountains, the
woman spent at least six days drifting in and out of consciousness,
listening to the swellings of wind, the howls of coyotes, the shaggythroated ravens—

I turn on the radio. Because he died this morning, Pavarotti’s
immoderate, unnatural Cs ring out. He said that, singing these notes, he
was seized by an animal sensation so intense he would almost lose
consciousness.

Duccio’s subject is God’s entrance into time: time meaning history,
meaning a body.

No one knows how the woman survived in her light clothes, what she
ate and drank, or what she thought when she looked up into the
unkindness of ravens, their loops, their green and purple iridescence
flashing—

I think of honeybees. For months, whole colonies have been
disappearing from their hives. Where are the bodies? Some blame
droughts. Too few flowers, they say: too little nectar.

Consider the ravens. They neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse
nor barn, and yet God feeds them. (Luke 12:24)

The men never saw the ravens—just heard their deep caw, caw circling.

Olivia and I look down on Duccio’s scene. I point to the angel’s closed
lips; she points to his dark wings.

The blue container of rice milk fits loosely into Olivia’s hand the same
way the book fits into the hand of Duccio’s Mary. She punches a hole in
the top and, until it is empty, Olivia drinks.

It Is Pretty to Think

Long after the Desert and Donkey
(Gabriel to Mary)
And of what there would be no end
—it came quickly.
The wind runs loose, the air churns over us.
No one remembers.
But I remember, under the elm’s cool awning,
watching you watch the clouds.
Afternoons passed like afternoons,
and I loved how dull you were.
Given a bit of bark or the buzz
of a bright green fly, you’d smile
for hours. Sweet child, you’d go to anyone.
You had no preferences.
I remember the first time coming toward you,
how solid you looked, sitting and twisting
your dark hair against your neck.
But you were not solid.
From the first moment, when you breathed
on my single lily, I saw
where you felt it.
From then on, I wanted to bend low and close
to the curves of your ear.
There were so many things I wanted to tell you.
Or rather,
I wished to have things that I wanted to tell you.

What a thing, to be with you and have
no words for it. What a thing,
to be outcast like that.
And then everything unfastened.
It was like something was always dissolving
inside you—
Already it’s hard to remember
how you used to comb your hair or how you
tilted your broad face in green shade.
Now what seas, what meanings
can I place in you?
Each night, I see you by the window—
sometimes pressing your lips against a pear
you do not eat. Each night,
I see where you feel it:
where there are no mysteries.

To Gabriela at the Donkey Sanctuary
All morning I’ve thought of you feeding donkeys in the Spanish sun—
Donkey Petra, old and full of cancer. Blind Ruby who, you say, loves
carrots and takes a long time to eat them. Silver the beautiful horse with
the sunken spine who was ridden too young for too long and then
abandoned. And the head-butting goat who turned down your delicious
kiwi so afterward you wondered why you hadn’t eaten it.
Here I feed only the unimpressed cats who go out in search of something
better. Outside, the solitaires are singing their metallic songs, warning
off other birds. Having to come down from the mountain this time of
year just to pick at the picked-over trees must craze them a little. I can
hear it in their shrill, emphatic notes, a kind of no, no in the undertone.
With each one, it is like my body blinks—which, from a distance, must
look like flickering.
Gabriela-flown-off-to-save-the-donkeys, it’s three hours past dawn. All
I’ve done is read the paper and watch the overcast sky gradually lighten.
Breaking news from the West: last night it snowed. A man, drunk, tied a
yellow inner-tube to his pickup, whistled in his daughter, and drove in
circles, dragging her wildly behind …
I know. But to who else can I write of all the things I should not write?
I’m afraid I’ve become one of those childless women who reads too much
about the deaths of children. Of the local woman who lured the girl to
her house, then cut the baby out of her. Of the mother who threw her
children off the bridge, not half a mile from where I sleep.
It’s not enough to say the heart wants what it wants. I think of the
ravine, the side dark with pines where we lounged through summer
days, waiting for something to happen; and of the nights, walking the
long way home, the stars so close they seemed to crown us. Once, I

asked for your favorite feeling. You said hunger. It felt true then. It was
as if we took the bit and bridle from our mouths. From that moment I
told myself it was the not yet that I wanted, the moving, the toward—
“Be it done unto me,” we used to say, hoping to be called by the right
god. Isn’t that why we liked the story of how every two thousand years,
a god descends. Leda’s pitiless swan. Then Gabriel announcing the new
god and his kingdom of lambs—and now? What slouches
toward us? I think I see annunciations everywhere: blackbirds fall out of
the sky, trees lift their feathery branches, a girl in an out-sized yellow
halo speeds toward—
I picture her last moments, the pickup pulling faster, pulling rougher,
kicking up its tracks in the slush: she’s nestled into that golden circle,
sliding toward the edge of the closed-off field—
I am looking at the postcard of Anunciación, the one you sent from
Córdoba in the spring. I taped it to the refrigerator next to the grocery
list because I wanted to think of you, and because I liked its promise: a
world where a girl has only to say yes and heaven opens. But now all I
see is a bright innertube pillowing behind her head. All I see is a girl
being crushed inside a halo that does not save her.
This is what it’s like to be alive without you here: some fall out of the
world. I fall back into what I was. Days go by when I do nothing but
underline the damp edge of myself.
What I want is what I’ve always wanted. What I want is to be changed.
Sometimes I half think I’m still a girl beside you—stretched out in the
ravine or slouched in the church pews, looking up at the angel and girl
in the colored glass, the ruby and sapphire bits lit up inside them. Our
scene. All we did was slip from their halos—
Which is to say, mi corazón, drink up the sunlight you can and stop
feeding the good fruit to the goat. Tell me you believe the world is made
of more than all its stupid, stubborn, small refusals, that anything,

everything is still possible. I wait for word here where the snow is
falling, the solitaires are calling, and I am, as always, your M.

Notes on a 39-Year-Old Body
Most internal organs jiggle and glow and are rosy
pink. The ovary is dull and gray…. It is scarred
and pitted, for each cycle of ovulation leaves
behind a white blemish where an egg follicle has
been emptied of its contents. The older the
woman, the more scarred her pair of ovaries will
be.
—NATALIE ANGIER, WOMAN: AN INTIMATE
GEOGRAPHY
She was always planning out her own
development, desiring her own perfection,
observing her own progress.
— HENRY JAMES, THE PORTRAIT OF A
LADY

Annunciation under Erasure
And he came to her and said
The Lord is
troubled
in
mind
be afraid Mary
The Holy
will overshadow you
therefore
be

nothing

be impossible

And Mary said
And the angel departed from her

Close Reading
But let us return to the words of the poem.
There is more here than a girl on a trampoline,
more than an up-and-down melancholy
movement. Notice, for instance, how far “girl” appears
from the “brandy-colored branches” of the pine.
And notice how close “girl” appears to “silver bar,”
the one that intermittently flashes in the afternoon light.
How she must long for it, separated only by “looks at.”
Since this is the work of a humanist poet, we can assume
that when she seems to hear a low whistle,
such as her sister described in line two,
she is really only hearing the high-pitched hum
of her own mind as it unwinds.
This suggests that if she had ever really given herself
to the piano or the violin, she would know
what notes were possible, and therefore
how to make a song of herself.
See all those capital Es in the passage, with their lines
like oven racks placed on the middle rung?
The irony is that this should be a domestic scene, but instead
she is forever bouncing on her trampoline
with the wind in her ears. Though her hands
seem to reach toward that metal bar that hangs
just above and before her, we can’t know if she will ever
grasp it. If she does,
she will forfeit her own status as a girl
on a trampoline. Poor girl,
she wants to do what’s right, and she knows
that we are watching. We are told
she is concerned about fair play, but consider
how close “fair play” is to “foreplay.”

She wants it, but she doesn’t know how it goes.
When we direct our gaze at anything,
it collides. She goes on bouncing, and when she tears
the lavender scarf from her neck and says “oh,”
we well might think of “zero.” As it floats down
against the backdrop of the endless, dust-colored clouds,
it could only symbolize something terrible as a lung torn from her
in its idle languor earthward.

So-and-So Descending from the Bridge
It is so-and-so and not the dusty world
who drops.
It is their mother and not the dusty world
who drops them.
Why I imagine her so often
empty-handed
as houseboats’ distant lights
rise and fall on the far ripples—
I do not know.
I know that darkness.
Have stood on that bridge
in the space between the streetlights
dizzy with looking down.
Maybe some darks are deep enough to swallow
what we want them to.
But you can’t have two worlds in your hands
and choose emptiness.
I think that she will never sleep as I sleep,
I who have no so-and-so to throw
or mourn or to let go.
But in that once—with no more
mine, mine, this little so, and that one—

she is what
out-nights me.
So close. So-called
crazy little mother who does not jump.

I Send News: She Has Survived the Tumor after All
To save her, they had to cut her brain in two,
had to sever nerves, strip one lobe almost bare.
It left her blind. Still, she has come through.
Today in her new room she sits and chews
the insides of her cheeks. Her gold scarf glares
on her bald head; her eyes are steelier blue.
Where are you as you read this? There’s little news
of war here—something about ambush flares
from TV maps of rivers coursing through
that broken world that soldiers such as you
must now remake. She almost seems to stare
up at the screen. We worry about you.
Not that she’ll know you—but she’ll know you knew
whatever it was she was. So you’ll be air
to her: something borrowed, something blue.
Her mouth hangs quiet, but I don’t think she’s confused.
She has a face she can’t prepare.
She sits and waits with eyes unscrewed.
No need to hurry—but do
come home. Whatever they want of you there,
just finish it. Just do what you must do.
Blind, lobotomized, she waits for you.

Another True Story
The journalist has proof: a photograph of his uncle during the last days
of the war, the whole of Florence unfolding behind him, the last
standing bridge, the Ponte Vecchio, stretching over the Arno and—you
could almost miss it, the point of what is being proved—a small bird on
his left shoulder.
Above the rubble, Florence is still Florence. The Duomo is intact, and
somewhere in the background, Fra Angelico’s winged creatures still
descend through their unearthly light, and Da Vinci’s calm, soft-featured
angel approaches the quiet field—
The war is almost over. The bird has made its choice, and it will remain,
perched for days, on his shoulder. And though the captain will soon go
home to South Africa and then America and live to be an old man, in
this once upon a time in Florence, in 1944, a bird chose him—young,
handsome, Jewish, alive—as the one place in the world to rest upon.
When Noah had enough of darkness, he sent forth a dove, but the dove
found no ground to rest upon and so returned to him. Later he sent her
again, and she returned with an olive branch. The next time she did not
return, and so Noah walked back into a world where every burnt
offering smelled sweet, and God finally took pity on the imaginations he
had made.
Some people took the young captain, walking around for days with that
bird on his shoulder, to be a saint, a new Saint Francis, and asked him to
bless them, which he did, saying “Ace-King-Queen-Jack,” making the
sign of the cross.
Saint Good Luck. Saint Young Man who lived through the war. Saint
Enough of darkness. Saint Ground for the bird. Saint Say there is a
promise here. Saint Infuse the fallen world. Saint How shall this be. Saint

Shoulder, Saint Apostrophe, Saint Momentary days. Saint Captain. Saint
Covenant of what we cannot say.

Annunciation in Byrd and Bush
(from Senator Robert Byrd and George W. Bush)
The president goes on. The president goes
on and on, though the senator complains
the language of diplomacy is imbued with courtesy …
Who can bear it? I’d rather fasten the words
to a girl, for instance, lounging at the far end of a meadow,
reading her thick book.
I’d rather the president’s words were merely spoken by
a stranger who leans in beside her:
you have a decision to make. Either you rise to this moment or …
She yawns, silver bracelets clicking
as she stretches her arms—
her cerulean sky studded with green, almost golden pears
hanging from honey-colored branches.
In her blue dress, she’s just a bit of that sky,
just a blank bit
fallen into the meadow.
The stranger speaks from the leafy shade.
Show uncertainty and the world will drift
toward tragedy—
Bluster and swagger, she says,
pulling her scarf to her throat as she turns,
impatient to return, to the half-read page—
He steps toward her.

She pulls her bright scarf tight.
For this, he says, everybody prayed.
A lot of people. He leans on a branch,
his ear bluish in shadow.
If I say everybody, I don’t know if everybody prayed.
I can tell you, a lot prayed.
How still she is.
(Her small lips pursed, her finger still in the pages,
her eyes almost slits as they narrow—)
Nothing matters in this meadow.
There is a girl under pear trees with her book,
and it doesn’t matter what she does or does not promise.
There’s no next scene to hurt her.
Not even the pears fall down.
I want the words to happen here.
God loves you, and I love you, he says.
Not far beyond his touch,
a wind shakes a dusting of sunlight
onto the edges of pears.
I’d rather think some things are like this.
The water’s green edge dissolves
into cerulean, cerulean pearls
into clouds; the girl’s unsandaled feet
into uncut fringes of grass—
I don’t need to explain, he says
(his sleeves swelling in a nudge of air)
—but the highest call of history,
it changes your heart.
She looks down: her finger in her book.

On a Spring Day in Baltimore, the Art Teacher Asks
the Class to Draw Flowers
I.
I can begin the picture: his neck is bent,
his mouth too close to her ear as he leans
in
above her shoulder—to point
to poppies shaded in apricot, stippled
just as he taught her. Class is over.
They are alone in the steady air—
Through the window, a jump rope’s tick.
An occasional bird. High voices.
Perhaps, so caught up in composing her
flower,
she doesn’t feel his fingers
there and there, her neck exposed
to the spring air—

II.
There are only a few lines in the newspaper: her grade, his age, when
the police arrived. J. calls to say he doesn’t believe the girl. Girls that
age, he says—you know how that goes. Hey, if there’s a trial, you could be a
witness.
What kind of witness?
Character witness.

III.
Yes I knew him. One summer we lounged in the backyard sun and
listened to songs about what would be nice. On the swing, on the lawn, I

posed for him, leaned my head against the picnic table. That was when I
did not have enough, could not have enough looking at.
That summer he carried his sketchpad everywhere, and on those slow,
humid afternoons, I felt him elongate, shade, and blur. Above us the sky
was like a white rush of streetlights, and I wanted to be nothing but
what he shaped in each moment—
I closed my eyes, felt the sunlight on my thighs. To be beheld like that—
it felt like glittering.

IV.
What should be remembered, what
imagined?
She shifts in her chair. Her uncertain
fingers
trace, against the sky—how many times?—
the red edges of the petals, caress
the darkening lines, trying to still them—
though she cannot make the air stop
breathing, cannot make cannot
make the shuddering lines stay put.

Touch Gallery: Joan of Arc
The sculptures in this gallery have been carefully
treated with a protective wax so that visitors may
touch them.

—EXHIBITIONS, THE ART INSTITUTE OF
CHICAGO

Stone soldier, it’s okay now.
I’ve removed my rings, my watch, my bracelets.
I’m allowed, brave girl,
to touch you here, where the mail covers your throat,
your full neck, down your shoulders
to here, where raised unlatchable buckles
mock-fasten your plated armor.
Nothing peels from you.
Your skin gleams like the silver earrings
you do not wear.
Above you, museum windows gleam October.
Above you, high gold leaves flinch in the garden,
but the flat immovable leaves entwined in your hair to crown you
go through what my fingers can’t.
I want you to have a mind I can turn in my hands.
You have a smooth and upturned chin,
cold cheeks, unbruisable eyes,
and hair as grooved as fig skin.
It’s October, but it’s not October

behind your ears, which don’t hint
of dark birds moving overhead,
or of the blush and canary leaves
emptying themselves
in slow spasms
into shallow hedgerows.
Still bride of your own armor,
bride of your own blind eyes,
this isn’t an appeal.
If I could I would let your hair down
and make your ears disappear.
Your head at my shoulder, my fingers on your lips—
as if the cool of your stone curls were the cool
of an evening—
as if you were about to eat salt from my hand.

To the Dove within the Stone
Sleeper, still untouched by
gravity, invisible
for the stone, I cannot
hear you shift in its dark
center. How many centuries
since the first girl—pressing hand
against stone—hardly meaning to
make an inside—
roused you? The stone had no
emptiness, and her body no
emptiness until she felt you
move under her palm, her steady
pulse. Already flesh was something to
stir you, something to make you
true. Stone-dove, untouched
by thistles, moths,
listen now
my hand is open.

Holy
Spirit who knows me, I do not feel you
fall so far in me,
do not feel you turn in my dark center.
My mother is sick, and you
cannot help her.
My beautiful, moon-faced mother is sick
and you sleep in the dark edges of her shadow.
Spirit made to
know me, is this your weight
in my throat, my
chest, the breath heavy so I hardly
breathe it?
I do not believe in the beauty of falling.
Over and over in the dark I tell myself
I do not have to believe
in the beauty of falling
though she edges toward you,
saying your name with such steadiness.
I sit winding blue tape around my wrists
to keep my hands from falling.
Holy Ghost, I come for you today
in this overlit afternoon as she

picks at the bread with her small hands,
her small rough hands,
the wide blue veins that have always been her veins
winding through them.
Ghost, what am I
if I lose the one
who’s always known me?
Spirit, know me.
Shadow, are you here
splintering into the bread’s thick crust as it
crumbles into my palms, is that
you, the dry cough in her lungs, the blue tape on my wrists.
The dark hair that used to fall over her shoulders.
Fragile mother, impossible spirit, will you fall so far
from me, will you leave me
to me?
To think it
is the last hard kiss, that seasick
silence, your bits of breath
diffusing in my mouth—

How (Not) to Speak of God

Yet Not Consumed
But give me the frost of your name
in my mouth, give me
spiny fruits and scaly husks—
give me breath
to say aloud to the breathless clouds
your name, to say
I am, let me need
to say it and still need you
to give me need, to make me
into what is needed, what you need, no
more than that I am, no more
than the stray wind on my neck, the salt
of your palm on my tongue, no more
than need, a neck that will bend
lower to what I am, so
give me creeping, give me clouds that hang
low and sweep the blue of the sky
to its edges, let me taste the edges, the bread-colored clouds,
here I am, give me
thumb and fingers, give me only
what I need, a turn here
to turn what I am
into I am, what your name writ in clouds
writ on me

On Wanting to Tell [

] about a Girl Eating Fish
Eyes

—how her loose curls float
above the silver fish as she leans in
to pluck its eyes.
You died just hours ago.
Not suddenly, no. You’d been dying so long
nothing looked like itself: from your window,
fishermen swirled sequins;
fishnets entangled the moon.
Now the dark rain
looks like dark rain. Only the wine
shimmers with candlelight. I refill the glasses
as we raise a toast to you
as so-and-so’s daughter—elfin, jittery as a sparrow—
slides into another lap
to eat another pair of slippery eyes
with her soft fingers, fingers rosier each time,
for being chewed a little.
If only I could go to you, revive you.
You must be a little alive still.
I’d like to put the girl in your lap.
She’s almost feverishly warm, and she weighs
hardly anything. I want to show you how
she relishes each eye, to show you
her greed for them.
She is placing one on her tongue,
bright as a polished coin—

What do they taste like? I ask.
Twisting in my lap, she leans back sleepily.
They taste like eyes, she says.

Annunciation in Play
—into the 3rd second, the girl
holds on, determined not to meet his gaze—
she swerves her blue sleeve,
closes down the space,
while his eyes are intent, unwilling
to relent and
late into the 5th second they are still
fighting on, their feet sinking into
the slippery grass—
Approaching the 6th second
he can’t repeat the sweeping in
and each time he tries to clear
the way to her thorn-brown eyes by the gesture of a hand
it is easily blocked by the turn
of her cheek.
By the 8th second she is still repelling
every attempt, still deflecting (you can see
the speed, the skillful knee action)
his gaze. And she must know (she has to think
every second, there’s no letting up)
this is only
delay, but the delay
is what she has
before his expert touch
swings in, before
she loses her light, clean edges, before she

loses possession—
before they look at each other.

Too Many Pigeons to Count and One Dove
Bellagio, Italy

—3:21

The startled ash tree
alive with them, wings lacing
through silver-green leaves—jumping

—3:24

from branch to branch
they rattle the leaves, or make the green leaves
sound dry—

—3:26

The surprise of a boat horn from below.
Increasingly voluptuous
fluttering.

—3:28

One just there on the low branch—
gone before I can breathe or
describe it.

—3:29

Nothing stays long enough to know.
How long since we’ve been inside
anything together the way

—3:29

these birds are inside

this tree together, shifting, making it into
a shivering thing?
—3:30

A churchbell rings once.
One pigeon flies
over the top of the tree without skimming

—3:30

the high leaves, another
flies to the tree below. I cannot find
a picture of you in my mind

—3:30

to land on. In the overlapping of soft dark
leaves, wings look
to be tangled, but

—3:32

I see when they pull apart, one bird far, one
near, they did not touch. One bird seems caught,
flapping violently, one

—3:32

becomes still and tilts down—
I cannot find the dove,
have not seen it for minutes. One pigeon nips

—3:32

at something on a high branch,
moves lower (it has taken this long for me to understand
that they are eating). Two flap

—3:33

their wings without leaving their branches and
I am tired
of paying attention. The birds are all the same

—3:33

to me. It’s too warm to stay still in the sun, leaning
over this wood fence to try to get a better look
into the branches. Why

—3:33

do the pigeons gather in this tree
or that one, why leave one for another
in this moment or that one, why do I miss you

—3:33

now, but not now,
my old idea of you, the feeling for you I lost
and remade so many times until it was

—3:33

something else, as strange as your touch
was familiar. Why not look up
at high white Alps or down at the

—3:33

untrumpeted shadows bronzing the water
or wonder why an almost lavender smoke
hovers over that particular orange villa

—3:33

on the far shoreline or if I am
capable of loving you better
or at all from this distance.

The Cathars Etc.
loved the spirit most
so to remind them of the ways of the flesh,
those of the old god
took one hundred prisoners and cut off
each nose
each pair of lips
and scooped out each eye
until just one eye on one man was left
to lead them home.
People did that, I say to myself,
a human hand lopping at a man’s nose
over and over with a dull blade
that could not then slice
the lips clean
but like an old can opener, pushed
into skin, sawed
the soft edges, working each lip
slowly off as
both men heavily, intimately
breathed.
My brave believer, in my private re-enactments,
you are one of them.
I pick up in the aftermath where you’re being led

by rope
by the one with the one good eye.
I’m one of the women at the edge of the hill
watching you stagger magnificently,
unsteadily back.
All your faces are tender with holes
starting to darken and scab
and I don’t understand how you could
believe in anything that much
that is not me.
The man with the eye pulls you
forward. You’re in the square now.
The women are hysterical,
the men are making terrible sounds
from unclosable mouths.
And I don’t know if I can do it, if I can touch
a lipless face that might
lean down, instinctively,
to try to kiss me.
White rays are falling through the clouds.
You are holding that imbecile rope.
You are waiting to be claimed.
What do I love more than this
image of myself?
There I am in the square walking toward you
calling you out by name.

To You Again
Again this morning my eyes woke up too close
to your eyes,
their almost green orbs
too heavy-lidded to really look back.
To wake up next to you
is ordinary. I do not even need to look at you
to see you.
But I do look. So when you come to me
in your opulent sadness, I see
you do not want me
to unbutton you
so I cannot do the one thing
I can do.
Now it is almost one a.m. I am still at my desk
and you are upstairs at your desk a staircase
away from me. Already it is years
of you a staircase
away from me. To be near you
and not near you
is ordinary.
You
are ordinary.

Still, how many afternoons have I spent
peeling blue paint from
our porch steps, peering above
hedgerows, the few parked cars for the first
glimpse of you. How many hours under
the overgrown, pink camillas, thinking
the color was wrong for you, thinking
you’d appear
after my next
blink.
Soon you’ll come down the stairs
to tell me something. And I’ll say,
okay. Okay. I’ll say it
like that, say it just like
that, I’ll go on being
your never-enough.
It’s not the best in you
I long for. It’s when you’re noteless,
numb at the ends of my fingers, all is
all. I say it is.

Annunciation: Eve to Ave
The wings behind the man I neversaw.
But often, afterward, I dreamed his lips,
remembered the slight angle of his hips,
his feet among the tulips and the straw.
I liked the way his voice deepened as he called.
As for the words, I liked the showmanship
with which he spoke them. Behind him, distant ships
went still; the water was smooth as his jaw—
And when I learned that he was not a man—
bullwhip, horsewhip, unzip, I could have crawled
through thorn and bee, the thick of hive, rosehip,
courtship, lordship, gossip and lavender.
(But I was quiet, quiet as
eagerness—that astonished, dutiful fall.)

Annunciation Overheard from the Kitchen
I could hear them from the kitchen, speaking as if
something important had happened.
I was washing the pears in cool water, cutting
the bruises from them.
From my place at the sink, I could hear
a jet buzz hazily overhead, a vacuum
start up next door, the click,
click between shots.
“Mary, step back from the camera.”
There was a softness to his voice
but no fondness, no hurry in it.
There were faint sounds
like walnuts being dropped by crows onto the street,
almost a brush
of windchime from the porch—
Windows around me everywhere half-open—
My skin alive with the pitch.

Night Shifts at the Group Home
for Lily Mae
The job was easy: I tucked
them in, kicked off my shoes, listened for
the floor to go quiet. Everyone
slept except one: outside her door,
she paced, she hummed, holding
the edge of her torn
nightgown. Pointing, I told
her: to bed. Your bed. But she would not
stay there. She was old,
older than my mother: manic, caught
up in gibberish, determined to
sleep on my cot—
At first it was just to
quiet her. I could only sleep
if she slept, and I needed relief
from myself. That is how she
became a body next to mine
whether or not I wanted there to be
a body. She climbed
into my bed. I let her
sleep hot and damp against my spine.
All night she rocked, she turned,
she poked her spastic elbows

into my calves and slurred
her broken noises in the dark. All the old
fans went round in clicks
those summer nights—and she rolled
in bed and kicked
me in the head and I was
happy. No words, no tricks,
I just didn’t love
my loneliness. My mind
felt cooler
with her there. Beside
her, I could have been anyone.
She had no word for me and not the kind
of mind to keep one.
And if she kicked
me, some nights, just
for the fun of it—who was I
to disappoint my one?
Sometimes I imagine I
was someone she won
at a fair as the wheel spun
under the floating, unfaltering sun
and clicked each lucky one
and one
until I was happily undone.

Happy Ideas
I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to
a kitchen stool and watch it turn.

—DUCHAMP

I had the happy idea to suspend some blue globes in the air
and watch them pop.
I had the happy idea to put my little copper horse on the shelf so we
could stare at each other all evening.
I had the happy idea to create a void in myself.
Then to call it natural.
Then to call it supernatural.
I had the happy idea to wrap a blue scarf around my head and spin.
I had the happy idea that somewhere a child was being born who was
nothing like Helen or Jesus except in the sense of changing everything.
I had the happy idea that someday I would find both pleasure and
punishment, that I would know them and feel them,
and that, until I did, it would be almost as good to pretend.
I had the happy idea to call myself happy.
I had the happy idea that the dog digging a hole in the yard in the
twilight had his nose deep in mold-life.
I had the happy idea that what I do not understand is more real than
what I do,

and then the happier idea to buckle myself
into two blue velvet shoes.
I had the happy idea to polish the reflecting glass and say
hello to my own blue soul. Hello, blue soul. Hello.
It was my happiest idea.

Annunciation as Right Whale with Kelp Gulls
The gulls have learned to feed on the whales….
The proportion of whales attacked annually has
soared from 1% in 1974 to 78% today.

— BBC NEWS

I tell you I have seen them in their glee
diving fast into the sureness of her flesh,
fast into the softness of
her wounds—have seen them
peel her, have seen them give themselves
full to the effort and the
lull of it—
Why wouldn’t such sweetness
be for them?
For they outnumber her.
For she is tender, pockmarked, full
of openness. For they
swoop down on her wherever she surfaces. For they
eat her alive. For they take mercy on others and show them the way.
At high tide, more gulls lift from the mussel beds and soar toward her.
For they do sit and eat, for they do sit and eat

a sweetness prepared for them
until she disappears again into the water.

Here, There Are Blueberries
When I see the bright clouds, a sky empty of moon and stars,
I wonder what I am, that anyone should note me.
Here there are blueberries, what should I fear?
Here there is bread in thick slices, of whom should I be afraid?
Under the swelling clouds, we spread our blankets.
Here in this meadow, we open our baskets
to unpack blueberries, whole bowls of them,
berries not by the work of our hands, berries not by the work of our
fingers.
What taste the bright world has, whole fields
without wires, the blackened moss, the clouds
swelling at the edges of the meadow. And for this,
I did nothing, not even wonder.
You must live for something, they say.
People don’t live just to keep on living.
But here is the quince tree, a sky bright and empty.
Here there are blueberries, there is no need to note me.

Do Not Desire Me, Imagine Me

As Corpse

Loosened, bare, profusely female,
the pulse in my thigh
unthreaded—

As Hair

Clear of furies, of flowers,
the shade of dry paste

As Skull

Fissured:
an unlit chandelier

As Dirt

The ants sift through
and soften
And with no fingertips, imagine

As Dust

You can hang the air on me

Insertion of Meadow with Flowers
In 1371, beneath the angel’s feet,
Veneziano added a meadow—
a green expanse with white
and yellow broom flowers, the kind
that—until the sun warms them—
have no scent—
God could have chosen other means than flesh.
Imagine he did
and the girl on her knees in this meadow—
open, expectant, dreamily rocking,
her mouth open, quiet—
is only important because we recognize
the wish. For look, the flowers
do not spin, not even
the threads of their shadows—
and they are infused
with what they did not
reach for.
Out of nothing does not mean
into nothing.

Knocking or Nothing
Knock me or nothing, the things of this world
ring in me, shrill-gorged and shrewish,
clicking their charms and their chains and their spouts.
Let them. Let the fans whirr.
All the similar virgins must have emptied
their flimsy pockets, and I
was empty enough,
sugared and stretched on the unmown lawn,
dumb as the frost-pink tongues
of the unpruned roses.
When you put your arms around me in that moment,
when you pulled me to you and leaned
back, when you lifted me
just a few inches, when you shook me
hard then, had you ever heard
such emptiness?
I had room for every girl’s locket,
every last dime and pocketknife.
Oh my out-sung, fierce, unthinkable—
why rattle only the world
you placed in me? Won’t you clutter the unkissed,
idiot stars? They blink and blink

like quiet shepherds,
like brides-about-your-neck.
Call them out of that quietness.
Knock them in their nothing, against their empty enamel,
against the dark that has no way to hold them
and no appetite.
Call in the dead to touch them.
Let them slip on their own chinks of light.

The Lushness of It
It’s not that the octopus wouldn’t love you—
not that it wouldn’t reach for you
with each of its tapering arms.
You’d be as good as anyone, I think,
to an octopus. But the creatures of the sea,
like the sea, don’t think
about themselves, or you. Keep on floating there,
cradled, unable to burn. Abandon
yourself to the sway, the ruffled eddies, abandon
your heavy legs to the floating meadows
of seaweed and feel
the bloom of phytoplankton, spindrift, sea
spray, barnacles. In the dark benthic realm, the slippery nekton
glide over the abyssal plains and as you float you can feel
that upwelling of cold, deep water touch
the skin stretched over
your spine. No, it’s not that the octopus
wouldn’t love you. If it touched,
if it tasted you, each of its three
hearts would turn red.
Will theologians of any confession refute me?
Not the bluecap salmon. Not its dotted head.

Notes
And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city
of Galilee, named Nazareth, to a virgin espoused to a man whose name
was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary. And
the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favoured,
the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women. And when she saw
him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner
of salutation this should be. And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary:
for thou hast found favour with God. And, behold, thou shalt conceive in
thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS. He shall
be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God
shall give unto him the throne of his father David: And he shall reign
over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no
end. Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not
a man? And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall
come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee:
therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called
the Son of God. And, behold, thy cousin Elisabeth, she hath also
conceived a son in her old age: and this is the sixth month with her, who
was called barren. For with God nothing shall be impossible. And Mary
said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy
word. And the angel departed from her.—King James Bible, Luke 1:26–
38
“Annunciation in Nabokov and Starr”: Italicized phrases in this poem are
taken from Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov and The Starr Report by Kenneth
Starr.
“Notes on a 39-Year-Old Body”: The language of each section is taken
from the combined text of the two epigraphs. Imported language is
marked in brackets.

“So-and-So Descending from the Bridge”: A mother threw her two
children off the Sellwood Bridge in Portland, Oregon, in the early
morning hours of May 23, 2009. One child died; one survived.
“Another True Story”: Thank you to Roger Cohen for sharing the
photograph and for relating Bert Cohen’s story so powerfully in the essay
“Lake Water Reflections.” The essay, in adapted form, will appear in his
forthcoming family memoir, The Girl from Human Street.
“Annunciation in Byrd and Bush”: Italicized phrases in this poem, words
of Senator Robert Byrd and President George W. Bush, are taken from
various sources including:
George W. Bush’s Address to a Joint Session of Congress, September
20, 2001, and “Remarks by the President to Coal Miners and Their
Families and Their Community,” Green Tree Fire Department, Green
Tree, Pennsylvania, 2002.
Senator Robert Byrd’s remarks to the Senate on February 13, 2003
(Congressional Record 108th Congress).
“To the Dove within the Stone”: This poem appeared as part of the
Manual Labors exhibit at the Laboratory of Art and Ideas at Belmar in
Denver, Colorado.
“How (Not) to Speak of God”: The title is taken from Peter Rollins’s book
of the same name.
“Yet Not Consumed”: “And the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a
flame of fire out of the midst of a bush. He looked, and behold, the bush
was burning, yet it was not consumed.” —Exodus 3:2
“On Wanting to Tell [
] about a Girl Eating Fish Eyes”: “Your
Majesty, when we compare the present life of man with that time of
which we have no knowledge, it seems to me like the swift flight of a
lone sparrow through the banqueting-hall where you sit in the winter
months to dine with your thanes and counselors. Inside there is a
comforting fire to warm the room; outside, the wintry storms of snow
and rain are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly in through one door of the
hall, and out through another. While he is inside, he is safe from the

wintry storms; but after a few moments of comfort, he vanishes from
sight into the darkness whence he came. Similarly, man appears on earth
for a little while, but we know nothing of what went before this life, and
what follows.” —Bede, A History of the English Church and People. This
poem is for Donald Justice.
“The Cathars Etc.”: “Here at the isolated Lastours castles, which were
built along a defensive cliff spur, the Cathars spent much of 1209
heroically fending off the onslaught. So the crusader leader, the sadistic
Simon de Montfort, resorted to primitive psychological warfare. He
ordered his troops to gouge out the eyes of 100 luckless prisoners, cut off
their noses and lips, then send them back to the towers led by a prisoner
with one remaining eye.” — “The Besieged and the Beautiful in
Languedoc” by Tony Perrottet, The New York Times, May 6, 2010.
“Happy Ideas”: “And why that cerulean color? The blue comes partly
from the sea, partly from the sky. While water in a glass is transparent, it
absorbs slightly more red light than blue … the red light is absorbed out
and what gets reflected back to space is mainly blue.”—Carl Sagan, Pale
Blue Dot
“Here, There Are Blueberries”: The italicized phrases are adapted from
Anat Cohen, as quoted by Jeffrey Goldberg in his 2004 New Yorker
article, “Among the Settlers”: “You don’t live just to keep living. That’s
not the point of life.” This poem is for my father, Charles A. Szybist.

Acknowledgments
Sincere thanks to the editors of the following journals in which these
poems first appeared, sometimes in different forms:
Agni Online: “Do Not Desire Me, Imagine Me.” The Burnside Review: “The
Heroine as She Turns to Face Me.” The Cincinnati Review: “Annunciation
as Fender’s Blue Butterfly with Kincaid’s Lupine.” The Chronicle of Higher
Education Review: “Happy Ideas.” Electronic Poetry Review: “The Lushness
of It” and “Invitation.” Fifth Wednesday Journal: “Night Shifts at the
Group Home.” The Iowa Review: “Annunciation (from the grass beneath
them),” “Annunciation under Erasure,” “Annunciation in Play,” and
“Annunciation: Eve to Ave.” The Kenyon Review: “Yet Not Consumed,”
“Girls Overheard While Assembling a Puzzle,” “Annunciation as Right
Whale with Kelp Gulls,” and “On a Spring Day in Baltimore, the Art
Teacher Asks the Class to Grow Flowers.” The Laurel Review: “You Tell
Me to Take a—” (now titled “Holy”). Lo-Ball: “Annunciation Overheard
from the Kitchen.” Long Journey: Contemporary Northwest Poets Anthology:
“Knocking or Nothing” and “Touch Gallery: Joan of Arc.” Meridian: “The
Troubadours Etc.” and “Close Reading.” Ploughshares: “Here, There Are
Blueberries” and “So-and-So Descending from the Bridge.” Plume: “Notes
on a 39-Year-Old Body.” Poetry: “On Wanting to Tell [
] about a Girl
Eating Fish Eyes” and “Hail.” Poets.org, The Academy of American Poets
Poem-a-Day Series: “All Times & All Tenses Alive in This Moment” (now
titled “How (Not) to Speak of God”). Sou’wester: “Entrances and Exits.”
Tin House: “Annunciation in Byrd and Bush,” “Annunciation in Nabokov
and Starr.” The Virginia Quarterly Review: “I Send News: She Has Survived
the Tumor after All.” West Branch: “Insertion of Meadow with Flowers”
and “Long after the Desert and Donkey.” Witness: “Conversion Figure.”
“How (Not) to Speak of God” (originally titled “All Times & All Tenses
Alive in This Moment”) can be viewed on the ceiling of the portico of
the Pennsylvania College of Arts & Design, where it was painted as a

mural by the artist team Root 222 as part of Poetry Paths, a public visual
and literary art project in the city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
“The Troubadours Etc.” also appeared in The Best American Poetry 2008,
edited by Charles Wright and David Lehman.
“The Troubadours Etc.,” “The Lushness of It,” and “Annunciation as
Fender’s Blue Butterfly with Kincaid’s Lupine” also appeared in The
Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Second Edition.
“On a Spring Day in Baltimore, the Art Teacher Asks the Class to Draw
Flowers” also appeared in Pushcart Prize Anthology XXVII.
“Annunciation: Eve to Ave,” “Annunciation (from the grass beneath
them),” and “Girls Overheard While Assembling a Puzzle” also appeared
on Poetry Daily.
Thank you to Willian Olsen for selecting “Night Shifts at the Group
Home” as the winner of the Fifth Wednesday Journal Editor’s Prize in
Poetry for 2012.
I am grateful to Lewis & Clark College, the MacDowell Colony, the
National Endowment for the Arts, the Witter Bynner Foundation (and to
Kay Ryan for selecting me for a fellowship), and the Rockefeller
Foundation Bellagio Center for generous fellowships and support that
enabled me to complete this collection.
Thank you Gabriela Rife, archangel and muse to this collection. The
heroine of “Entrances and Exits” and “On Wanting to Tell [
] about a
Girl Eating Fish Eyes” is Olivia Glosser Asher. Thank you, Olivia. Thank
you, Michele Glazer, for going a long way into these poems with me and
helping me through them. I am grateful to many readers for their
attention, care, and invaluable help, especially Endi Bogue Hartigan,
Molly Lou Freeman, Mark Szybist, D. A. Powell, John Casteen, Joy Katz,
Rachel Cole, Katie Ford, Sara Guest, and Jeffrey Shotts. Thank you to my
husband, Jerry Harp, for always helping me see the potential in my
attempts, and for believing in them. To my colleagues, friends, and
family, my deepest gratitude for your generosity, support, and

friendship.

MARY SZYBIST is the author of a previous collection of poems, Granted,
which was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
The recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts,
a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writing Award, and a Witter Bynner Fellowship
from the Library of Congress, she lives in Portland, Oregon, and teaches
at Lewis & Clark College and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for
Writers.

The text of Incarnadine is set in Minion Pro, an original typeface
designed by Robert Slimbach in 1990. Composition by BookMobile
Design and Digital Publisher Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Printed
by BookMobile on acid-free paper.

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preserve line breaks.

FOR MY SISTER,

Mary-Ellen (1955–2017)

Contents

from AWAKE

Two Pictures of My Sister
What My Father Told Me
Ghosts
The Garden
The Tooth Fairy
Quarter to Six
Awake
Girl in the Doorway
On the Back Porch
Bird
The Laundromat
Sunday
from WHAT WE CARRY

Late October
After Twelve Days of Rain
Aphasia
What We Carry
For the Sake of Strangers
Dust
Twelve

Each Sound
Fast Gas
As It Is
The Thief
This Close
The Lovers
Kissing
from SMOKE

Death Comes to Me Again, a Girl
How It Will Happen, When
Fear
Last Words
Trying to Raise the Dead
The Shipfitter’s Wife
Abschied Symphony
Family Stories
Pearl
Smoke
The Orgasms of Organisms
Life is Beautiful
from FACTS ABOUT THE MOON

Moon in the Window
Facts About the Moon
The Crossing
The Ravens of Denali
The Life of Trees
What’s Broken
Afterlife

Savages
Vacation Sex
Democracy
Face Poem
Superglue
Cello
Little Magnolia
Starling
from THE BOOK OF MEN

Staff Sgt. Metz
Bakersfield, 1969
Juneau Spring
Mine Own Phil Levine
Late-Night TV
Homicide Detective: A Film Noir
Mick Jagger (World Tour, 2008)
Men
Antilamentation
Cher
Dog Moon
Mother’s Day
Dark Charms
Lost in Costco
Second Chances
Fall
Emily Said
The Secret of Backs
ONLY AS THE DAY IS LONG: NEW POEMS

Lapse
Before Surgery
Death of the Mother
Under Stars
Changeable Weather
Only as the Day Is Long
Piano with Children
My Mother’s Colander
Ant Farm
Heart of Thorns
Ideas of Heaven
Crow
Ode to Gray
Evening
Error’s Refuge
Augusta, Maine, 1951
Chair
Urn
Arizona
Letter to My Dead Mother
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

from

AWAKE

Two Pictures of My Sister
If an ordinary person is silent,
this may be a tactical maneuver.
If a writer is silent, he is lying.
—JAROSLAV SEIFERT

The pose is stolen from Monroe, struck
in the sun’s floodlight, eyes lowered,
a long-stemmed plastic rose between her teeth.
My cast-off bathing suit hangs
in folds over her ribs, straps
cinched, pinned at the back of her neck.
Barefoot on the hot cement, knock-kneed,
comical if it weren’t for the graceful
angles of her arms, her flesh soft
against the chipped stucco.
The other picture is in my head.
It is years later.
It is in color.
Blonde hair curls away from the planes of her face
like wood shavings.
She wears a lemon-yellow ruffled top, denim
cutoffs, her belly button squeezed to a slit
above the silver snap.
She stands against the hallway wall
while Dad shakes his belt in her face.
A strip of skin has been peeled
from her bare shoulder, there are snake
lines across her thighs, a perfect curl
around her long neck.
She looks through him
as if she could see behind his head.
She dares him.

Go on. Hit me again.
He lets the folded strap unravel to the floor.
Holds it by its tail. Bells the buckle
off her cheekbone.
She does not move or cry or even wince
as the welt blooms on her temple
like a flower opening frame by frame
in a nature film.
It lowers her eyelid with its violet petals
and as he walks away only her eyes
move, like the eyes of a portrait that follow you
around a museum room, her face
a stubborn moon that trails the car all night,
stays locked in the frame of the back window
no matter how many turns you take,
no matter how far you go.

What My Father Told Me
Always I have done what was asked.
Melmac dishes stacked on rag towels.
The slack of a vacuum cleaner cord
wound around my hand. Laundry
hung on a line.
There is always much to do and I do it.
The iron resting in its frame, hot
in the shallow pan of summer
as the basins of his hands push
aside the book I am reading.
I do as I am told, hold his penis
like the garden hose, in this bedroom,
in that bathroom, over the toilet
or my bare stomach.
I do the chores, pull the weeds out back,
finger stink-bug husks, snail carcasses,
pile dead grass in black bags. At night
his feet are safe on their pads, light
on the wall-to-wall as he takes
the hallway to my room.
His voice, the hiss of the lawn sprinklers,
the wet hush of sweat in his hollows,
the mucus still damp
in the corners of my eyes as I wake.
Summer ends. Schoolwork doesn’t suit me.
My fingers unaccustomed to the slimness
of a pen, the delicate touch it takes
to uncoil the mind.
History. A dateline pinned to the wall.
Beneath each president’s face, a quotation.
Pictures of buffalo and wheat fields,
a wagon train circled for the night,
my hand raised to ask a question,

Where did the children sleep?

Ghosts
It’s midnight and a light rain falls.
I sit on the front stoop to smoke.
Across the street a lit window, filled
with a ladder on which a young man stands.
His head dips into the frame each time
he sinks his brush in the paint.
He’s painting his kitchen white, patiently
covering the faded yellow with long strokes.
He leans into this work like a lover, risks
losing his balance, returns gracefully
to the precise middle of the step to dip
and start again.
A woman appears beneath his feet, borrows
paint, takes it onto her thin brush
like a tongue. Her sweater is the color
of tender lemons. This is the beginning
of their love, bare and simple
as that wet room.
My hip aches against the damp cement.
I take it inside, punch up a pillow
for it to nest in. I’m getting too old
to sit on the porch in the rain,
to stay up all night, watch morning
rise over rooftops.
Too old to dance
circles in dirty bars, a man’s hands
laced at the small of my spine, pink
slingbacks hung from limp fingers. Love.

I’m too old for that, the foreign tongues
loose in my mouth, teeth that rang
my breasts by the nipples like soft bells.
I want it back. The red earrings and blue
slips. Lips alive with spit. Muscles
twisting like boat ropes in a hard wind.
Bellies for pillows. Not this ache in my hip.
I want the girl who cut through blue poolrooms
of smoke and golden beers, stepping out alone
into a summer fog to stand beneath a streetlamp’s
amber halo, her blue palms cupped
around the flare of a match.
She could have had so many lives. Gone off
with a boy to Arizona, lived on a ranch
under waves of carved rock, her hands turned
the color of flat red sands. Could have said
yes to a woman with fingers tapered as candles,
or a man who slept in a canvas tepee, who pulled
her down on his mattress of grass where she made
herself as empty as the guttered fire.
Oklahoma.
I could be there now, spinning corn from dry cobs,
working fat tomatoes into mason jars.
The rain has stopped. For blocks the houses
drip like ticking clocks. I turn off lights
and feel my way to the bedroom, slip cold
toes between flowered sheets, nest my chest
into the back of a man who sleeps in fits,
his suits hung stiff in the closet, his racked
shoes tipped toward the ceiling.

This man loves me for my wit, my nerve,
for the way my long legs fall from hemmed skirts.
When he rolls his body against mine, I know
he feels someone else. There’s no blame.
I love him, even as I remember a man with canebrown hands, palms pink as blossoms opening
over my breasts.
And he holds me,
even with all those other fingers nestled
inside me, even with all those other shoulders
wedged above his own like wings.

The Garden
We were talking about poetry.
We were talking about nuclear war.
She said she couldn’t write about it
because she couldn’t imagine it.
I said it was simple. Imagine
this doorknob is the last thing
you will see in this world.
Imagine you happen to be standing
at the door when you look down, about
to grasp the knob, your fingers
curled toward it, the doorknob old
and black with oil from being turned
so often in your hand, cranky
with rust and grease from the kitchen.
Imagine it happens this quickly, before
you have time to think of anything else;
your kids, your own life, what it will mean.
You reach for the knob and the window
flares white, though you see it only
from the corner of your eye because
you’re looking at the knob, intent
on opening the back door to the patch
of sunlight on the porch, that garden
spread below the stairs and the single
tomato you might pick for a salad.
But when the flash comes you haven’t
thought that far ahead. It is only
the simple desire to move into the sun
that possesses you. The thought
of the garden, that tomato, would have
come after you had taken the knob
in your hand, just beginning to twist it,
and when the window turns white
you are only about to touch it,
preparing to open the door.

The Tooth Fairy
They brushed a quarter with glue
and glitter, slipped in on bare
feet, and without waking me
painted rows of delicate gold
footprints on my sheets with a love
so quiet, I still can’t hear it.
My mother must have been
a beauty then, sitting
at the kitchen table with him,
a warm breeze lifting her
embroidered curtains, waiting
for me to fall asleep.
It’s harder to believe
the years that followed, the palms
curled into fists, a floor
of broken dishes, her chain-smoking
through long silences, him
punching holes in the walls.
I can still remember her print
dresses, his checkered taxi, the day
I found her in the closet
with a paring knife, the night
he kicked my sister in the ribs.
He lives alone in Oregon now, dying
slowly of a rare bone disease.
His face stippled gray, his ankles
clotted beneath wool socks.

She’s a nurse on the graveyard shift.
Comes home mornings and calls me.
Drinks her dark beer and goes to bed.
And I still wonder how they did it, slipped
that quarter under my pillow, made those
perfect footprints . . .
Whenever I visit her, I ask again.
“I don’t know,” she says, rocking, closing
her eyes. “We were as surprised as you.”

Quarter to Six
and the house swept with the colors of dusk,
I set the table with plates and lace. In these minutes
left to myself, before the man and child scuff at the doorstep
and come in, I think of you and wonder what I would say
if I could write. Would I tell you how I avoid his eyes,
this man I’ve learned to live with, afraid
of what he doesn’t know about me. That I’ve finished
a pack of cigarettes in one sitting, to ready myself
for dinner, when my hands will waver over a plate of fish
as my daughter grows up normal in the chair beside me. Missy,
this is what’s become of the wedding you swore you’d come to
wearing black. That was in 1970 as we sat on the bleached
floor of the sanitarium sharing a cigarette you’d won
in a game of pool. You said even school was better
than this ward, where they placed the old men
in their draped pants, the housewives screaming in loud
flowered shifts as they clung to the doors that lined the halls.
When we ate our dinner of fish and boiled potatoes,
it was you who nudged me under the table
as the thin man in striped pajamas climbed
the chair beside me in his bare feet, his pink-tinged urine
making soup of my leftovers. With my eyes locked on yours,
I watched you keep eating. So I lifted my fork
to my open mouth, jello quivering green
against the tines, and while I trusted you and chewed
on nothing, he leapt into the arms of the night nurse
and bit open the side of her face. You had been there
longer, knew the ropes, how to take the sugar-coated pill
and slip it into the side pocket in your mouth, pretend
to swallow it down in drowsy gulps while
the white-frocked nurse eyed the clockface above our heads.

You tapped messages into the wall while I wept, struggling
to remember the code, snuck in after bedcount
with cigarettes, blew the blue smoke through barred windows.
We traded stories, our military fathers:
yours locking you in a closet for the days it took
to chew ribbons of flesh from your fingers, a coat
pulled over your head; mine, who worked
his ringed fingers inside me while the house
slept, my face pressed to the pillow, my fists
knotted into the sheets. Some nights
I can’t eat. The dining room fills
with their chatter, my hand stuffed with the glint
of a fork and the safety of butter knives
quiet at the sides of our plates. If I could write you now,
I’d tell you I wonder how long I can go on with this careful
pouring of the wine from the bottle, straining to catch it
in the fragile glass. Tearing open my bread, I see
the scar, stitches laced up the root of your arm, the flesh messy
where you grabbed at it with the broken glass of an ashtray.
That was the third time. And later you laughed
when they twisted you into the white strapped jacket
demanding you vomit the pills. I imagined you
in the harsh light of a bare bulb where you took
the needle without flinching, retched
when the ipecac hit you, your body shelved over
the toilet and no one to hold the hair
from your face. I don’t know
where your hands are now, the fingers that filled my mouth
those nights you tongued me open in the broken light
that fell through chicken-wired windows. The intern
found us and wrenched us apart, the half-moon of your breast
exposed as you spit on him. “Now you’re going to get it,”
he hissed through this teeth and you screamed, “Get what?”

As if there was anything anyone could give you.
If I could write you now, I’d tell you
I still see your face, bone-white as my china
above the black velvet cape you wore to my wedding
twelve years ago, the hem of your black crepe skirt
brushing up the dirty rice in swirls
as you swept down the reception line to kiss me.
“Now you’re going to get it,” you whispered,
cupping my cheek in your hand.

Awake
Except for the rise and fall of a thin sheet
draped across your chest, you could be dead.
Your hair curled into the pillow.
Arms flung wide. The moon fills our window
and I stand in a white
rectangle of light. Hands crossed
over empty breasts. In an hour
the moon will lower itself. In the backyard
the dog will bark, dig up his bone
near the redwood fence. If we could have had
children, or religion, maybe sleep
wouldn’t feel like death, like shovel heads
packing the black earth down.
Morning will come because it has to.
You will open your eyes. The sun
will flare and rise. Chisel the hills
into shape. The sax player next door
will lift his horn and pour
music over the downturned Vs of rooftops,
the tangled ivy, the shivering tree,
giving it all back to us as he breathes:
The garden. The hard blue sky. The sweet
apple of light.

Girl in the Doorway
She is twelve now, the door to her room
closed, telephone cord trailing the hallway
in tight curls. I stand at the dryer, listening
through the thin wall between us, her voice
rising and falling as she describes her new life.
Static flies in brief blue stars from her socks,
her hairbrush in the morning. Her silver braces
shine inside the velvet case of her mouth.
Her grades rise and fall, her friends call
or they don’t, her dog chews her new shoes
to a canvas pulp. Some days she opens her door
and musk rises from the long crease in her bed,
fills the dim hall. She grabs a denim coat
and drags the floor. Dust swirls in gold eddies
behind her. She walks through the house, a goddess,
each window pulsing with summer. Outside,
the boys wait for her teeth to straighten.
They have a vibrant patience.
When she steps onto the front porch, sun shimmies
through the tips of her hair, the V of her legs,
fans out like wings under her arms
as she raises them and waves. Goodbye, Goodbye.
Then she turns to go, folds up
all that light in her arms like a blanket
and takes it with her.

On the Back Porch
The cat calls for her dinner.
On the porch I bend and pour
brown soy stars into her bowl,
stroke her dark fur.
It’s not quite night.
Pinpricks of light in the eastern sky.
Above my neighbor’s roof, a transparent
moon, a pink rag of cloud.
Inside my house are those who love me.
My daughter dusts biscuit dough.
And there’s a man who will lift my hair
in his hands, brush it
until it throws sparks.
Everything is just as I’ve left it.
Dinner simmers on the stove.
Glass bowls wait to be filled
with gold broth. Sprigs of parsley
on the cutting board.
I want to smell this rich soup, the air
around me going dark, as stars press
their simple shapes into the sky.
I want to stay on the back porch
while the world tilts
toward sleep, until what I love
misses me, and calls me in.

Bird
For days now a red-breasted bird
has been trying to break in.
She tests a low branch, violet blossoms
swaying beside her, leaps into the air and flies
straight at my window, beak and breast
held back, claws raking the pane.
Maybe she longs for the tree she sees
reflected in the glass, but I’m only guessing.
I watch until she gives up and swoops off.
I wait for her return, the familiar
click, swoosh, thump of her. I sip cold coffee
and scan the room, trying to see it new,
through the eyes of a bird. Nothing has changed.
Books piled in a corner, coats hooked
over chair backs, paper plates, a cup
half-filled with sour milk.
The children are in school. The man is at work.
I’m alone with dead roses in a jam jar.
What do I have that she could want enough
to risk such failure, again and again?

The Laundromat
My clothes somersault in the dryer. At thirty
I float in and out of a new kind of horniness,
the kind where you get off on words and gestures;
long talks about art are foreplay, the climax
is watching a man eat a Napoleon while he drives.
Across from me a fifty-year-old matron folds clothes,
her eyes focused on the nipples of a young man in
silk jogging shorts. He looks up, catching her.
She giggles and blurts out, “Hot, isn’t it?”
A man on my right eyes the line of my shorts, waiting
for me to bend over. I do. An act of animal kindness.
A long black jogger swings in off the street to
splash his face in the sink and I watch the room
become a sweet humid jungle. We crowd around
the Amazon at the watering hole, twitching our noses
like wildebeests or buffalo, snorting, rooting out
mates in the heat. I want to hump every moving thing
in this place. I want to lie down in the dry dung
and dust and twist to scratch my back. I want to
stretch and prowl and grow lazy in the shade. I want
to have a slew of cubs. “Do you have change for
a quarter?” he asks, scratching the inside of his thigh.
Back in the Laundromat my socks are sticking to my
sheets. Caught in the crackle of static electricity,
I fold my underwear. I notice the honey-colored
stains in each silk crotch. Odd-shaped, like dreams,
I make my panties into neat squares and drop them,
smiling, into the wicker basket.

Sunday
We sit on the lawn, an Igloo
cooler between us. So hot, the sky
is white. Above gravel rooftops
a spire, a shimmering cross.
You pick up the swollen hose, press
your thick thumb into the silver nozzle.
A fan of water sprays rainbows
over the dying lawn. Hummingbirds
sparkle green. Bellies powdered
with pollen from the bottle-brush tree.
The bells of twelve o’clock.
Our neighbors return from church.
I bow my head as they ease
clean cars into neat garages, file
through screen doors in lace gloves,
white hats, Bible-black suits.
The smell of barbeque rises, hellish
thick and sweet. I envy their weekly
peace of mind. They know
where they’re going when they die.
Charcoal fluid cans contract in the sun.
I want to be Catholic. A Jew. Maybe
a Methodist. I want to kneel
for days on rough wood.

Their kids appear in bright shorts,
bathing suits, their rubber thongs
flapping down the hot cement.
They could be anyone’s children;
they have God inside their tiny bodies.
My god, look how they float, like birds
through the scissor-scissor-scissor
of lawn sprinklers.
Down the street, a tinny radio bleats.
The sun bulges above our house
like an eye. I don’t want to die.
I never want to leave this block.
I envy everything, all of it. I know
it’s a sin. I love how you can shift
in your chair, take a deep drink
of gold beer, curl your toes under, and hum.

from

WHAT WE CARRY

Late October
Midnight. The cats under the open window,
their guttural, territorial yowls.
Crouched in the neighbor’s driveway with a broom,
I jab at them with the bristle end,
chasing their raised tails as they scramble
from bush to bush, intent on killing each other.
I shout and kick until they finally
give it up; one shimmies beneath the fence,
the other under a car. I stand in my underwear
in the trembling quiet, remembering my dream.
Something had been stolen from me, valueless
and irreplaceable. Grease and grass blades
were stuck to the bottoms of my feet.
I was shaking and sweating. I had wanted
to kill them. The moon was a white dinner plate
broken exactly in half. I saw myself as I was:
forty-one years old, standing on a slab
of cold concrete, a broom handle slipping
from my hands, my breasts bare, my hair

on end, afraid of what I might do next.

After Twelve Days of Rain
I couldn’t name it, the sweet
sadness welling up in me for weeks.
So I cleaned, found myself standing
in a room with a rag in my hand,
the birds calling time-to-go, time-to-go.
And like an old woman near the end
of her life I could hear it, the voice
of a man I never loved who pressed
my breasts to his lips and whispered
“My little doves, my white, white lilies.”
I could almost cry when I remember it.
I don’t remember when I began
to call everyone “sweetie,”
as if they were my daughters,
my darlings, my little birds.
I have always loved too much,
or not enough. Last night
I read a poem about God and almost
believed it—God sipping coffee,
smoking cherry tobacco. I’ve arrived
at a time in my life when I could believe
almost anything.
Today, pumping gas into my old car, I stood
hatless in the rain and the whole world
went silent—cars on the wet street
sliding past without sound, the attendant’s
mouth opening and closing on air
as he walked from pump to pump, his footsteps
erased in the rain—nothing
but the tiny numbers in their square windows
rolling by my shoulder, the unstoppable seconds

gliding by as I stood at the Chevron,
balanced evenly on my two feet, a gas nozzle
gripped in my hand, my hair gathering rain.
And I saw it didn’t matter
who had loved me or who I loved. I was alone.
The black oily asphalt, the slick beauty
of the Iranian attendant, the thickening
clouds—nothing was mine. And I understood
finally, after a semester of philosophy,
a thousand books of poetry, after death
and childbirth and the startled cries of men
who called out my name as they entered me,
I finally believed I was alone, felt it
in my actual, visceral heart, heard it echo
like a thin bell. And the sounds
came back, the slish of tires
and footsteps, all the delicate cargo
they carried saying thank you
and yes. So I paid and climbed into my car
as if nothing had happened—
as if everything mattered—What else could I do?
I drove to the grocery store
and bought wheat bread and milk,
a candy bar wrapped in gold foil,
smiled at the teenaged cashier
with the pimpled face and the plastic
name plate pinned above her small breast,
and knew her secret, her sweet fear—
Little bird. Little darling. She handed me
my change, my brown bag, a torn receipt,
pushed the cash drawer in with her hip
and smiled back.

Aphasia
for Honeya

After the stroke all she could say
was Venezuela, pointing to the pitcher
with its bright blue rim, her one word
command. And when she drank the clear
water in and gave the glass back,
it was Venezuela again, gratitude,
maybe, or the word now simply
a sigh, like the sky in the window,
the pillows a cloudy definition
propped beneath her head. Pink roses
dying on the bedside table, each fallen
petal a scrap in the shape of a country
she’d never been to, had never once
expressed interest in, and now
it was everywhere, in the peach
she lifted, dripping, to her lips,
the white tissue in the box, her brooding
children when they came to visit,
baptized with their new name
after each kiss. And at night
she whispered it, dark narcotic
in her husband’s ear as he bent
to listen, her hands, fumbling
at her buttons, her breasts,
holding them up to the light
like a gift. Venezuela, she said.

What We Carry
for Donald

He tells me his mother carries his father’s ashes
on the front seat in a cardboard box, exactly
where she placed them after the funeral.
Her explanation: she hasn’t decided
where they should be scattered.
It’s been three years.
I imagine her driving home from the store,
a sack of groceries jostling next to the box—
smell of lemons, breakfast rolls,
the radio tuned to the news.
He says he never liked his father,
but made peace with him before he died.
That he carries what he can
and discards the rest.
We are sitting in a café.
Because I don’t love him, I love
to watch him watch the women walk by
in their sheer summer skirts.
From where I sit I can see them approach,
then study his face as he watches them go.
We are friends. We are both lonely.
I never tell him about my father
so he doesn’t know that when I think of his—
blue ashes in a cardboard box—I think
of my own, alive in a room
somewhere in Oregon, a woman
helping his worn body into bed, the same body
that crushed my sister’s childhood, mine.
Maybe this wife kisses him
goodnight, tells him she loves him,

actually means it. This close to the end,
if he asked forgiveness, what could I say?
If I were handed my father’s ashes,
what would I do with them?
What body of water would be fit
for his scattering? What ground?
It’s best when I think least. I listen
to my friend’s story without judgment
or surprise, taking it in as he takes in
the women, without question, simply a given,
as unexceptional as conversation between friends,
the laughter, and at each end
the relative comfort of silence.

For the Sake of Strangers
No matter what the grief, its weight,
we are obliged to carry it.
We rise and gather momentum, the dull strength
that pushes us through crowds.
And then the young boy gives me directions
so avidly. A woman holds the glass door open,
waits patiently for my empty body to pass through.
All day it continues, each kindness
reaching toward another—a stranger
singing to no one as I pass on the path, trees
offering their blossoms, a Down child
who lifts his almond eyes and smiles.
Somehow they always find me, seem even
to be waiting, determined to keep me
from myself, from the thing that calls to me
as it must have once called to them—
this temptation to step off the edge
and fall weightless, away from the world.

Dust
Someone spoke to me last night,
told me the truth. Just a few words,
but I recognized it.
I knew I should make myself get up,
write it down, but it was late,
and I was exhausted from working
all day in the garden, moving rocks.
Now, I remember only the flavor—
not like food, sweet or sharp.
More like a fine powder, like dust.
And I wasn’t elated or frightened,
but simply rapt, aware.
That’s how it is sometimes—
God comes to your window,
all bright light and black wings,
and you’re just too tired to open it.

Twelve
Deep in the canyon, under the red branches
of a manzanita, we turned the pages
slowly, seriously, as if it were a holy text,
just as the summer before we had turned
the dark undersides of rocks to interrupt
the lives of ants, or a black stink bug
and her hard-backed brood.
And because the boys always came,
even though they weren’t invited, we never
said anything, except Brenda who whispered
Turn the page when she thought we’d seen enough.
This went on for weeks one summer, a few of us
meeting at the canyon rim at noon, the glossy
magazine fluttering at the tips of our fingers.
Brenda led the way down, and the others
stumbled after blindly, Martin,
always with his little brother
hanging off the pocket of his jeans, a blue
pacifier stuck like candy in his mouth.
Every time he yawned, the wet nipple
fell out into the dirt, and Martin, the good brother,
would pick it up, dust it with the underside
of his shirt, then slip it into his own mouth
and suck it clean. And when the turning
of the pages began, ceremoniously, exposing
thigh after thigh, breast after beautiful, terrible
breast, Martin leaned to one side,
and slid the soft palm of his hand
over his baby brother’s eyes.

Each Sound
Beginnings are brutal, like this accident
of stars colliding, mute explosions
of colorful gases, the mist and dust
that would become our bodies
hurling through black holes, rising,
muck-ridden, from pits of tar and clay.
Back then it was easy to have teeth,
claw our way into the trees—it was
accepted, the monkeys loved us, sat
on their red asses clapping and laughing.
We’ve forgotten the luxury of dumbness,
how once we crouched naked on an outcrop
of rock, the moon huge and untouched
above us, speechless. Now we talk
about everything, incessantly,
our moans and grunts turned on a spit
into warm vowels and elegant consonants.
We say plethora, demitasse, ozone and love.
We think we know what each sound means.
There are times when something so joyous
or so horrible happens our only response
is an intake of breath, and then
we’re back at the truth of it,
that ball of life expanding
and exploding on impact, our heads,
our chests, filled with that first
unspeakable light.

Fast Gas
for Richard

Before the day of self service,
when you never had to pump your own gas,
I was the one who did it for you, the girl
who stepped out at the sound of a bell
with a blue rag in my hand, my hair pulled back
in a straight, unlovely ponytail.
This was before automatic shut-offs
and vapor seals, and once, while filling a tank,
I hit a bubble of trapped air and the gas
backed up, came arcing out of the hole
in a bright gold wave and soaked me—face, breasts,
belly and legs. And I had to hurry
back to the booth, the small employee bathroom
with the broken lock, to change my uniform,
peel the gas-soaked cloth from my skin
and wash myself in the sink.
Light-headed, scrubbed raw, I felt
pure and amazed—the way the amber gas
glazed my flesh, the searing,
subterranean pain of it, how my skin
shimmered and ached, glowed
like rainbowed oil on the pavement.
I was twenty. In a few weeks I would fall,
for the first time, in love, that man waiting
patiently in my future like a red leaf
on the sidewalk, the kind of beauty
that asks to be noticed. How was I to know
it would begin this way: every cell of my body
burning with a dangerous beauty, the air around me
a nimbus of light that would carry me

through the days, how when he found me
weeks later, he would find me like that,
an ordinary woman who could rise
in flame, all he would have to do
is come close and touch me.

As It Is
The man I love hates technology, hates
that he’s forced to use it: telephones
and microfilm, air conditioning,
car radios and the occasional fax.
He wishes he lived in the old world,
sitting on a stump carving a clothespin
or a spoon. He wants to go back, slip
like lint into his great-great-grandfather’s
pocket, reborn as a pilgrim, a peasant,
a dirt farmer hoeing his uneven rows.
He walks when he can, through the hills
behind his house, his dogs panting beside him
like small steam engines. He’s delighted
by the sun’s slow and simple
descent, the complicated machinery
of his own body. I would have loved him
in any era, in any dark age, I would take him
into the twilight and unwind him, slide
my fingers through his hair and pull him
to his knees. As it is, this afternoon, late
in the twentieth century, I sit on a chair
in the kitchen with my keys in my lap, pressing
the black button on the answering machine
over and over, listening to his message,
his voice strung along the wires outside my window
where the birds balance themselves
and stare off into the trees, thinking
even in the farthest future, in the most
distant universe, I would have recognized
this voice, refracted, as it would be, like light
from some small, uncharted star.

The Thief
What is it when your man sits on the floor
in sweatpants, his latest project
set out in front of him like a small world, maps
and photographs, diagrams and plans, everything
he hopes to build, invent or create,
and you believe in him as you always have,
even after the failures, even more now
as you set your coffee down
and move toward him, to where he sits
oblivious of you, concentrating
in a square of sun—
you step over the rulers and blue graph-paper
to squat behind him, and he barely notices
though you’re still in your robe
which falls open a little as you reach
around his chest, feel for the pink
wheel of each nipple, the slow beat
of his heart, your ear pressed to his back
to listen—and you are torn,
not wanting to interrupt his work
but unable to keep your fingers
from dipping into the ditch in his pants,
torn again with tenderness
for the way his flesh grows unwillingly
toward your curved palm, toward the light,
as if you had planted it, this sweet root,
your mouth already an echo of its shape—
you slip your tongue into his ear
and he hears you, calling him away
from his work, the angled lines of his thoughts,
into the shapeless place you are bound
to take him, over bridges of bone, beyond
borders of skin, climbing over him
into the world of the body, its labyrinth
of ladders and stairs—and you love him

like the first time you loved him,
with equal measures of expectancy
and fear and awe, taking him with you
into the soft geometry of the flesh, the earth
before its sidewalks and cities,
its glistening spires,
stealing him back from the world he loves
into this other world he cannot build without you.

This Close
In the room where we lie, light
stains the drawn shades yellow.
We sweat and pull at each other, climb
with our fingers the slippery ladders of rib.
Wherever our bodies touch, the flesh
comes alive. Heat and need, like invisible
animals, gnaw at my breasts, the soft
insides of your thighs. What I want
I simply reach out and take, no delicacy now,
the dark human bread I eat handful
by greedy handful. Eyes, fingers, mouths,
sweet leeches of desire. Crazy woman,
her brain full of bees, see how her palms curl
into fists and beat the pillow senseless.
And when my body finally gives in to it
then pulls itself away, salt-laced
and arched with its final ache, I am
so grateful I would give you anything, anything.
If I loved you, being this close would kill me.

The Lovers
She is about to come. This time,
they are sitting up, joined below the belly,
feet cupped like sleek hands praying
at the base of each other’s spines.
And when something lifts within her
toward a light she’s sure, once again,
she can’t bear, she opens her eyes
and sees his face is turned away,
one arm behind him, hand splayed
palm down on the mattress, to brace himself
so he can lever his hips, touch
with the bright tip the innermost spot.
And she finds she can’t bear it—
not his beautiful neck, stretched and corded,
not his hair fallen to one side like beach grass,
not the curved wing of his ear, washed thin
with daylight, deep pink of the inner body.
What she can’t bear is that she can’t see his face,
not that she thinks this exactly—she is rocking
and breathing—it’s more her body’s thought,
opening, as it is, into its own sheer truth.
So that when her hand lifts of its own volition
and slaps him, twice on the chest,
on that pad of muscled flesh just above the nipple,
slaps him twice, fast, like a nursing child
trying to get a mother’s attention,
she’s startled by the sound,
though when he turns his face to hers—
which is what her body wants, his eyes
pulled open, as if she had bitten—
she does reach out and bite him, on the shoulder,
not hard, but with the power infants have
over those who have borne them, tied as they are
to the body, and so, tied to the pleasure,
the exquisite pain of this world.

And when she lifts her face he sees
where she’s gone, knows she can’t speak,
is traveling toward something essential,
toward the core of her need, so he simply
watches, steadily, with an animal calm
as she arches and screams, watches the face that,
if she could see it, she would never let him see.

Kissing
They are kissing, on a park bench,
on the edge of an old bed, in a doorway
or on the floor of a church. Kissing
as the streets fill with balloons
or soldiers, locusts or confetti, water
or fire or dust. Kissing down through
the centuries under sun or stars, a dead tree,
an umbrella, amid derelicts. Kissing
as Christ carries his cross, as Gandhi
sings his speeches, as a bullet
careens through the air toward a child’s
good heart. They are kissing,
long, deep, spacious kisses, exploring
the silence of the tongue, the mute
rungs of the upper palate, hungry
for the living flesh. They are still
kissing when the cars crash and the bombs
drop, when the babies are born crying
into the white air, when Mozart bends
to his bowl of soup and Stalin
bends to his garden. They are kissing
to begin the world again. Nothing
can stop them. They kiss until their lips
swell, their thick tongues quickening
to the budded touch, licking up
the sweet juices. I want to believe
they are kissing to save the world,
but they’re not. All they know
is this press and need, these two-legged
beasts, their faces like roses crushed
together and opening, they are covering
their teeth, they are doing what they have to do
to survive the worst, they are sealing
the hard words in, they are dying
for our sins. In a broken world they are

practicing this simple and singular act
to perfection. They are holding
onto each other. They are kissing.

from

SMOKE

Death Comes to Me Again, a Girl
Death comes to me again, a girl in a cotton slip.
Barefoot, giggling. It’s not so terrible, she tells me,
not like you think: all darkness and silence.
There are wind chimes and the scent of lemons.
Some days it rains. But more often the air
is dry and sweet. We sit beneath the staircase
built from hair and bone and listen
to the voices of the living.
I like it, she says, shaking the dust from her hair.
Especially when they fight, and when they sing.

How It Will Happen, When
There you are, exhausted from a night of crying, curled up on the couch,
the floor, at the foot of the bed, anywhere you fall you fall down crying,
half amazed at what the body is capable of, not believing you can cry
anymore. And there they are, his socks, his shirt, your underwear
and your winter gloves, all in a loose pile next to the bathroom door,
and you fall down again. Someday, years from now, things will be
different, the house clean for once, everything in its place, windows
shining, sun coming in easily now, sliding across the high shine of wax
on the wood floor. You’ll be peeling an orange or watching a bird
spring from the edge of the rooftop next door, noticing how,
for an instant, its body is stopped on the air, only a moment before
gathering the will to fly into the ruff at its wings and then doing it:
flying. You’ll be reading, and for a moment there will be a word
you don’t understand, a simple word like now or what or is
and you’ll ponder over it like a child discovering language.
Is you’ll say over and over until it begins to make sense, and that’s
when you’ll say it, for the first time, out loud: He’s dead. He’s not
coming back. And it will be the first time you believe it.

Fear
We were afraid of everything: earthquakes,
strangers, smoke above the canyon, the fire
that would come running and eat up our house,
the Claymore girls, big-boned, rough, razor blades
tucked in their ratted hair. We were terrified
of polio, tuberculosis, being found out, the tent
full of boys two blocks over, the kick ball, the asphalt,
the pain-filled rocks, the glass-littered canyon, the deep
cave gouged in its side, the wheelbarrow crammed
with dirty magazines, beer cans, spit-laced butts.
We were afraid of hands, screen doors slammed
by angry mothers, abandoned cars, their slumped
back seats, the chain-link fence we couldn’t climb
fast enough, electrical storms, blackouts, fistfights
behind the pancake house, Original Sin, sidewalk
cracks and the corner crematorium, loose brakes
on the handlebars of our bikes. It came alive
behind our eyes: ant mounds, wasp nests, the bird
half-eaten on the scratchy grass, chained dogs,
the boggy creek bed, the sewer main that fed it,
the game where you had to hold your breath
until you passed out. We were afraid of being
poor, dumb, yelled at, ignored, invisible
as the nuclear dust we were told to wipe
from lids before we opened them in the kitchen,
the fat roll of meat that slid into the pot, sleep,
dreams, the soundless swing of the father’s ringed
fist, the mother’s face turned away, the wet bed,

anything red, wrenches left scattered in the dirt,
the slow leak, the stain on the driveway, oily gears
soaking in a shallow pan, busted chairs stuffed
in the rafters of the neighbor’s garage, the Chevy’s
twisted undersides jacked up on blocks.
It was what we knew best, understood least,
it whipped through our bodies like fire or sleet.
We were lured by the dumpster behind the liquor store,
fissures in the baked earth, the smell of singed hair,
the brassy hum of high-tension towers, train tracks,
buzzards over a ditch, black widows, the cat
with one eye, the red spot on the back of the skirt,
the fallout shelter’s metal door hinged to the rusty
grass, the back way, the wrong path, the night’s
wide back, the coiled bedsprings of the sister’s top
bunk, the wheezing, the cousin in the next room
tapping on the wall, anything small.
We were afraid of clothesline, curtain rods, the worn
hairbrush, the good-for-nothings we were about to become,
reform school, the long ride to the ocean on the bus,
the man at the back of the bus, the underpass.
We were afraid of fingers of pickleweed crawling
over the embankment, the French Kiss, the profound
silence of dead fish, burning sand, rotting elastic
in the waistbands of our underpants, jellyfish, riptides,
eucalyptus bark unraveling, the pink flesh beneath,
the stink of seaweed, seagulls landing near our feet,
their hateful eyes, their orange-tipped beaks stabbing
the sand, the crumbling edge of the continent we stood on,
waiting to be saved, the endless, wind-driven waves.

Last Words
for Al

His voice, toward the end, was a soft coal breaking
open in the little stove of his heart. One day
he just let go and the birds stopped singing.
Then the other deaths came on, as if by permission—
beloved teacher, cousin, a lover slipped from my life
the way a rope slithers from your grip, the ocean
folding over it, your fingers stripped of flesh. A deck
of cards, worn smooth at a kitchen table, the jack
of spades laid down at last, his face thumbed to threads.
An ashtray full of pebbles on the window ledge, wave-beaten,
gathered at day’s end from a beach your mind has never left,
then a starling climbs the pine outside—
the cat’s black paw, the past shattered, the stones
rolled to their forever-hidden places. Even the poets
I had taken to my soul: Levis, Matthews, Levertov—
the books of poetry, lost or stolen, left on airport benches,
shabby trade paperbacks of my childhood, the box
misplaced, the one suitcase that mattered crushed
to nothing in the belly of a train. I took a rubbing
of the carved wings and lilies from a headstone
outside Philadelphia, frosted gin bottles
stationed like soldiers on her grave:

The Best Blues Singer in the World
Will Never Stop Singing.
How many losses does it take to stop a heart,
to lay waste to the vocabularies of desire?
Each one came rushing through the rooms he left.
Mouths open. Last words flown up into the trees.

Trying to Raise the Dead
Look at me. I’m standing on a deck
in the middle of Oregon. There are
people inside the house, It’s not my
house, you don’t know them.
They’re drinking and singing
and playing guitars. You love
this song. Remember? “Ophelia.”
Boards on the windows, mail
by the door. I’m whispering
so they won’t think I’m crazy.
They don’t know me that well.
Where are you now? I feel stupid.
I’m talking to trees, to leaves
swarming on the black air, stars
blinking in and out of heartshaped shadows, to the moon, halflit and barren, stuck like an ax
between the branches. What are you
now? Air? Mist? Dust? Light?
What? Give me something. I have
to know where to send my voice.
A direction. An object. My love, it needs
a place to rest. Say anything. I’m listening.

I’m ready to believe. Even lies, I don’t care.
Say burning bush. Say stone. They’ve
stopped singing now and I really should go.
So tell me, quickly. It’s April. I’m
on Spring Street. That’s my gray car
in the driveway. They’re laughing
and dancing. Someone’s bound
to show up soon. I’m waving.
Give me a sign if you can see me.
I’m the only one here on my knees.

The Shipfitter’s Wife
I loved him most
when he came home from work,
his fingers still curled from fitting pipe,
his denim shirt ringed with sweat,
smelling of salt, the drying weeds
of the ocean. I’d go to where he sat
on the edge of the bed, his forehead
anointed with grease, his cracked hands
jammed between his thighs, and unlace
the steel-toed boots, stroke his ankles
and calves, the pads and bones of his feet.
Then I’d open his clothes and take
the whole day inside me—the ship’s
gray sides, the miles of copper pipe,
the voice of the foreman clanging
off the hull’s silver ribs. Spark of lead
kissing metal. The clamp, the winch,
the white fire of the torch, the whistle,
and the long drive home.

Abschied Symphony
Someone I love is dying, which is why,
when I turn the key in the ignition
and the radio comes on, sudden and loud,
something by Haydn, a diminishing fugue,
then back the car out of the parking space
in the underground garage, maneuvering through
the dimly lit tunnels, under low ceilings,
following yellow arrows stenciled at intervals
on gray cement walls and I think of him,
moving slowly through the last
hard days of his life, I won’t
turn it off, and I can’t stop crying.
When I arrive at the tollgate I have to make
myself stop thinking as I dig in my pockets
for the last of my coins, turn to the attendant,
indifferent in his blue smock, his white hair
curling like smoke around his weathered neck,
and say Thank you, like an idiot, and drive
into the blinding midday light.
Everything is hideously symbolic:
the Chevron truck, its underbelly
spattered with road grit and the sweat
of last night’s rain, the dumpster
behind the flower shop, sprung lid
pressed down on dead wedding bouquets—
even the smell of something simple, coffee
drifting from the open door of a café,
and my eyes glaze over, ache in their sockets.
For months now all I’ve wanted is the blessing
of inattention, to move carefully from room to room
in my small house, numb with forgetfulness.
To eat a bowl of cereal and not imagine him,
drawn thin and pale, unable to swallow.
How not to imagine the tumors
ripening beneath his skin, flesh

I have kissed, stroked with my fingertips,
pressed my belly and breasts against, some nights
so hard I thought I could enter him, open
his back at the spine like a door or a curtain
and slip in like a small fish between his ribs,
nudge the coral of his brain with my lips,
brushing over the blue coils of his bowels
with the fluted silk of my tail.
Death is not romantic. He is dying. That fact
is stark and one-dimensional, a black note
on an empty staff. My feet are cold,
but not as cold as his, and I hate this music
that floods the cramped insides
of my car, my head, slowing the world down
with its lurid majesty, transforming
everything I see into stained memorials
to life—even the old Ford ahead of me,
its battered rear end thinned to scallops of rust,
pumping grim shrouds of exhaust
into the shimmering air—even the tenacious
nasturtiums clinging to a fence, stem and bloom
of the insignificant, music spooling
from their open faces, spilling upward, past
the last rim of blue and into the black pool
of another galaxy. As if all that emptiness
were a place of benevolence, a destination,
a peace we could rise to.

Family Stories
I had a boyfriend who told me stories about his family,
how an argument once ended when his father
seized a lit birthday cake in both hands
and hurled it out a second-story window. That,
I thought, was what a normal family was like: anger
sent out across the sill, landing like a gift
to decorate the sidewalk below. In mine
it was fists and direct hits to the solar plexus,
and nobody ever forgave anyone. But I believed
the people in his stories really loved one another,
even when they yelled and shoved their feet
through cabinet doors or held a chair like a bottle
of cheap champagne, christening the wall,
rungs exploding from their holes.
I said it sounded harmless, the pomp and fury
of the passionate. He said it was a curse
being born Italian and Catholic and when he
looked from that window what he saw was the moment
rudely crushed. But all I could see was a gorgeous
three-layer cake gliding like a battered ship
down the sidewalk, the smoking candles broken, sunk
deep in the icing, a few still burning.

Pearl
She was a headlong assault, a hysterical discharge, an act of total extermination.
—MYRA FRIEDMAN,
Buried Alive: The Biography of Janis Joplin

She was nothing much, this plain-faced girl from Texas,
this moonfaced child who opened her mouth
to the gravel pit churning in her belly, acne-faced
daughter of Leadbelly, Bessie, Otis, and the boozefilled moon, child of the honkytonk bar-talk crowd
who cackled like a bird of prey, velvet cape blown
open in the Monterey wind, ringed fingers fisted
at her throat, howling the slagheap up and out
into the sawdusted air. Barefaced, mouth warped
and wailing like giving birth, like being eaten alive
from the inside, or crooning like the first child
abandoned by God, trying to woo him back,
down on her knees and pleading for a second chance.
When she sang she danced a stand-in-place dance,
one foot stamping at that fire, that bed of coals;
one leg locked at the knee and quivering, the other
pumping its oil-rig rhythm, her boy hip jigging
so the beaded belt slapped her thigh.
Didn’t she give it to us? So loud so hard so furious,
hurling heat-seeking balls of lightning
down the long human aisles, her voice crashing
into us—sonic booms to the heart—this little white girl
who showed us what it was like to die
for love, to jump right up and die for it night after
drumbeaten night, going down shrieking—hair
feathered, frayed, eyes glazed, addicted to the song—
a one-woman let me show you how it’s done, how it is,
where it goes when you can’t hold it in anymore.
Child of everything gone wrong, gone bad, gone down,
gone. Girl with the girlish breasts and woman hips,

thick-necked, sweat misting her upper lip, hooded eyes
raining a wild blue light, hands reaching out
to the ocean we made, all that anguish and longing
swelling and rising at her feet. Didn’t she burn
herself up for us, shaking us alive? That child,
that girl, that rawboned woman, stranded
in a storm on a blackened stage like a house
on fire.

Smoke
Who would want to give it up, the coal
a cat’s eyein the dark room, no one there
but you and your smoke, the window
cracked to street sounds, the distant cries
of living things. Alone, you are almost
safe, smoke slipping out between the sill
and the glass, sucked into the night
you don’t dare enter, its eyes drunk
and swimming with stars. Somewhere
a dumpster is ratcheted open by the claws
of a black machine. All down the block
something inside you opens and shuts.
Sinister screech, pneumatic wheeze,
trash slams into the chute: leftovers, empties.
You don’t flip on the TV or the radio, they
might muffle the sound of car engines
backfiring, and in the silence between,
streetlights twitching from green to red, scoff
of footsteps, the rasp of breath, your own,
growing lighter and lighter as you inhale.
There’s no music for this scarf of smoke
wrapped around your shoulders, its fingers
crawling the pale stem of your neck,
no song light enough, liquid enough,
that climbs high enough before it thins
and disappears. Death’s shovel scrapes
the sidewalk, critches across the man-made
cracks, slides on grease into rain-filled gutters,
digs its beveled nose among the ravaged leaves.
You can hear him weaving his way
down the street, sloshed on the last breath
he swirled past his teeth before swallowing:
breath of the cat kicked to the curb, a woman’s
sharp grasp, lung-filled wail of the shaken child.
You can’t put it out, can’t stamp out the light

and let the night enter you, let it burrow through
your smallest passages. So you listen and listen
and smoke and give thanks, suck deep
with the grace of the living, blowing halos
and nooses and zeros and rings, the blue chains
linking around your head. Then you pull it in
again, the vein-colored smoke,
and blow it up toward a ceiling you can’t see
where it lingers like a sweetness you can never hold,
like the ghost the night will become.

The Orgasms of Organisms
Above the lawn the wild beetles mate
and mate, skew their tough wings
and join. They light in our hair,
on our arms, fall twirling and twinning
into our laps. And below us, in the grass,
the bugs are seeking each other out,
antennae lifted and trembling, tiny legs
scuttling, then the infinitesimal
ahs of their meeting, the awkward joy
of their turnings around. O end to end
they meet again and swoon as only bugs can.
This is why, sometimes, the grass feels electric
under our feet, each blade quivering, and why
the air comes undone over our heads
and washes down around our ears like rain.
But it has to be spring, and you have to be
in love—acutely, painfully, achingly in love—
to hear the black-robed choir of their sighs.

Life is Beautiful
and remote, and useful,
if only to itself. Take the fly, angel
of the ordinary house, laying its bright
eggs on the trash, pressing each jewel out
delicately along a crust of buttered toast.
Bagged, the whole mess travels to the nearest
dump where other flies have gathered, singing
over stained newsprint and reeking
fruit. Rapt on air they execute an intricate
ballet above the clashing pirouettes
of heavy machinery. They hum with life.
While inside rumpled sacks pure white
maggots writhe and spiral from a rip,
a tear-shaped hole that drools and drips
a living froth onto the buried earth.
The warm days pass, gulls scree and pitch,
rats manage the crevices, feral cats abandon
their litters for a morsel of torn fur, stranded
dogs roam open fields, sniff the fragrant edges,
a tossed lacework of bones and shredded flesh.
And the maggots tumble at the center, ripening,
husks membrane-thin, embryos darkening
and shifting within, wings curled and wet,
the open air pungent and ready to receive them
in their fecund iridescence. And so, of our homely hosts,
a bag of jewels is born again into the world. Come, lost
children of the sun-drenched kitchen, your parents
soundly sleep along the windowsill, content,
wings at rest, nestled in against the warm glass.
Everywhere the good life oozes from the useless
waste we make when we create—our streets teem
with human young, rafts of pigeons streaming
over the squirrel-burdened trees. If there is
a purpose, maybe there are too many of us
to see it, though we can, from a distance,

hear the dull thrum of generation’s industry,
feel its fleshly wheel churn the fire inside us, pushing
the world forward toward its ragged edge, rushing
like a swollen river into multitude and rank disorder.
Such abundance. We are gorged, engorging, and gorgeous.

from

FACTS ABOUT THE MOON

Moon in the Window
I wish I could say I was the kind of child
who watched the moon from her window,
would turn toward it and wonder.
I never wondered. I read. Dark signs
that crawled toward the edge of the page.
It took me years to grow a heart
from paper and glue. All I had
was a flashlight, bright as the moon,
a white hole blazing beneath the sheets.

Facts About the Moon
The moon is backing away from us
an inch and a half each year. That means
if you’re like me and were born
around fifty years ago the moon
was a full six feet closer to the earth.
What’s a person supposed to do?
I feel the gray cloud of consternation
travel across my face. I begin thinking
about the moon-lit past, how if you go back
far enough you can imagine the breathtaking
hugeness of the moon, prehistoric
solar eclipses when the moon covered the sun
so completely there was no corona, only
a darkness we had no word for.
And future eclipses will look like this: the moon
a small black pupil in the eye of the sun.
But these are bald facts.
What bothers me most is that someday
the moon will spiral right out of orbit
and all land-based life will die.
The moon keeps the oceans from swallowing
the shores, keeps the electromagnetic fields
in check at the polar ends of the earth.
And please don’t tell me
what I already know, that it won’t happen
for a long time. I don’t care. I’m afraid
of what will happen to the moon.
Forget us. We don’t deserve the moon.
Maybe we once did but not now
after all we’ve done. These nights
I harbor a secret pity for the moon, rolling
around alone in space without
her milky planet, her only love, a mother
who’s lost a child, a bad child,
a greedy child or maybe a grown boy

who’s murdered and raped, a mother
can’t help it, she loves that boy
anyway, and in spite of herself
she misses him, and if you sit beside her
on the padded hospital bench
outside the door to his room you can’t not
take her hand, listen to her while she
weeps, telling you how sweet he was,
how blue his eyes, and you know she’s only
romanticizing, that she’s conveniently
forgotten the bruises and booze,
the stolen car, the day he ripped
the phones from the walls, and you want
to slap her back to sanity, remind her
of the truth: he was a leech, a fuckup,
a little shit, and you almost do
until she lifts her pale puffy face, her eyes
two craters, and then you can’t help it
either, you know love when you see it,
you can feel its lunar strength, its brutal pull.

The Crossing
The elk of Orick wait patiently to cross the road
and my husband of six months, who thinks
he’s St. Francis, climbs out of the car to assist.
Ghost of St. Francis, his T-shirt flapping, steps
tenderly onto the tarmac and they begin their trek,
heads lifted, nostrils flared, each footfall
a testament to stalled momentum, gracefully
hesitant, as a brace of semis, lined up, humming,
adjust their air brakes. They cross the four-lane
like a coronation, slow as a Greek frieze, river
wind riffling the wheat grass of their rumps.
But my husband stays on, to talk to the one
who won’t budge, oblivious to her sisters,
a long stalk of fennel gyrating between her teeth.
Go on, he beseeches, Get going, but the lone elk
stands her ground, their noses less than a yard apart.
One stubborn creature staring down another.
This is how I know the marriage will last.

The Ravens of Denali
Such dumb luck. To stumble
across an “unkindness” of ravens
at play with a shred of clear visquine
fallen from the blown-out window
of the Denali Truck Stop and Café.
Black wings gathering in the deserted
parking lot below the Assembly of God.
Ravens at play in the desolate fields
of the lord, under the tallest mountain
in North America, eight of them,
as many as the stars in the Big Dipper
on Alaska’s state flag, yellow stars
sewn to a blue background flapping
from a pole over the roadside.
Flag that Benny Benson, age 13,
an Alutiiq Indian of Seward
formerly housed at the Jesse-Lee Memorial
Home for Orphans in Unalaska,
designed and submitted to a contest
in 1927 and won, his crayoned masterpiece
snapping above every broken-down
courthouse, chipped brick library
and deathtrap post office
in the penultimate state accepted
to the Union, known to its people
as the Upper One. Though a design
of the northern lights would have been
my choice, those alien green curtains
swirling over Mt. McKinley, Denali,
“the tall one,” during the coldest, darkest
months of the subarctic year.
Red starburst or purple-edged skirt
rolling in vitreous waves
over the stunted ice-rimed treetops
or in spring, candles of fireweed

and the tiny ice blue flowers
of the tundra. Tundra, a word
that sounds like a thousand caribou
pouring down a gorge.
But all that might be difficult
for an orphaned 7th grader to draw
with three chewed-up crayons
and a piece of butcher paper.
As would these eight giggling ravens
with their shrewd eyes and slit-shine wings,
beaks like keloid scars. Acrobats
of speed and sheen. Black boot
of the bird family. Unconcerned
this moment with survival.
Though I hope they survive.
Whatever we have in store for them.
And the grizzly bear and the clubfooted moose. The muscular salmon.
The oil-spill seal and gull.
And raven’s cousin, the bald eagle,
who can dive at 100 miles per hour,
can actually swim with massive
butterfly strokes through
the great glacial lakes of Alaska,
her wingspan as long as a man.
Architect of the two-ton nest
assembled over 34 years
with scavenged branches,
threatened in all but three
of the Lower 48, but making, by god,
a comeback if it’s not too late
for such lofty promises.
Even the homely marmot
and the immigrant starling,
I wish you luck,
whatever ultimate harm we do
to this northernmost up-flung arm
of our country, our revolving world.
But you, epicurean raven, may you

be the pole star of the apocalypse,
you stubborn snow-trudger,
you quorum of eight who jostle one another
for a strip of plastic on the last
endless day, the last endless night
of our only sun’s solar wind,
those glorious auroras, glassine gowns
of Blake’s angels, that almost invisible shine
tugged and stretched between you
like taffy from outer space, tattered ends
gripped in your fur-crested beaks as we reel
headlong into the dwindling unknown.
Denizens of the frozen north, the last
frontier, harbingers of unluck
and the cold bleak lack to come.

The Life of Trees
The pines rub their great noise
into the spangled dark, scratch
their itchy boughs against the house,
and that moan’s mystery translates roughly
into drudgery of ownership: time
to drag the ladder from the shed,
climb onto the roof with a saw
between my teeth, cut
those suckers down. What’s reality
if not a long exhaustive cringe
from the blade, the teeth? I want to sleep
and dream the life of trees, beings
from the muted world who care
nothing for Money, Politics, Power,
Will or Right, who want little from the night
but a few dead stars going dim, a white owl
lifting from their limbs, who want only
to sink their roots into the wet ground
and terrify the worms or shake
their bleary heads like fashion models
or old hippies. If trees could speak
they wouldn’t, only hum some low
green note, roll their pinecones
down the empty streets and blame it,
with a shrug, on the cold wind.
During the day they sleep inside
their furry bark, clouds shredding
like ancient lace above their crowns.
Sun. Rain. Snow. Wind. They fear
nothing but the Hurricane, and Fire,
that whipped bully who rises up
and becomes his own dead father.
In the storms the young ones
bend and bend and the old know
they may not make it, go down

with the power lines sparking,
broken at the trunk. They fling
their branches, forked sacrifice
to the beaten earth. They do not pray.
If they make a sound it’s eaten
by the wind. And though the stars
return they do not offer thanks, only
ooze a sticky sap from their roundish
concentric wounds, clap the water
from their needles, straighten their spines
and breathe, and breathe again.

What’s Broken
The slate black sky. The middle step
of the back porch. And long ago
my mother’s necklace, the beads
rolling north and south. Broken
the rose stem, water into drops, glass
knob on the bedroom door. Last summer’s
pot of parsley and mint, white roots
shooting like streamers through the cracks.
Years ago the cat’s tail, the bird bath,
the car hood’s rusted latch. Broken
little finger on my right hand at birth—
I was pulled out too fast. What hasn’t
been rent, divided, split? Broken
the days into nights, the night sky
into stars, the stars into patterns
I make up as I trace them
with a broken-off blade
of grass. Possible, unthinkable,
the cricket’s tiny back as I lie

on the lawn in the dark, my heart
a blue cup fallen from someone’s hands.

Afterlife
Even in heaven, when a former waitress goes out
for lunch, she can’t help it, can’t stop wiping down
the counter, brushing crumbs from the bottoms
of ketchup bottles, cleaning the chunky rim
around the cap with a napkin, tipping big.
Old habits die hard. Old waitresses
die harder, laid out in cheap cardboard coffins
in their lacy blue varicose veins, arches fallen
like grand cathedrals, a row of female Quasimodos:
each finely sprung spine humped from a lifetime
hefting trays. But they have smiles on their faces,
feet up, dancing shoes shined, wispy hair nets
peeled off and tossed in the trash, permed strands
snagged in the knots. You hover over their open caskets
with your fist full of roses and it’s their hands
you can’t stop staring at. Hands like yours, fingers
scarred, stained, rough, muscles plump
between each knuckle, tough as a man’s,
useless now, still as they never were
even at shift’s end, gnarled wings folded
between the breasts of faceless women done
with their gossip, their earthly orders,
having poured the day’s dark brew
into the last bottomless cup, finished
with mice in the rice bags, roaches
in the walk-in, their eyes sealed shut, deaf
forever to the clatter, the cook, the cries
of the living. Grateful as nuns. Quite dead.

Savages
Those two shelves, down there.
—ADRIENNE RICH
for Matthew, Mike, Michael and Carl

They buy poetry like gang members
buy guns—for aperture, caliber,
heft and defense. They sit on the floor
in the stacks, thumbing through Keats
and Plath, Levine and Olds, four boys
in a bookstore, black glasses, brackish hair,
rumpled shirts from the bin at St. Vincent de Paul.
One slides a warped hardback
from the bottom shelf, the others
scoot over to check the dates,
the yellowed sheaves ride smooth
under their fingers.
One reads a stanza in a whisper,
another turns the page, and their heads
almost touch, temple to temple—toughs
in a huddle, barbarians before a hunt, kids
hiding in an alley while sirens spiral by.
When they finish reading one closes
the musty cover like the door
on Tutankhamen’s tomb. They are savage
for knowledge, for beauty and truth.
They crawl on their knees to find it.

Vacation Sex
We’ve been at it all summer, from the Canadian border
to the edge of Mexico, just barely keeping it American
but doing okay just the same, in hotels under overpasses
or rooms next to ice machines, friends’ fold-out couches,
in-laws’ guest quarters—wallpaper and bedspreads festooned
with nautical rigging, tiny life rings and coiled tow ropes—
even one night in the car, the plush backseat not plush
enough, the door handle giving me an impromptu
sacro-cranial chiropractic adjustment, the underside
of the front seat strafing the perfect arches of his feet.
And one long glorious night in a cabin tucked in the woods
where our crooning and whooping started the coyotes
singing. But the best was when we got home, our luggage
cuddled in the vestibule—really just a hallway
but because we were home it seemed like a vestibule—
and we threw off our vestments, which were really
just our clothes but they seemed like garments, like raiment,
like habits because we felt sorely religious, dropping them
one by one on the stairs: white shirts, black bra, blue jeans,
red socks, then stood naked in our own bedroom, our bed
with its drab spread, our pillows that smelled like us:
a little shampoo-y, maybe a little like myrrh, the gooseberry
candle we light sometimes when we’re in the mood for mood,
our own music and books and cap off the toothpaste and cat
on the window seat. Our window looks over a parking lot—
a dental group—and at night we can hear the cars whisper past
the 24-hour Albertson’s where the homeless couple
buys their bag of wine before they walk across the street

to sit on the dentist’s bench under a tree and swap it
and guzzle it and argue loudly until we all fall asleep.

Democracy
When you’re cold—November, the streets icy and everyone you pass
homeless, Goodwill coats and Hefty bags torn up to make ponchos—
someone is always at the pay phone, hunched over the receiver
spewing winter’s germs, swollen lipped, face chapped, making the last
tired connection of the day. You keep walking to keep the cold
at bay, too cold to wait for the bus, too depressing the thought
of entering that blue light, the chilled eyes watching you decide
which seat to take: the man with one leg, his crutches bumping
the smudged window glass, the woman with her purse clutched
to her breasts like a dead child, the boy, pimpled, morose, his head
shorn, a swastika carved into the stubble, staring you down.
So you walk into the cold you know: the wind, indifferent blade,
familiar, the gold leaves heaped along the gutters. You have
a home, a house with gas heat, a toilet that flushes. You have
a credit card, cash. You could take a taxi if one would show up.
You can feel it now: why people become Republicans: Get that dog
off the street. Remove that spit and graffiti. Arrest those people huddled
on the steps of the church. If it weren’t for them you could believe in god,
in freedom, the bus would appear and open its doors, the driver dressed
in his tan uniform, pants legs creased, dapper hat: Hello Miss, watch
your step now. But you’re not a Republican. You’re only tired, hungry,
you want out of the cold. So you give up, step into line behind
the grubby vet who hides a bag of wine under his pea coat, holds out

his grimy 85 cents, takes each step slow as he pleases, releases his coins
into the box and waits as they chink down the chute, stakes out a seat
in the back and eases his body into the stained vinyl to dream
as the chips of shrapnel in his knee warm up and his good leg
flops into the aisle. And you’ll doze off, too, in a while, next to the girl
who can’t sit still, who listens to her Walkman and taps her boots
to a rhythm you can’t hear, but you can see it—when she bops
her head and her hands do a jive in the air—you can feel it
as the bus rolls on, stopping at each red light in a long wheeze,
jerking and idling, rumbling up and lurching off again.

Face Poem
Your craggy mountain goat face.
Your mole-ridden, whiskered, stumpy fish of a face. Face
I turn to, face I trust, face I trace with grateful fingertips,
jaw like a hinge, washboard forehead, the deep scar a gnarl
along the scritch of your chin.
Your steep, crumbling cliff of a face.
Your U-Haul, bulldozer, crane of a face. Face worthy
of a thousand-dollar bill, a thickly poured, stamped, minted
and excavated coin. Your mile-high billboard of a face looming
up from the pillow of sighs.
Your used car lot of a face, the bumpers
and sprung hoods and headlights of your eyes, your DieHard
battery of a face, the pulpy pith of it, the flare and slur and flange
of your ears, the subterranean up-thrust ridge of your nose.
Your many-planed, light-catching, shadow-etched face.
Your sallow, sun-wracked, jowl-hung face. Eye flash
in flesh folds, gunnel rope and upper lip storm on the high seas
thrash of a face. Your been-there, done-that, anything-goes face.
Luck-of-the-draw fabulous four clubs five-knuckled slug
of a face. Toss of the dice face.

Superglue
I’d forgotten how fast it happens, the blush of fear
and the feeling of helpless infantile stupidity, stooped
over the sink, warm water gushing into a soapy bowl,
my stuck fingers plunged in, knuckles bumping the glass
like a stillborn pig in formaldehyde, my aging eyes
straining to read the warning label in minus two type,
lifting the dripping deformed thing up every few seconds
to stare, unbelieving, at the seamless joining, the skin
truly bonded as they say happens immediately, thinking:
Truth in Labeling, thinking: This is how I began inside
my mother’s belly, before I divided toe from toe, bloomed
into separation like a peach-colored rose, my eyes going slick
and opening, my mouth releasing itself from itself to make
lips, legs one thick fin of trashing flesh wanting to be two,
unlocking from ankles to knees, cells releasing between
my thighs, not stopping there but wanting more double-ness,
up to the crotch and into the crotch, needing the split
to go deeper, carve a core, a pit, a two-sided womb, with
or without me my body would perform this sideshow
trick and then like a crack in a sidewalk
stop. And I’d carry that want for the rest of my life,
eyes peeled open, mouth agape, the world
piled around me with its visible seams: cheap curtains,
cupboard doors, cut bread on a plate, my husband
appearing in the kitchen on his two strong legs
to see what’s wrong, lifting my hand by the wrist.
And I want to kiss him, to climb him,
to stuff him inside me and fill that space, poised
on the brink of opening opening opening
as my wrinkled fingers, pale and slippery,
remember themselves, and part.

Cello
When a dead tree falls in a forest
it often falls into the arms
of a living tree. The dead,
thus embraced, rasp in wind,
slowly carving a niche
in the living branch, shearing away
the rough outer flesh, revealing
the pinkish, yellowish, feverish
inner bark. For years
the dead tree rubs its fallen body
against the living, building
its dead music, making its raw mark,
wearing the tough bough down
as it moans and bends, the deep
rosined bow sound of the living
shouldering the dead.

Little Magnolia
Not nearly a woman like the backyard cedar
whose branches fall and curl,
whose curved body sways in wind,
the little magnolia is still a girl,
her first blossoms tied like white strips of rag
to the tips of her twiggy pigtails.
Who are the trees? They live
half in air, half below ground,
both rooted and homeless, like the man
who wedges his life between
the windbreak wall of the Laundromat
and the broken fence, a strip of gritty earth
where he’s unfolded his section
of clean cardboard, his Goodwill blanket.
Here’s his cup, his candle, his knife.

Starling
Tail a fanfare and the devil’s
kindling. Oh to be a rider
on that purple storm. Not
peacock or eagle but lowly
starling, Satan’s bird,
spreading her spotted wings
over the Valley of Bones.
To build a home within her, stark
shanty for the soul, bonfire stoked
with pine-sap sage, smoke
rising through her ribs, her skin,
tainting the undersides of leaves.
Marrow house from which the one
wild word escapes. Stave and barrel
world of want. Of late, my plush
black nest. My silver claw
and gravel craw. My only song.

from

THE BOOK OF MEN

Staff Sgt. Metz
Metz is alive for now, standing in line
at the airport Starbucks in his camo gear
and buzz cut, his beautiful new
camel-colored suede boots. His hands
are thick-veined. The good blood
still flows through, given an extra surge
when he slurps his latte, a fleck of foam
caught on his bottom lip.
I can see into the canal in his right ear,
a narrow darkness spiraling deep inside his head
toward the place of dreaming and fractions,
ponds of quiet thought.
In the sixties my brother left for Vietnam,
a war no one understood, and I hated him for it.
When my boyfriend was drafted I made a vow
to write a letter every day, and then broke it.
I was a girl torn between love and the idea of love.
I burned their letters in the metal trash bin
behind the broken fence. It was the summer of love
and I wore nothing under my cotton vest,
my Mexican skirt.
I see Metz later, outside baggage claim,
hunched over a cigarette, mumbling
into his cell phone. He’s more real to me now
than my brother was to me then, his big eyes
darting from car to car as they pass.
I watch him breathe into his hands.
I don’t believe in anything anymore:

god, country, money or love.
All that matters to me now
is his life, the body so perfectly made,
mysterious in its workings, its oiled
and moving parts, the whole of him
standing up and raising one arm
to hail a bus, his legs pulling him forward,
all muscle and sinew and living gristle,
the countless bones of his foot trapped in his boot,
stepping off the red curb.

Bakersfield, 1969
I used to visit a boy in Bakersfield, hitchhike
to the San Diego terminal and ride the bus for hours
through the sun-blasted San Fernando Valley
just to sit on his fold-down bed in a trailer
parked in the side yard of his parents’ house,
drinking Southern Comfort from a plastic cup.
His brother was a sessions man for Taj Mahal,
and he played guitar, too, picked at it like a scab.
Once his mother knocked on the tin door
to ask us in for dinner. She watched me
from the sides of her eyes while I ate.
When I offered to wash the dishes she told me
she wouldn’t stand her son being taken
advantage of. I said I had no intention
of taking anything and set the last dish
carefully in the rack. He was a bit slow,
like he’d been hit hard on the back of the head,
but nothing dramatic. We didn’t talk much anyway,
just drank and smoked and fucked and slept
through the ferocious heat. I found a photograph
he took of me getting back on the bus or maybe
stepping off into his arms. I’m wearing jeans
with studs punched into the cuffs,
a T-shirt with stars on the sleeves, a pair
of stolen bowling shoes and a purse I made
while I was in the loony bin, wobbly X’s
embroidered on burlap with gaudy orange yarn.
I don’t remember how we met. When I look
at this picture I think I might not even
remember this boy if he hadn’t taken it
and given it to me, written his name under mine
on the back. I stopped seeing him
after that thing with his mother. I didn’t know
I didn’t know anything yet. I liked him.
That’s what I remember. That,

and the I-don’t-know-what degree heat
that rubbed up against the trailer’s metal sides,
steamed in through the cracks between the door
and porthole windows, pressed down on us
from the ceiling and seeped through the floor,
crushing us into the damp sheets. How we endured it,
sweat streaming down our naked bodies, the air
sucked from our lungs as we slept. Taj Mahal says
If you ain’t scared, you ain’t right. Back then
I was scared most of the time. But I acted
tough, like I knew every street.
What I liked about him was that he wasn’t acting.
Even his sweat tasted sweet.

Juneau Spring
In Alaska I slept in a bed on stilts, one arm
pressed against the ice-feathered window,
the heat on high, sweat darkening the collar
of my cotton thermals. I worked hard to buy that bed,
hiked toward it when the men in the booths
were finished crushing hundred-dollar bills
into my hand, pitchers of beer balanced on my shoulder
set down like pots of gold. My shift ended at 5 AM:
station tables wiped clean, salt and peppers
replenished, ketchups married. I walked the dirt road
in my stained apron and snow boots, wool scarf,
second-hand gloves, steam rising
off the backs of horses wading chest deep in fog.
I walked home slow under Orion, his starry belt
heavy beneath the cold carved moon.
My room was still, quiet, squares of starlight
set down like blank pages on the yellow quilt.
I left the heat on because I could afford it, the house
hot as a sauna, and shed my sweater and skirt,
toed off my boots, slung my damp socks
over the oil heater’s coils. I don’t know now
why I ever left. I slept like the dead
while outside my window the sun rose
low over the glacier, and the glacier did its best
to hold on, though one morning I woke to hear it
giving up, sloughing off a chunk of antediluvian ice,
a sound like an iron door opening on a bent hinge.
Those undefined days I stared into the blue scar
where the ice face had been, so clear and crystalline
it hurt. I slept in my small room and all night—
or what passed for night that far north—
the geography of the world outside my window
was breaking and falling and changing shape.
And I woke to it and looked at it and didn’t speak.

Mine Own Phil Levine
after W. S. Merwin

What he told me, I will tell you
There was a war on
It seemed we had lived through
Too many to name, to number
There was no arrogance about him
No vanity, only the strong backs
Of his words pressed against
The tonnage of a page
His suggestion to me was that hard work
Was the order of each day
When I asked again, he said it again,
Pointing it out twice
His Muse, if he had one, was a window
Filled with a brick wall, the left hand corner
Of his mind, a hand lined with grease
And sweat: literal things
Before I knew him, I was unknown
I drank deeply from his knowledge
A cup he gave me again and again
Filled with water, clear river water
He was never old, and never grew older
Though the days passed and the poems

Marched forth and they were his words
Only, no other words were needed
He advised me to wait, to hold true
To my vision, to speak in my own voice
To say the thing straight out
There was the whole day about him
The greatest thing, he said, was presence
To be yourself in your own time, to stand up
That poetry was precision, raw precision
Truth and compassion: genius
I had hardly begun. I asked, How did you begin
He said, I began in a tree, in Lucerne
In a machine shop, in an open field
Start anywhere
He said If you don’t write, it won’t
Get written. No tricks. No magic
About it. He gave me his gold pen
He said What’s mine is yours

Late-Night TV
Again the insomnia of August,
a night sky buffed by the heat,
the air so still a ringing phone
three blocks away sings
through the fan’s slow moving blades.
The sleeping cat at the foot of the bed
twitches in a pool of dusty sheets,
her fur malt-colored, electric.
Time to rub the shoulder’s tight knots out
with a thumb, flip on the TV, watch a man
douse a white blouse with ink before dipping
that sad sleeve into a clear bucket.
What cup of love poured him into this world?
Did his mother touch her lips
to his womb-battered crown
and inhale his scent?
Did his new father lift him and name him?
He was fed, clothed, taught to talk.
Someone must have picked him up
each time he wobbled and fell.
There might have been a desk, a history book,
pencils in a box, a succession
of wheeled toys.
By what back road did he travel
to this late-night station?
By what untraceable set of circumstances
did he arrive in my bedroom on a summer night,
pinching a shirt collar between his fingers,
his own invention locked in a blue box,
a rainbow slashed across it?

Somewhere in the universe is a palace
where each of us is imprinted with a map,
the one path seared into the circuits of our brains.
It signals us to turn left at the green light,
right at the dead tree.
We know nothing about how it all works,
how we end up in one bed or another,
speak one language instead of the others,
what heat draws us to our life’s work
or keeps us from a dream until it’s nothing
but a blister we scratch in our sleep.
His voice is soothing, his teeth crooked,
his arms strong and smooth below rolled-up cuffs.
I have the power to make him disappear
with one touch, though if I do the darkness
will swallow me, drown me.
Time to settle back against the pillows,
gaze deeply into the excitement
welling in his eyes. It’s a miracle, he whispers
as the burnt moon slips across the sky,
then he dumps the grainy crystals in
and stirs the water with a wooden spoon.

Homicide Detective: A Film Noir
Smell of diesel fuel and dead trees
on a flatbed soaked to the bone.
Smell of dusty heater coils.
We got homicides in motels and apartments
all across the city: under the beds,
behind the doors, in the bathtubs.
It’s where I come in at 5 AM,
paper cup of coffee dripping
down my sleeve, powdered
half-moon donut in my mouth.
Blood everywhere. Bodies
belly down, bodies faceup
on the kitchenette floor.
¿Dónde está? Que será.
We got loose ends, we got
dead ends, we got split ends,
hair in the drains, fingerprints
on glass. This is where I stand,
my hat glittery with rain,
casting my restless shadow.
These are the dark hours,
dark times are these, hours
when the clock chimes once
as if done with it, tired of it: the sun,
the highways, the damnable
flowers strewn on the fake wool rug.
These are the flayed heart’s flowers,
oil-black dahlias big as fists,
stems thick as wrists, striped, torn,
floating in the syrupy left-on music
but the bright world is done and I’m

a ghost touching the hair of the dead
with a gloved hand.
These are the done-for, the poor,
the defenseless, mostly women,
felled trees, limbs lashing
up into air, into rain,
as if time were nothing, hours,
clocks, highways, faces, don’t step
on the petals, the upturned hands, stay
behind the yellow tape, let
the photographer’s hooded camera pass,
the coroner in his lab coat, the DA
in her creased black pants.
Who thought
to bring these distracting flowers?
Who pushed
out the screen and broke the lock?
Who let him in?
Who cut the phone cord, the throat,
the wrist, the cake
on a plate and sat down and ate
only half?
What good is my life if I can’t read the clues,
my mind the glue and each puzzle piece
chewed by the long-gone dog who raced
through the door, ran through our legs
and knocked over the vase,
hurtled down the alley and into the street?
What are we but meat, flesh
and the billion veins to be bled?
Why do we die this way, our jaws
open, our eyes bulging, as if there

were something to see or say?
Though today the flowers speak to me,
the way they sprawl in the streaked light,
their velvet lips and lids opening as I watch,
as if they wanted to go on living, climb
my pant legs, my wrinkled shirt, reach up
past my throat and curl over my mouth,
my eyes. Bury me in bloom.

Mick Jagger (World Tour, 2008)
He stands on stage
after spot-lit stage, yowling
with his rubber mouth. If you
turn off the sound he’s
a ruminating bovine,
a baby’s face tasting his first
sour orange or spitting
spooned oatmeal out.
Rugose cheeks and beef
jerky jowls, shrubby hair
waxed, roughed up, arms
slung dome-ward, twisted
branches of a tough tree, knees
stomped high as his sunken chest.
Oddities aside, he’s a hybrid
of stamina and slouch,
tummy pooch, pouches under
his famous invasive rolling eyes.
He flutters like the pages
of a dirty book, doing
the sombrero dance, rocking
the microphone’s
round black foot, one hand
gripping the skinny metal rod,
the other pumping its victory fist
like he’s flushing a chain toilet.
Old as the moon and sleek
as a puma circling the herd.
The vein on his forehead
pops. His hands drop into fists.
He bows like a beggar then rises
like a monarch. Sir Mick,
our bony ruler. Jagger, slumping
off stage shining with sweat.
Oh please don’t die, not now,

not ever, not yet.

Men
It’s tough being a guy, having to be gruff
and buff, the strong silent type, having to laugh
it off—pain, loss, sorrow, betrayal—or leave in a huff
and say No big deal, take a ride, listen to enough
loud rock and roll that it scours out your head, if
not your heart. Or to be called a fag or a poof
when you love something or someone, scuffing
a shoe across the floor, hiding a smile in a muffler
pulled up nose high, an eyebrow raised for the word quaff
used in casual conversation—wine, air, oil change at the Jiffy
Lube—gulping it down, a joke no one gets. It’s rough,
yes, the tie around the neck, the starched white cuffs
too long, too short, frayed, frilled, rolled up. The self
isn’t an easy quest for a beast with balls, a cock, proof
of something difficult to define or defend. Chief or chef,
thief or roofer, serf or sheriff, feet on the earth or aloof.
Son, brother, husband, lover, father, they are different
from us, except when they fall or stand alone on a wharf.

Antilamentation
Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook, not
the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication, not
the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punch line, the door or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don’t regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the living room couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the window.
Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied of expectation.
Relax. Don’t bother remembering any of it. Let’s stop here,
under the lit sign on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

Cher
I wanted to be Cher, tall
as a glass of iced tea,
her bony shoulders draped
with a curtain of dark hair
that plunged straight down,
the cut tips brushing
her nonexistent butt.
I wanted to wear a lantern
for a hat, a cabbage, a piñata
and walk in thigh-high boots
with six-inch heels that buttoned
up the back. I wanted her
rouged cheek bones and her
throaty panache, her voice
of gravel and clover, the hokum
of her clothes: black fishnet
and pink pom-poms, frilled
halter tops, fringed bells
and her thin strip of waist
with the bullet-hole navel.
Cher standing with her skinny arm
slung around Sonny’s thick neck,
posing in front of the Eiffel Tower,
The Leaning Tower of Pisa,
The Great Wall of China,
The Crumbling Pyramids, smiling
for the camera with her crooked
teeth, hit-and-miss beauty, the sun
bouncing off the bump on her nose.
Give me back the old Cher,
the gangly, imperfect girl
before the shaving knife
took her, before they shoved
pillows in her tits, injected
the lumpy gel into her lips.

Take me back to the woman
I wanted to be, stalwart
and silly, smart as her lion
tamer’s whip, my body a torch
stretched the length of the polished
piano, legs bent at the knee, hair
cascading down over Sonny’s blunt
fingers as he pummeled the keys,
singing in a sloppy alto
the oldest, saddest songs.

Dog Moon
The old dog next door won’t stop barking
at the moon. My neighbor is keeping a log:
what time, how long, whether howling is involved.
I know she’s awake as I am, robe askew,
calling animal control while I drink dark tea
and stare out my window at the voodoo moon,
throwing beads of light into the arms
of the bare-chested trees. Who can blame him
when the moon is as big as a kitchen clock
and ticking like a time bomb? The bright full moon
with its beryl core and striated face, its plasma umbra,
pouring borrowed light into every abyss on earth,
turning the rivers silver, plowing the mountains’
shadows across grasslands and deserts, towns
riddled with mineshafts, oil rigs and mills,
yellow tractors asleep in the untilled fields.
The what-were-they-like moon staring down
on rain-pocked gravestones, worming its way
into gopher holes, setting barbed wire fences ablaze.
Who wouldn’t love this old-tooth moon,
this toilet-paper moon? This feral, flea-bitten moon
is that dog’s moon, too. Certain-of-nothing moon, bone
he can’t wait to sink his teeth into. Radio moon,
the white dial tuned to static. Panic moon,
pulling clouds like blankets over its baby face.
Moon a portrait hung from a nail
in the starred hallway of the past.
Full moon that won’t last.
I can hear that dog clawing at the fence.
Moon a manhole cover sunk in the boulevard
of night, monocle on a chain, well of light,
a frozen pond lifted and thrown like a discus
onto the sky. I scratch my skull, look down
into my stained empty cup. That dog
has one blind eye, the other one’s looking up.

Mother’s Day
I passed through the narrow hills
of my mother’s hips one cold morning
and never looked back, until now, clipping
her tough toenails, sitting on the bed’s edge
combing out the tuft of hair at the crown
where it ratted up while she slept, her thumbs
locked into her fists, a gesture as old
as she is, her blanched knees fallen together
beneath a blue nightgown. The stroke
took whole pages of words, random years
torn from the calendar, the names of roses
leaning over her driveway: Cadenza,
Great Western, American Beauty. She can’t
think, can’t drink her morning tea, do her
crossword puzzle in ink. She’s afraid
of everything, the sound of the front door
opening, light falling through the blinds—
pulls her legs up so the bright bars
won’t touch her feet. I help her
with the buttons on her sweater. She looks
hard at me and says the word sleeve.
Exactly, I tell her and her face relaxes
for the first time in weeks. I lie down
next to her on the flowered sheets and tell her
a story about the day she was born, head
first into a hard world: the Great Depression,
shanties, Hoovervilles, railroads and unions.
I tell her about Amelia Earhart and she asks
Air? and points to the ceiling. Asks Heart?
and points to her chest. Yes, I say. I sing
Cole Porter songs, Brother, Can You Spare

a Dime? When I recite lines from Gone
with the Wind she sits up and says Potatoes!
and I say, Right again. I read her Sandburg,
some Frost, and she closes her eyes. I say yes,
yes, and tuck her in. It’s summer. She’s tired.
No one knows where she’s been.

Dark Charms
Eventually the future shows up everywhere:
those burly summers and unslept nights in deep
lines and dark splotches, thinning skin.
Here’s the corner store grown to a condo,
the bike reduced to one spinning wheel,
the ghost of a dog that used to be, her trail
no longer trodden, just a dip in the weeds.
The clear water we drank as thirsty children
still runs through our veins. Stars we saw then
we still see now, only fewer, dimmer, less often.
The old tunes play and continue to move us
in spite of our learning, the wraith of romance,
lost innocence, literature, the death of the poets.
We continue to speak, if only in whispers,
to something inside us that longs to be named.
We name it the past and drag it behind us,
bag like a lung filled with shadow and song,
dreams of running, the keys to lost names.

Lost in Costco
Our mother wandered the aisles in the city
of canned goods and 30-lb. sacks
of dog food, mountains of sweat pants
and cheap jeans, open bins of discounted CDs.
She rested for a moment on the edge
of a bed in the furniture section,
trying to remember if it was time to sleep,
then headed off to garden supplies
where she stared at the glazed pots, missing
her roses, the ones she planted
outside the house she had to sell with the tree
she wanted to be buried under, her ashes
sealed in a See’s Candy tin. We found her
on a piano bench, her purse beside her
like a canvas familiar, her fingers
running over the keys, playing the songs
she loved, taking requests from the crowd
gathered under the buzzing fluorescent lights.
Faking it, picking out the tunes, striking
a chord like she’d do when we were young
and she’d say sing it to me and we’d hum
a few bars: pop songs and Top 40 hits,
TV theme songs or chewing gum jingles,
our high, sweet voices giving her
so little to go on.

Second Chances
What are the chances a raindrop
from last night’s storm caught
in the upturned cup of an autumn leaf
will fall from this tree I pass under
and land on the tip of my lit cigarette,
snuffing it out? What are the chances
my niece will hit bottom before Christmas,
a drop we all long for, and quit heroin?
What are the chances of being hit
by a bus, a truck, a hell-bound train
or inheriting the gene for cancer,
addiction? What good are statistics
on a morning like this? What good
is my niece to anyone but herself?
What are the chances any of you
are reading this poem?
Dear men,
whom I have not met,
when you meet her on the street
wearing the wounds that won’t heal
and she offers you the only thing
she has left, what are the chances
you’ll take pity on her fallen body?

Fall
I’m tired of stories about the body,
how important it is, how unimportant,
how you’re either a body
hauling a wrinkled brain around
or a brain trailing a stunned sheen
of flesh. Or those other questions
like Would you rather love or be loved?
If you could come back as the opposite sex,
what would you do first? As if. As if.
Yes the body is lonely, especially at twilight.
Yes Baptists would rather you not have a body at all,
especially not breasts, suspended in their hooked bras
like loose prayers, like ticking bombs, like two
Hallelujahs, the choir frozen in their onyx gowns
like a row of flashy Cadillacs, their plush upholstery
hidden behind tinted windows, Jesus swinging
from the rearview mirror by a chain.
And certainly not the body in the autumn
of its life, humming along in a wheelchair,
legs withered beneath the metallic shine
of thinning skin. No one wants to let
that body in. Especially not the breasts again.
Your mother’s are strangers to you now, your sister’s
were always bigger and clung to her blouse,
your lover’s breasts, deep under the ground,
you weep beside the little mounds of earth
lightly shoveled over them.

Emily Said
Emily said she heard a fly buzz
when she died, heard it whizz
over her head, troubling her frizzed
hair. What will I hear? Showbiz
tunes on the radio, the megahertz
fuzz when the station picks up Yaz,
not the Hall-of-Famer or the Pez
of contraceptives, but the jazzy
flash-in-the-pan 80’s techo-pop star, peach fuzz
on her rouged cheeks singing Pul-ease
Don’t Go through a kazoo. Will my old love spritz
the air with the perfume of old roses,
buy me the white satin Mercedes-Benz
of pillows, string a rainbow blitz
of crystals in the window—quartz, topaz—
or will I die wheezing, listening to a quiz
show: What year is this? Who was the 44th Prez
of the United States? Where is the Suez
Canal? Are you too hot? Cold? Freezing.

The Secret of Backs
Heels of the shoes worn down, each
in its own way, sending signals to the spine.
The back of the knee as it folds and unfolds.
In winter the creases of American-made jeans:
blue denim seams worried to white thread.
And in summer, in spring, beneath the hems
of skirts, Bermudas, old bathing suit elastic,
the pleating and un-pleating of parchment skin.
And the dear, dear rears. Such variety! Such
choice in how to cover or reveal: belts looped high
or slung so low you can’t help but think of plumbers.
And the small of the back: dimpled or taut, spiny or not,
tattooed, butterflied, rosed, winged, whorled. Maybe
still pink from the needle and ink. And shoulders,
broad or rolled, poking through braids, dreads, frothy
waterfalls of uncut hair, exposed to rain, snow, white
stars of dandruff, unbrushed flecks on a blue-black coat.
And the spiral near the top of the back of the head—
peek of scalp, exquisite galaxy—as if the first breach
had swirled each filament away from that startled center.
Ah, but the best are the bald or neatly shorn, revealing
the flanged, sun-flared, flamboyant backs of ears: secret
as the undersides of leaves, the flipside of flower petals.

And oh, the oh my nape of the neck. The up-swept oh my
nape of the neck. I could walk behind anyone and fall in love.
Don’t stop. Don’t turn around.

ONLY AS THE DAY IS LONG: NEW
POEMS

Lapse
I am not deceived, I do not think it is still summer. I
see the leaves turning on their stems. I am
not oblivious to the sun as it lowers on its stem, not
fooled by the clock holding off, not deceived
by the weight of its tired hands holding forth. I
do not think my dead will return. They will not do
what I ask of them. Even if I plead on my knees. Not
even if I kiss their photographs or think
of them as I touch the things they left me. It
isn’t possible to raise them from their beds, is
it? Even if I push the dirt away with my bare hands? Stillness, unearth their faces. Bring me the last dahlias of summer.

Before Surgery
In another life you might hear the song
of your neighbor clipping the hedges, a sound
oddly pleasant, three coarse dull snips,
three thin branches thumping softly as death
onto the closed doors of the mown lawn.
You might get your every dark wish: damson plums
for breakfast, mud swelling up between your toes
as you brush the green scum from the face of a pond
with a stick, gold carp flying like flocks of finches
through the azurite blue, a copperhead with a minnow
struggling in its mouth winding away from you.
In that hush you might hear the gods
mutter your name, diamonds of salt
melting on your tongue. You could lie there
molten and glowing as a blade hammered to silver
by the four-billion-year-old middle-aged sun.
In another life you might slip under canal after canal
in a coracle boat, look up to see river light
scribbling hieroglyphs on the curved undersides
of each stone arch. You might hear
an echo, the devil’s fiddle
strummed just for you, and you might sing, too,
unbuckle your voice. You can’t speak
the meaning of being. The nurses can’t help you.
Beautiful as you are with your plasma eyes,
beautiful as they are in their mesh-blue protective booties,
their sugary-white dresses, so starched, so pressed.

Your deepest bones might ache with longing,
your skeleton draped in its finest flesh
like the lush velvet curtains that open slowly
before the opera begins.

Death of the Mother
At the round earth’s imagined corners, blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise . . .
—JOHN DONNE

At day’s end: last sight, sound, smell and touch, blow
your final breath into the hospital’s disinfected air, rise
from your bed, mother of eight, the blue scars of infinity
lacing your belly, your fractious hair and bony knees, and go
where we can never find you, where we can never overthrow
your lust for order, your love of chaos, your tyrannies
of despair, your can of beer. Cast down your nightshade eyes
and float through the quiet, your nightgown wrapped like woe
around your shredded soul, your cavernous heart, that space
you left us like a gift, brittle staircase of ifs we are bound
to climb too often and too late. Unleash us, let your grace
breathe over us in silence, when we can bear it, ground
as we are into our loss. You taught us how to glean the good
from anything, pardon anyone, even you, awash as we are in your blood.

Under Stars
When my mother died
I was as far away
as I could be, on an arm of land
floating in the Atlantic
where boys walk shirtless
down the avenue
holding hands, and gulls sleep
on the battered pilings,
their bright beaks hidden
beneath one white wing.
Maricopa, Arizona. Mea culpa.
I did not fly to see your body
and instead stepped out
on a balcony in my slip
to watch the stars turn
on their grinding wheel.
Early August, the ocean,
a salt-tinged breeze.
Botanists use the word
serotinous to describe
late-blossoming, serotinal
for the season of late summer.
I did not write your obituary
as my sister requested, could
not compose such final lines:
I closed the piano
to keep the music in. Instead
I stood with you
on what now seems
like the ancient deck

of a great ship, our nightgowns
flaring, the smell of dying lilacs
drifting up from someone’s
untended yard, and we
listened to the stars hiss
into the bent horizon, blossoms
the sea gathered tenderly, each
shattered and singular one
long dead, but even so, incandescent,
making a singed sound, singing
as they went.

Changeable Weather
My mother might launch her thumb
into the air and say Get the hell
out of here or she might tell
us a parable about the quick and the dumb
pulling a splinter from a finger.
She’d linger at the back door
humming notes to a score
she was struggling to learn. Bring
me a cigarette she would shout
over her nightgowned shoulder.
The weather could change without
warning: clear morning, mountains
of cloud by noon. When you’re older
she would snap, turning off the TV
or snatching a book from our hands,
then scuff across the rug, a phantom
in her blue robe and slippers. We
lost her daily, then found her, devout
over a bowl of cherries, turning
to spit the seeds over our upturned
faces, us flinching in unison when she hit
the wall, her red lips shaped in a kiss.
We never knew which way to run:

into her arms or away from her sharp eyes.
We loved her most when she was gone,
and when, after long absence, she arrived.

Only as the Day Is Long
Soon she will be no more than a passing thought,
a pang, a timpani of wind in the chimes, bent spoons
hung from the eaves on a first night in a new house
on a block where no dog sings, no cat visits
a neighbor cat in the middle of the street, winding
and rubbing fur against fur, throwing sparks.
Her atoms are out there, circling the earth, minus
her happiness, minus her grief, only her body’s
water atoms, her hair and bone and teeth atoms,
her fleshy atoms, her boozy atoms, her saltines
and cheese and tea, but not her piano concerto
atoms, her atoms of laughter and cruelty, her atoms
of lies and lilies along the driveway and her slippers,
Lord her slippers, where are they now?

Piano with Children
Think of the leaning note: a dissonance
released by a consonance. Think
of the crushed tone or tone clusters, notes
piling up around the legs of a piano bench
like one-winged blackbirds,
all eye and beak, fallen letters of the alphabet
spelling out what’s missing. Think of purple bells
of delphinium in a window box, their stained light,
coarse granite slab chinked
into the semblance of a face, think of fate,
how it embraces the ghost gowns of the past,
the span of a hand, a clutch of keys,
a stick dragged along fence slats, the custom
of taking off one’s hat in church, scrap of lace
draped over a child’s still soft skull.
There are those for whom music is a staunch
against an open wound, the piano a tomb
into which the sparrows of sorrow tumble:
Clair de Lune perishes the terror of time,
and rivers run through, scumbling up the rocks.
Think of all that’s left behind, whatever leaves
trails as it trembles: horse tail, fish fan, feathers, flutes,
whispers like vespers in another room.

We did not question the hours’ rhythms,
the adagio of her hands, each a pale veined reckoning,
the day gleaned of its moments, embroidered berries
in the gathers of her dress, her scent unleashed
in a square of sun, one minute tilting into the next,
our house a battered ship on which we tossed
as she steered us through the afternoons.

My Mother’s Colander
Holes in the shape of stars
punched in gray tin, dented,
cheap, beaten by each
of her children with a wooden spoon.
Noodle catcher, spaghetti stopper,
pouring cloudy rain into the sink,
swirling counter clockwise
down the drain, starch slime
on the backside, caught
in the piercings.
Scrubbed for sixty years, packed
and unpacked, the baby’s
helmet during the cold war,
a sinking ship in the bathtub,
little boat of holes.
Dirt scooped in with a plastic
shovel, sifted to make cakes
and castles. Wrestled
from each other’s hands,
its tin feet bent and re-bent.
Bowl daylight fell through
onto freckled faces, noon stars
on the pavement, the universe
we circled aiming jagged stones,
rung bells it caught and held.

Ant Farm
We saved our money and sent away for it,
red plastic frame, clear plastic maze,
packaged sand siphoned into a slot, then freed
the ants into their new lives, little machines
of desire, watched them carry the white
bread crumbs late into the night
beneath a table lamp. Sweet dynasty.
We bent our queenly ten-year-old heads
over their busy industry in 1962, Uncle Milton’s
personal note of thanks unfolded on the floor,
while underground the first nuclear warhead
was being released from the Polaris submarine,
and Christmas Island shook, shrouded in a fine
radioactive mist. And our mother sang
her apocalyptic gospel to anyone who’d listen,
the navy housing’s gravel lots shimmering
with each sonic boom, began a savings account
for a fall-out shelter she said she knew we couldn’t
possibly afford. The poor will die, she told us,
Who cares about us peasants? To them
we’re only workers: dependable, expendable,
and then thrust her middle finger up
into the oniony kitchen air. The ants died
soon after, one by shriveled one, then in clumps;
they looked like spiders with all their legs
and antennae sticking crookedly out
from a pea-sized knot of ruined bodies.
She was reading Fail Safe between loads
of laundry and we were reading Uncle Milton’s
cheerful instructions. Some questions have
no answers. That night we listened to the silence
occupy our room. We slept together in one bed,
heel to heel, head to head. We tunneled deep
beneath the covers and waited for the light.

Heart of Thorns
The two young women in the house across the way
are singing old-world songs, ballads dredged up
from our muddy history, tragic myths of peril,
betrayal. Harmonies slip across the paint-flaked sills
of the open window like vapor, drift up
into the unfolding cones of the surrounding pines
where the scarlet tanager, flame of spring,
his blood-red body and jet-black wings, answers
with his territorial chick-burr, chick-burr, as the girls
trill through a series of Appalachian blue notes
and sliding tones, one strumming the African banjo,
the other plucking a classical viola.
They seem unreal, though I can see the fact
of them through the glass, their tumblers
of iced tea, their heads thrown back,
the sudden laughter. I like to think
they’ve always been this happy, though I know
they must have felt alone, the last of one
they love burning out like an ember, a distant star—
Barbara Allen, The Wayfaring Stranger—but I also know
they must have been visited by a miracle
like the doctor removing the bandage from my husband’s
damaged eye, the new world rushing in.
Does the artist live to commemorate? Do the birds
long to sing? And how far have we traveled
to get here where a summer breeze unleashes
the scents of wild lavender and lily of the valley,
where every unmarked grave is covered with a carpet
of sweet alyssum, where the mother tanager sings
her softer song above the crowns of hemlock,
death bloom made poisonous when the blood
of Jesus seeped into its roots: Woomlick, Devil’s
Flower and Gypsy Flower, Break-Your-Mother’s-Heart.

Ideas of Heaven
My mother’s idea of heaven was a pulse, nurses
in white spilling light across fields with hurricane
lamps, bandage rolls, syringes, pain killers,
stethoscopes, pressure cuffs, patella hammers.
Twice she almost died herself, and so knew heaven
was not the light moving toward her but the lights
over the operating table, those five blue spheres
a spaceship’s landing gear hovering above
such alien beings as we are. My mother’s idea
of heaven was a jar of peanut butter and saltine
crackers, a patient’s chart and a pot of tea, notes
scribbled in her elegant hand: more Morphine,
Cortizone, Alprazolam. It was a quorum of doctors
in an elevator going up, blood swabbed from the walls,
the smell of bleach following her to the next bed,
the next crisis, the next head she would cradle like
a baby, rubbing gravel from a wound with a
green soap sponge. Plastic gloves, IV stands,
pocket light, Iris scissors, forceps, thermometer,
and her gold Caduceus emblem pin, its coiled snakes
and disembodied wings. Her shoes of breathable
white leather, stain-resistant, slip-resistant, padded
collars, 4-ply pillow-top insole, their signature blue hearts.
Her heaven was smoking Kents while feeding crows

in the parking lot, The God of Sleep, twenty minutes
of uninterrupted unconsciousness, an abyssal cot
in the break room next to a broken ventilator, flat
on her back, her split-shift night-shift back, her spine
with its bolts and bent crossbars, its stripped screws
and bony overgrowths, fusions and cages and allografts.
She was a shaft of light in the inner workings, her touch
a tincture, a gauze dressing, a salve, a room-temp
saline bath. She microwaved blankets
to slide over the dead so when the ones
who loved them filed in to say goodbye,
the body felt warm under their hands.

Crow
When the air conditioner comes on it sounds for all the world
like my mother clearing her throat, and then sighing.
After she died I’d shudder and look up
expecting to see her ghost. I wasn’t afraid, only hopeful.
To see her again, to hear her knees creak, her knuckles
pop, the ash of her cigarette hiss and flare.
She gargled with salt water, spit it into the sink,
grabbed the phone with her claw, the back of her head
sleek as a crow. My mother is a crow on my lawn,
laughing with the others, flapping up on a branch,
jerking and twisting her ruffed neck, looking around.
I find her everywhere, her eyes staring out from aspen bark,
the rivers of her hands, the horse’s ankle bones.
Astounding such delicacy could bear such terrible weight.

Ode to Gray
Mourning dove. Goose. Catbird. Butcher bird. Heron.
A child’s plush stuffed rabbit. Buckets. Chains.
Silver. Slate. Steel. Thistle. Tin.
Old man. Old woman.
The new screen door.
A squadron of Mirage F-1’s dogfighting
above ground fog. Sprites. Smoke.
“Snapshot gray” circa 1952.
Foxes. Rats. Nails. Wolves. River stones. Whales.
Brains. Newspapers. The backs of dead hands.
The sky over the ocean just before the clouds
let down their rain.
Rain.
The sea just before the clouds
let down their nets of rain.
Angelfish. Hooks. Hummingbird nests.
Teak wood. Seal whiskers. Silos. Railroad ties.
Mushrooms. Dray horses. Sage. Clay. Driftwood.
Crayfish in a stainless steel bowl.

The eyes of a certain girl.
Grain.

Evening
Moonlight pours down
without mercy, no matter
how many have perished
beneath the trees.
The river rolls on.
There will always be
silence, no matter
how long someone
has wept against
the side of a house,
bare forearms pressed
to the shingles.
Everything ends.
Even pain, even sorrow.
The swans drift on.
Reeds bear the weight
of their feathery heads.
Pebbles grow smaller,
smoother beneath night’s
rough currents. We walk
long distances, carting
our bags, our packages.
Burdens or gifts.

We know the land
is disappearing beneath
the sea, islands swallowed
like prehistoric fish.
We know we are doomed,
done for, damned, and still
the light reaches us, falls
on our shoulders even now,
even here where the moon is
hidden from us, even though
the stars are so far away.

Error’s Refuge
Some things happen only once.
A molar pulled is gone forever,
a thrown spark. The invention
of the internal combustion engine,
the rivening blade of the axe,
the first axe. First flight,
ice, light, math, birth.
And death,
we think, happens only once,
though many of us hold to the belief
some residue transcends,
some fine filament that lingers on,
the body gone into a stream of purity,
the brain a blown fuse that leaves
a bright flash, rib of arc light,
nickel’s worth of energy cast out
as seed onto the friable air, weed stem
of electricity that grows no matter
how often it’s hacked back,
the 21 grams we long to trust:
the soul surrendering its host.
Who could blame us for once
taking refuge in the atom’s
indestructibility. We did not
invent dust but can create
great waves that envelop cities,
sunder mountains of trees, render
vast swaths of water and earth
radioactive into eternity.
Once upon a time . . .

we begin our saddest stories.
Once bitten. Once burned.
Once in a blue moon. Once more
unto the breach. We die a while
into each other’s arms and are
reborn like Lazarus, like Jesus.
Once we were warriors. Once,
eons ago, some of us turned
our backs to the fire, and some
were annihilated by love.

Augusta, Maine, 1951
Who was the man who ran the bait stand,
wiry and bluff, his cap’s faded logo
a hooked fish, faint, barely there,
sitting on an upturned milk crate at a card table,
Igloo coolers filled with glass eels set like a row
of saltbox houses, red with squat white roofs,
near a roadside patch of briars, a black-domed grill
cooking up a batch of hot dogs, white-bread buns
wrapped in reused tin foil, puffs of steam
escaping from the cracked blackened folds,
some unnamable, maybe flammable, amber liquid
in a mason jar from which he sipped as the sun
blared down, blot on the blue summer sky?
This is a portrait of the father I never knew,
a snapshot taken by my mother the year
before I was born, before he left this photograph
to work with the other men filing into
the brick paper mill along the Kennebec River,
the roped backs of his hands growing paler
each day, sawdust on his shoes, duff in his lungs.
But weren’t they beautiful? Those nights
on the dance floor. Her black satin skirt.
Her ankles flashing. His white cuffs rolled up,
exposing his wrists as he spun her.
Where is it written that a man must love the child
he fathers, hold her through the night and into
the shank of morning, must work to feed her,
clothe her, stuff trinkets in his pockets, hide one
in a mysterious hand held behind his back,
telling her to choose? It’s anyone’s guess.
I will never know the man who sat by the road

that led to the ocean, though I swam
between his hip bones, lived in that kingdom,
that great secret sea, my heart
smaller than a spark inside a tadpole
smaller than a grain of salt.

Chair
Oh the thuggish dusk, the brackish dawn, morning
cantilevered over the trees, afternoons doing nothing
again and again, like pushups. Like watching
a redwood grow: fast and slow at the same time.
Clock ticks: each minute a year in your ear.
The days are filled with such blandishments, nights
brandishing their full-blown stars, the decade’s
rickety bridges, baskets of magazines open-winged
on the porch, rusted wind vanes pointing north, cows
drowsing in clumps on the hills. Will you ever come back?
Will I welcome you again into this house? There are staircases
sewn to the walls throwing bolts of deckled light.
Let’s breathe that air. You could sit in a chair, right here.

Urn
I feel her swaying
under the earth, deep
in a basket of tree roots,
their frayed silk
keeping her calm,
a carpet of grass singing
Nearer my god to thee,
oak branches groaning in wind
coming up from the sea.
We take on trust the dead
are buried and gone,
the light doused for eternity,
the nevermore of their particulars
ground up, dispersed.
As a child I didn’t know
where the light went
when she flipped the switch,
though I once touched
the dark bulb that burned
my fingertips, studied the coiled
element trapped inside
seething with afterglow.

Arizona
The last time I saw my mother
she was sitting on the back patio
in her nightgown, a robe
thrown over her shoulders, the elbows
gone sheer from wear.
It was three months before her death.
She was hunched above one of the last
crossword puzzles she would ever
solve, her brow furrowed
over a seven-letter word for tooth.
I was staying at a cheap hotel, the kind
where everyone stands outside
their front door to smoke, a cup
of hotel coffee balanced
on the butt end of the air conditioner,
blasting its cold fumes over
the unmade bed. The outdoor
speakers played Take It Easy
on a loop, and By the Time
I Get to Phoenix and Get Back.
It wasn’t the best visit. My sister’s house
was filled with dogs, half-grown kids
and piles of dirty clothes. No food
in the fridge so we went out
and got tacos, enchiladas and burritos
from the Filibertos a few blocks away,
a squat tub of guacamole and chips,
tumblers of horchata, orange Fanta
and Mr. Pibb, a thousand napkins.
Everyone was happy while they chewed.

The state of Arizona is a box of heat
wedged between Las Vegas and Albuquerque.
Not a good place to be poor or get sick or die.
My mother rode a train from Maine in 1953
—she was just a girl, me bundled in her arms—
all the way to California. I’ve tried to imagine it.
If you continue west on Route 66
it will branch upward and dump you
into the spangle of Santa Monica
where I used to live, and then you can
drive Highway One almost all the way up
the Redwood Coast to Mendocino.
I used to do that. I probably spent more time
in my car than any house I lived in.
My mother never knew where I was.
She’d call and leave a message,
“This is your mother” (as if I might not
recognize her voice), “and I’m just wondering
where you are in these United States.”
She used to make me laugh. The whole family
was funny as hell, once. Dinnertime was like
a greenroom full of stand-up comics.
That day, sitting with them over spilled salsa,
I saw the damage booze and meth can do
to a row of faces. The jokes were tired
and the windows behind them filled
with hot white sky, plain as day.
When I got back to the hotel it was getting dark,
but it had cooled off so I took a walk around
the parking lot. Strangers leaned out over
their second-floor balconies and shouted down
at their friends traipsing away in thin
hotel towels toward the tepid blue pool.

The moon was up, struggling to unsnag itself
from the thorny crowns of the honey locusts,
the stunted curbside pines.
I left my tall mother on the couch where
she was sleeping, flat on her back, her robe
now a blanket, her rainbow-striped socks
sticking out like the bad witch beneath
the house in the Wizard of Oz. But she
was not a bad witch, nor was she Glinda,
that was my mother’s brother’s wife’s name.
We called her the bad witch behind her back.
My mother still wore her wedding ring,
even after she remarried. Why spend good money
on a new one when she liked this one perfectly well.
She always touched it like a talisman,
fretted it around her bony finger.
Three kinds of braided gold: white, rose and yellow.
By the end, the only thing keeping it
from slipping off was her arthritic knuckle.
I don’t know what my sister did with it
after she died. I wonder if all that gold
was melted down in a crucible, the colors
mixing, a muddy nugget.
I do know that Route 66, in addition
to being called the Will Rogers Highway
and The Main Street of America,
was also known as the Mother Road,
from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
My mother looked like a woman Walker Evans
might have photographed, with her dark
wavy hair, wide forehead and high cheekbones,
one veined hand clutching her sweater at the collar,
her face a map of every place she’d been,

every floor she scrubbed, every book she’d read,
every ungrateful child she birthed that lived or died,
every hungry upturned mouth she fed,
every beer she drank, every unslept night,
every cigarette, every song gone out of her,
every failure. Severe, you might say.
She always looked slightly haughty,
glamorous and famished.
I saw all the cars parked in that lot and wanted
to hotwire one with a good radio, drive away,
keep driving until the ocean stopped me,
then hairpin up the coast and arrive
like an orphan at Canada’s front door.
If I’d known I’d never see my mother again,
I wouldn’t have done much different.
I might have woken her, taken her tarnished
shoulders in my arms, rocked her like a child.
As it was, I bent over her and kissed her
on the temple, a curl of her hair caught
for a moment in the corner of my lips.
This is my mother I thought, her brain
sleeping beneath her skull, her heart
sluggish but still beating, her body
my first house, the dark horse I rode in on.

Letter to My Dead Mother
Dear White Raven, Dear Albino Crow.
Time to apologize for all the times I devised
Excuses to hang up the phone.
Dear Swarm of Summer Sun, Dear Satin Doll.
You were my panic in a dark house, my mistake,
My maybe, my heart drain, my worst curse.
Dear Scientific Fact, Dear Cake Batter Spoon.
I love you. I love you.
I knew after I fell for the third time
I should write you, Dear Mother.
Dear Pulse, Clobber, Partaker, Cobbler.
Dear Crossword, Crick, Coffeepot, Catchall.
You told me when you were 72
You still felt 25 behind your eyes.
Dear Underbelly, Bisection, Scimitar, Doge.
Dear Third Rail. Dear Bandbox. Dear Scapegrace.
How could I know—I want to go home.

Don’t leave me alone—Blank as a stone.
Dear Piano.
You played for no one, your fingers touched the keys
With naked intimacy.
At the science fair we looked in a two-way mirror
And our eyes merged.
Dear Wreck. Dear Symphony.
Dear Omission. Dear Universe.
Dear Moon-in-the-sky like a toy.
Dear Reason for my being.
You were the Emergency Room Angel
In a gown of light, the injured flocked to you.
You could not heal them all. Dear Failure.
No one on earth more hated
Or loved: your warm hands,
Your cold heart.
Dear Mother, I have tried. I think I know now
What you meant when you said, I’m tired.
I have no song to sing to your Death Star.
No wish. Though I kissed your cheek
And sang for you in the kitchen
While you stirred the soup, steam
Licking our faces—crab legs and potatoes—

Those were the days.

Acknowledgments
The Ampersand Review: “Ideas of Heaven”
The BAKERY: “Evening”
BOAAT: “Arizona”
Catamaran Magazine: “Heart of Thorns”
Cortland Review: “Changeable Weather”
Gulf Coast: “Ant Farm”
Oxford American: “Chair,” “Error’s Refuge”
The Pedestal Magazine: “Ode to Gray”
Poetry Northwest: “Augusta, Maine, 1951”
Plume: “Lapse”
Southern Humanities Review: “Piano with Children”
Tinhouse: “Before Surgery,” “Death of the Mother”
The Well Review, Ireland: “Urn”
Willow Springs: “Crow”
“Only as the Day Is Long” and “Under Stars,” Academy of American Poets,
Poem-A-Day
“Letter to My Dead Mother,” Montreal International Poetry Prize Anthology,
Vehicule Press, UK
Thank you first and always to Joe for his unwavering faith and faithful attention,
to Jill for lending me her ear and support, to my daughter Tristem for her spirit,
to Wilton for his encouragement, to Michelle, Michael and Nancy who see me
through, to Rosen for his abiding friendship, and to my mother who made me
and gave me music.
Thank you to Michael McGriff for transcribing Awake, and to my students who
have inspired me and given me hope for the future of poetry.
Gratitude to VCCA where some of the new poems were written, NC State for
sabbatical time, and my colleagues and students at Pacific University.
In memory of my teachers, Steve Kowit and Chana Bloch, and my mentor and
friend, Philip Levine.

Notes
“Lapse” is a “Golden Shovel,” a form Terrance Hayes invented in which one
takes a line from a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks and uses each word in the line,
in order, as the new poem’s end words.
“Heart of Thorns” was written about folk singers Anna and Elizabeth.
“Ode to Gray” is for Sharon Olds.
“Death of the Mother” uses the end rhymes from John Donne’s “Holy Sonnet 7.”

Index
Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function
to locate particular terms in the text.
Abschied Symphony, 58
After Twelve Days of Rain, 28
Afterlife, 81
Ant Farm, 138
Antilamentation, 111
Aphasia, 30
Arizona, 154
As It Is, 39
Augusta, Maine, 1951, 150
Awake, 17
Bakersfield, 1969, 97
Before Surgery, 128
Bird, 20
Cello, 89
Chair, 152
Changeable Weather, 133
Cher, 112
Crossing, The, 74
Crow, 144
Dark Charms, 118
Death Comes to Me Again, a Girl, 49
Death of the Mother, 130
Democracy, 85
Dog Moon, 114
Dust, 34
Each Sound, 36
Emily Said, 122
Error’s Refuge, 148
Evening, 146
Face Poem, 87
Facts About the Moon, 72
Fall, 121
Family Stories, 60
Fast Gas, 37
Fear, 51
For the Sake of Strangers, 33

Garden, The, 10
Ghosts, 7
Girl in the Doorway, 18
Heart of Thorns, 140
Homicide Detective: A Film Noir, 105
How It Will Happen, When, 50
Ideas of Heaven, 142
Juneau Spring, 99
Kissing, 45
Lapse, 127
Last Words, 53
Late October, 27
Late-Night TV, 103
Laundromat, The, 21
Letter to My Dead Mother, 158
Life is Beautiful, 66
Life of Trees, The, 78
Little Magnolia, 90
Lost in Costco, 119
Lovers, The, 43
Men, 110
Mick Jagger (World Tour, 2008), 108
Mine Own Phil Levine, 101
Moon in the Window, 71
Mother’s Day, 116
My Mother’s Colander, 137
Ode to Gray, 145
On the Back Porch, 19
Only as the Day Is Long, 134
Orgasms of Organisms, The, 65
Pearl, 61
Piano with Children, 135
Quarter to Six, 14
Ravens of Denali, The, 75
Savages, 82
Second Chances, 120
Secret of Backs, The, 123
Shipfitter’s Wife, The, 57

Smoke, 63
Staff Sgt. Metz, 95
Starling, 91
Sunday, 22
Superglue, 88
Thief, The, 40
This Close, 42
Tooth Fairy, The, 12
Trying to Raise the Dead, 55
Twelve, 35
Two Pictures of My Sister, 3
Under Stars, 131
Urn, 153
Vacation Sex, 83
What My Father Told Me, 5
What We Carry, 31
What’s Broken, 80

ALSO BY DORIANNE LAUX

The Book of Men
Facts About the Moon
Smoke
What We Carry
Awake
The Poet’s Companion:
A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry
(with Kim Addonizio)

Copyright © 2019, 2011, 2006, 2000, 1994, 1990 by Dorianne Laux
All rights reserved
First Edition
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W.
Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact W. W. Norton Special Sales at
specialsales@wwnorton.com or 800-233-4830
Book design by JAM Design
Production manager: Lauren Abbate
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Laux, Dorianne, author.
Title: Only as the day is long : new and selected poems / Dorianne Laux.
Description: First edition. | New York : W. W. Norton & Company, [2019] | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018038026 | ISBN 9780393652338 (hardcover)
Classification: LCC PS3562.A8455 A6 2019 | DDC 811/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018038026
ISBN: 978-0-39365-234-5 (ebk.)
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 15 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BS

Red Stilts

TED KOOSER

COPPER CANYON
PRESS

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For Kathleen

After he’d walked away, she stood in the yard
in starlight listening to dogs bark, each more faintly
as he passed the farms along the road.
Tolstoy, “Father Sergius”

Contents
Title Page
Note to Reader
I
A Letter
II
Recital
For a Friend, Ten Years Dead
House Moving
Ohio Blue Tip
An Overnight Snow
Mother and Child
Helping
At Dusk, in December
Bread
Winter Deaths
At the Salvation Army Store
Another World
After a Heavy Snow
A Letter from Never Before
Dropped Ceiling
III
Spring Landscape
Man at a Bulletin Board
At Dawn
In April
A Floating Bottle
Buttons
A Caesura
A Portrait Photograph
Rain after Dark
A Woman and Two Men
Vulture
Training to Be Blind
Tarnish
Farmyard Light
Starling
Cover the Earth
IV
A Town Somewhere
Raspberry Patch
Sounds of a Summer Night
Noon Whistle
Vespers
A Broken Sidewalk
A Place under a Roof
The Dead Vole

Apron
A Heron
A Shadow
Up the Block
Rabbit Hutches
Tree Frog
Farm Wagon
Red Stilts
V
In Early August
The Couple
A Roadside Cemetery
Autumn Equinox
Cleaning a Chimney
Sixtieth Reunion Banquet
A Moth, a Moon
Suitcase
Shame
Driving to Dwight
Battleship Gray
Fairgrounds
On the Market
Deer Path
Woolly Caterpillar
Applause
About the Author
Books by Ted Kooser
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Special Thanks

Red Stilts

I

A Letter
You couldn’t have known of my parents,
who lived in Iowa, where they’d been born
and where they’d worked together in a store
and fallen in love and were married. Father
was thirty-five and Mother twenty-seven,
old to get started but not too old in those
hardship Great Depression nineteen thirties
when people had to wait for everything.
That first year they had an apartment
across from a park where the town band
held its summer concerts, in a band shell
rainbowed with rows of hidden, colored bulbs
that slowly shifted with the music’s mood.
Imagine that, young families on blankets
spread on the grass, with their open faces
reflecting cool violets and blues.
You have to imagine all this, as I have,
for I was only a child in those years.
Imagine Dick Day, the town’s bandmaster,
in his black-billed cap, black uniform
with yellow piping running down the legs,
the fish-like mouths of the flashing trombones
appearing as if they were trying to catch
the little white tip of his flying baton.
Oh, the noise! That silvery fife coming in
on the minute, the boy with the triangle
waiting and waiting and waiting, then ping!
Tubas nodding and burping and honking,
and fanfares of brass, the bandmaster’s hanky
snatched from his pants like a referee’s flag,
swiped under his cap, then swiftly stuffed back
where it was without dropping a beat.

Imagine, too, this painted popcorn wagon
parked under the trees at the curb,
with a few children there at its window,
a single bulb under its roof, the light
spilling over my father’s cousin, Ronald,
in his spotted white apron and cap
as he trickles a ribbon of butter
into the lined-up ten-cent popcorn bags.
Then think your way back up the streets
into the shadows, the Sousa marches
still pumping away but fading a little
with each house you pass. In the shadows
under the spreading porch roofs, old couples
sit on their creaky, pinging swings,
watching from silence the others, like you,
who left the park early, carrying children.
Imagine the warm weight of this child
as you carry him pressed to your breast,
for I am that child at this moment
and you are my father, carrying me
up dark Duff Avenue to the two-bedroom
house you recently borrowed to buy,
three blocks from the park, from the band’s
last arrangement, a violet finale.
What you are feeling isn’t legerdemain,
a phantom child in your arms, but a moment
I’m forcing upon you. You are already
beginning to smell things, leaves cooling
in the maples above, freshly mown grass.
And to hear things, somebody pushing a mower
long after dark in the light from a window,
not lifting his eyes as the two of you pass.
And, in an instant, I am too heavy to carry

and I walk at your side for a little while
but soon skip out ahead, and look back, and you
step up your pace but can never catch up,
and, in an instant, I am irretrievably
and altogether gone, the sound of my shoes
pattering over the sidewalk, then fading.
Maybe one day I’ll come back, in a poem.
Behind you the band-shell park is emptying
and Dick Day is rolling his wooden band box
into a closet between ribs in the shell, locking
the door, and someone always out of sight
behind the arcs of color is waiting to switch off
what’s left of the lights, and you sit alone
on your porch, moving your feet just enough
to swing an inch into the future and back.

II

Recital
The garbage truck’s tires had left two keyboards
impressed in the snow, with the shadows of treads
for the sharps and flats, at least a hundred octaves
reaching far into a silence, and a tattered leaf
appeared as if out of thin air, sat down, and started
playing, first picking out a few simple scales, then
in a gust of breeze and confidence launched into
a complicated study composed for one hand,
too difficult, I would have thought, to be played
in front of songbirds, for there were cardinals,
finches, and juncos perched in the nearby bushes,
but on it played, and after a while as the wind
came up and swelled around us, the leaves above
burst into spontaneous applause, some of them
standing, and the birds nodded, one to another,
and the leaf that had played got up and stiffly
turned toward me and bowed, then bowed again,
and I began to clap along with all the others.

For a Friend, Ten Years Dead
Your outer door? With the cracked, milky plastic
tacked over the screen? It was hard to see through
when I stopped by and knocked, as if your little
glassed-in porch were filled with blowing snow,
a winter outside and a winter within, the door
hooked from the inside. Were you at home behind
that other, inner door, a dish-towel curtain
slack as a shroud in back of the icy glass?
Leaning against the wall by that inner door
was your broom, your tired red-handled one,
the straw bowed over to one side from ages
of cleaning-up-after, and on the black boot-mat
was the pie pan for your cat, and it was empty.

House Moving
With the earth between this house and the road
too muddy from snow, the movers have
driven away to wait out the winter
in a warmer place, leaving the house four feet
in the air on two steel I-beams, and the beams
on interlocking wooden blocks. And the wind,
with something new to do, is scouring out
the damp rock cellar, whistling a little,
wiping a hundred years of tattered cobwebs
from joists that haven’t seen the light of day
since, as sweet-sour yellow two-by-tens,
they were hauled here and stacked in the grass.
If one of us had the guts to crawl in under
that cold blue shadow, pressing its four supports
into the sucking earth, I think we’d find
a breath of what was new here once, and fragrant,
still up there on the bottom side of time.

Ohio Blue Tip
I liked to watch him light his pipe
with a stick match pinched from the trough
of the matchbox holder nailed by the door
to the world, and how he popped it
to flame with the edge of his clamshell
thumbnail, and then how he drew
the fire down out of sight in the bowl,
then turned it loose, then did it again,
a cat-and-mouse game he was playing
with flame, and, though the fire tried
to cling to the match tip, how he flicked it
away with a snap of his wrist, though it
took two flicks to do it, and then how
the two of us studied the thin curl
of smoke as it lifted away from the tip
and then vanished, and it seemed he could
read something special in that, but he
never would say what it was.

An Overnight Snow
Before walking to work, and in still-falling snow,
my father in hat, suit, topcoat, and galoshes
would scoop our sidewalk. Only a few sounds
came in to me out of the predawn darkness:
the scrapes of not one but two shovels, each scrape
with a tap at the end to knock off the snow, then
a word or two, muffled, back and forth between
my father and our next-door neighbor, Elmo Mallo,
who was out shoveling, too. And later, after both
had gone to work and I’d be setting out for school,
I’d see their boot prints—can see them still, after
seventy years—my father’s on one side of the line
where their shovels met, and Mr. Mallo’s on the other.

Mother and Child
It was scarcely a park,
one corner of a block
scraped clean of whatever
had stood there, now seeded
and graveled, pinned down
by a half-dozen saplings.
At the center was one
of those red, blue, and yellow
plastic play sets, with a tube
to slide down. It was cold,
no one there but a woman
and child, wearing mufflers
and down-filled jackets
with hoods pursed in around
their faces, she standing
apart, patient, watching him
climb the blue blocky steps,
knee over knee, and then
the boy calling out with
a white puff of farewell,
vanishing into the mouth
of the big yellow tube
to appear at the bottom
again and again and again
as if to underline
something. What was it?
The woman, her hands stuffed
in her pockets, chin down
in her muffler, taking sips
of the air, the boy tasting
his lip with his tongue
as he climbed the blue steps,
and I only happening past.

Helping
Our basement floor sloped to the linty lid
of a drain, with a muddy-smelling darkness
through the holes, and when my mother’s
wringer washer was left alone, its belly
sloshing and gurgling, digesting my father’s
white shirts in a bath of bluing, it could be
counted on to sashay toward the drain
hoping to get a sniff, but at the last its leash
would restrain it, stretched tight to the outlet,
that washer too old to muster the strength
to yank the plug out of the wall, the furnace
looking on with amusement, its gray hair
rolled in enormous curlers as if it were
getting prepared to go away somewhere
although I knew it was far too fat to move.
There were washtubs, too, a pair of them
fastened together, like drums with the tops
peeled off, on metal legs with rubber casters
that shrieked when I’d try to push them
over the floor, and of course there were stairs,
thick planks with coats of gray enamel
down which my mother’s boxy shoes came,
both shoes on each step, then her slightly
swollen ankles, and then the rickrack hem
of her apron, and then the rest of her,
slowly, a step at a time to keep from falling,
her arms around a load of what our lives
kept getting dirty and were wearing out,
those days when I was three or four or five
and waiting in our basement, helping.

At Dusk, in December
Driving a gravel road in the country
I saw a hawk fly up out of a ditch
with a mouse in its beak, and it flew
along beside my car for a minute,
the mouse still alive, its little legs
running as fast as they could, and there
we were, the three of us, all going
in the same direction, west, at just
a little under forty miles per hour.

Bread
I saw a man coming out of a day-old baked goods store
with two white plastic bags of something, held out like
the pans on the jeweler’s scale that he was becoming
as he turned and walked away, presenting his back
and the outstretched beams of his arms with their bags
of bread or pastries suspended, an overlarge man
who rocked on the fulcrum of his dainty feet, the bags
rocking, too, the one on his right side lifting a little
when his weight settled onto his left foot, and vice versa.
Whatever was in those bags, or on that scale, he was
clearly a man on balance with himself, who knew exactly
how much of his life he was weighing and what it had cost
as, with an extra tip of the fulcrum, swinging his bags,
he rocked around the corner drugstore and was gone.

Winter Deaths
That snowy February the deaths came at us
from far offshore, three in one week, and though
the death ship lay at anchor below the horizon,
it seemed to know within only a few yards
where we mourners were standing, at graveside,
and it was triangulating fire. Each shelling
shook us right to our knees, throwing up snow
and chunks of wet, black sod, the craters so close
we could smell the miles lying beneath us,
not only the odors of clay, mold, and gumbo
but, strangely, of seawater, too, as if it were
welling up through those eons of limestone,
like time itself. Then the deaths stopped. A week
slowly passed, then another, and those of us
who’d survived stood softly talking together
through the now-lengthening days, our backs
to the graves as they healed, peering into
one another’s stunned faces, then turning away.

At the Salvation Army Store
The man at the counter had a black brace
on one thumb and was loudly instructing
a young volunteer as to the best way
to display pairs of shoes in the window,
and the boy stood there patiently waiting
with a shoe in each hand, their toes too blunt
to point but pointing anyway, right toward
the man at the counter, as if they might
at any moment go galloping forward
and stomp him right into the floor. As I
browsed through the aisles I could hear
almost all of his monologue, the man’s
voice raised as if to be certain I’d be
able to hear him, all the way back to
the book rack, then over in knickknacks,
words shoving their way through the aisles,
jostling the bony old shoulders of shirts,
brushing the white but now yellowing blouses
with their lily-of-the-valley fragrance.
It was a voice that would sink its fangs
into your ankle and never let go. I found
a novel I wanted, and walked to the counter
and paid, and the man at the register
punched in the keys without using his thumb,
his voice a little softer now that I’d come
within closer range, but still yammering on
at the young volunteer, who stood waiting,
holding one sorry old shoe in each hand.

Another World
It was one of those common goldfish bowls
in the shape of a mantel clock, curved sides
and a flat face front and back, two fish
with tails that swept along behind them
for the clock’s two hands, though they were
loose and swam through time, ahead and back,
with nothing to age or change, just hours
of kissing the lips of their own reflections
and swimming past the tilted plastic anchor
as each delivered a bubble, always the same
tiny bubble, bright as a bead of mercury,
up to the locked door of the aqua castle.
Oh, now and then a sprinkle of fish food
momentarily clouded the mirror above,
then, zigzag, drifted down, and the fish would
swirl as if dancing in veils to catch the flakes
as they fell. But that was all that happened,
ever. All was well. But when I awoke
from dreaming in that easy, timeless world
I had to leave the timeless part behind.

After a Heavy Snow
I watched, from my window, a thin man
of indeterminate age—for only part
of his face, in dark glasses, was revealed
by the hood of his jacket—watched him
kick past my house in shoes so encrusted
with snow that all I could see of them
was that they weren’t suited for winter,
with low tops, and what appeared to be
bare ankles or soaked white stockings,
yet he kicked at the snow as if with great
pleasure, big rooster tails flying ahead,
while behind him he pulled the short sled
of his shadow, and he kicked his way past
and was gone. And then, a little later,
I watched him come back, though this time
with his shadow in front, as he nudged it
along with the toe of one foot, as I’d once
done myself, pushing a sled out ahead,
both of those legs probably numb now
and raw as a rash at the ankles, and he
came and he went, and I leaned out to watch
him kick past, all the way to the corner.

A Letter from Never Before
It arrived with the rest of the mail
in our box by the road, came
bearing a standard Forever stamp,
a little American flag, and the letter
handwritten in pencil. “You don’t
know me,” it opened. “Never before
have I written to you….” It had a quaint
syntax, its rhythm like that of
a waltz that was ever so gracefully
taking me into its arms. It had no
past to offer, only the present, as if
everything started from there,
with that Never Before, and this
on such an ordinary day, a few clouds,
birds flying high in the clouds,
then this, a few words of thanks,
carefully chosen and shaped
with a No. 2 pencil, which I knew
had been recently sharpened,
all this from a stranger, setting out
for Forever from Never Before.

Dropped Ceiling
The grave has been left in the hands of two men
with a backhoe, and already the funeral lunch
has been eaten, the mourners have driven away
from the Legion Hall, and it happened so fast,
first the death, then the mourning, then goodbyes
and goodbyes and goodbyes, the foam plates
packed in black bags by the door, the thermostat
next to the kitchen already turned down, tables
cocked out of place, the folding chairs in disarray,
the floor messed by galoshes that dripped snow
from the churchyard—work for the janitor later,
all of it ashes to ashes—the only available light
through a small front window displaying a curb
heaped with snow. Between us and the next world
is a fiberboard ceiling like so many thousands
of others, two-by-two tiles in a frail metal grid,
sagging in spots as if cupping the great weight
of the dust, rust, and air in the stale space
above it, where a patterned stamped-tin ceiling
coated with ancient enamel makes a fit roof
above that temporary stop for a departing spirit,
while below the dropped ceiling, dust sifts down
through the pores in the tiles, like time. We see it
on the coatrack’s hangers waiting to be chimed.

III

Spring Landscape
A wake of black waves foamy with pebbles
follows the plow, rolls all the way up
to the fence, slaps into the grass and trickles
back, while farther out a spray of white gulls,
wings like splashes, are splashing down.
Spring on the prairie, a sky reaching forever
in every direction, and here at my feet,
distilled from all that blue, a single drop
caught in the spoon of a leaf, a robin’s egg.

Man at a Bulletin Board
He is just one of the many we pass without seeing.
Today he’s standing in out of the rain at the puddled
entrance to the supermarket, a few feet back from
the automatic doors which, gliding open at so little
as a sparrow’s shadow, admit a chill that makes
the notices flutter: lost dogs and cats, announcements
on Easter-egg-colored paper, the newest tacked on top
of the out-of-date, the already-sold. He’s head-to-toe
in grays, with wet shoes we notice with cast-down eyes
in walking past, which with those of other customers
have muddied the vinyl before crossing the inner
threshold into the store’s colossal fluorescence,
into the faint kerosene odor of carrots, the shuffle
and snap of paper bags at the checkouts. His arms
are empty, slack at his sides. He might be on his way
in to buy something or out without buying, or
has he appeared here to let it all wash over him:
the harried young woman with a child in her cart
kicking the Pampers, two hard men side by side
with identical twelve-packs, and an elderly woman
with two bananas, awaiting the Senior Handi-Van?
He’s almost invisible, this angel on watch, standing
a little apart, now reaching out and with one finger
pressing the corner of one of the fluttering bulletins
with studied interest, pretending to read as we pass.

At Dawn
I watched
a junco
climb a spruce
as if upon
a spiral stair
as branch to
branch it hopped
up round
and round
through green
not lifting wing
to touch
the banisters,
gray bird
with pearly breast,
all purpose,
who had soon
achieved the topmost
bobbing step
and, as if it
thought of it
the whole way up,
hopped off
upon the sky
and flew away.

In April
The roadside ditches are running ankle-deep
in green, where spring has spilled a gallon
of April, and it seems as if the wild plum bushes
have accidentally brushed against the clouds
and are tipped with a white that looks as fresh
as blossoms, though in a week they’ll all be brown,
for it’s impossible to keep the dust away
from any color painted on Nebraska, despite
the thin, transparent drop cloths of the rains.

A Floating Bottle
River within it, river without,
it bobs downstream, its long neck
catching the sun. It carries a cup
of muddy water from somewhere
upriver, and shoulders its way
through the light like a woman
with an apron-load of dirty onions,
or like a drunk, pitching forward,
about to be sick. Before the mind
can take it in (in every way it is
or might be), it is gone, one glint
among the many, far away.

Buttons
On a slick clay slope the Mississippi
licked at night and day, the button factory
stood with one floor at the edge of the water
and two above, fronting on Front Street
in Guttenberg, Iowa. Built of stone blocks
cut from the high yellow bluffs that rose
back from the river, it had once been
a busy place, making buttons for shirts,
for collars, pearl buttons of all sizes,
but had been closed up and shuttered
for decades. It was lofty and drafty,
the glass gone from the high windows,
the floors creaky and splattered with lime
from the pigeons. When I was a boy
there were scatters of mussel shells
down the slope to the edge of the water,
tumbled shine over shine over shine,
the light trickling down into the open
pink saucers of some, or over the rippled
black backs of the others, most of them
bored with three pearly holes. Holding
a shell up, you could see three vignettes
of the river at once: the one on the left
through which the languid brown water
was entering, easing downstream; the hole
in the middle showing the flow moving
faster as it passed by the spot on the bank
where I stood looking on; and, through
the one on the right, I could see where
the river was going, passing into the glare
of the midsummer morning, gone like
the buttons, thousands of new buttons,
coat buttons, shirt buttons, shoe buttons
sixteen for a dime, not one left behind.

A Caesura
He has been walking along among others
when his steps start to lag, and he stops,
and the others sidestep out and around
as he stands there, a snag in a river, bent
a bit forward, his ordinary human head
shining a little, with no hat and thin hair,
his eyes halfway closed, his ordinary hands
first clenching, then opening again, as if
to a pulse, the others not seeming to notice.
And then, quite suddenly, he awakens
from wherever he went in that moment,
from whatever he’d stopped to peer into,
and opens his eyes onto the brightness
that’s all over everything and everyone
passing around him, and he steps ahead
into the stream, not ever quite to catch up
with the others, but swinging his arms
a little more than he needs to, striding
away from whatever has happened.

A Portrait Photograph
L.S. 1941-2017

Today you’ve returned, a lifelike figurine
in a midnight-black dress, nudged into light
by an invisible finger, a drapery
of brown shadow closing behind you.
Somebody’s back there, peeking through
folds of death to see how we’ll respond to
what’s been placed before us after two
or can it be nearly three years gone?
The likeness is good but not quite perfect,
hair in a chignon, not fragrant and blowing,
and the smile was applied by someone
who didn’t know how you warmed to kisses
when all of us were young. On the breast,
as if to call attention to itself, is a locket
bright as a star, as if we are to understand
that who you really were is closed forever.

Rain after Dark
The barns, in clear plastic slickers of rain,
stand at the side of the muddy gravel road
where they wait for the men to come home
from the tavern in a fleet of old pickups
awash in the misty gray waves of the hills,
the beds heavy with ballast: steel fence posts,
spools of wire, log chains, a grain scoop
for paddling, a five-gallon bucket for bailing,
and tanks of resentments recently topped,
the caps loose and reeking with fumes.

A Woman and Two Men
I was past in an instant. It was raining,
just softly, after a morning-long shower,
no sounds but the hiss of the pavement,
my wipers whupping on low. Two men
in hardhats were parked on the shoulder
in a truck with a ladder rack and a bed
full of tools. A woman driving a pickup
with a camper had pulled up a few yards
behind them and had walked up the road
to the passenger’s side, her hair wet,
her arms wrapped about her. She had
boots, a fringed leather jacket with beads
on the fringe, and jeans with galaxies
of rhinestones on the pockets. The man
on the passenger’s side had rolled down
his window, but only partway, and was
staring out over the hood while the driver
leaned far forward and over to talk,
his shoulder pressed into the wheel,
all this in a flash, those three at the side
of the highway, the fourth glancing over
in passing. I could in that instant feel
something common between us, among us,
around us, within us. It was more than
a light April rain playing over a road.

Vulture
I watched a vulture fly into a gusty wind,
tipping its wings one way and then the other,
just as a tightwire walker might hold out
a pole as he made his way over the world,
like Philippe Petit, who crossed the windy space
(his pole like wings, bending and rocking)
between the towers of the World Trade Center,
which today are space as well. The vulture
was bending its neck just a little, to peer
down into death, there far below.

Training to Be Blind
They are not yet blind, but are learning
to feel their way into a darkness
that slowly bleeds in from the edges.
They practice in pairs, walking the streets
in black blindfolds, each tapping a cane
the way a moth taps with a foreleg,
feeling the light. They talk, but do not
turn to each other because they are
looking ahead, seeing what can’t be seen
coming. It’s a halting conversation,
made around obstacles, their voices
slowly picking up each word and then
carefully setting it down, their free hands
lifting and settling like birds
at the cold edge of a sea. For this day,
they have chosen their clothes
for color, for style, but a time will come
when everything to touch their skins
will be merely weather. Two by two
they come toward us through traffic,
helping each other move into the future.

Tarnish
Unrolled from a sleeve of green felt
after years in a chest in the attic,
the family silverware has gone ghostly
with inky fingerprints of tarnish,
which for years have been feeling
their way forward through time
in the manner that flat black paint
on the back of a mirror picks its way
through to the front, as if wanting to
take part in whatever’s reflected,
in this instance a very old woman
bent alone at her table, peering down
into the past in the bowl of a spoon.

Farmyard Light
for Don Williams

This one’s been fixed to the top of a pole
poked into the center of everything,
and it looks like a stick with a puff of
yellow cotton-candy light spun round it
through which a few bats flit so expertly
that none of the light gets stuck to their
hunger. The barn and grain bins, though,
have got it all over their homely faces
and a single strand drapes from the pole
to the house. Out at the edge of all this,
a deaf old shed leans in, turning the ear
of a broken window as if trying to hear
the music of the carousel upon which
a frightened moth rides round and round.

Starling
From a fourth-story hotel window
looking out into rain, I watched
a starling make its way across
the low-sloping ribbed-metal roof
of a nearby building, hopping up
on each rib, then jumping down,
walking the spaces between them,
apparently intent on making it
on foot all the way over the roof
to its end, maybe seventy feet,
a distance any bird could cover
in an instant, flying. But no, this
starling was walking, although
the roofing was shiny with rain
and must have been slippery.
I expected that at any moment
it might give up and fly away,
but on it hopped as if it were
unaware that someone might be
high up in a window watching.
And though I couldn’t hear it,
I supposed it was talking to itself
in the manner of starlings, and
enjoying the shine on its feet—
hop, step, and hop—the roof
all the more vast for its efforts,
with me its witness, the two of us
joined by the rain to a bit of forever.

Cover the Earth
The world hung high on the side of a shed
at the lumberyard, a plywood disk painted green,
with a small but apparently bottomless bucket
of red enamel tipped and pouring over it, the red
running down over all of America, dripping away
from its sides, and as we leaned our bicycles into
the turn up Northwestern Avenue toward the park
with its two miserable bears in their stinky cages,
in big blocky letters it told us to COVER THE EARTH
and we’ve done just that, and though those bears
died long ago, and though that sign was taken down
so many years ago that few remember it, just now
I leaned into another turn and saw it there.

IV

A Town Somewhere
I’d like to find it for you but I can’t. You might not
like it anyway. It’s quaint and pretty in an old
worn way, quite near to me at times. But then it’s
gone, impossible to find. I’ve been there always
but I haven’t been, if you can understand. It’s a town
that I remember in sweet detail that was never.
It would be simple to find someone to love,
it’s so open there. Wherever there’s a fence around
a stand of flowers—bachelor’s buttons—there’s a gate
with a hook-and-eye latch that a finger can lift,
and wherever you see shutters framing windows,
they’re decorations only, for they shut out nothing.
Those windows are Windex clean, too, sprayed
and wiped with wads of inessential news.
If you peer deep into the liquid shadows, careful
to avoid stirring the surface, you might see a figure
rising, as if to take a breath of what’s beyond,
looking out at you above a sill of potted violets.
Was she the person you might love? She’s gone.
And even as I call up the town for you I feel it
darken. Sundown. A dog is in the distance barking
and barking, as if aware that we’d been there
just passing through, leaving no more than a scent
on the wind where no one was, or seemed to be.

Raspberry Patch
Summer is in and under and around each leaf
and thorny cane and every weed and stalk of foxtail
woven among them, as if this were a tank brim-full
of green, a slosh of sun-warmed greens without room
for a breath between one leaf and the next but for
a few white bindweed flowers bubbling into the light
and buoys of berries bobbing on the surface,
where during the night a black-and-yellow spider
has spun an elaborate web, putting a dusty shine
on one soft wash of green, and now, astraddle
its center, pulls it together, one thin leg flexed
on every spoke, shaking the dewdrops free, closing
the hole beneath her feet through which a little
light has trickled, fallen, and been lost forever.
There’s butterfly milkweed, too, its flowers dipped
in a kettle of fire, with white and blue butterflies
coming and going, staggering, finding their way
through the hot July air, stumbling along over
boulders of light, then clawing up onto the rough
sponge-like tops of the blossoms, and stepping out
onto them, kneeling to sip at the freshets of orange.
Then poison ivy as well, with waxy leaves of three,
more bindweed with those tiny morning-glory flowers,
and sticky vines of wild cucumber, all of which
have over many summers learned how best to climb
the thorny berry stalks without hurting themselves,
and closer to the earth, a twiny length of creeper
has crept unseen from miles away and years before.
And behind the patch, where the plywood siding
of the old garage lifts a yellow cuff and steps
over its own cool stone foundation, is a damp

black burrow leading down and in and under,
a slide of mud dug slightly larger with each spring,
where a groundhog lolls in semidarkness, and can hear
from time to time a berry drop and roll a little way.

Sounds of a Summer Night
Up to his smile in the pond,
the leopard frog plays his kazoo.
A June bug plunks the dobro
of a window screen.
On a leaf, the tree frog strokes
her washboard with a twig.
A bobwhite toots two notes
on a pennywhistle.
Bellied in mud, a bullfrog
blows down the neck of a jug.
Owl on the ocarina,
raccoon on the trashcan,
but not a sound from the snake
who slips through the night
in his tight black leather suit,
guitar picks sewn all over it.

Noon Whistle
The siren on the village water tower
is each noon wound onto the spool of itself,
then released, and the sharp end
springs out and slaps at the fading barns
and pig sheds all over the township,
blisters the sides of big square farmhouses,
then reaches out over the partly turned fields
to wake the old farmers, wheeled up
to their nursing home windows or dead,
nagging at them to leave their teams
and four-bottom plows, letting the horses
cool off, hanging their heads, reins
drooling down, and to limp in over
the fresh black clods toward chicken,
new potatoes, and green beans for lunch
in the silence that rushes back in.

Vespers
The streetlamps come on, one by one,
as darkness washes in, and soon
there is only a cone-shaped buoy of light
afloat at the end of each block, clanging
with color, its surface glittering
with moths, something to steer by.

A Broken Sidewalk
In a town in Iowa where I had stopped
to stretch my legs, I found an old sidewalk
buckled by roots where great white maples
had wedged fingers in under the slabs,
trying, I supposed, to reach the damp gutters
at the edge of the street. And there they’d been
caught by the knuckles, as though under
the sash of a great glass pane through which
the people who lived along that street
peered out at the world. Above me, the trees
rested their foreheads against the cool glass
as if they’d surrendered, and there I was,
adding my weight, though I felt as light
as a spider, stepping along the chipped top
of that sash, over the broken gray caulking.

A Place under a Roof
A summer ago, a little brown bat
slept through the days tucked into a corner
up under our roof, and coming and going,
I’d look up to see it there, like a wallet
or coin purse that someone had tried to hide,
hooking it over a nail, not much within it
but sleep. Every night the whole sky
belonged to the bat, but each day it had
just this one spot, and that corner
became ours, the bat’s place in the shadows
and my place to peer into, finding it there.
This summer it’s gone. There’s a wasp nest
the size of a golf ball just inches away
that’s alive with black wasps, but a nest
doesn’t fly off each night and flutter
back in the morning. Yet there’s a place
in that corner which, only for me now,
is ours, still full of both of us, empty.

The Dead Vole
In blinding sunlight on my open hand,
it was no longer than the first two joints
of my little finger, its eyes so small
I couldn’t see them for the fur, its tail
no longer than a stem, no, half the length
of the stem on, what, a cherry, or, better,
that of a grape, for it was dark as a grape,
the rest of its tail probably still on a vine
in the clouds that it dropped from, this
dab of thunderhead gray, too light to make
even as much sound as a raindrop, and
with a dry speck of a nose that might
have been sniffing my palm, for it
appeared to be that much alive, although
it weighed nothing, a leaf on the wind,
as if it could catch at not only a breeze
but no more than a breath and fly off,
but even such a minuscule being, I thought,
ought to weigh something in death,
a little more than itself, even if only to
hold it down under, though not nearly
as heavy as the few things you’d find
on a walk up your lane to the road,
like a bolt fallen out of an oil pan,
or a skeleton key or a nickel, but
at least as much weight as a grape or
the pit of a cherry spat out at the edge
of the gravel leading back to your house,
with no mail today in the box by the road,
and the small, indescribable weight
of no weight to the death in your hand.

Apron
Most of the time it hung flat
down her flat front, like a shade
drawn over a window. No one
could see within her, or who
she really was, all grays behind it,
her legs below it, thin in loose
brown stockings coarse as burlap,
fallen in rings above her slippers,
their insteps slit for comfort.
Some afternoons in apple time
she’d be out in her yard, the hem
bunched up in one hand, forming
a basket, while with the other
she’d pick out only three or four
nice apples, leaving a hundred
hanging. Passing by, you wouldn’t
have noticed her inside the arms
of that tree, a cobbler’s worth
of apples clutched in her apron,
invisible woman, tilted a little
to favor the leg on the right.

A Heron
Maybe twenty yards out from the shoreline
a great blue heron waited, motionless,
upon a post that seemed to have no purpose
other than to stand there stained with rings
of history as the old lake, breathing sunlight,
rose and fell.
The heron was the color of the water
so that it seemed that I could see the water
through her, as if she were a creature blown
of glass, not smeared by anybody’s fingers,
still clean and delicate and waiting to be filled
with color
although I saw that she was filled already,
from the bulb of her body to the tip of her beak,
not with a color that anyone knew but with
a cloudy fluid that had been distilled
from summer light and now was being aged
and mellowed
though how much longer it might take was
anybody’s guess. But I had been imagining
too long, and she had felt it, too, that threat
of too much beauty being forced upon her,
and spread her glassy wings and lifted off
and flapped away across the water.

A Shadow
for Jared Carter

Dust whispered to the shadow under the bridge
and told it whose team and wagon were crossing
and how it could know whose it was by the clop
of the hooves—each team had its own rhythm—
and by the distinctive tock-tick of the wheels
as they knocked over the planks. The shadow
made notes on the long scroll of the water
using the tip of a willow branch, but the notes
disappeared under its eyes as if written in
vanishing ink. Counting the farm wagons
that crossed just one old one-lane bridge in one
little township could prove to be boring,
but if you’d been born to a long line of shadows—
bridge after bridge after bridge all the way out
to the hazy horizon—counting the wagons
and horses was what was expected of you.
And while the men and their teams were all day
in the sun, riding those clattering wagons
empty out onto the fields, then back, loaded
with hay—the wheels’ sound by then always
different, hammering down through the timbers—
the work of the shadow took place in shade
and was mostly just counting and listening,
cooling its feet in the water that trickled
down out of time, cutting a shadowy track
like a cow path, carrying clouds and sometimes
a few homely pigeons with news from afar.

Up the Block
Maybe you saw me pass by, walking,
or maybe you didn’t. I raised a hand
in a tentative wave, but you were intent
upon your watering, as if to make sure
the spray from the hose fell evenly
over your small plot of petunias, purple,
pink, and white. The nozzle was yellow,
of plastic, much like a showerhead,
sweeping or brushing the bright drops
evenly, lacquering over the flowers,
the dark purple ones deeper in color
under the layers of glazes, and the pink
brighter, too. The white looked the same,
but you’d probably planted those there
mostly to set off the others. From one end
to the other you slowly and gently
swept the soft whiskbroom of droplets,
enrapt, or so it appeared, by what
you saw sprinkling out of your hand,
upon which I could see drops forming,
each diamond-bright on a knuckle,
and I’d guess they were cold, perhaps
even numbing, but you’d gotten hold
of a rainbow, and couldn’t let go.

Rabbit Hutches
to the memory of William Stafford

You’ll find them sometimes in those small towns
pushed off to the side by a four-lane bypass
that avoids the boarded-up motels and shut-down
filling stations bald in the trees at the junky edge,
those highways gaining a little distance, too,
from whatever’s reaching up and out and over—
the steeples, Catholic and Lutheran, the tin-clad
co-op elevator, the water tower with the town’s name
turned to the side. Somewhere within a place
like that, propped up on rotting two-by-fours,
you’ll find a little row of rabbit hutches, three
or four, their doors thrown open, shingles gone,
the plywood floors sour and delaminating,
wire netting torn and rusty, all that’s left
of someone’s good idea gone bad and left behind,
poor peach-crate hutches hammered up against
whatever might be slightly stronger for a while
until there’s not much standing but a steady wind,
whining with semis passing on the four-lane,
stirring a little tuft of soft white rabbit fur.

Tree Frog
Late evening, a velvety black
beyond the high windows, and on one
a tiny tree frog with its legs spread
presses its soft, white belly to the glass.
This night it gets to be the evening star.

Farm Wagon
I pull out the four chunks of moldy old firewood,
one from under each wheel, and the wagon, heavy
when empty, when given a shoulder to rock the wheels
out of their dents in the earth, slowly starts to roll
down the slope of this poem, through a pasture,
its wheels with their tight iron bands striking sparks
from a few of the words it rolls over and knocks
to the side. I am running alongside it as, faster and
faster, it careens down the hill toward the high bank
of the creek, bordered by springy young willows
that a wagon like this one can shove through without
trying. Some of these words, like dry leaves on the floor
of the box, are trying to leap out but fall back. It’s all
moving quickly, but I want you to see what I see
before it rolls over the edge: the tongue’s out in front,
tapping the slope like the cane of a blind man,
a blind man in a hurry, and one side of the box
has been built up a couple of feet higher, the planks
loose in the frame, rattling now, but when your
great-grandpa was handpicking corn it would sound
only once when each ear rapped this bang-board,
and his good horse, old Dolly, knew from that sound
to take a step forward, on to the next stalks of corn,
very slow work, handpicking a whole field, but
now you might say I’ve unharnessed the past,
and it may well leap out from the willowy bank,
out over this second-to-last line with its dry creek
below, and, with luck, rattle on into forever.

Red Stilts
Seventy years ago I made a pair of stilts
from six-foot two-by-twos, with blocks
to stand on nailed a foot from the bottom.
If I was to learn to walk on stilts I wanted
them red and I had to wait almost forever
for the paint to dry, laid over the arms
of a saggy, ancient Adirondack chair
no longer good for much but holding hoes
and rakes and stakes rolled up in twine,
and at last I couldn’t wait a minute longer
and took the stilts into my hands and stepped
between them, stepped up and stepped out,
tilted far forward, clopping fast and away
down the walk, a foot above my neighborhood,
the summer in my hair, my new red stilts
stuck to my fingers, not knowing how far
I’d be able to get, and now, in what seems
just a few yards down the block, I’m there.

V

In Early August
At dusk I glanced out one of our west windows
and saw a stirring in the golden air, the way
a glass of water stirs when some enormous truck
drives past, but this was dragonflies, a hundred
or more out hunting together, darting and diving,
snatching mosquitoes or gnats from the last light
of the afternoon. Each was its own, with its own
small part of the work to do, like men with sandbags
damming a rising tide, and what it was that they
were holding back, it seemed to me, was nightfall,
and they held it a long, long time as I looked on,
afraid to step outside and stand among them,
not knowing what there’d be that I could do.

The Couple
Under a sky of white fluorescence
and surrounded by chattering gulls,
the waves of her illness would lift them
then let them fall, and in each trough
they took on a little more water,
the test results spilling over the rails,
but both were still able to bail
and they bailed, she in the bow, looking
forward, and he in the stern, his eyes
on her back, her shoulders, the light
in her well-kept hair. Days passed,
weeks passed, months passed until
she’d lost the strength for bailing,
and all the color had been bleached
from his hopeful face, but still
they drifted on, a clamor of gulls
surrounding them, calling out
to one another, a dizzying flurry
of white that followed their boat
as now, riding low in the water,
it floated toward the gray horizon,
that ever-leveling line, and it seemed
he’d have to swim a long, long way
if he were ever willing to return.

A Roadside Cemetery
Some of the old stone markers had broken
away from their bases and fallen, some of them
broken in falling, and the long succession
of old men who cared for the graves—always
old men—had carried the pieces up into
the shade of two great, ancient Scots pines
and leaned them around the trunks, the way
a man might lean the scrap ends of boards
around something he wanted to burn. For years
those stones leaned there, and lichens grew gold
on those that leaned back from the sun
on the south, and moss had grown over the ones
in the shade to the north. It all felt balanced,
those stones held up by trees, trees holding stones.
From time to time I’d stop by to spend time
in what seemed very close to permanence,
and although the weather was always at work,
softening the names and dates into whispers,
I thought that this would last. Then one day
I found that the trees were gone, their stumps
gone too, ground out, damp dust in the grass.
The sun was everywhere, all over everything,
brighter and more merciless than it had ever
been before, a glare on every standing marker,
bleaching the little flags and plastic flowers.
I had to shade my eyes to find those stones
I felt were mine, stacked up like phone books
by the fence, with lichens burning like a field
of wheat on top of the topmost stone, arranged
in three pieces, the inscription turned down.

Autumn Equinox
I was driving straight into the rising sun
on a dusty country road when out of it
came a school bus, going too fast, I thought,
for driving on gravel, yellow light filling it
back to front, a soft halo around the head
of the driver. It was trailing a long cocoon
of glowing dust that it seemed to be trying
to free itself from, but the tips of its slick
yellow wings were stuck in the opening.
I had to pull over hard, far to the right,
to let it go past, my two right wheels
off in the weeds on the spongy shoulder,
and I glanced up at the flashing windows
and saw the silhouetted heads of children,
all facing forward, trusting the bus and
the driver, trusting in me to swerve out of
the way, trusting in everything, being
borne along at a frightening speed into
the dust that I’d lifted while driving a road
I’d felt was all mine, that had suddenly
gone dark in my car’s mirror. A shadow
of something far out of reach of this road
had raced past, far beyond stopping.

Cleaning a Chimney
Cleaning a farmhouse chimney with a log chain
would make its own soft music—solo piano, the notes
mellowed by soot, and no one nearby to hear them
but the performer as he lowered his cold chain
though the octaves, his feet pressing the shingles
as if pressing the pedals, glancing up now and then
at the cloudy sheet music all along the horizon.

Sixtieth Reunion Banquet
From left to right they have begun
to pass the dream, a crystal platter
upon which each of them places
a piece of the past, and though it
should be growing heavier, it isn’t,
having begun now to lift, as if to
float from hand to hand around
the table, no more than a breath
on the tips of their fingers,
and even when one of them takes
a moment suddenly remembered
and looks at it from every angle,
then stuffs it into her purse
for safekeeping, or into his wallet,
one of the others adds a memory
to keep it balanced, then passes
it on, and the dream grows ever
lighter, and brighter, too, as if lit
from within by colored fires,
and when at last it’s gotten so full
that bits start to spill from its edges,
they nudge it to the table’s center
and look upon it with delight
as it floats there, gently rocking,
inches above the invisible shadow.

A Moth, a Moon
I watched a moth fly round and round the moon,
or so it seemed as I stood looking up.
More than two hundred thousand miles away,
the moon was small, and full, and very bright
like a lightbulb over a neighbor’s door.
The moth was the size of a moth, but next to
the faraway moon it looked big, like a satellite
orbiting, held in place by the moon like a moth
by the glow of a bulb, and it seemed to be
spanking the face of the moon with its wings
the way that a moth will spank a lightbulb.
The explanation, of course, was that the moth
had chosen to fly round an invisible spot
directly between where I stood and the moon…
Although maybe not, maybe the moon I could see
wasn’t our everyday moon, far off in the stars,
but another, smaller one, and this little moon
was the size of a cabbage, magically floating
over my house, wrinkly and pale like a cabbage,
for the moth had a cabbage moth’s whiteness,
and flew in and out of the light like a star.

Suitcase
You’ve seen others like it in the tan light
of an attic or perhaps in a closet
with musty black shadows on hangers.
Pull it into the light by a handle
of cracked leatherette, you can feel that it’s
unaccustomed to hands, its two snaps
biting down on themselves. But now,
in the light, it’s becoming a warm,
welcoming blue, like a late autumn sky
with a little brown dust from a harvest
mixed in. And how can you not open it
now, though you know that there’s
nothing inside? Only the sound of snaps
snapping back on themselves with a rap
on that blue pasteboard soundboard
and the stained and torn lining, thin as
a nightgown, pink and blushing, exposed
all at once with its powdery fragrance.

Shame
You were a college student, a waitress
paying your way through the sixties,
and I was recently divorced, alone
and lonely, looking for someone to love
in those dreary years when it seemed
no one else was willing “to make
a commitment,” as we said back then,
and I mustered my courage and asked you
to dinner, and met you at your door,
and we walked downtown, both of us shy,
both awkward, both scented and scrubbed
and overdressed and clopping along
in new and uncomfortable shoes,
and over wine and dinner, as we began
to feel more comfortable together,
sometimes touching each other’s hands,
I told you my story and you told me
yours, the way young people will,
you finishing yours with the news
that you had leukemia, the slow kind
that with “adequate treatment”
could keep you alive, at least for a time,
and it frightened me, having no courage
for anyone’s pain but my own, knowing
nothing at all about love, and surely
you must have been terribly hurt
to read all that in my expression,
and fifty years later I’m still ashamed
to have been the kind of person
who could then walk you back to your door
still early in the evening, and leave you
there with a dry little kiss and a promise,
who would never phone, who would avoid
the restaurant where I’d first seen you

wiping the tables, working your way
through so much more than college,
you in your starched uniform apron
with a plastic tag pinned to your breast
and your name that I’ve even forgotten.

Driving to Dwight
Before I could get to the place where I saw it,
that young fox was gone, having looked up
from whatever it had found on the road
and was playing with, cricket or field mouse.
It had seen my car coming and scampered off
into the long grass of the ditch. Four things
were gone in that instant: first, the fox;
then its playfulness, too, seeing its dancing
on the gravel, batting at whatever it found
with a paw; and third, whatever it found,
so small it too had disappeared; and last
was that featureless vent in the grass
that had opened for these, then had closed,
disappearing into its greens. The fifth thing
wasn’t gone: my delight, to come upon
something like this for the very first time,
so far into my years—my car slowing down—
peering out into the world, hoping to
see it again. That joy hadn’t scampered away
after the others. I caught it and carried it
this far, smoothing its fur, almost too happy
with having it happen to share it with you.

Battleship Gray
The tongue-and-groove floors of the open porches
on these old houses up in dry dock in the ports
of little towns have been painted again and again
always a coat of slightly tacky gray, the color
of what remained of Nimitz’s Pacific fleet
in the years when in those shaded parlor windows
hung little flags with one star, gold or silver, for those
who served and, up under the pale blue ceilings—
always painted blue, a warm sky blue—were
slatted porch swings rigged high in their chains
for winter weather, like the last few lifeboats,
weak and leaky, only one small boat per ship.

Fairgrounds
A special kind of breathy stillness fills
an empty county fairgrounds on a late
October afternoon, and a cool, light-fingered,
pickpocket breeze runs in circles about you,
touching your buttoned-up jacket. Bleachers
upon which dozens of people were shelved
like jars of pickles and preserves are empty
but still warm to the touch, with sunlight
breaking through clouds that come and go,
waiting for something to start, perhaps
the first exhibition of snow, the earliest
and youngest snows first, led into the ring,
plumes lifted from the crowns of drifts.
But that is later; now it’s just leaves, leaves
everywhere, up to the ankles, and in the bare
spaces among them, the rakes of the seasons
are smoothing the dust, erasing the footprints.
But I know you were here for the fair, and you
and you. I feel you all around me. And I, too,
was among you, living, and the last to leave.

On the Market
Their children came home, but not to stay,
to get the house ready to put on the market,
and they ripped up all the carpeting
because of the cats, and piled it on the curb
to be hauled away, beige, beige, and beige,
a mountain of stains soaked through
to the backing, but what they did with all
the cats is a mystery. They’re gone today,
including the earless old tom I used to see
slinking back home in the morning,
not looking both ways before crossing,
and the parents, too, gone with the cats.

Deer Path
It’s a track that wobbles a little as it crosses
the grassy slope, as if a wheelbarrow made it,
one heaped with wariness, though wariness
weighs almost nothing, is as light as a breath.
The deer walk east in single file at sunset, west
at dawn, testing each step with a tentative hoof
as if crossing a stream, their path just wide enough
for one, because they’ve never met another
coming back. By early morning they’re at home
at the western edge of the pasture, out of sight
in the tangled sumac. All day they rest in polished
bowls of grass set out to catch those few warm
drops of deer, and when the sun is low, and casts
long shadows east, they each unfold and follow.

Woolly Caterpillar
I came upon you on a sidewalk,
black as a hyphen slowly crossing a page,
as if you were trying to connect
the last word in October with a word in
the April to come. From closer up
you looked like a casket being borne
by a half-dozen soldiers walking in step
and I stopped, as one would, as you passed.
Your casket was draped with the flag
of your country, orange like a leaf,
and there were clusters of old leaves,
many in orange, curled up in lawn chairs
all along the processional, younger ones
restless and darting about. I thought
I should take off my cap and I did,
and the late autumn wind in my ears
was the bugle that played, not so well,
as they carried you into the distance.

Applause
At the close of her solo recital
the young pianist bows, and her hair,
like a curtain of gold, falls over
her modesty, as if she were smiling
down into a pool, and as we stand
to applaud, she lifts up her face,
shining and bright from the kiss
of that mirroring water, then bows
once again. Our applause has the sound
of a sudden downpouring of leaves,
a warm yellow clatter like that of
a ginkgo in autumn, when it drops
every leaf, all at once, after a frost,
though this time the frost was those
crystalline notes that she shook
from the tips of her fingers. And now
she is shaking her head, as if to say
that all of this praise is too much,
but the clapping keeps leafing down,
even out of the balcony shadows.

About the Author
Red Stilts is Ted Kooser’s fifteenth book of poetry in sixty years. He has also
published five books of nonfiction, five children’s picture books, and sixteen
chapbooks and special editions. He served two terms, from 2004 to 2006, as the
US Poet Laureate, and during his first term won the Pulitzer Prize for Delights &
Shadows from Copper Canyon Press. He is the founder and editor of American
Life in Poetry, a weekly column reaching 4.6 million readers in print and online.
He lives with his wife, Kathleen Rutledge, in rural Nebraska, and teaches one
class a year at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln—a tutorial in poetry writing
for graduate students in the creative writing program. His most recent of many
honors is the inauguration of the Ted Kooser Center for Medical Humanities at
the University of Nebraska Omaha.

Books by Ted Kooser from Copper Canyon Press
Kindest Regards: New and Selected Poems
Splitting an Order
Delights & Shadows
Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry (with Jim Harrison)

Acknowledgments
Able Muse: “On the Market”
The Briar Cliff Review: “Sixtieth Reunion Banquet”
The Chattahoochee Review: “Suitcase”
Great River Review: “Sounds of a Summer Night”
The High Window (UK): “Apron,” “A Caesura,” “In Early August,” “Recital,” “Starling”
The Hopper: “At Dusk, in December”
The Hudson Review: “A Shadow,” “Vespers,” “Vulture”
Kenyon Review: “Raspberry Patch,” “Woolly Caterpillar”
Mantis: “Deer Path”
The Midwest Quarterly: “A Moth, a Moon,” “Noon Whistle,” “An Overnight Snow,” “Rain after Dark,”
“Spring Landscape,” “Up the Block”
Mississippi Review: “A Floating Bottle”
New Letters: “Mother and Child”
Nimrod: “Shame”
North American Review: “A Letter”
Plume Poetry 7: “A Roadside Cemetery”
Poetry East: “The Couple”
Rattle: “A Town Somewhere”
A Ritual to Read Together: “Rabbit Hutches”
River Styx: “House Moving”
Solo Novo: “Red Stilts”
Terrain: “Farmyard Light”
3rd Wednesday: “Fairgrounds,” “Ohio Blue Tip”
Viking Dog Press (broadsides): “After a Heavy Snow,” “Tree Frog”
Virginia Quarterly Review: “At Dawn”
West Branch: “A Heron”
I am grateful to my wife, Kathleen Rutledge, and to Pat Emile,
Steve Hahn, Judith Harris, Katie Schmid Henson, Suzanne
Ohlmann,Connie Wanek, and P. Ivan Young for their helpful
suggestions. And to the generous supporters of Copper
Canyon Press who make these books possible.

Copyright 2020 by Ted Kooser
All rights reserved
Cover art: Don Williams, Nebraska City Alley, oil on panel, 11 × 14 in.
ISBN: 978-1-55659-609-4
eISBN: 978-1-61932-227-1
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
From TWO-HEADED POEMS (1978)
A Paper Bag
The Woman Who Could Not Live With Her Faulty Heart
Five Poems for Dolls
Five Poems for Grandmothers
Marrying the Hangman
Four Small Elegies
Two-Headed Poems
The Bus to Alliston, Ontario
The Woman Makes Peace With Her Faulty Heart
Solstice Poem
Marsh, Hawk
A Red Shirt
Night Poem
All Bread
You Begin
From TRUE STORIES (1981)
True Stories
Landcrab I
Landcrab II
Postcard
Nothing
From NOTES TOWARDS A POEM THAT CAN NEVER BE WRITTEN
A Conversation
Flying Inside Your Own Body
Torture
A Women's Issue
Christmas Carols
Notes Towards a Poem that Can Never Be Written
Vultures
Sunset II
Variation on the Word Sleep

Mushrooms
Out
Blue Dwarfs
Last Day
From INTERLUNAR (1984)
From SNAKE POEMS
Snake Woman
Bad Mouth
Eating Snake
Metempsychosis
Psalm to Snake
Quattrocento
After Heraclitus
From INTERLUNAR
Bedside
Precognition
Keep
Anchorage
Georgia Beach
A Sunday Drive
Orpheus (1)
Eurydice
The Robber Bridegroom
Letter from Persephone
No Name
Orpheus (2)
The Words Continue Their Journey
Heart Test With an Echo Chamber
A Boat
Interlunar
NEW POEMS (1985–1986)
Aging Female Poet Sits on the Balcony
Porcupine Tree
Aging Female Poet Reads Little Magazines
Porcupine Meditation
Aging Female Poet on Laundry Day
Nightshade on the Way to School
Mothers
She

Werewolf Movies
How to Tell One Country From Another
Machine. Gun. Nest.
The Rest
Another Elegy
Galiano Coast: Four Entrances
Squaw Lilies: Some Notes
Three Praises
Not the Moon
About the Author

Copyright © 1987 by Margaret Atwood
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write
to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park
Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhbooks.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Atwood, Margaret Eleanor, date.
Selected poems II.
I. Title.
PR9199.3A8A17 1987 811'.54 87-3861
ISBN 978-0-395-45406-0
eISBN 978-0-544-14701-0
v1.1212
This book was published in a different form by Oxford University Press
(Canada) in 1986.
The poems reprinted in this collection are from Two-Headed Poems, True
Stories, and lnterlunar, published by Oxford University Press (Canada). New
poems have appeared in The Malahat Review, Exile, The Memphis State Review,
and Poetry Australia.

From TWO-HEADED POEMS (1978)

A Paper Bag
I make my head, as I used to,
out of a paper bag,
pull it down to the collarbone,
draw eyes around my eyes,
with purple and green
spikes to show surprise,
a thumb-shaped nose,
a mouth around my mouth
penciled by touch, then colored in
flat red.
With this new head, the body now
stretched like a stocking and exhausted could
dance again; if I made a
tongue I could sing.
An old sheet and it's Halloween;
but why is it worse or more
frightening, this pinface
head of square hair and no chin?
Like an idiot, it has no past
and is always entering the future
through its slots of eyes, purblind
and groping with its thick smile,
a tentacle of perpetual joy.
Paper head, I prefer you
because of your emptiness;
from within you any
word could still be said.
With you I could have

more than one skin,
a blank interior, a repertoire
of untold stories,
a fresh beginning.

The Woman Who Could Not Live With Her Faulty Heart
I do not mean the symbol
of love, a candy shape
to decorate cakes with,
the heart that is supposed
to belong or break;
I mean this lump of muscle
that contracts like a flayed biceps,
purple-blue, with its skin of suet,
its skin of gristle, this isolate,
this caved hermit, unshelled
turtle, this one lungful of blood,
no happy plateful.
All hearts float in their own
deep oceans of no light,
wetblack and glimmering,
their four mouths gulping like fish.
Hearts are said to pound:
this is to be expected, the heart's
regular struggle against being drowned.
But most hearts say, I want, I want,
I want, I want. My heart
is more duplicitous,
though no twin as I once thought.
It says, I want, I don't want, I
want, and then a pause.
It forces me to listen,
and at night it is the infra-red
third eye that remains open
while the other two are sleeping
but refuses to say what it has seen.

It is a constant pestering
in my ears, a caught moth, limping drum,
a child's fist beating
itself against the bedsprings:
I want, I don't want.
How can one live with such a heart?
Long ago I gave up singing
to it, it will never be satisfied or lulled.
One night I will say to it:
Heart, be still,
and it will.

Five Poems for Dolls
i
Behind glass in Mexico
this clay doll draws
its lips back in a snarl;
despite its beautiful dusty shawl,
it wishes to be dangerous.

ii
See how the dolls resent us,
with their bulging foreheads
and minimal chins, their flat bodies
never allowed to bulb and swell,
their faces of little thugs.
This is not a smile,
this glossy mouth, two stunted teeth;
the dolls gaze at us
with the filmed eyes of killers.

iii
There have always been dolls
as long as there have been people.
In the trash heaps and abandoned temples
the dolls pile up;
the sea is filling with them.
What causes them?

Or are they gods, causeless,
something to talk to
when you have to talk,
something to throw against the wall?
A doll is a witness
who cannot die,
with a doll you are never alone.
On the long journey under the earth,
in the boat with two prows,
there were always dolls.

iv
Or did we make them
because we needed to love someone
and could not love each other?
It was love, after all,
that rubbed the skins from their gray cheeks,
crippled their fingers,
snarled their hair, brown or dull gold.
Hate would merely have smashed them.
You change, but the doll
I made of you lives on,
a white body leaning
in a sunlit window, the features
wearing away with time,
frozen in the gaunt pose
of a single day,
holding in its plaster hand
your doll of me.

v

Or: all dolls come
from the land of the unborn,
the almost-born; each
doll is a future
dead at the roots,
a voice heard only
on breathless nights,
a desolate white memento.
Or: these are the lost children,
those who have died or thickened
to full growth and gone away.
The dolls are their souls or cast skins
which line the shelves of our bedrooms
and museums, disguised as outmoded toys,
images of our sorrow,
shedding around themselves
five inches of limbo.

Five Poems for Grandmothers
i
In the house on the cliff
by the ocean, there is still a shell
bigger and lighter than your head, though now
you can hardly lift it.
It was once filled with whispers;
it was once a horn
you could blow like a shaman
conjuring the year,
and your children would come running.
You've forgotten you did that,
you've forgotten the names of the children
who in any case no longer run,
and the ocean has retreated,
leaving a difficult beach of gray stones
you are afraid to walk on.
The shell is now a cave
which opens for you alone.
It is still filled with whispers
which escape into the room,
even though you turn it mouth down.
This is your house, this is the picture
of your misty husband, these are your children, webbed
and doubled. This is the shell,
which is hard, which is still there,
solid under the hand, which mourns, which offers
itself, a narrow journey
along its hallways of cold pearl

down the cliff into the sea.

ii
It is not the things themselves
that are lost, but their use and handling.
The ladder first; the beach;
the storm windows, the carpets;
The dishes, washed daily
for so many years the pattern
has faded; the floor, the stairs, your own
arms and feet whose work
you thought defined you;
The hairbrush, the oil stove
with its many failures,
the apple tree and the barrels
in the cellar for the apples,
the flesh of apples; the judging
of the flesh, the recipes
in tiny brownish writing
with the names of those who passed them
from hand to hand: Gladys,
Lorna, Winnie, Jean.
If you could only have them back
or remember who they were.

iii
How little I know
about you finally:

The time you stood
in the nineteenth century
on Yonge Street, a thousand
miles from home, with a brown purse
and a man stole it.
Six children, five who lived.
She never said anything
about those births and the one death;
her mouth closed on a pain
that could neither be told nor ignored.
She used to have such a sense of fun.
Now girls, she would say
when we would tease her.
Her anger though, why
that would curl your hair,
though she never swore.
The worst thing she could say was:
Don't be foolish.
At eighty she had two teeth pulled out
and walked the four miles home
in the noon sun, placing her feet
in her own hunched shadow.
The bibbed print aprons, the shock
of the red lace dress, the pin
I found at six in your second drawer,
made of white beads, the shape of a star.
What did we ever talk about
but food, health and the weather?
Sons branch out, but
one woman leads to another.
Finally I know you
through your daughters,
my mother, her sisters,
and through myself:

Is this you, this edgy joke
I make, are these your long fingers,
your hair of an untidy bird,
is this your outraged
eye, this grip
that will not give up?

iv
Some kind of ritual
for your dwindling,
some kind of dragon, small,
benign and wooden
with two mouths to catch your soul
because it is wandering
like a lost child, lift it back safely.
But we have nothing; we say,
How is she?
Not so good, we answer,
though some days she's fine.
On other days you walk through
the door of the room in the house
where you've lived for seventy years
and find yourself in a hallway
you know you have never seen before.
Midnight, they found her
opening and dosing the door
of the refrigerator:
vistas of day-old vegetables, the used bone
of an animal, and beyond that
the white ice road that leads north.
They said, Mother,

what are you doing here?
Nothing is finished
or put away, she said.
I don't know where I am.
Against the disappearance
of outlines, against
the disappearance of sounds,
against the blurring of the ears
and eyes, against the small fears
of the very old, the fear
of mumbling, the fear of dying,
the fear of falling downstairs,
I make this charm
from nothing but paper; which is good
for exactly nothing.

v
Goodbye, mother
of my mother, old bone
tunnel through which I came.
You are sinking down into
your own veins, fingers
folding back into the hand,
day by day a slow retreat
behind the disk of your face
which is hard and netted like an ancient plate.
You will flicker in these words
and in the words of others
for a while and then go out.
Even if I send them,

you will never get these letters.
Even if I see you again,
I will never see you again.

Marrying the Hangman
She has been condemned to death by hanging, A man may escape this death
by becoming the hangman, a woman by marrying the hangman. But at the
present time there is no hangman; thus there is no escape. There is only a
death, indefinitely postponed. This is not fantasy, it is history.
***
To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live
without the self. She is living selflessly, she finds a hole in the stone wall
and on the other side of the wall, a voice. The voice comes through
darkness and has no face. This voice becomes her mirror.
***
In order to avoid her death, her particular death, with wrung neck and
swollen tongue, she must marry the hangman. But there is no hangman,
first she must create him, she must persuade this man at the end of the
voice, this voice she has never seen and which has never seen her, this
darkness, she must persuade him to renounce his face, exchange it for the
impersonal mask of death, of official death which has eyes but no mouth,
this mask of a dark leper. She must transform his hands so they will be
willing to twist the rope around throats that have been singled out as hers
was, throats other than hers. She must marry the hangman or no one, but
that is not so bad. Who else is there to marry?
***
You wonder about her crime. She was condemned to death for stealing
clothes from her employer, from the wife of her employer. She wished to
make herself more beautiful. This desire in servants was not legal.
***
She uses her voice like a hand, her voice reaches through the wall, stroking
and touching. What could she possibly have said that would have convinced
him? He was not condemned to death, freedom awaited him. What was the
temptation, the one that worked? Perhaps he wanted to live with a woman
whose life he had saved, who had seen down into the earth but had
nevertheless followed him back up to life. It was his only chance to be a
hero, to one person at least, for if he became the hangman the others would
despise him. He was in prison for wounding another man, on one finger of
the right hand, with a sword. This too is history.
***

My friends, who are both women, tell me their stories, which cannot be
believed and which are true. They are horror stories and they have not
happened to me, they have not yet happened to me, they have happened to
me but we are detached, we watch our unbelief with horror. Such things
cannot happen to us, it is afternoon and these things do not happen in the
afternoon. The trouble was, she said, I didn't have time to put my glasses on
and without them I'm blind as a bat, I couldn't even see who it was. These
things happen and we sit at a table and tell stories about them so we can
finally believe. This is not fantasy, it is history, there is more than one
hangman and because of this some of them are unemployed.
***
He said: the end of walls, the end of ropes, the opening of doors, a field, the
wind, a house, the sun, a table, an apple.
She said: nipple, arms, lips, wine, belly, hair, bread, thighs, eyes, eyes.
They both kept their promises.
***
The hangman is not such a bad fellow. Afterwards he goes to the
refrigerator and cleans up the leftovers, though he does not wipe up what he
accidentally spills. He wants only the simple things: a chair, someone to
pull off his shoes, someone to watch him while he talks, with admiration
and fear, gratitude if possible, someone in whom to plunge himself for rest
and renewal. These things can best be had by marrying a woman who has
been condemned to death by other men for wishing to be beautiful. There is
a wide choice.
Everyone said he was a fool.
Everyone said she was a clever woman.
They used the word ensnare.
***
What did they say the first time they were alone together in the same room?
What did he say when she had removed her veil and he could see that she
was not a voice but a body and therefore finite? What did she say when she
discovered that she had left one locked room for another? They talked of
love, naturally, though that did not keep them busy forever.
***
The fact is there are no stories I can tell my friends that will make them feel
better. History cannot be erased, although we can soothe ourselves by

speculating about it. At that time there were no female hangmen. Perhaps
there have never been any, and thus no man could save his life by marriage.
Though a woman could, according to the law.
***
He said: foot, boot, order, city, fist, roads, time, knife.
She said: water, night, willow, rope hair, earth belly, cave, meat, shroud,
open, blood.
They both kept their promises.
NOTE: In eighteenth-century Québec the only way for someone under sentence
of death to escape hanging was, for a man, to become a hangman, or, for a
woman, to marry one. Françoise Laurent, sentenced to hang for stealing,
persuaded Jean Corolère, in the next cell, to apply for the vacant post of
executioner, and also to marry her.

Four Small Elegies
(1838, 1977)
i
BEAUHARNOIS

The bronze clock brought
with such care over the sea,
which ticked like the fat slow heart
of a cedar, of a grandmother,
melted and its hundred years
of time ran over the ice and froze there.
We are fixed by this frozen clock
at the edge of the winter forest.
Ten below zero.
Shouts in a foreign language
come down blue snow.
The women in their thin nightgowns
disappear wordlessly among the trees.
Here and there a shape,
a limp cloth bundle, a child
who could not keep up
lies sprawled face down in a drift
near the trampled clearing.
No one could give them clothes or shelter,
these were the orders.
We didn't hurt them, the man said,
we didn't touch them.

ii
BEAUHARNOIS, GLENGARRY

Those whose houses were burned
burned houses. What else ever happens
once you start?
While the roofs plunged
into the root-filled cellars,
they chased ducks, chickens, anything
they could catch, clubbed their heads
on rock, spitted them, singed off the feathers
in fires of blazing fences,
ate them in handfuls, charred
and bloody.
Sitting in the snow
in those mended plaids, rubbing their numb feet,
eating soot, still hungry,
they watched the houses die like
sunsets, like their own
houses. Again
those who gave the orders
were already somewhere else,
of course on horseback.

iii
BEAUHARNOIS

Is the man here, they said,
where is he?
She didn't know, though

she called to him as they dragged her
out of the stone house by both arms
and fired the bedding.
He was gone somewhere with the other men,
he was not hanged, he came back later,
they lived in a borrowed shack.
A language is not words only,
it is the stories
that are told in it,
the stories that are never told.
He pumped himself for years
after that into her body
which had no feet
since that night, which had no fingers.
His hatred of the words
that had been done became children.
They did the best they could:
she fed them, he told them
one story only.

iv
DUFFERIN, SIMCOE, GREY

This year we are making
nothing but elegies.
Do what you are good at,
our parents always told us,
make what you know.
This is what we are making,
these songs for the dying.
You have to celebrate something.

The nets rot, the boats rot, the farms
revert to thistle, foreigners
and summer people admire the weeds
and the piles of stones dredged from the fields
by men whose teeth were gone by thirty.
But the elegies are new and yellow,
they are not even made, they grow,
they come out everywhere,
in swamps, at the edges of puddles,
all over the acres
of parked cars, they are mournful
but sweet, like flowered hats
in attics we never knew we had.
We gather them, keep them in vases,
water them while our houses wither.
NOTE: After the failure of the uprising in Lower Canada (now Québec) in 1838,
the British army and an assortment of volunteers carried out reprisals against the
civilian population around Beauharnois, burning houses and barns and turning
the inhabitants out into the snow. No one was allowed to give them shelter and
many froze to death. The men were arrested as rebels; those who were not home
were presumed to be rebels and their houses were burned.
The volunteers from Glengarry were Scots, most of them in Canada because
their houses had also been burned during the Highland Clearances, an aftermath
of the British victory at Culloden. Dufferin, Simcoe, and Grey are the names of
three counties in Ontario, settled around this period.

Two-Headed Poems
"Joined Head to Head, and still alive"
Advertisement for Siamese Twins,
Canadian National Exhibition, c. 1954
The heads speak sometimes singly, sometimes
together, sometimes alternately within a poem.
Like all Siamese twins, they dream of separation.

i
Well, we felt
we were almost getting somewhere
though how that place would differ
from where we've always been, we
couldn't tell you
and then this happened,
this joke or major quake, a rift
in the earth, now everything
in the place is falling south
into the dark pit left by Cincinnati
after it crumbled.
This rubble is the future,
pieces of bureaucrats, used
bumper stickers, public names
returnable as bottles.
Our fragments made us.
What will happen to the children,
not to mention the words
we've been stockpiling for ten years now,
defining them, freezing them, storing

them in the cellar.
Anyone asked us who we were, we said
just look down there.
So much for the family business.
It was too small anyway
to be, as they say, viable.
But we weren't expecting this,
the death of shoes, fingers
dissolving from our hands,
atrophy of the tongue,
the empty mirror,
the sudden change
from ice to thin air.

ii
Those south of us are lavish
with their syllables. They scatter, we
hoard. Birds
eat their words, we eat
each other's, words, hearts, what's
the difference? In hock
up to our eyebrows, we're still
polite, god knows, to the tourists.
We make tea properly and hold the knife
the right way.
Sneering is good for you
when someone else has cornered
the tree market.
Who was it told us
so indelibly,
those who take risks

have accidents?

iii
We think of you as one
big happy family, sitting around
an old pine table, trading
in-jokes, hospitable to strangers
who come from far enough away.
As for us, we're the neighbors,
we're the folks whose taste
in fences and pink iron lawn flamingoes
you don't admire.
(All neighbors are barbarians,
that goes without saying,
though you too have a trashcan.)
We make too much noise,
you know nothing about us,
you would like us to move away.
Come to our backyard, we say,
friendly and envious,
but you don't come.
Instead you quarrel
among yourselves, discussing
genealogies and the mortgage,
while the smoke from our tireless barbecues
blackens the roses.

iv

The investigator is here,
proclaiming his own necessity.
He has come to clean your heart.
Is it pure white,
or is there blood in it?
Stop this heart!
Cut this word from his mouth.
Cut this mouth.
(Expurgation: purge.
To purge is to clean,
also to kill.)
For so much time, our history
was written in bones only.
Our flag has been silence,
which was mistaken for no flag,
which was mistaken for peace.

v
Is this what we wanted,
this politics, our hearts
flattened and strung out
from the backs of helicopters?
We thought we were talking
about a certain light
through the window of an empty room,
a light beyond the wet black trunks
of trees in this leafless forest
just before spring,
a certain loss.

We wanted to describe the snow,
the snow here, at the corner
of the house and orchard
in a language so precise
and secret it was not even
a code, it was snow,
there could be no translation.
To save this language
we needed echoes,
we needed to push back
the other words, the coarse ones
spreading themselves everywhere
like thighs or starlings.
No forests of discarded
crusts and torn underwear for us.
We needed guards.
Our hearts are flags now,
they wave at the end of each
machine we can stick them on.
Anyone can understand them.
They inspire pride,
they inspire slogans and tunes
you can dance to, they are redder than ever.

vi
Despite us
there is only one universe, the sun
burns itself slowly out no matter
what you say, is that
so? The man
up to his neck in whitehot desert

sand disagrees.
Close your eyes now, see:
red sun, black sun, ordinary
sun, sunshine, sunking, sunlight soap, the sun
is an egg, a lemon, a pale eye,
a lion, sun
on the beach, ice on the sun.
Language, like the mouths
that hold and release
it, is wet & living, each
word is wrinkled
with age, swollen
with other words, with blood, smoothed by the numberless
flesh tongues that have passed across it.
Your language hangs around your neck,
a noose, a heavy necklace;
each word is empire,
each word is vampire and mother.
As for the sun, there are as many
suns as there are words for sun;
false or true?

vii
Our leader
is a man of water
with a tinfoil skin.
He has two voices,
therefore two heads, four eyes,

two sets of genitals, eight
arms and legs and forty
toes and fingers.
Our leader is a spider,
he traps words.
They shrivel in his mouth,
he leaves the skins.
Most leaders speak
for themselves, then
for the people.
Who does our leader speak for?
How can you use two languages
and mean what you say in both?
No wonder our leader skuttles
sideways, melts in hot weather,
corrodes in the sea, reflects
light like a mirror,
splits our faces, our wishes,
is bitter.
Our leader is a monster
sewn from dead soldiers,
a Siamese twin.
Why should we complain?
He is ours and us,
we made him.

viii
If I were a foreigner, as you say,
instead of your second head,
you would be more polite.

Foreigners are not there:
they pass and repass through the air
like angels, invisible
except for their cameras, and the rustle
of their strange fragrance
but we are not foreigners
to each other; we are the pressure
on the inside of the skull, the struggle
among the rocks for more room,
the shove and giveway, the grudging love,
the old hatreds.
Why fear the knife
that could sever us, unless
it would cut not skin but brain?

ix
You can't live here without breathing
someone else's air,
air that has been used to shape
these hidden words that are not yours.
This word was shut
in the mouth of a small man
choked off by the rope and gold/
red drumroll
This word was deported
This word was guttural,
buried wrapped in a leather throat
wrapped in a wolfskin
This word lies
at the bottom of a lake

with a coral bead and a kettle
This word was scrawny,
denied itself from year
to year, ate potatoes,
got drunk when possible
This word died of bad water.
Nothing stays under
forever, everyone
wants to fly, whose language
is this anyway?
You want the air
but not the words that come with it:
breathe at your peril.
These words are yours,
though you never said them,
you never heard them, history
breeds death but if you kill
it you kill yourself.
What is a traitor?

x

This is the secret: these hearts
we held out to you, these party
hearts (our hands
sticky with adjectives
and vague love, our smiles
expanding like balloons)
, these candy hearts we sent you

in the mail, a whole
bouquet of hearts, large as a country,
these hearts, like yours,
hold snipers.
A tiny sniper, one in each heart,
curled like a maggot, pallid
homunculus, pinhead, glass-eyed fanatic,
waiting to be given life.
Soon the snipers will bloom
in the summer trees, they will eat
their needle holes through your windows
(Smoke and broken leaves, up close
what a mess, wet red glass
in the zinnia border,
Don't let it come to this, we said
before it did.)
Meanwhile, we refuse
to believe the secrets of our hearts,
these hearts of neat velvet,
moral as fortune cookies.
Our hearts are virtuous, they swell
like stomachs at a wedding,
plump with goodwill.
In the evenings the news seeps in
from foreign countries,
those places with unsafe water.
We listen to the war, the wars,
any old war.

xi

Surely in your language
no one can sing, he said, one hand
in the small-change pocket.
That is a language for ordering
the slaughter and gutting of hogs, for
counting stacks of cans. Groceries
are all you are good for. Leave
the soul to us. Eat shit.
In these cages, barred crates,
feet nailed to the floor, soft
funnel down the throat,
we are forced with nouns, nouns,
till our tongues are sullen and rubbery.
We see this language always
and merely as a disease
of the mouth. Also
as the hospital that will cure us,
distasteful but necessary.
These words slow us, stumble
in us, numb us, who
can say even Open
the door, without these diffident
smiles, apologies?
Our dreams though
are of freedom, a hunger
for verbs, a song
which rises liquid and effortless,
our double, gliding beside us
over all these rivers, borders,
over ice or clouds.
Our other dream: to be mute.
Dreams are not bargains,
they settle nothing.

This is not a debate
but a duet
with two deaf singers.

The Bus to Alliston, Ontario
Snow packs the roadsides, sends dunes
onto the pavement, moves
through vision like a wave or sandstorm.
The bus charges this winter,
a whale or blunt gray
tank, wind whipping its flank.
Inside, we sit woolswathed and over-furred, made stodgy
by the heat, our boots
puddling the floor, our Christmas bundles
stuffed around us in the seats, the paper bags
already bursting; we trust
the driver, who is plump and garrulous, familiar
as a neighbor, which he is
to the thirty souls he carries, as
carefully as the timetable permits; he knows
by experience the fragility of skulls.
Travel is dangerous; nevertheless, we travel.
The talk, as usual,
is of disasters; trainwrecks, fires,
herds of cattle killed in floods,
the malice of weather and tractors,
the clogging of hearts known
and unknown to us, illness and death,
true cases of buses
such as ours,
which skid, which hurtle
through snake fences and explode
with no survivors.
The woman talking says she heard

their voices at the crossroad
one night last fall, and not
a drop taken.
The dead ride with us on this bus,
whether we like it or not,
discussing aunts and suicides,
wars and the price of wheat,
fogging the close air, hugging us,
repeating their own deaths through these mouths,
cramped histories, violent
or sad, earthstained, defeated, proud,
the pain in small print, like almanacs,
mundane as knitting.
In the darkness, each distant house
glows and marks time,
is as true in attics
and cellars as in its steaming rich
crackling and butter kitchens.
The former owners, coupled and multiple,
seep through the mottled plaster, sigh
along the stairs they once rubbed concave
with their stiff boots, still envious,
breathe roasts and puddings through the floors;
it's wise
to set an extra plate.
How else can you live but with the knowledge
of old lives continuing in fading
sepia blood under your feet?
Outside, the moon is fossil
white, the sky cold purple, the stars
steely and hard; when there are trees they are dried
coral; the snow
is an unbroken spacelit
desert through which we make
our ordinary voyage,
those who hear voices and those

who do not, moving together, warm
and for the moment safe,
along the invisible road towards home.

The Woman Makes Peace With Her Faulty Heart
It wasn't your crippled rhythm
I could not forgive, or your dark red
skinless head of a vulture
but the things you hid:
five words and my lost
gold ring, the fine blue cup
you said was broken,
that stack of faces, gray
and folded, you claimed
we'd both forgotten,
the other hearts you ate,
and all that discarded time you hid
from me, saying it never happened.
There was that, and the way
you would not be captured,
sly featherless bird, fat raptor
singing your raucous punctured song
with your talons and your greedy eye
lurking high in the molten sunset
sky behind my left cloth breast
to pounce on strangers.
How many times have I told you:
The civilized world is a zoo,
not a jungle, stay in your cage.
And then the shouts
of blood, the rage as you threw yourself
against my ribs.
As for me, I would have strangled you
gladly with both hands,
squeezed you closed, also
your yelps of joy.

Life goes more smoothly without a heart,
without that shiftless emblem,
that flyblown lion, magpie, cannibal
eagle, scorpion with its metallic tricks
of hate, that vulgar magic,
that organ the size and color
of a scalded rat,
that singed phoenix.
But you've shoved me this far,
old pump, and we're hooked
together like conspirators, which
we are, and just as distrustful.
We know that, barring accidents,
one of us will finally
betray the other; when that happens,
it's me for the urn, you for the jar.
Until then, it's an uneasy truce,
and honor between criminals.

Solstice Poem
i
A tree hulks in the livingroom, prickly monster, our hostage
from the wilderness, prelude
to light in this dark space of the year
which turns again toward the sun
today, or at least we hope so.
Outside, a dead tree
swarming with blue and yellow
birds; inside, a living one
that shimmers with hollow silver
planets and wafer faces,
salt and flour, with pearl
teeth, tin angels, a knitted bear.
This is our altar.

ii
Beyond the white hill which maroons us,
out of sight of the white
eye of the pond, geography
is crumbling, the nation
splits like an iceberg, factions
shouting Good riddance from the floes
as they all melt south,
with politics the usual

rats' breakfast.
All politicians are amateurs:
wars bloom in their heads like flowers
on wallpaper, pins strut on their maps.
Power is wine with lunch
and the right pinstripes.
There are no amateur soldiers.
The soldiers grease their holsters,
strap on everything
they need to strap, gobble their dinners.
They travel quickly and light.
The fighting will be local,
they know, and lethal.
Their eyes flick from target
to target: window, belly, child.
The goal is not to get killed.

ii
As for the women, who did not
want to be involved, they are involved.
It's that blood on the snow
which turns out to be not
some bludgeoned or machine-gunned
animal's, but your own
that does it.
Each has a knitting needle
stuck in her abdomen, a red pincushion
heart complete with pins,
a numbed body
with one more entrance than the world finds safe,
and not much money.

Each fears her children sprout
from the killed children of others.
Each is right.
Each has a father.
Each has a mad mother
and a necklace of lightblue tears.
Each has a mirror
which when asked replies Not you.

iv
My daughter crackles paper, blows
on the tree to make it live, festoons
herself with silver.
So far she has no use
for gifts.
What can I give her,
what armor, invincible
sword or magic trick, when that year comes?
How can I teach her
some way of being human
that won't destroy her?
I would like to tell her, Love
is enough, I would like to say,
Find shelter in another skin.
I would like to say, Dance
and be happy. Instead I will say
in my crone's voice, Be
ruthless when you have to, tell
the truth when you can,
when you can see it.

Iron talismans, and ugly, but
more loyal than mirrors.

v
In this house (in a dying orchard,
behind it a tributary
of the wilderness, in front a road),
my daughter dances
unsteadily with a knitted bear.
Her father, onetime soldier,
touches my arm.
Worn language clots our throats,
making it difficult to say
what we mean, making it
difficult to see.
Instead we sing in the back room, raising
our pagan altar
of oranges and silver flowers:
our fools' picnic, our signal,
our flame, our nest, our fragile golden
protest against murder.
Outside, the cries of the birds
are rumors we hear clearly
but can't yet understand. Fresh ice
glints on the branches.
In this dark
space of the year, the earth
turns again toward the sun, or
we would like to hope so.

Marsh, Hawk
Diseased or unwanted
trees, cut into pieces, thrown
away here, damp and soft in the sun, rotting and half
covered with sand, burst truck
tires, abandoned, bottles and cans hit
with rocks or bullets, a mass grave,
someone made it, spreads on the
land like a bruise and we stand on it, vantage
point, looking out over the marsh.
Expanse of green
reeds, patches of water, shapes
just out of reach of the eyes,
the wind moves, moves it and it
eludes us, it is full
daylight. From the places
we can't see, the guttural swamp voices
impenetrable, not human,
utter their one-note
syllables, boring and
significant as oracles and quickly over.
It will not answer, it will not
answer, though we hit
it with rocks, there is a splash, the wind
covers it over; but
intrusion is not what we want,
we want it to open, the marsh rushes
to bend aside, the water
to accept us, it is only
revelation, simple as the hawk
which lifts up now against
the sun and into
our eyes, wingspread and sharp call

filling the head/sky, this,
to immerse, to have it slide
through us, disappearance
of the skin, this is what we are looking for,
the way in.

A Red Shirt
(For Ruth)

i
My sister and I are sewing
a red shirt for my daughter.
She pins, I hem, we pass the scissors
back & forth across the table.
Children should not wear red,
a man once told me.
Young girls should not wear red.
In some countries it is the color
of death; in others passion,
in others war, in others anger,
in others the sacrifice
of shed blood. A girl should be
a veil, a white shadow, bloodless
as a moon on water; not
dangerous; she should
keep silent and avoid
red shoes, red stockings, dancing.
Dancing in red shoes will kill you.

ii
But red is our color by birth-

right, the color of tense joy
& spilled pain that joins us
to each other. We stoop over
the table, the constant pull
of the earth's gravity furrowing
our bodies, tugging us down.
The shirt we make is stained
with our words, our stories.
The shadows the light casts
on the wall behind us multiply:
This is the procession
of old leathery mothers,
the moon's last quarter
before the blank night,
mothers like worn gloves
wrinkled to the shapes of their lives,
passing the work from hand to hand,
mother to daughter,
a long thread of red blood, not yet broken.

iii
Let me tell you the story
about the Old Woman.
First: she weaves your body.
Second: she weaves your soul.

Third: she is hated & feared,
though not by those who know her.
She is the witch you burned
by daylight and crept from your home
to consult & bribe at night. The love
that tortured you you blamed on her.
She can change her form,
and like your mother she is covered with fur.
The black Madonna
studded with miniature
arms & legs, like tin stars,
to whom they offer agony
and red candles when there is no other
help or comfort, is also her.

iv
It is January, it's raining, this gray
ordinary day. My
daughter, I would like
your shirt to be just a shirt,
no charms or fables. But fables
and charms swarm here
in this January world,
entrenching us like snow, and few
are friendly to you; though
they are strong,
potent as viruses
or virginal angels dancing
on the heads of pins,

potent as the hearts
of whores torn out
by the roots because they were thought
to be solid gold, or heavy
as the imaginary
jewels they used to split
the heads of Jews for.
It may not be true
that one myth cancels another.
Nevertheless, in a corner
of the hem, where it will not be seen,
where you will inherit
it, I make this tiny
stitch, my private magic.

v
The shirt is finished: red
with purple flowers and pearl
buttons. My daughter puts it on,
hugging the color
which means nothing to her
except that it is warm
and bright. In her bare
feet she runs across the floor,
escaping from us, her new game,
waving her red arms
in delight, and the air
explodes with banners.

Night Poem
There is nothing to be afraid of,
it is only the wind
changing to the east, it is only
your father the thunder
your mother the rain
In this country of water
with its beige moon damp as a mushroom,
its drowned stumps and long birds
that swim, where the moss grows
on all sides of the trees
and your shadow is not your shadow
but your reflection,
your true parents disappear
when the curtain covers your door.
We are the others,
the ones from under the lake
who stand silently beside your bed
with our heads of darkness.
We have come to cover you
with red wool,
with our tears and distant whispers.
You rock in the rain's arms,
the chilly ark of your sleep,
while we wait, your night
father and mother,
with our cold hands and dead flashlight,
knowing we are only
the wavering shadows thrown
by one candle, in this echo
you will hear twenty years later.

All Bread
All bread is made of wood,
cow dung, packed brown moss,
the bodies of dead animals, the teeth
and backbones, what is left
after the ravens. This dirt
flows through the stems into the grain,
into the arm, nine strokes
of the axe, skin from a tree,
good water which is the first
gift, four hours.
Live burial under a moist cloth,
a silver dish, the row
of white famine bellies
swollen and taut in the oven,
lungfuls of warm breath stopped
in the heat from an old sun.
Good bread has the salt taste
of your hands after nine
strokes of the axe, the salt
taste of your mouth, it smells
of its own small death, of the deaths
before and after.
Lift these ashes
into your mouth, your blood;
to know what you devour
is to consecrate it,
almost. All bread must be broken
so it can be shared. Together
we eat this earth.

You Begin
You begin this way:
this is your hand,
this is your eye,
that is a fish, blue and flat
on the paper, almost
the shape of an eye.
This is your mouth, this is an O
or a moon, whichever
you like. This is yellow.
Outside the window
is the rain, green
because it is summer, and beyond that
the trees and then the world,
which is round and has only
the colors of these nine crayons.
This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with the red and then
the orange: the world burns.
Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.
The word hand floats above your hand
like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors
your hand to this table,
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.
This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
which is round but not flat and has more colors

than we can see.
It begins, it has an end,
this is what you will
come back to, this is your hand.

From TRUE STORIES (1981)

True Stories
i
Don't ask for the true story;
why do you need it?
It's not what I set out with
or what I carry.
What I'm sailing with,
a knife, blue fire,
luck, a few good words
that still work, and the tide.

ii
The true story was lost
on the way down to the beach, it's something
I never had, that black tangle
of branches in a shifting light,
my blurred footprints
filling with salt
water, this handful
of tiny bones, this owl's kill;
a moon, crumpled papers, a coin,
the glint of an old picnic,

the hollows made by lovers
in sand a hundred
years ago: no clue.

iii
The true story lies
among the other stories,
a mess of colors, like jumbled clothing
thrown off or away,
like hearts on marble, like syllables, like
butchers' discards.
The true story is vicious
and multiple and untrue
after all. Why do you
need it? Don't ever
ask for the true story.

Landcrab I

A lie, that we come from water.
The truth is we were born
from stones, dragons, the sea's
teeth, as you testify,
with your crust and jagged scissors.
Hermit, hard socket
for a timid eye,
you're a soft gut scuttling
sideways, a blue skull,
round bone on the prowl.
Wolf of treeroots and gravelly holes,
a mouth on stilts,
the husk of a small demon.
Attack, voracious
eating, and flight:
it's a sound routine
for staying alive on edges.
Then there's the tide, and that dance
you do for the moon
on wet sand, claws raised
to fend off your mate,
your coupling a quick
dry clatter of rocks.
For mammals
with their lobes and tubers,
scruples and warm milk,
you've nothing but contempt.
Here you are, a frozen scowl
targeted in flashlight,
then gone: a piece of what

we are, not all,
my stunted child, my momentary
face in the mirror,
my tiny nightmare.

Landcrab II
The sea sucks at its own
edges, in and out with the moon.
Tattered brown fronds
(shredded nylon stockings,
feathers, the remnants of hands)
wash against my skin.
As for the crab, she's climbed
a tree and sticks herself
to the bark with her adroit
spikes; she jerks
her stalked eyes at me, seeing
a meat shadow,
food or a predator.
I smell the pulp
of her body, faint odor
of rotting salt,
as she smells mine,
working those martian palps:
seawater in leather.
I'm a category, a noun
in a language not human,
infra-red in moonlight,
a tidal wave in the air.
Old fingernail, old mother,
I'm up to scant harm
tonight; though you don't care,
you're no-one's metaphor,
you have your own paths
and rituals, frayed snails
and soaked nuts, waterlogged sacks

to pick over, soggy chips and crusts.
The beach is all yours, wordless
and ripe once I'm off it,
wading towards the moored boats
and blue lights of the dock.

Postcard
I'm thinking about you. What else can I say?
The palm trees on the reverse
are a delusion; so is the pink sand.
What we have are the usual
fractured Coke bottles and the smell
of backed-up drains, too sweet,
like a mango on the verge
of rot, which we have also.
The air clear sweat, mosquitoes
& their tracks; birds, blue & elusive.
Time comes in waves here, a sickness, one
day after the other rolling on;
I move up, it's called
awake, then down into the uneasy
nights but never
forward. The roosters crow
for hours before dawn, and a prodded
child howls & howls
on the pocked road to school.
In the hold with the baggage
there are two prisoners,
their heads shaved by bayonets, & ten crates
of queasy chicks. Each spring
there's a race of cripples, from the store
to the church. This is the sort of junk
I carry with me; and a clipping
about democracy from the local paper.
Outside the window
they're building the damn hotel,
nail by nail, someone's
crumbling dream. A universe that includes you
can't be all bad, but
does it? At this distance

you're a mirage, a glossy image
fixed in the posture
of the last time I saw you.
Turn you over, there's the place
for the address. Wish you were
here. Love comes
in waves like the ocean, a sickness which goes on
& on, a hollow cave
in the head, filling & pounding, a kicked ear.

Nothing
Nothing like love to put blood
back in the language,
the difference between the beach and its
discrete rocks & shards, a hard
cuneiform, and the tender cursive
of waves; bone & liquid fishegg, desert
& saltmarsh, a green push
out of death. The vowels plump
again like lips or soaked fingers, and the fingers
themselves move around these
softening pebbles as around skin. The sky's
not vacant and over there but close
against your eyes, molten, so near
you can taste it. It tastes of
salt. What touches
you is what you touch.

From NOTES TOWARDS A POEM THAT CAN NEVER BE
WRITTEN

A Conversation
The man walks on the southern beach
with sunglasses and a casual shirt
and two beautiful women.
He's a maker of machines
for pulling out toenails,
sending electric shocks
through brains or genitals.
He doesn't test or witness,
he only sells. My dear lady,
he says, You don't know
those people. There's nothing
else they understand. What could I do?
she said. Why was he at that party?

Flying Inside Your Own Body
Your lungs fill & spread themselves,
wings of pink blood, and your bones
empty themselves and become hollow.
When you breathe in you'll lift like a balloon
and your heart is light too & huge,
beating with pure joy, pure helium.
The sun's white winds blow through you,
there's nothing above you,
you see the earth now as an oval jewel,
radiant & seablue with love.
It's only in dreams you can do this.
Waking, your heart is a shaken fist,
a fine dust clogs the air you breathe in;
the sun's a hot copper weight pressing straight
down on the thick pink rind of your skull.
It's always the moment just before gunshot.
You try & try to rise but you cannot.

Torture
What goes on in the pauses
of this conversation?
Which is about free will
and politics and the need for passion.
Just this: I think of the woman
they did not kill.
Instead they sewed her face
shut, closed her mouth
to a hole the size of a straw,
and put her back on the streets,
a mute symbol.
It doesn't matter where
this was done or why or whether
by one side or the other;
such things are done as soon
as there are sides
and I don't know if good men
living crisp lives exist
because of this woman or in spite
of her.
But power
like this is not abstract, it's not concerned
with politics and free will, it's beyond slogans
and as for passion, this
is its intricate denial,
the knife that cuts lovers
out of your flesh like tumors,
leaving you breastless
and without a name,
flattened, bloodless, even your voice
cauterized by too much pain,

a flayed body untangled
string by string and hung
to the wall, an agonized banner
displayed for the same reason
flags are.

A Women's Issue
The woman in the spiked device
that locks around the waist and between
the legs, with holes in it like a tea strainer
is Exhibit A.
The woman in black with a net window
to see through and a four-inch
wooden peg jammed up
between her legs so she can't be raped
is Exhibit B.
Exhibit C is the young girl
dragged into the bush by the midwives
and made to sing while they scrape the flesh
from between her legs, then tie her thighs
till she scabs over and is called healed.
Now she can be married.
For each childbirth they'll cut her
open, then sew her up.
Men like tight women.
The ones that die are carefully buried.
The next exhibit lies flat on her back
while eighty men a night
move through her, ten an hour.
She looks at the ceiling, listens
to the door open and close.
A bell keeps ringing.
Nobody knows how she got here.
You'll notice that what they have in common
is between the legs. Is this
why wars are fought?
Enemy territory, no man's
land, to be entered furtively,

fenced, owned but never surely,
scene of these desperate forays
at midnight, captures
and sticky murders, doctors' rubber gloves
greasy with blood, flesh made inert, the surge
of your own uneasy power.
This is no museum.
Who invented the word love?

Christmas Carols
Children do not always mean
hope. To some they mean despair.
This woman with her hair cut off
so she could not hang herself
threw herself from a rooftop, thirty
times raped & pregnant by the enemy
who did this to her. This one had her pelvis
broken by hammers so the child
could be extracted. Then she was thrown away,
useless, a ripped sack. This one
punctured herself with kitchen skewers
and bled to death on a greasy
oilcloth table, rather than bear
again and past the limit. There
is a limit, though who knows
when it may come? Nineteenth-century
ditches are littered with small wax corpses
dropped there in terror. A plane
swoops too low over the fox farm
and the mother eats her young. This too
is Nature. Think twice then
before you worship turned furrows, or pay
lip service to some full belly
or other, or single out one girl to play
the magic mother, in blue
& white, up on that pedestal,
perfect & intact, distinct
from those who aren't. Which means
everyone else. It's a matter
of food & available blood. If motherhood is sacred, put
your money where your mouth is. Only
then can you expect the coming
down to the wrecked & shimmering earth
of that miracle you sing

about, the day
when every child is a holy birth.

Notes Towards a Poem that Can Never Be Written

(For Carolyn Forché)

i
This is the place
you would rather not know about,
this is the place that will inhabit you,
this is the place you cannot imagine,
this is the place that will finally defeat you
where the word why shrivels and empties
itself. This is famine.

ii
There is no poem you can write
about it, the sandpits
where so many were buried
& unearthed, the unendurable
pain still traced on their skins.
This did not happen last year
or forty years ago but last week.
This has been happening,
this happens.
We make wreaths of adjectives for them,
we count them like beads,
we turn them into statistics & litanies
and into poems like this one.

Nothing works.
They remain what they are.

iii
The woman lies on the wet cement floor
under the unending light,
needle marks on her arms put there
to kill the brain
and wonders why she is dying.
She is dying because she said.
She is dying for the sake of the word.
It is her body, silent
and fingerless, writing this poem.

iv
It resembles an operation
but it is not one
nor despite the spread legs, grunts
& blood, is it a birth.
Partly it's a job,
partly it's a display of skill
like a concerto.
It can be done badly
or well, they tell themselves.
Partly it's an art.

v
The facts of this world seen clearly
are seen through tears;
why tell me then
there is something wrong with my eyes?
To see clearly and without flinching,
without turning away,
this is agony, the eyes taped open
two inches from the sun.
What is it you see then?
Is it a bad dream, a hallucination?
Is it a vision?
What is it you hear?
The razor across the eyeball
is a detail from an old film.
It is also a truth.
Witness is what you must bear.

vi
In this country you can say what you like
because no one will listen to you anyway,
it's safe enough, in this country you can try to write
the poem that can never be written,
the poem that invents
nothing and excuses nothing,
because you invent and excuse yourself each day.
Elsewhere, this poem is not invention.
Elsewhere, this poem takes courage.
Elsewhere, this poem must be written

because the poets are already dead.
Elsewhere, this poem must be written
as if you are already dead,
as if nothing more can be done
or said to save you.
Elsewhere you must write this poem
because there is nothing more to do.
***

Vultures
Hung there in the thermal
whiteout of noon, dark ash
in the chimney's updraft, turning
slowly like a thumb pressed down
on target; indolent V's; flies, until they drop.
Then they're hyenas, raucous
around the kill, flapping their black
umbrellas, the feathered red-eyed widows
whose pot bodies violate mourning,
the snigger at funerals,
the burp at the wake.
They cluster, like beetles
laying their eggs on carrion,
gluttonous for a space, a little
territory of murder: food
and children.
Frowzy old saint, baldheaded and musty, scrawnynecked recluse on your pillar
of blazing air which is not
heaven: what do you make
of death, which you do not
cause, which you eat daily?
I make life, which is a prayer.
I make clean bones.
I make a gray zinc noise
which to me is a song.
Well, heart, out of all this
carnage, could you do better?

Sunset II
Sunset, now that we're finally in it
is not what we thought.
Did you expect this violet black
soft edge to outer space, fragile as blown ash
and shuddering like oil, or the reddish
orange that flows into
your lungs and through your fingers?
The waves smooth mouthpink light
over your eyes, fold after fold.
This is the sun you breathe in,
pale blue. Did you
expect it to be this warm?
One more goodbye,
sentimental as they all are.
The far west recedes from us
like a mauve postcard of itself
and dissolves into the sea.
Now there's a moon,
an irony. We walk
north towards no home,
joined at the hand.
I'll love you forever,
I can't stop time.
This is you on my skin somewhere
in the form of sand.

Variation on the Word Sleep
I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head
and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear
I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in
I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.

Mushrooms
i
In this moist season,
mist on the lake and thunder
afternoons in the distance
they ooze up through the earth
during the night,
like bubbles, like tiny
bright red balloons
filling with water;
a sound below sound, the thumbs of rubber
gloves turned softly inside out.
In the mornings, there is the leaf mold
starred with nipples,
with cool white fishgills,
leathery purple brains,
fist-sized suns dulled to the color of embers,
poisonous moons, pale yellow.

ii
Where do they come from?
For each thunderstorm that travels
overhead there's another storm
that moves parallel in the ground.
Struck lightning is where they meet.
Underfoot there's a cloud of rootlets,

shed hairs or a bundle of loose threads
blown slowly through the midsoil.
These are their flowers, these fingers
reaching through darkness to the sky,
these eyeblinks
that burst and powder the air with spores,

iii
They feed in shade, on halfleaves
as they return to water,
on slowly melting logs,
deadwood. They glow
in the dark sometimes. They taste
of rotten meat or cloves
or cooking steak or bruised
lips or new snow.

iv
It isn't only
for food I hunt them
but for the hunt and because
they smell of death and the waxy
skins of the newborn,
flesh into earth into flesh.
Here is the handful
of shadow I have brought back to you:
this decay, this hope, this mouthful of dirt, this poetry.

Out
This is all you go with,
not much, a plastic bag
with a zipper, a bar of soap,
a command, blood in the sink,
the body's word.
You spiral out there,
locked & single
and on your way at last,
the rings of Saturn brilliant
as pain, your dark craft
nosing its way through stars.
You've been gone now
how many years?
Hot metal hurtles over your eyes,
razors the flesh, recedes;
this is the universe
too, this burnt view.
Deepfreeze in blankets; tubes feed you,
your hurt cells glow & tick;
when the time comes you will wake
naked and mended, on earth again, to find
the rest of us changed and older.
Meanwhile your body
hums you to sleep, you cruise
among the nebulae, ice glass
on the bedside table,
the shining pitcher, your white cloth feet
which blaze with reflected light
against the harsh black shadow
behind the door.

Hush, say the hands
of the nurses, drawing the blinds
down hush
says your drifting blood,
cool stardust.

Blue Dwarfs
Tree burial, you tell me, that's
the way. Not up in but under.
Rootlets & insects, you say as we careen
along the highway with the news on
through a wind thickening with hayfever.
Last time it was fire.
It's a problem, what to do
with yourself after you're dead.
Then there's before.
The scabby wild plums fall from the tree
as I climb it, branches & leaves
peeling off under my bootsoles.
They vanish into the bone-colored
grass & mauve asters
or lie among the rocks and the stench
of woodchucks, bursting & puckered
and oozing juice & sweet pits & yellow
pulp but still
burning, cool and blue
as the cores of the old stars
that shrivel out there in multiples
of zero. Pinpoint mouths
burrowing in them. I pick up the good ones
which won't last long either.
If there's a tree for you it should be
this one. Here
it is, your six-quart basket
of blue light, sticky
and fading but more than
still edible. Time smears
our hands all right, we lick it off, a windfall.

Last Day
This is the last day of the last week.
It's June, the evenings touching
our skins like plush, milkweed sweetening
the sticky air which pulses
with moths, their powdery wings and velvet
tongues. In the dusk, nighthawks and the fluting
voices from the pond, its edges
webbed with spawn. Everything
leans into the pulpy moon.
In the mornings the hens
make egg after egg, warty-shelled
and perfect; the henhouse floor
packed with old shit and winter straw
trembles with flies, green and silver.
Who wants to leave it, who wants it
to end, water moving
against water, skin
against skin? We wade
through moist sunlight towards nothing, which is oval
and full. This egg
in my hand is our last meal,
you break it open and the sky
turns orange again and the sun rises
again and this is the last day again.

From INTERLUNAR (1984)

From SNAKE POEMS

Snake Woman
I was once the snake woman,
the only person, it seems, in the whole place
who wasn't terrified of them.
I used to hunt with two sticks
among milkweed and under porches and logs
for this vein of cool green metal
which would run through my fingers like mercury
or turn to a raw bracelet
gripping my wrist:
I could follow them by their odor,
a sick smell, acid and glandular,
part skunk, part inside
of a torn stomach,
the smell of their fear.
Once caught, I'd carry them,
limp and terrorized, into the dining room,
something even men were afraid of.
What fun I had!
Put that thing in my bed and I'll kill you.
Now, I don't know.
Now I'd consider the snake.

Bad Mouth
There are no leaf-eating snakes.
All are fanged and gorge on blood.
Each one is a hunter's hunter,
nothing more than an endless gullet
pulling itself on over the still-alive prey
like a sock gone ravenous, like an evil glove,
like sheer greed, lithe and devious.
Puff adder buried in hot sand
or poisoning the toes of boots,
for whom killing is easy and careless
as war, as digestion,
why should you be spared?
And you, Constrictor constrictor,
sinuous ribbon of true darkness,
one long muscle with eyes and an anus,
looping like thick tar out of the trees
to squeeze the voice from anything edible,
reducing it to scales and belly.
And you, pit viper
with your venomous pallid throat
and teeth like syringes
and your nasty radar
homing in on the deep red shadow
nothing else knows it casts...
Shall I concede these deaths?
Between us there is no fellow feeling,
as witness: a snake cannot scream.
Observe the alien
chainmail skin, straight out
of science fiction, pure
shiver, pure Saturn.

Those who can explain them
can explain anything.
Some say they're a snarled puzzle
only gasoline and a match can untangle.
Even their mating is barely sexual,
a romance between two lengths
of cyanide-colored string.
Despite their live births and squirming nests
it's hard to believe in snakes loving.
Alone among the animals
the snake does not sing.
The reason for them is the same
as the reason for stars, and not human.

Eating Snake
I too have taken the god into my mouth,
chewed it up and tried not to choke on the bones.
Rattlesnake it was, panfried
and good too though a little oily.
(Forget the phallic symbolism:
two differences:
snake tastes like chicken,
and who ever credited the prick with wisdom?)
All peoples are driven
to the point of eating their gods
after a time: it's the old greed
for a plateful of outer space, that craving for darkness,
the lust to feel what it does to you
when your teeth meet in divinity, in the flesh,
when you swallow it down
and you can see with its own cold eyes,
look out through murder.
This is a lot of fuss to make about mere lunch:
metaphysics with onions.
The snake was not served with its tail in its mouth
as would have been appropriate.
Instead the cook nailed the skin to the wall,
complete with rattles, and the head was mounted.
It was only a snake after all.
(Nevertheless, the authorities are agreed:
God is round.)

Metempsychosis
Somebody's grandmother glides through the bracken,
in widow's black and graceful
and sharp as ever: see how her eyes glitter!
Who were you when you were a snake?
This one was a dancer who is now
a green streamer waved by its own breeze
and here's your blunt striped uncle, come back
to bask under the wicker chairs
on the porch and watch over you.
Unfurling itself from its cast skin,
the snake proclaims resurrection
to all believers
though some tire soon of being born
over and over; for them there's the breath
that shivers in the yellow grass,
a papery finger, half of a noose, a summons
to the dead river.
Who's that in the cold cellar
with the apples and the rats? Whose is
that voice of a husk rasping in the wind?
Your lost child whispering Mother,
the one more child you never had,
your child who wants back in.

Psalm to Snake
O snake, you are an argument
for poetry:
a shift among dry leaves
when there is no wind,
a thin line moving through
that which is not
time, creating time,
a voice from the dead, oblique
and silent. A movement
from left to right,
a vanishing. Prophet under a stone.
I know you're there
even when I can't see you
I see the trail you make
in the blank sand, in the morning
I see the point
of intersection, the whiplash
across the eye. I see the kill.
O long word, cold-blooded and perfect

Quattrocento
The snake enters your dreams through paintings:
this one, of a formal garden
in which there are always three:
the thin man with the green-white skin
that marks him vegetarian
and the woman with a swayback and hard breasts
that look stuck on
and the snake, vertical and with a head
that's face-colored and haired like a woman's.
Everyone looks unhappy,
even the few zoo animals, stippled with sun,
even the angel who's like a slab
of flaming laundry, hovering
up there with his sword of fire,
unable as yet to strike.
There's no love here.
Maybe it's the boredom.
And that's no apple but a heart
torn out of someone
in this myth gone suddenly Aztec.
This is the possibility of death
the snake is offering:
death upon death squeezed together,
a blood snowball.
To devour it is to fall out
of the still unending noon
to a hard ground with a straight horizon

and you are no longer the
idea of a body but a body,
you slide down into your body as into hot mud.
You feel the membranes of disease
close over your head, and history
occurs to you and space enfolds
you in its armies, in its nights, and you
must learn to see in darkness.
Here you can praise the light,
having so little of it:
it's the death you carry in you
red and captured, that makes the world
shine for you
as it never did before.
This is how you learn prayer.
Love is choosing, the snakesaid.
The kingdom of God is within you
because you ate it.

After Heraclitus
The snake is one name of God,
my teacher said:
All nature is a fire
we burn in and are
renewed, one skin
shed and then another.
To talk with the body
is what the snake does, letter
after letter formed on the grass,
itself a tongue, looping its earthy hieroglyphs,
the sunlight praising it
as it shines there on the doorstep,
a green light blessing your house.
This is the voice
you could pray to for the answers
to your sickness:
leave it a bowl of milk,
watch it drink
You do not pray, but go for the shovel,
old blood on the blade
But pick it up and you would hold
the darkness that you fear
turned flesh and embers,
cool power coiling into your wrists
and it would be in your hands
where it always has been.
This is the nameless one
giving itself a name,
one among many

and your own name as well.
You know this and still kill it.
***

From INTERLUNAR

Bedside
You sit beside the bed
in the extremis ward, holding your father's feet
as you have not done since you were a child.
You would hold his hands, but they are strapped down,
emptied at last of power.
He can see, possibly, the weave of the sheet
that covers him from chest to ankles;
he does not wish to.
He has been opened. He is at the mercy.
You hold his feet,
not moving. You would like
to drag him back. You remember
how you have judged each other
in silence, relentlessly.
You listen intently, as if for a signal,
to the undersea ping of the monitors,
the waterlogged lungs breathed into by machines,
the heart, wired for sound
and running too quickly in the stuck body,
the murderous body, the body
itself stalled in a field of ice
that spreads out endlessly under it,
the snowdrifts tucked by the wind around
the limbs and torso.
Now he is walking
somewhere you cannot follow,
leaving no footprints.
Already in this whiteness
he casts no shadow.

Precognition
Living backwards means only
I must suffer everything twice.
Those picnics were already loss:
with the dragonflies and the clear streams halfway.
What good did it do me to know
how far along you would come with me
and when you would return?
By yourself, to a life you call daily.
You did not consider me a soul
but a landscape, not even one
I recognize as mine, but foreign
and rich in curios:
an egg of blue marble,
a dried pod,
a clay goddess you picked up at a stall
somewhere among the dun and dust-green
hills and the bronze-hot
sun and the odd shadows,
not knowing what would be protection,
or even the need for it then.
I wake in the early dawn and there is the roadway
shattered, and the glass and blood,
from an intersection that has happened
already, though I can't say when.
Simply that it will happen.
What could I tell you now that would keep you
safe or warn you?
What good would it do?
Live and be happy.

I would rather cut myself loose
from time, shave off my hair
and stand at a crossroads
with a wooden bowl, throwing
myself on the dubious mercy
of the present, which is innocent
and forgetful and hits the eye bare
and without words and without even
than do this mourning over.

Keep
I know that you will die
before I do.
Already your skin tastes faintly
of the acid that is eating through you.
None of this, none of this is true,
no more than a leaf is botany,
along this avenue of old maples
the birds fall down through the branches
as the long slow rain of small bodies
falls like snow through the darkening sea,
wet things in turn move up out of the earth,
your body is liquid in my hands, almost
a piece of solid water.
Time is what we're doing,
I'm falling into the flesh,
into the sadness of the body
that cannot give up its habits,
habits of the hands and skin.
I will be one of those old women
with good bones and stringy necks
who will not let go of anything.
You'll be there. You'll keep
your distance,
the same one.

Anchorage
This is the sea then, once
again, warm this time
and swarming. Sores fester
on your feet in the tepid
beach water, where French
wine bottles float among grapefruit peels and the stench of death
from the piles of sucked-out shells
and emptied lunches.
Here is a pool with nurse sharks
kept for the tourists
and sea turtles scummy with algae,
winging their way through their closed
heaven of dirty stones. Here
is where the good ship Envious
rides at anchor.
The land is red with hibiscus
and smells of piss; and here
beside the houses built on stilts,
warped in the salt and heat,
they plant their fathers in the yards,
cover them with cement
tender as blankets:
Drowned at sea, the same one
the mermaids swim in, hairy
and pallid, with rum on the beach after.
But that's a day trip.
Further along, there are tents
where the fishers camp,
cooking their stews of claws
and spines, and at dawn they steer
further out than you'd think
possible, between the killer
water and the killer sun,

carried on hollow pieces
of wood with the names of women,
not sweethearts
only but mothers, clumsy
and matronly, though their ribbed bodies
are fragile as real bodies
and like them also a memory,
and like them also two hands
held open, and like them also
the last hope of safety.

Georgia Beach
In winter the beach is empty
but south, so there is no snow.
Empty can mean either
peaceful or desolate.
Two kinds of people walk here:
those who think they have love
and those who think they are without it.
I am neither one nor the other.
I pick up the vacant shells,
for which open means killed,
saving only the most perfect,
not knowing who they are for.
Near the water there are skinless
trees, fluid, grayed by weather,
in shapes of agony, or you could say
grace or passion as easily.
In any case twisted.
By the wind, which keeps going.
The empty space, which is not empty
space, moves through me.
I come back past the salt marsh,
dull yellow and rust-colored,
which whispers to itself,
which is sad only to us.

A Sunday Drive
The skin seethes in the heat
which roars out from the sun, wave after tidal wave;
the sea is flat and hot and too bright,
stagnant as a puddle,
edged by a beach reeking of shit.
The city is like a city
bombed out and burning;
the smell of smoke is everywhere,
drifting from the mounds of rubble.
Now and then a new tower,
already stained, lifts from the tangle;
the cars stall and bellow.
From the trampled earth rubbish erupts
and huts of tin and warped boards
and cloth and anything scavenged.
Everything is the color of dirt
except the kites, red and purple,
three of them, fluttering cheerfully
from a slope of garbage,
and the women's dresses, cleaned somehow,
vaporous and brilliant, and the dutiful
white smiles of the child beggars
who kiss your small change
and press it to their heads and hearts.
Uncle, they call you. Mother.
I have never felt less motherly.
The moon is responsible for all this,
goddess of increase
and death, which here are the same.
Why try to redeem
anything? In this maze
of condemned flesh without beginning or end
where the pulp of the body steams and bloats
and spawns and multiplies itself

the wise man chooses serenity.
Here you are taught the need to be holy,
to wash a lot and live apart.
Burial by fire is the last mercy:
decay is reserved for the living.
The desire to be loved is the last illusion:
Give it up and you will be free.
Bombay, 1982

Orpheus (1)
You walked in front of me,
pulling me back out
to the green light that had once
grown fangs and killed me.
I was obedient, but
numb, like an arm
gone to sleep; the return
to time was not my choice.
By then I was used to silence.
Though something stretched between us
like a whisper, like a rope:
my former name,
drawn tight.
You had your old leash
with you, love you might call it,
and your flesh voice.
Before your eyes you held steady
the image of what you wanted
me to become: living again.
It was this hope of yours that kept me following.
I was your hallucination, listening
and floral, and you were singing me:
already new skin was forming on me
within the luminous misty shroud
of my other body; already
there was dirt on my hands and I was thirsty.
I could see only the outline
of your head and shoulders,
black against the cave mouth,
and so could not see your face

at all, when you turned
and called to me because you had
already lost me. The last
I saw of you was a dark oval.
Though I knew how this failure
would hurt you, I had to
fold like a gray moth and let go.
You could not believe I was more than your echo.

Eurydice
He is here, come down to look for you.
It is the song that calls you back,
a song of joy and suffering
equally: a promise:
that things will be different up there
than they were last time.
You would rather have gone on feeling nothing,
emptiness and silence; the stagnant peace
of the deepest sea, which is easier
than the noise and flesh of the surface.
You are used to these blanched dim corridors,
you are used to the king
who passes you without speaking.
The other one is different
and you almost remember him.
He says he is singing to you
because he loves you,
not as you are now,
so chilled and minimal: moving and still
both, like a white curtain blowing
in the draft from a half-opened window
beside a chair on which nobody sits.
He wants you to be what he calls real.
He wants you to stop light.
He wants to feel himself thickening
like a treetrunk or a haunch
and see blood on his eyelids
when he closes them, and the sun beating.
This love of his is not something

he can do if you aren't there,
but what you knew suddenly as you left your body
cooling and whitening on the lawn
was that you love him anywhere,
even in this land of no memory,
even in this domain of hunger.
You hold love in your hand, a red seed
you had forgotten you were holding.
He has come almost too far.
He cannot believe without seeing,
and it's dark here.
Go back, you whisper,
but he wants to be fed again
by you. O handful of gauze, little
bandage, handful of cold
air, it is not through him
you will get your freedom.

The Robber Bridegroom
He would like not to kill. He would like
what he imagines other men have,
instead of this red compulsion. Why do the women
fail him and die badly? He would like to kill them gently,
finger by finger and with great tenderness, so that
at the end they would melt into him
with gratitude for his skill and the final pleasure
he still believes he could bring them
if only they would accept him,
but they scream too much and make him angry.
Then he goes for the soul, rummaging
in their flesh for it, despotic with self-pity,
hunting among the nerves and the shards
of their faces for the one thing
he needs to live, and lost
back there in the poplar and spruce forest
in the watery moonlight, where his young bride,
pale but only a little frightened,
her hands glimmering with his own approaching
death, gropes her way towards him
along the obscure path, from white stone
to white stone, ignorant and singing,
dreaming of him as he is.

Letter from Persephone
This is for the left-handed mothers
in their fringed black shawls or flowered housecoats
of the 'forties, their pink mule slippers,
their fingers, painted red or splay-knuckled
that played the piano formerly.
I know about your houseplants
that always died, about your spread
thighs roped down and split
between, and afterwards
that struggle of amputees
under a hospital sheet that passed
for sex and was never mentioned,
your invalid mothers, your boredom,
the enraged sheen of your floors;
I know about your fathers
who wanted sons.
These are the sons
you pronounced with your bodies,
the only words you could
be expected to say,
these flesh stutters.
No wonder this one
is nearly mute, flinches when touched,
is afraid of caves
and this one threw himself at a train
so he could feel his own heartbeat
once anyway; and this one
touched his own baby gently
he thought, and it came undone;
and this one enters the trussed bodies
of women as if spitting.

I know you cry at night
and they do, and they are looking for you.
They wash up here, I get
this piece or that. It's a blood
puzzle.
It's not your fault
either, but I can't fix it.

No Name
This is the nightmare you now have frequently:
that a man will come to your house at evening
with a hole in him—you place it
in the chest, on the left side—and blood leaking out
onto the wooden door as he leans against it.
He is a man in the act of vanishing
one way or another.
He wants you to let him in.
He is like the soul of a dead
lover, come back to the surface of the earth
because he did not have enough of it and is still hungry
but he is far from dead. Though the hair
lifts on your arms and cold
air flows over your threshold
from him, you have never
seen anyone so alive
as he touches, just touches your hand
with his left hand, the clean
one, and whispers Please
in any language.
You are not a doctor or anything like it.
You have led a plain life
which anyone looking would call blameless.
On the table behind you
there are bread on a plate, fruit in a bowl.
There is one knife. There is one chair.
It is spring, and the night wind
is moist with the smell of turned loam
and the early flowers;
the moon pours out its beauty

which you see as beauty finally,
warm and offering everything.
You have only to take.
In the distance you hear dogs barking.
Your door is either half open
or half closed.
It stays that way and you cannot wake.

Orpheus (2)
Whether he will go on singing
or not, knowing what he knows
of the horror of this world:
He was not wandering among meadows
all this time. He was down there
among the mouthless ones, among
those with no fingers, those
whose names are forbidden,
those washed up eaten into
among the gray stones
of the shore where nobody goes
through fear. Those with silence.
He has been trying to sing
love into existence again
and he has failed.
Yet he will continue
to sing, in the stadium
crowded with the already dead
who raise their eyeless faces
to listen to him; while the red flowers
grow up and splatter open
against the walls.
They have cut off both his hands
and soon they will tear
his head from his body in one burst
of furious refusal.
He foresees this. Yet he will go on
singing, and in praise.
To sing is either praise
or defiance. Praise is defiance.

The Words Continue Their Journey
Do poets really suffer more
than other people? Isn't it only
that they get their pictures taken
and are seen to do it?
The loony bins are full of those
who never wrote a poem.
Most suicides are not
poets: a good statistic.
Some days though I want, still,
to be like other people;
but then I go and talk with them,
these people who are supposed to be
other, and they are much like us,
except that they lack the sort of thing
we think of as a voice.
We tell ourselves they are fainter
than we are, less defined,
that they are what we are defining,
that we are doing them a favor,
which makes us feel better.
They are less elegant about pain than we are.
But look, I said us. Though I may hate your guts
individually, and want never to see you,
though I prefer to spend my time
with dentists because I learn more,
I spoke of us as we, I gathered us
like the members of some doomed caravan
which is how I see us, traveling together,
the women veiled and singly, with that intumed
sight and the eyes averted,
the men in groups, with their moustaches
and passwords and bravado

in the place we're stuck in, the place we've chosen,
a pilgrimage that took a wrong turn
somewhere far back and ended
here, in the full glare
of the sun, and the hard red-black shadows
cast by each stone, each dead tree lurid
in its particulars, its doubled gravity, but floating
too in the aureole of stone, of tree,
and we're no more doomed really than anyone, as we
together, through this moon terrain
where everything is dry and perishing and so
vivid, into the dunes, vanishing out of sight,
vanishing out of the sight of each other,
vanishing even out of our own sight,
looking for water.

Heart Test With an Echo Chamber
Wired up at the ankles and one wrist,
a wet probe rolling over my skin,
I see my heart on a screen
like a rubber bulb or a soft fig, but larger,
enclosing a tentative double flutter,
the rhythm of someone out of breath
but trying to speak anyway; two valves opening
and shutting like damp wings
unfurling from a gray pupa.
This is the heart as television,
a softcore addiction
of the afternoon. The heart
as entertainment, out of date
in black and white.
The technicians watch the screen,
looking for something: a block, a leak,
a melodrama, a future
sudden death, clenching
of this fist which goes on
shaking itself at fate.
They say: It may be genetic.
(There you have it, from science,
what God has been whispering all along
through stones, madmen and birds' entrails:
hardness of the heart can kill you.)
They change the picture:
now my heart is cross-sectioned
like a slice of textbook geology.
They freeze-frame it, take its measure.
A deep breath, they say.
The heart gasps and plods faster.

It enlarges, grows translucent,
a glowing stellar
cloud at the far end
of a starscope. A pear
made of smoke and about to rot.
For once the blood and muscle
heart and the heart of pure
light are beating in unison,
visibly.
Dressing, I am diaphanous,
a mist wrapping a flare.
I carry my precarious
heart, radiant and already
fading, out with me
along the tiled corridors
into the rest of the world,
which thinks it is opaque and hard.
I am being very careful.
O heart, now that I know your nature,
who can I tell?

A Boat
Evening comes on and the hills thicken;
red and yellow bleaching out of the leaves.
The chill pines grow their shadows.
Below them the water stills itself,
a sunset shivering in it.
One more going down to join the others.
Now the lake expands
and closes in, both.
The blackness that keeps itself
under the surface in daytime
emerges from it like mist
or as mist.
Distance vanishes, the absence
of distance pushes against the eyes.
There is no seeing the lake,
only the outlines of the hills
which are almost identical,
familiar to me as sleep,
shores unfolding upon shores
in their contours of slowed breathing.
It is touch I go by,
the boat like a hand feeling
through shoals and among
dead trees, over the boulders
lifting unseen, layer
on layer of drowned time falling away.
This is how I learned to steer

through darkness by no stars.
To be lost is only a failure of memory.

Interlunar
Darkness waits apart from any occasion for it;
like sorrow it is always available.
This is only one kind,
the kind in which there are stars
above the leaves, brilliant as steel nails
and countless and without regard.
We are walking together
on dead wet leaves in the intermoon
among the looming nocturnal rocks
which would be pinkish gray
in daylight, gnawed and softened
by moss and ferns, which would be green,
in the musty fresh yeast smell
of trees rotting, earth returning
itself to itself
and I take your hand, which is the shape a hand
would be if you existed truly.
I wish to show you the darkness
you are so afraid of.
Trust me. This darkness
is a place you can enter and be
as safe in as you are anywhere;
you can put one foot in front of the other
and believe the sides of your eyes.
Memorize it. You will know it
again in your own time.
When the appearances of things have left you,
you will still have this darkness.
Something of your own you can carry with you.
We have come to the edge:

the lake gives off its hush;
in the outer night there is a barred owl
calling, like a moth
against the ear, from the far shore
which is invisible.
The lake, vast and dimensionless,
doubles everything, the stars,
the boulders, itself, even the darkness
that you can walk so long in
it becomes light.
***

NEW POEMS (1985–1986)

Aging Female Poet Sits on the Balcony
The front lawn is littered with young men
who want me to pay attention to them
not to their bodies and their freshlywashed cotton skins, not to their enticing
motifs of bulb and root, but
to their poems. In the back yard
on the other hand are the older men
who want me to pay attention to their
bodies. Ah men,
why do you want
all this attention?
I can write poems for myself, make
love to a doorknob if absolutely
necessary. What do you have to offer me
I can't find otherwise
except humiliation? Which I no longer
need. I gather
dust, for practice, my attention
wanders like a household pet
once leashed, now
out on the prowl, an animal
neither dog nor cat, unique
and hairy, snuffling
among the damp leaves at the foot
of the hedge, among the afterbloom
of irises which melt like blue and purple
ice back into air; hunting for something
lost, something to eat or love, among
the twists of earth,
among the glorious bearclaw sunsets, evidence
of the red life that is leaking
out of me into time, which become
each night more final.

Porcupine Tree

A porcupine tree is always
dead or half dead with chewed core
and mangy bark. Droppings drool down it.
In winter you can see it clear:
shreds of wood, porcupine piss
as yellow ice, toothwork, trails to and from
waddling in the snow. In summer you smell it.
This tree
is bigger than the other trees,
frowsy as my
room or my vocabulary.
It does not make
leaves much any more,
only porcupines and porcupines,
fat, slow and lazy,
each one a low note, the longest string
on a cello,
or like turning over in bed
under the eiderdown in spring,
early before the leaves are out;
sunlight too hot on you through the window,
your head sodden with marshy dreams
or like a lungfish burrowed
into mud. Oh pigsheart. Oh luxury.
I'll come around at night
and gnaw the salt off your hands,
eat toilet seats and axe handles.
That is my job in life: to sniff
your worn skin music,
to witness the border
between flesh and the inert,
lick up dried blood
soaked into the grain,

the taste of mortality in the wood.

Aging Female Poet Reads Little Magazines
Amazingly young beautiful woman poets
with a lot of hair falling down around
their faces like a bad ballet,
their eyes oblique over their cheekbones;
they write poems like blood in a dead person
that comes out black, or at least deep
purple, like smashed grapes.
Perhaps I was one of them once.
Too late to remember
the details, the veils.
If I were a man I would want to console them,
and would not succeed.

Porcupine Meditation
I used to have tricks, dodges, a whole sackful.
I could outfox anyone,
double back, cover my tracks,
walk backwards, the works.
I left it somewhere, that knack
of running, that good luck.
Now I have only
one trick left: head down, spikes out,
brain tucked in.
I can roll up:
thistle as animal, a flower of quills,
that's about it.
I lie in the grass and watch the sunlight pleating
the skin on the backs of my hands
as if I were a toad, squashed and drying.
I don't even wade through spring water
to cover my scent.
I can't be bothered.
I squat and stink, thinking:
peace and quiet are worth something.
Here I am, dogs,
nose me over,
go away sneezing, snouts full of barbs
hooking their way to your brain.
Now you've got some
of my pain. Much good may it do you.

Aging Female Poet on Laundry Day
I prop up my face and go out, avoiding the sunlight,
keeping away from the curve where the burnt road
touches the sky.
Whatever exists at the earth's center will get me
sooner or later. Sooner. Than I think.
That core of light squeezed tight
and shut, dense as a star, as molten
mirrors. Dark red and heavy. Slab at the butcher's.
Already it's dragging me down, already
I become shorter, infinitesimally.
The bones of my legs thicken—that's first—
contract, like muscles.
After that comes the frailty, a dry wind blowing
inside my body,
scouring me from within, as if I were
a fossil, the soft parts eaten away.
Soon I will turn to calcium. It starts with the heart.
I do a lot of washing. I wash everything.
If I could only get this clean once, before I die.
To see God, they told me, you do not go
into the forest or city; not the meadow,
the seashore even unless it is cold.
You go to the desert.
You think of sand.

Nightshade on the Way to School
Nightshade grows more densely than most weeds:
in the country of burdock and random stones,
rooted in undersides of damp logs,
leaf mold, worm castings.
Dark foliage, strong tendrils, the flowers purple
for mourning but with a center
so yellow I thought buttercup or adder,
the berries red, translucent,
like the eggs of an unknown moth,
feather-soft, nocturnal.
Belladonna was its name, beautiful lady.
Its other name was deadly.
If you ate it it would stop your heart,
you would sleep forever. I was told that.
Sometimes it was used for healing,
or in the eyes. I learned that later.
I had to go down the mud path to the ravine,
the wooden bridge across it rotting,
walk across it, from good
board to good board,
level with the tips of the trees.
Birds I don't remember.
On the other side the thicket of nightshade
where cats hunted, leaving their piss:
a smell of ammonia and rust, some dead thing.
All this in sunshine.
At that time I did well, my fingers
were eaten down to the blood.
They never healed.
The word Nightshade a shadow,
the color of a recurring dream
in which you cannot see color.
Porridge, worn underwear, wool

stockings, my fault. Not purple: some
other color. Sick
outside in a snowbank.
I dreamed of falling from the bridge,
one hand holding on, unable to call.
In other dreams, I could step into the air.
It was not flying. I never flew.
Now some years I cross the new bridge,
concrete, the path white gravel.
The old bridge is gone,
the nightshade has been cut down.
The nightshade spreads and thickens
where it always was,
at this season the red berries.
You would be tempted to eat them
if you did not know better.
Also the purple flowers.

Mothers
How much havoc this woman spills
out of herself into us
merely by being
unhappy with such finality:
The mothers rise up in us,
rustling, uttering cooing
sounds, their hands moving
into our hands, patting anything
smooth again. Her deprived eyes and deathcamp
shoulders. There there
we say, bringing
bright things in desperation:
a flower? We make
dolls of other people and offer
them to her. Have him, we say,
what about her? Eat their heads off
for all we care, but stop crying.
She half sits in the bed, shaking
her head under the cowl of hair.
Nothing will do, ever.
She discards us, crumples down
into the sheets, twisting around
that space we can never
hope to fill,
hugging her true mother,
the one who left her here
not among us:
hugging her darkness.

She
The snake hunts and sinews
his way along and is not his own
idea of viciousness. All he wants is
a fast grab, with fur and a rapid
pulse, so he can take that fluttering
and make it him, do a transfusion.
They say whip or rope about him, but this
does not give the idea; nor
phallus, which has no bones,
kills nothing and cannot see.
The snake sees red, like a hand held
above sunburn. Zeroes in,
which means, aims for the round egg
with nothing in it but blood.
If lucky, misses the blade
slicing light just behind him.
He's our idea of a bad time, we are his.
I say he out of habit. It could be she.

Werewolf Movies
Men who imagine themselves covered with fur and sprouting
fangs, why do they do that? Padding among wet
moonstruck treetrunks crouched on all fours, sniffing
the mulch of sodden leaves, or knuckling
their brambly way, arms dangling like outsized
pajamas, hair all over them, noses and lips
sucked back into their faces, nothing left of their kindly
smiles but yellow eyes and a muzzle. This gives them
pleasure, they think they'd be
more animal. Could then freely growl, and tackle
women carrying groceries, opening
their doors with keys. Freedom would be
bared ankles, the din of tearing: rubber, cloth,
whatever. Getting down to basics. Peel, they say
to strippers, meaning: take off the skin.
A guzzle of flesh
dogfood, ears in the bowl. But
no animal does that: couple and kill,
or kill first: rip up its egg, its future.
No animal eats its mate's throat, except
spiders and certain insects, when it's the protein
male who's gobbled. Why do they have this dream then?
Dress-ups for boys, some last escape
from having to be lawyers? Or a
rebellion against the mute
resistance of objects: reproach of the
pillowcase big with pillow, the teacosy swollen with its warm
pot, not soft as it looks but hard
as it feels, round tummies of saved string in the top
drawer tethering them down. What joy, to smash the
tyranny of the doorknob, sink your teeth
into the inert defiant eiderdown with matching
spring-print queensized sheets and listen to her
scream. Surrender.

How to Tell One Country From Another
Whether it is possible to become lost.
Whether one tree looks like another.
Whether there is water all around
the edges or not. Whether
there are edges or whether
there are just insects.
Whether the insects bite,
whether you would die
from the bites of the insects.
Whether you would die.
Whether you would die for your country.
Whether anyone in the country would die for your country.
Let's be honest here.
A layer of snow, a layer of granite, a layer of snow.
What you think lies under the snow.
What you think lies.
Whether you think white on white is a state of mind
or blue on blue or green on green.
Whether you think there is a state,
of mind.
How many clothes you have to take off
before you can make love.
This I think is important:
the undoing of buttons, the gradual shedding.
of one color after another. It leads
to the belief that what you see is not
what you get.
Whether there are preliminaries,
hallways, vestibules,

basements, furnaces,
chesterfields, silences
between sentences, between pieces
of furniture, parasites in your eyes,
drinkable water.
Whether there has ever been
an invading army.
Whether, if there were an invading army,
you would collaborate.
Poor boy, you'd say, he looks cold
standing out there, and he's only twenty.
From his point of view this must be hell.
A fur coat is what he needs,
a cup of tea, a cup of coffee,
a warm body.
Whether on the contrary
you'd slit his throat in his sleep
or in yours. I ask you.
So, you are a nice person.
You would behave well.
What you mean by behaving well.
When the outline of a man
whose face you cannot see
appears at your bedroom window,
whether you would shoot.
If you had a gun, that is.
Whether you would have a gun.
It goes on.

Machine. Gun. Nest.
The blood goes through your neck veins with a noise they call singing.
Time shatters like bad glass; you are this pinpoint of it.
Your feet rotting inside your boots, the skin of your chest
festering under the zippers, the waterproof armor,
you sit here, on the hill, a vantage point, at this X or scuffling in the earth,
which they call a nest. Who chose that word?
Whatever you are you are not an egg, or a bird either.
Vipers perhaps is what was meant. Who cares now?
That is the main question: who cares. Not these pieces of paper
from somewhere known as home you fold, unread, in your pocket.
Each landscape is a state of mind, he once told me:
mountains for awe and remoteness, meadows for calm and the steam
of the lulled senses. But some views are slippery.
This place is both beautiful as the sun and full of menace:
dark green, with now and then a red splotch, like a punctured
vein, white like a flare; stench of the half-eaten.
Look at it carefully, see what it hides, or it will burst in your head.
If you lose your nerve you may die, if you don't lose it
you may die anyway, the joke goes. What is your nerve?
It is turning the world flat, the moon to a disc you could aim at,
popping the birds off the fence wire. Delight in accuracy,
no attention paid to results, dead singing, the smear of feathers.
You know you were more than that, but best to forget it.
There's no slack time for memory here; when you can, you plunge

into some inert woman as into a warm bath; for a moment
comforting, and of no consequence, like sucking your thumb.
No woman can imagine this. What you do to them
is therefore incidental, and also your just reward,
though sometimes, in a gap in the action, there's a space
for the concepts of sister, mother. Like folded laundry. They come
and go.
But stick your hand up a woman, alive or freshlydead, it is much like a gutted chicken:
giblets, a body cavity. Killing can be
merely a kind of impatience, at the refusal
of this to mean anything to you. He told me that.
You wanted to go in sharp and clean with a sword,
do what they once called battle. Now you just want your life.
There's not much limit to what you would do to get it.
Justice and mercy are words that happen in cool rooms, elsewhere.
Are you your brother's keeper? Yes or no, depending
what clothes he has on, what hair. There is more than one brother.
What you need to contend with now is the hard Eastereggshell blue of the sky, that shows you too clearly
the mass of deep green trees leaning slowly towards you
as if on the verge of speech, or annunciation.
More likely some break in the fabric of sight, or a sad mistake
you will hear about in the moment you make it. Some glint of
reflected light.
That whir in the space where your left hand was is not singing.
Death is the bird that hatches, is fed, comes flying.

The Rest
The rest of us watch from beyond the fence
as the woman moves with her jagged stride
into her pain as if into a slow race.
We see her body in motion
but hear no sounds, or we hear
sounds but no language; or we know
it is not a language we know
yet. We can see her clearly
but for her it is running in black smoke.
The clusters of cells in her swelling
like porridge boiling, and bursting,
like grapes, we think. Or we think of
explosions in mud; but we know nothing.
All around us the trees
and the grasses light up with forgiveness,
so green and at this time
of the year healthy.
We would like to call something
out to her. Some form of cheering.
There is pain but no arrival at anything.

Another Elegy
Strawberries, pears, fingers, the eyes
of snails: the other shapes water
takes. Even leaves are liquid
arrested. To die
is to dry, lose juice,
the sweet pulp sucked out. To enter
the time of rind and stone.
Your clothes hang shriveling
in the closet, your other body once
filled with your breath.
When I say body, what
is that a word for?
Why should the word you
remain attached to that suffering?
Wave upon wave, as we say.
I think of your hair burning
first, a scant minute
of halo; later, an afterglow
of bone, red slash of sunset.
The body a cinder or luminescent
saint, or Turner seascape.
Fine words, but why do I want
to tart up death?
Which needs no decoration,
which is only a boat,
plain and wooden
and ordinary, without eyes
painted on it,
sightless and hidden
in fog and going somewhere
else. Away from the shore.

My dear, my voyager, my scant handful
of ashes: I'd scatter you
if I could, this way, on the river.
A wave is neither form
nor energy. Both. Neither.

Galiano Coast: Four Entrances
i
The arbutus trees, with their bark like burned skin
that has healed, enclosing someone's real arms
in the moment of reaching, but not towards you:
you know they are paying no attention
to you and your failed love and equivocation.
Why do you wish to be forgiven by them?
Yet you are, and you breathe in,
and the new moon sheds grace without intention.

ii
You lie on your stomach
looking down through a crack between rocks:
the seaweed with its bladders and hairs,
the genital bodies hinted
by the pink flanges of limpets,
five starfish, each thickened purple arm
a drowning tongue,
the sea's membrane, with its wet shine
and pulse, and no promise.
There is no future,
really there is none
and no salvation
To know this is salvation

iii
Where the rock stops upland, thistles burning
at the tips, leaving their white ash
A result of the sun, this pentecost
and conflagration.
Light flares up off the tidepool
where the barnacles grasp at the water
each with its one skeletal hand
which is also a frond
which is also a tongue
which is also a flame
you are praised by

iv
Sandrock the color of erosion,
pushed by the wind
into gills and clefts
and heavy folds like snow melting
or the crease of a doubled arm
There ought to be caves here
The sunlight
slides over the body like pollen
A door is about to open
onto paradise. Onto a beach like this one,
exactly like it, down to each thistle,
down to the red halfcrab eaten on the sand,

down to the rubber glove
gone white and blinded,
wedged in and stranded by the tide
down to the loss because you
can never truly be here.
Can this be paradise, with so much loss
in it?
Paradise
is defined by loss.
Is loss.
Is.

Squaw Lilies: Some Notes
Went up the steep stone hill, thinking,
My trick hip could fail me. Went up anyway
to see the flower with three names:
chocolate lilies, for the color,
stink lilies for the smell, red meat going off,
squaw lilies. Thought what I would be like, falling.
Brain spilled on the rocks.
Said to her: never seen these before. Why squaw?
Oh, she said, something to do
with the smell.
When she said that I felt as if painted
naked on an off-blue sofa
by a bad expressionist, ochre
and dirty greens, lips thickened with yellow
pigment, a red-infected
crevice dividing the splayed legs.
Thought: this is what it is, to be part
of the landscape. Subject to
depiction. Thought:
release the lilies. They have nothing
to do with these names for them.
Not even lilies.
Went down the steep stone hill. Did not fall.

Three Praises
***
The dipper, small dust-colored bird with robin
feet, walks on the stream bed
enclosed in its nimbus of silver
air, miraculous bubble, a non-miracle.
Who could have thought it? We think it now,
and liverwort on a dead log, earthstar,
hand, finger by finger.
***
For you, at last, I'd like to make
something uncomplicated; some neither god
nor goddess, not between, beyond
them; pinch it from dough,
bake it in the oven, a stone in its belly.
Stones lined up on the windowsill,
picked off some beach or other for being holy.
***
The hookworm, in the eye of
the universe, which is the unsteady gaze
of eternity maybe, is beloved. How could it not be,
living so blessed, in its ordained red meadows
of blood where it waves like a seaweed?
Praise be, it sings with its dracula mouth.
Praise be.

Not the Moon
What idiocy could transform the moon, that old sea-overgrown
skull seen from above, to a goddess of mercy?
You fish for the silver light, there on the quiet lake, so clear
to see; you plunge your hands into the water and come up empty.
Don't ask questions of stones. They will rightly ignore you,
they have shoulders but no mouths, their conversation is elsewhere.
Expect nothing else from the perfect white birdbones, picked clean
in the sedge in the cup of muskeg: you are none of their business.
Fresh milk in a glass on a plastic tray, a choice of breakfast
foods; we sit at the table, discussing the theories of tragedy.
The plump pink-faced men in the metal chairs at the edge of the
golf course
adding things up, sunning themselves, adding things up.
The corpse, washed and dressed, beloved meat pumped full of
chemicals
and burned, if turned back into money could feed two hundred.
Voluptuousness of the newspaper; scratching your back on the
bad news;
furious anger in spring sunshine, a plate of fruit on the table.
Ask of the apple, crisp heart, ask the pear or suave banana
which necks got sucked, whose flesh got stewed, so we could love
them.
The slug, a muscular jelly, slippery and luminous, dirty
eggwhite unrolling its ribbon of mucous—this too is delicious.
The oily slick, rainbow-colored, spread on the sewage

flats in the back field is beautiful also
as is the man's hand cut off at the wrist and nailed to a treetrunk,
mute and imploring, as if asking for alms, or held up in warning.
Who knows what it tells you? It does not say, beg, Have mercy,
it is too late for that. Perhaps only, I too was here once, where you are.
The star-like flower by the path, by the ferns, in the rainforest, whose name I did not know, and the war in the jungle—
the war in the jungle, blood on the crushed ferns, whose name I
do not
know, and the star-like flower grow out of the same earth
whose name I do not know. Whose name for itself I do not know.
Or much else, except that the moon is no goddess of mercy
but shines on us each damp warm night of her full rising
as if she were, and that is why we keep asking
the wrong questions, he said, of the wrong things. The questions
of things.
Ask the spider
what is the name of God, she will tell you: God is a spider.
Let the other moons pray to the moon. O Goddess of Mercy,
you who are not the moon, or anything we can see clearly,
we need to know each other's names and what we are asking.
Do not be any thing. Be the light we see by.

About the Author

MARGARET ATWOOD's poetry, like her fiction — including The Handmaid’s Tale
and the Booker-winning The Blind Assassin — is known and acclaimed around
the world. Her collection, Morning in the Burned House, won the Trillium Book
Award in 1995. The author of more than forty works of fiction, poetry, critical
essays, and books for children, Atwood has received top honors and awards in
Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and many other countries. She
lives in Toronto. In 2008, Atwood was awarded the prestigious Prince of
Asturias Award Laureate for Letters, considered to be the Spanish-language
Nobel.

ALSO BY SHARON OLDS

Satan Says
The Dead and the Living
The Gold Cell
The Father
The Wellspring
Blood, Tin, Straw
The Unswept Room
One Secret Thing

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2004 by Sharon Olds
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in
the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and

simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random
House, Inc., New York.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the University of Pittsburgh Press for permission to reprint
“Indictment of Senior Officials,” “The Sisters of Sexual Treasure,” “Station,” “Monarchs,”

“Infinite Bliss,” “The Language of the Brag,” “The Talk,” and “I Could Not Tell” from Satan Says

by Sharon Olds. Copyright © 1980 by Sharon Olds. Reprinted by permission of the University of
Pittsburgh Press.

All other poems in this collection have been previously published in the following Alfred A.
Knopf works: The Dead and the Living (1984); The Gold Cell (1987); The Father (1992); The
Wellspring (1996); Blood, Tin, Straw (1999); The Unswept Room (2002)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Olds, Sharon.

Strike sparks: selected poems, 1980–2002 / Sharon Olds.—1st ed.
p. cm.

eISBN: 978-0-307-54760-6
I. Title.

PS3565.l34A6

2004

811′.5—dc2

Published October 4, 2004
v3.1

2004044150

For Phil and Franny

I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hip, like chips of flint, as if to

strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

Contents

Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication

from Satan Says (1980)
Indictment of Senior Officers
The Sisters of Sexual Treasure
Station
Monarchs
Infinite Bliss
The Language of the Brag
The Talk
I Could Not Tell

from The Dead and the Living (1984)
Ideographs
Photograph of the Girl
Race Riot, Tulsa, 1921
Of All the Dead That Have Come to Me, This Once
Miscarriage
My Father Snoring
The Moment
The Connoisseuse of Slugs
New Mother
Sex Without Love
Ecstasy
Exclusive
Rite of Passage
35/10
The Missing Boy

Bestiary
The One Girl at the Boys’ Party

from The Gold Cell (1987)
Summer Solstice, New York City
On the Subway
The Food-Thief
The Girl
The Pope’s Penis
When
I Go Back to May 1937
Alcatraz
Why My Mother Made Me
After 37 Years My Mother Apologizes for My Childhood
Cambridge Elegy
Topography
I Cannot Forget the Woman in the Mirror
The Moment the Two Worlds Meet
Little Things
The Month of June: 13½
Looking at Them Asleep

from The Father (1992)
The Glass
His Stillness
The Lifting
The Race
Wonder
The Feelings
His Ashes
Beyond Harm
The Underlife
Natural History
The Ferryer
I Wanted to Be There When My Father Died
Waste Sonata
My Father Speaks to Me from the Dead

from The Wellspring (1996)
My Parents’ Wedding Night, 1937
Japanese-American Farmhouse, California, 1942
Killing My Sister’s Fish
Mrs. Krikorian
First
Adolescence
May 1968
Bathing the New Born
41, Alone, No Gerbil
Physics
My Son the Man
First Formal
High School Senior
The Pediatrician Retires
This Hour
Full Summer
Am and Am Not
True Love

from Blood, Tin, Straw (1999)
The Promise
Know-Nothing
Dear Heart,
19
That Day
After Punishment Was Done with Me
What Is the Earth?
Leaving the Island
The Prepositions
1954
Cool Breeze
For and Against Knowledge
The Spouses Waking Up in the Hotel Mirror
You Kindly
Where Will Love Go?
The Protestor
The Summer-Camp Bus Pulls Away from the Curb
The Talkers

First Thanksgiving
The Native
The Knowing

from The Unswept Room (2002)
Kindergarten Abecedarian
Bible Study: 71 B.C.E.
5¢ a Peek
Grey Girl
Still Life in Landscape
The Wedding Vow
His Costume
First Weeks
The Clasp
Diaphragm Aria
The Window
Fish Oil
Wonder as Wander
The Shyness
April, New Hampshire
The Untangling
The Learner
Heaven to Be
The Tending
Psalm
The Unswept
A Note About the Author

from Satan Says

Indictment of Senior Officers

In the hallway above the pit of the stairwell
my sister and I would meet, at night,

eyes and hair dark, bodies
like twins in the dark. We did not talk of
the two who had brought us there, like generals,
for their own reasons. We sat, buddies in cold
war, her living body the proof of
my living body, our backs to the mild
shell hole of the stairs, down which
we would have to go, knowing nothing
but what we had learned there,
so that now
when I think of my sister, the holes of the needles
in her hips and in the creases of her elbows,
and the marks from the doctor husband’s beatings,
and the scars of the operations, I feel the
rage of a soldier standing over the body of
someone sent to the front lines
without training
or a weapon.

The Sisters of Sexual Treasure

As soon as my sister and I got out of our
mother’s house, all we wanted to

do was fuck, obliterate
her tiny sparrow body and narrow
grasshopper legs. The men’s bodies
were like our father’s body! The massive
hocks, flanks, thighs, male
structure of the hips, knees, calves—
we could have him there, the steep forbidden
buttocks, backs of the knees, the cock
in our mouth, ah the cock in our mouth.
Like explorers who
discover a lost city, we went
nuts with joy, undressed the men
slowly and carefully, as if
uncovering buried artifacts that
proved our theory of the lost culture:
that if Mother said it wasn’t there,
it was there.

Station

Coming in off the dock after writing,
I approached the house,

and saw your fine grandee face
lit by a lamp with a parchment shade
the color of flame.
An elegant hand on your beard. Your tapered
eyes found me on the lawn. You looked
as the lord looks down from a narrow window
and you are descended from lords. Calmly, with no
hint of shyness, you examined me,
the wife who runs out on the dock to write
as soon as one of the children is in bed,
leaving the other to you.
Your thin
mouth, flexible as an archer’s bow,
did not curve. We spent a long moment
in the truth of our situation, the poems
heavy as poached game hanging from my hands.

Monarchs
(for P. W.)
All morning, as I sit, thinking of you,
the Monarchs are passing. Seven stories up,
to the left of the river, they are making their way
south, their wings the dry red of
your hands like butchers’ hands, the raised
veins of their wings like your scars.
I could scarcely feel your massive rough
palms on me, your touch was so light,
the chapped scrape of an insect’s leg
across my breast. No one had ever
touched me before. I didn’t know enough to
open my legs, but felt your thighs,
feathered with red, gold hairs,
opening
between my legs
like a pair of wings.
The hinged print of my blood on your thighs—
a winged creature, pinned there—
and then you left, as you were to leave
over and over, the butterflies moving
in masses past my window, floating
south to their transformation, crossing over
borders in the night, the diffuse blood-red

cloud of them, my body under yours,
the beauty and silence of the great migrations.

Infinite Bliss

When I first saw snow cover the air
with its delicate hoofprints, I said I would never
live where it did not snow, and when
the first man tore his way into me,
and tore up the passageway,
and came to the small room, and pulled the
curtain aside that I might enter, I knew I could
never live apart from them
again, the strange race with their massive
bloodied hooves. Today we lay in our
small bedroom, dark gold with
reflected snow, and while the flakes climbed
delicately down the sky, you
came into me, pressing aside
the curtain, revealing the small room,
dark gold with reflected snow,
where we lay, and where you entered me and
pressed the curtain aside, revealing
the small room, dark gold with
reflected snow, where we lay.

The Language of the Brag

I have wanted excellence in the knife-throw,
I have wanted to use my exceptionally strong and accurate arms
and my straight posture and quick electric muscles
to achieve something at the center of a crowd,
the blade piercing the bark deep,
the haft slowly and heavily vibrating like the cock.

I have wanted some epic use for my excellent body,
some heroism, some American achievement
beyond the ordinary for my extraordinary self,
magnetic and tensile, I have stood by the sandlot
and watched the boys play.
I have wanted courage, I have thought about fire
and the crossing of waterfalls, I have dragged around
my belly big with cowardice and safety,
stool charcoal from the iron pills,
huge breasts leaking colostrum,
legs swelling, hands swelling,
face swelling and reddening, hair
falling out, inner sex
stabbed again and again with pain like a knife.
I have lain down.
I have lain down and sweated and shaken

and passed blood and shit and water and
slowly alone in the center of a circle I have
passed the new person out
and they have lifted the new person free of the act
and wiped the new person free of that
language of blood like praise all over the body.

I have done what you wanted to do, Walt Whitman,
Allen Ginsberg, I have done this thing,
I and the other women this exceptional
act with the exceptional heroic body,
this giving birth, this glistening verb,
and I am putting my proud American boast
right here with the others.

The Talk

In the sunless wooden room at noon
the mother had a talk with her daughter.

The rudeness could not go on, the meanness
to her little brother, the selfishness.
The eight-year-old sat on the bed
in the corner of the room, her irises distilled as
the last drops of something, her firm
face melting, reddening,
silver flashes in her eyes like distant
bodies of water glimpsed through woods.
She took it and took it and broke, crying out
I hate being a person! diving
into the mother
as if
into
a deep pond—and she cannot swim,
the child cannot swim.

I Could Not Tell

I could not tell I had jumped off that bus,
that bus in motion, with my child in my arms,

because I did not know it. I believed my own story:
I had fallen, or the bus had started up
when I had one foot in the air.
I would not remember the tightening of my jaw,
the irk that I’d missed my stop, the step out
into the air, the clear child
gazing about her in the air as I plunged
to one knee on the street, scraped it, twisted it,
the bus skidding to a stop, the driver
jumping out, my daughter laughing
Do it again.
I have never done it
again. I have been very careful.
I have kept an eye on that nice young mother
who lightly leapt
off the moving vehicle
onto the stopped street, her life
in her hands, her life’s life in her hands.

from The Dead and the Living

Ideographs
(a photograph of China, 1905)
The handmade scaffolds, boards in the form of
ideographs the size of a person
lean against a steep wall
of dressed stone. One is the simple
shape of a man. The man on it
is asleep, his arms nailed to the wood.
No timber is wasted; his fingertips
curl in at the very end of the plank
as a child’s hand opens in sleep.
The other man is awake—he looks
directly at us. He is fixed to a more
complex scaffold, a diagonal crosspiece
pointing one arm up, one down,
and his legs are bent, the spikes through his ankles
holding them up, off the ground,
his knees cocked, the folds of his robe flowing
sideways as if he were suspended in the air
in flight, his naked legs bared.
They await execution, tilted to the wall
as you’d prop up a tool until you needed it.
They’ll be shouldered up over the crowd and
carried through the screaming. The sleeper will wake.
The twisted one will fly above the faces, his

garment rippling.
Here there is still the backstage quiet,
the shadow at the bottom of the wall, the props
leaning in the grainy half-dusk.
He looks at us in the silence. He says
Save me, there is still time.

Photograph of the Girl

The girl sits on the hard ground,
the dry pan of Russia, in the drought

of 1921, stunned,
eyes closed, mouth open,
raw, hot wind blowing
sand in her face. Hunger and puberty
are taking her together. She leans on a sack,
layers of clothes fluttering in the heat,
the new radius of her arm curved.
She cannot be not beautiful, but she is
starving. Each day she grows thinner, and her bones
grow longer, porous. The caption says
she is going to starve to death that winter
with millions of others. Deep in her body
the ovaries let out her first eggs,
golden as drops of grain.

Race Riot, Tulsa, 1921

The blazing white shirts of the white men
are blanks on the page, looking at them is like

looking at the sun, you could go blind.
Under the snouts of the machine guns,
the dark glowing skin of the women and
men going to jail. You can look at the
gleaming horse chestnuts of their faces the whole day.
All but one descend from the wood
back of the flatbed truck. He lies,
shoes pointed North and South,
knuckles curled under on the splintered slats,
head thrown back as if he is in
a field, his face tilted up
toward the sky, to get the sun on it, to
darken it more and more toward the color of the human.

Of All the Dead That Have Come
to Me, This Once

I have never written against the dead. I feel as
if I would open my shirt to them, the
cones still making sugary milk, but when

Grandfather’s 14-carat pocketwatch
came in by air over the Rockies,
over the shorn yellow of the fields
and the winter rivers, with Grandmother’s blank
face pressed against his name in the back,
I thought of how he put the empty
plate in front of my sister, turned out
the lights after supper, sat in the ashen
room with the fire, the light of the flames
flashing, in his glass eye, in that
cabin where he taught my father his notion
of what a man’s life was, and I said
No. I said, Let this one be dead.
Let the fall he made through the glass roof,
splintering, turning, the companion shanks and
slices of glass in the air, be his last
appearance here.

Miscarriage

When I was a month pregnant, the great
clots of blood appeared in the pale
green swaying water of the toilet,
brick red like black in the salty
translucent brine, like forms of life
appearing, jellyfish with the clear-cut
shapes of fungi.

That was the only appearance made
by that child, the rough, scalloped shapes
falling slowly. A month later
our son was conceived, and I never went back
to mourn the one who came as far as the
sill with its information: that we could
botch something, you and I. All wrapped in
purple it floated away, like a messenger
put to death for bearing bad news.

My Father Snoring

Deep in the night, I would hear it through the wall—
my father snoring, the dense, tuneless
clotted mucus rising in his nose and
falling, like coils of seaweed a wave
brings in and takes back. The clogged roar
filled the house. Even down in the kitchen,
in the drawers, the knives and forks hummed
with that distant throbbing. But in my room,
next to theirs, it was so loud
I could feel myself inside his body,
lifted on the knotted rope of his life
and lowered again, into the narrow
ragged well, its amber walls
slick around my torso, the smell of bourbon
pungent as sputum. He lay like a felled
beast all night and sounded his thick
buried stoppered call, like a cry for
help. And no one ever came:
there were none of his kind around there anywhere.

The Moment

When I saw the red Egyptian stain,
I went down into the house to find you, Mom—
past the grandfather clock, with its huge
ochre moon, past the burnt
sienna woodwork, rubbed and glazed.
I went lower and lower down into the
body of the house, down below
the level of the earth,
I found you there
where I had never found you, by the old sink,
your hands to the elbow in soapy water,
and above your head, the blazing windows
at the surface of the ground.
You looked up from the zinc tub,
a short haggard pretty woman
of forty, one week divorced.
“I’ve got my period, Mom,” I said,
and saw your face abruptly break open and
glow with joy. “Baby,” you said,
coming toward me, hands out and
covered with tiny delicate bubbles like seeds.

The Connoisseuse of Slugs

When I was a connoisseuse of slugs
I would part the ivy leaves, and look for the

naked jelly of those greenish creatures,
translucent strangers glistening along
the stones, slowly, their gelatinous bodies
at my mercy. Made mostly of water, they would shrivel
to nothing if they were sprinkled with salt,
but I was not interested in that. What I liked
was to draw aside the ivy, breathe
the odor of the wall, and stand there in silence
until the slug forgot I was there
and sent its antennae up out of its
head, the glimmering umber horns
rising like telescopes, until finally the
sensitive knobs would pop out the ends,
unerring and intimate. Years later,
when I first saw a naked man,
I gasped with pleasure to see that quiet
mystery reenacted, the slow
elegant being coming out of hiding and
gleaming in the powdery air, eager and so
trusting you could weep.

New Mother

A week after our child was born,
you cornered me in the spare room

and we sank down on the bed.
You kissed me and kissed me, my milk undid its
burning slipknot through my nipples,
soaking my shirt. All week I had smelled of milk,
fresh milk, sour. I began to throb:
my sex had been torn easily as cloth by the
crown of her head, I’d been cut with a knife and
sewn, the stitches pulling at my skin—and the
first time you’re broken, you don’t know
you’ll be healed again, better than before.
I lay in fear and blood and milk
while you kissed and kissed me, your lips hot and swollen
as a teenage boy’s, your sex dry and big,
all of you so tender, you hung over me,
over the nest of the stitches, over the
splitting and tearing, with the patience of someone who
finds a wounded animal in the woods
and stays with it, not leaving its side
until it is whole, until it can run again.

Sex Without Love

How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Formal as dancers,

gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other’s bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, heat
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? I guess they are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the partner for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their overall cardio-vascular
health—just factors, like the other
in the bed, and not their truth, which is
the single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.

Ecstasy

As we made love for the third day,
cloudy and dark, as we did not stop but went

into it, and into it, and
did not hesitate and did not hold back we
rose through the air, until we were up above
timber line. The lake lay,
icy and silver, the surface shirred,
reflecting nothing. The black rocks
lifted around it, into the grainy
sepia air, the patches of snow
brilliant white, and even though we
did not know where we were, we could not
speak the language, we could hardly see, we
did not stop, rising with the black
rocks to the black hills, the black
mountains rising from the hills. Resting
on the crest of the mountains, one huge
cloud with scalloped edges of blazing
evening light, we did not turn back,
we stayed with it, even though we were
far beyond what we knew, we rose
into the grain of the cloud, even though we were
frightened, the air hollow, even though
nothing grew there, even though it is a

place from which no one has ever come back.

Exclusive
(for my daughter)
I lie on the beach, watching you
as you lie on the beach, memorizing you
against the time when you will not be with me:
your empurpled lips, swollen in the sun
and smooth as the inner lips of a shell;
your biscuit-gold skin, glazed and
faintly pitted, like the surface of a biscuit;
the serious knotted twine of your hair.
I have loved you instead of anyone else,
loved you as a way of loving no one else,
every separate grain of your body
building the god, as you were built within me,
a sealed world. What if from your lips
I had learned the love of other lips,
from your starred, gummed lashes the love of
other lashes, from your shut, quivering
eyes the love of other eyes,
from your body the bodies,
from your life the lives?
Today I see it is there to be learned from you:
to love what I do not own.

Rite of Passage

As the guests arrive at our son’s party
they gather in the living room—

short men, men in first grade
with smooth jaws and chins.
Hands in pockets, they stand around
jostling, jockeying for place, small fights
breaking out and calming. One says to another
How old are you? —Six. —I’m seven. —So?
They eye each other, seeing themselves
tiny in the other’s pupils. They clear their
throats a lot, a room of small bankers,
they fold their arms and frown. I could beat you
up, a seven says to a six,
the midnight cake, round and heavy as a
turret, behind them on the table. My son,
freckles like specks of nutmeg on his cheeks,
chest narrow as the balsa keel of a
model boat, long hands
cool and thin as the day they guided him
out of me, speaks up as a host
for the sake of the group.
We could easily kill a two-year-old,
he says in his clear voice. The other
men agree, they clear their throats

like Generals, they relax and get down to
playing war, celebrating my son’s life.

35/10

Brushing out our daughter’s brown
silken hair before the mirror

I see the grey gleaming on my head,
the silver-haired servant behind her. Why is it
just as we begin to go
they begin to arrive, the fold in my neck
clarifying as the fine bones of her
hips sharpen? As my skin shows
its dry pitting, she opens like a moist
precise flower on the tip of a cactus;
as my last chances to bear a child
are falling through my body, the duds among them,
her full purse of eggs, round and
firm as hard-boiled yolks, is about
to snap its clasp. I brush her tangled
fragrant hair at bedtime. It’s an old
story—the oldest we have on our planet—
the story of replacement.

The Missing Boy
(for Etan Patz)
Every time we take the bus
my son sees the picture of the missing boy.
He looks at it like a mirror—the dark
straw hair, the pale skin,
the blue eyes, the electric-blue sneakers with
slashes of jagged gold. But of course that
kid is little, only six and a half,
an age when things can happen to you,
when you’re not really safe, and our son is seven,
practically fully grown—why, he would
tower over that kid if they could
find him and bring him right here on this bus and
stand them together. He holds to the pole,
wishing for that, the tape on the poster
gleaming over his head, beginning to
melt at the center and curl at the edges as it
ages. At night, when I put him to bed,
my son holds my hand tight
and says he’s sure that kid’s all right,
nothing to worry about, he just
hopes he’s getting the food he likes,
not just any old food, but the food
he likes the most, the food he is used to.

Bestiary

Nostrils flared, ears pricked,
our son asks me if people can mate with

animals. I say it hardly
ever happens. He frowns, fur and
skin and hooves and teeth and tails
whirling in his brain. You could do it,
he says, and we talk about elephants
and parakeets, until we are rolling on the
floor, laughing like hyenas. Too late,
I remember love—I backtrack
and try to slip it in, but that is
not what he means. Seven years old,
he is into hydraulics, pulleys, doors
which fly open in the side of the body,
entrances, exits. Flushed, panting,
hot for physics, he thinks about lynxes,
eagles, pythons, mosquitoes, girls,
casting a glittering eye of use
over creation, wanting to know
exactly how the world was made to receive him.

The One Girl at the Boys’ Party

When I take our girl to the swimming party
I set her down among the boys. They tower

and bristle, she stands there smooth and sleek,
her math scores unfolding in the air around her.
They will strip to their suits, her body hard and
indivisible as a prime number,
they’ll plunge in the deep end, she’ll subtract
her height from ten feet, divide it into
hundreds of gallons of water, the numbers
bouncing in her mind like molecules of chlorine
in the bright-blue pool. When they climb out,
her ponytail will hang its pencil lead
down her back, her narrow silk suit
with hamburgers and french fries printed on it
will glisten in the brilliant air, and they will
see her sweet face, solemn and
sealed, a factor of one, and she will
see their eyes, two each,
their legs, two each, and the curves of their sexes,
one each, and in her head she’ll be doing her
wild multiplying, as the drops
sparkle and fall to the power of a thousand from her body.

from The Gold Cell

Summer Solstice, New York City

By the end of the longest day of the year he could not stand it,
he went up the iron stairs through the roof of the building

and over the soft, tarry surface
to the edge, put one leg over the complex green tin cornice
and said if they came a step closer that was it.
Then the huge machinery of the earth began to work for his life,
the cops came in their suits blue-grey as the sky on a cloudy evening,
and one put on a bulletproof vest, a
dense shell around his own life,
life of his children’s father, in case
the man was armed, and one, slung with a
rope like the sign of his bounden duty,
came up out of a hole in the top of the neighboring building
like the hole they say is in the top of the head,
and began to lurk toward the man who wanted to die.
The tallest cop approached him directly,
softly, slowly, talking to him, talking, talking,
while the man’s leg hung over the lip of the next world
and the crowd gathered in the street, silent, and the
hairy net with its implacable grid was
unfolded, near the curb, and spread out, and
stretched as the sheet is prepared to receive at a birth.
Then they all came a little closer
where he squatted next to his death, his shirt

glowing its milky glow like something
growing in a dish at night in the dark in a lab and then
everything stopped
as his body jerked and he
stepped down from the parapet and went toward them
and they closed on him, I thought they were going to
beat him up, as a mother whose child has been
lost might scream at the child when it’s found, they
took him by the arms and held him up and
leaned him against the wall of the chimney and the
tall cop lit a cigarette
in his own mouth, and gave it to him, and
then they all lit cigarettes, and the
red, glowing ends burned like the
tiny campfires we lit at night
back at the beginning of the world.

On the Subway

The young man and I face each other.
His feet are huge, in black sneakers

laced withwhite in a complex pattern like a
set of intentional scars. We are stuck on
opposite sides of the car, a couple of
molecules stuck in a rod of energy
rapidly moving through darkness. He has
or my white eye imagines he has
the casual cold look of a mugger,
alert under lowered eyelids. He is wearing
red, like the inside of the body
exposed. I am wearing old fur, the
whole skin of an animal taken
and used. I look at his unknown face,
he looks at my grandmother’s coat, and I don’t
know if I am in his power—
he could take my coat so easily, my
briefcase, my life—
or if he is in my power, the way I am
living off his life, eating the steak
he may not be eating, as if I am taking
the food from his mouth. And he is black
and I am white, and without meaning or
trying to I must profit from our history,

the way he absorbs the murderous beams of the
nation’s heart, as black cotton
absorbs the heat of the sun and holds it. There is
no way to know how easy this
white skin makes my life, this
life he could break so easily, the way I
think his own back is being broken, the
rod of his soul that at birth was dark and
fluid, rich as the heart of a seedling
ready to thrust up into any available light.

The Food-Thief
(Uganda, drought)
They drive him along the road in the steady
conscious way they drove their cattle
when they had cattle, when they had homes and
living children. They drive him with pliant
peeled sticks, snapped from trees
whose bark cannot be eaten—snapped,
not cut, no one has a knife, and the trees that can be
eaten have been eaten leaf and trunk and the
roots pulled from the ground and eaten.
They drive him and beat him, a loose circle of
thin men with sapling sticks,
driving him along slowly, slowly
beating him to death. He turns to them
with all the eloquence of the body, the
wrist turned out and the vein up his forearm
running like a root just under the surface, the
wounds on his head ripe and wet as a
loam furrow cut back and cut back at
plough-time to farrow a trench for the seed, his
eye pleading, the white a dark
occluded white like cloud-cover on the
morning of a day of heavy rain.
His lips are open to his brothers as the body of a

woman might be open, as the earth itself was
split and folded back and wet and
seedy to them once, the lines on his lips
fine as the thousand tributaries of a
root-hair, a river, he is asking them for life

with his whole body, and they are driving his body
all the way down the road because
they know the life he is asking for—
it is their life.

The Girl

They chased her and her friend through the woods
and caught them in a waste clearing, broken

random bracken, a couple of old mattresses,
as if the place had been prepared.
The thin one with straight hair
started raping her best friend,
and the curly one stood above her,
thrust his thumbs back inside her jaws, she was twelve,
stuck his penis in her mouth and throat
faster and faster and faster.
Then the straight-haired one stood up—
they lay like pulled-up roots at his feet,
naked twelve-year-old girls—he said
Now you’re going to know what it’s like
to be shot five times and slaughtered like a pig,
and they switched mattresses,
the blond was raping and stabbing her friend,
the straight-haired one sticking inside her
in one place and then another,
the point of his gun pressed deep into her waist,
she felt a little click in her spine and a
sting like 7-Up in her head, and then he
pulled the tree-branch across her throat
and everything went dark,

the gym went dark, and her mother’s kitchen,
even the globes of light on the rounded
lips of her mother’s nesting bowls went dark.
When she woke up, she was lying on the cold

copper-smelling earth, the mattress was pulled up
over her like a blanket, she saw
the dead body of her best friend
and she began to run,
she came to the edge of the woods and she stepped
out from the trees, like a wound debriding,
she walked across the field to the tracks
and said to the railway brakeman Please, sir. Please, sir.
At the trial she had to say everything—
her elder sister helped her with the words—
she had to sit in the room with them
and point to them. Now she goes to parties
but does not smoke, she is a cheerleader,
she throws her body up in the air
and kicks her legs and comes home and does the dishes
and her homework, she has to work hard in math,
the sky over the roof of her bed
filled with white planets. Every night
she prays for the soul of her best friend and
then thanks God for life. She knows
what all of us want never to know
and she does a cartwheel, the splits, she shakes the
shredded pom-poms in her fists.

The Pope’s Penis

It hangs deep in his robes, a delicate
clapper at the center of a bell

It moves when he moves, a ghostly fish in a
halo of silver seaweed, the hair
swaying in the dimness and the heat—and at night,
while his eyes sleep, it stands up
in praise of God.

When

I wonder, now, only when it will happen,
when the young mother will hear the

noise like somebody’s pressure cooker
down the block, going off. She’ll go out in the yard,
holding her small daughter in her arms,
and there, above the end of the street, in the
air above the line of the trees,
she will see it rising, lifting up
over our horizon, the upper rim of the
gold ball, large as a giant
planet starting to lift up over ours.
She will stand there in the yard holding her daughter,
looking at it rise and glow and blossom and rise,
and the child will open her arms to it,
it will look so beautiful.

I Go Back to May 1937

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out

under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks,
the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips aglow in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don’t do—she’s the wrong woman,
he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,

but I don’t do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to
strike sparks from them, I say

Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

Alcatraz

When I was a girl, I knew I was a man
because they might send me to Alcatraz

and only men went to Alcatraz.
Every time we drove to the city,
I’d see it there, white as a white
shark in the shark-rich Bay, the bars like
milk-white ribs. I knew I had pushed my
parents too far, my inner badness had
spread like ink and taken me over, I could
not control my terrible thoughts,
terrible looks, and they had often said
they would send me there—maybe the very next
time I spilled my milk, Ala
Cazam, the aluminum doors would slam, I’d be
there where I belonged, a girl-faced man in the
prison no one had escaped from. I did not
fear the other prisoners,
I knew who they were, men like me who had
spilled their milk one time too many,
not been able to curb their thoughts—
what I feared was the horror of the circles: circle of
sky around the earth, circle of
land around the Bay, circle of
water around the island, circle of

sharks around the shore, circle of
outer walls, inner walls,
steel girders, chrome bars,
circle of my cell around me, and there at the
center, the glass of milk and the guard’s
eyes upon me as I reached out for it.

Why My Mother Made Me

Maybe I am what she always wanted,
my father as a woman,

maybe I am what she wanted to be
when she first saw him, tall and smart,
standing there in the college yard with the
hard male light of 1937
shining on his slicked hair. She wanted that
power. She wanted that size. She pulled and
pulled through him as if he were silky
bourbon taffy, she pulled and pulled and
pulled through his body till she drew me out,
sticky and gleaming, her life after her life.
Maybe I am the way I am
because she wanted exactly that,
wanted there to be a woman
a lot like her, but who would not hold back, so she
pressed herself, hard, against him,
pressed and pressed the clear soft
ball of herself like a stick of beaten cream
against his stained sour steel grater
until I came out the other side of his body,
a tall woman, stained, sour, sharp,
but with that milk at the center of my nature.
I lie here now as I once lay

in the crook of her arm, her creature,
and I feel her looking down into me the way
the maker of a sword gazes at his face
in the steel of the blade.

After 37 Years My Mother
Apologizes for My Childhood

When you tilted toward me, arms out

like someone trying to walk through a fire,
when you swayed toward me, crying out you were
sorry for what you had done to me, your
eyes filling with terrible liquid like
balls of mercury from a broken thermometer
skidding on the floor, when you quietly screamed
Where else could I turn? Who else did I have?, the
chopped crockery of your hands swinging toward me, the
water cracking from your eyes like moisture from
stones under heavy pressure, I could not
see what I would do with the rest of my life
The sky seemed to be splintering, like a window
someone is bursting into or out of, your
tiny face glittered as if with
shattered crystal, with true regret, the
regret of the body. I could not see what my
days would be, with you sorry, with
you wishing you had not done it, the
sky falling around me, its shards
glistening in my eyes, your old, soft
body fallen against me in horror I
took you in my arms, I said It’s all right,

don’t cry, it’s all right, the air filled with
flying glass, I hardly knew what I
said or who I would be now that I had forgiven you.

Cambridge Elegy
(for Henry Averell Gerry, 1941–60)
I scarcely know how to speak to you now,
you are so young now, closer to my daughter’s age
than mine—but I have been there and seen it, and must
tell you, as the seeing and hearing
spell the world into the deaf-mute’s hand.
The dormer windows like the ears of a fox, like the
double row of teats on a pig, still
perk up over the Square, though they’re digging up the
street now, as if digging a grave,
the shovels shrieking on stone like your car
sliding on its roof after the crash.
How I wanted everyone to die if you had to die,
how sealed into my own world I was,
deaf and blind. What can I tell you now,
now that I know so much and you are a
freshman, still, drinking a quart of orange juice and
playing three sets of tennis to cure a hangover, such an
ardent student of the grown-ups! I can tell you
we were right, our bodies were right, life was
really going to be that good, that
pleasurable in every cell.
Suddenly I remember the exact look of your body, but
better than the bright corners of your eyes, or the

light of your face, the rich Long Island
puppy-fat of your thighs, or the shined
chino of your pants bright in the corners of my eyes, I
remember your extraordinary act of courage in
loving me, something no one but the

blind and halt had done before. You were
fearless, you could drive after a sleepless night
just like a grown-up, and not be afraid, you could
fall asleep at the wheel easily and
never know it, each blond hair of your head—and they were
thickly laid—put out like a filament of light,
twenty years ago. The Charles still
slides by with that ease that made me bitter when I
wanted all things hard as your death was hard,
wanted all things broken and rigid as the
bricks in the sidewalk or your love for me
stopped cell by cell in your young body.
Ave—I went ahead and had the children,
the life of ease and faithfulness, the
palm and the breast, every millimeter of delight in the body,
I took the road we stood on at the start together, I
took it all without you as if
in taking it after all I could most
honor you.

Topography

After we flew across the country we
got in bed, laid our bodies

intricately together, like maps laid
face to face, East to West, my
San Francisco against your New York, your
Fire Island against my Sonoma, my
New Orleans deep in your Texas, your Idaho
bright on my Great Lakes, my Kansas
burning against your Kansas your Kansas
burning against my Kansas, your Eastern
Standard Time pressing into my
Pacific Time, my Mountain Time
beating against your Central Time, your
sun rising swiftly from the right my
sun rising swiftly from the left your
moon rising slowly from the left my
moon rising slowly from the right until
all four bodies of the sky
burn above us, sealing us together,
all our cities twin cities,
all our states united, one
nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

I Cannot Forget the Woman in the Mirror

Backwards and upside down in the twilight, that
woman on all fours, her head

dangling, and suffused, her lean
haunches, the area of darkness, the flanks and
ass narrow and pale as a deer’s and those
breasts hanging down toward the center of the earth like
plummets, when I
swayed from side to side they swayed, it was
so near night I couldn’t tell if they were yellow or
violet or rose. I cannot get over her
moving toward him upside down in the mirror like a
fly on the ceiling, her head hanging down and her
tongue long and purple as an anteater’s
going toward his body, she was clearly a human
animal, like an Iroquois scout creeping
naked and noiseless, and when I looked at her
she looked at me so directly, her eyes all
pupil, her stare said to me I
belong here, this is mine, I am living out my
true life on this earth.

The Moment the Two Worlds Meet

That’s the moment I always think of—when the
slick, whole body comes out of me,

when they pull it out, not pull it but steady it
as it pushes forth, not catch it but keep their
hands under it as it pulses out,
they are the first to touch it,
and it shines, it glistens with the thick liquid on it.
That’s the moment, while it’s sliding, the limbs
compressed close to the body, the arms
bent like a crab’s cloud-muscle legs, the
thighs packed plums in heavy syrup, the
legs folded like the wings of a chicken—
that is the center of life, the moment when the
juiced, bluish sphere of the baby is
sliding between the two worlds,
wet, like sex, it is sex,
it is my life opening back and back
as you’d strip the reed from the bud, not strip it but
watch it thrust so it peels itself and the
flower is there, severely folded, and
then it begins to open and dry
but by then the moment is over,
they wipe off the grease and wrap the child in a blanket and
hand it to you entirely in this world.

Little Things

After she’s gone to camp, in the early
evening I clear our girl’s breakfast dishes

from the rosewood table, and find a dinky
crystallized pool of maple syrup, the
grains standing there, round, in the night, I
rub it with my fingertip
as if I could read it, this raised dot of
amber sugar, and this time,
when I think of my father, I wonder why
I think of my father, of the Vulcan blood-red
glass in his hand, or his black hair gleaming like a
broken-open coal. I think I learned
to love the little things about him
because of all the big things
I could not love, no one could, it would be wrong to.
So when I fix on this image of resin,
or sweep together with the heel of my hand a
pile of my son’s sunburn peels like
insect wings, where I peeled his back the night before camp,
I am doing something I learned early to do, I am
paying attention to small beauties,
whatever I have—as if it were our duty
to find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world.

The Month of June: 13½

As our daughter approaches graduation and
puberty at the same time, at her

own, calm, deliberate, serious rate,
she begins to kick up her heels, jazz out her
hands, thrust out her hipbones, chant
I’m great! I’m great! She feels 8th grade coming
open around her, a chrysalis cracking and
letting her out, it falls behind her and
joins the other husks on the ground,
7th grade, 6th grade, the
magenta rind of 5th grade, the
hard jacket of 4th when she had so much pain,
3rd grade, 2nd, the dim cocoon of
1st grade back there somewhere on the path, and
kindergarten like a strip of thumb-suck blanket
taken from the actual blanket they wrapped her in at birth.
The whole school is coming off her shoulders like a
cloak unclasped, and she dances forth in her
jerky sexy child’s joke dance of
self, self, her throat tight and a
hard new song coming out of it, while her
two dark eyes shine
above her body like a good mother and a
good father who look down and

love everything their baby does, the way she
lives their love.

Looking at Them Asleep

When I come home late at night and go in to kiss them,
I see my girl with her arm curled around her head,

her mouth a little puffed, like one sated, but
slightly pouted like one who hasn’t had enough,
her eyes so closed you would think they have rolled the
iris around to face the back of her head,
the eyeball marble-naked under that
thick satisfied desiring lid,
she lies on her back in abandon and sealed completion,
and the son in his room, oh the son he is sideways in his bed,
one knee up as if he is climbing
sharp stairs, up into the night,
and under his thin quivering eyelids you
know his eyes are wide open and
staring and glazed, the blue in them so
anxious and crystally in all this darkness, and his
mouth is open, he is breathing hard from the climb
and panting a bit, his brow is crumpled
and pale, his fine fingers curved,
his hand open, and in the center of each hand
the dry dirty boyish palm
resting like a cookie. I look at him in his
quest, the thin muscles of his arms
passionate and tense, I look at her with her

face like the face of a snake who has swallowed a deer,
content, content—and I know if I wake her she’ll
smile and turn her face toward me though
half asleep and open her eyes and I
know if I wake him he’ll jerk and say Don’t and sit
up and stare about him in blue
unrecognition, oh my Lord how I
know these two. When love comes to me and says
What do you know, I say This girl, this boy.

from The Father

The Glass

I think of it with wonder now,
the glass of mucus that stood on the table

in front of my father all weekend. The tumor
is growing fast in his throat these days,
and as it grows it sends out pus
like the sun sending out flares, those pouring
tongues. So my father has to gargle, cough,
spit a mouthful of thick stuff
into the glass every ten minutes or so,
scraping the rim up his lower lip
to get the last bit off his skin, then he
sets the glass down, on the table, and it
sits there, like a glass of beer foam,
shiny and faintly yellow, he gargles and
coughs and reaches for it again,
and gets the heavy sputum out,
full of bubbles and moving around like yeast—
he is like a god producing food from his own mouth.
He himself can eat nothing, anymore,
just a swallow of milk, sometimes,
cut with water, and even then
it cannot, always, get past the tumor,
and the next time the saliva comes up
it is ropey, he has to roll it in his throat

a minute to form it and get it up and disgorge
the oval globule into the
glass of phlegm, which stood there all day and
filled slowly with compound globes and I would
empty it, and it would fill again,
and shimmer there on the table until
the room seemed to turn around it
in an orderly way, a model of the solar system
turning around the sun,
my father the old earth that used to
lie at the center of the universe, now
turning with the rest of us
around his death, luminous glass of
spit on the table, these last mouthfuls of his life.

His Stillness

The doctor said to my father, “You asked me
to tell you when nothing more could be done.

That’s what I’m telling you now.” My father
sat quite still, as he always did,
especially not moving his eyes. I had thought
he would rave if he understood he would die,
wave his arms and cry out. He sat up,
thin, and clean, in his clean gown,
like a holy man. The doctor said,
“There are things we can do which might give you time,
but we cannot cure you.” My father said,
“Thank you.” And he sat, motionless, alone,
with the dignity of a foreign leader.
I sat beside him. This was my father.
He had known he was mortal. I had feared they would have to
tie him down. I had not remembered
he had always held still and kept quiet to bear things,
the liquor a way to keep still. I had not
known him. My father had dignity. At the
end of his life his life began
to wake in me.

The Lifting

Suddenly my father lifted up his nightie, I
turned my head away but he cried out

Share!, my nickname, so I turned and looked.
He was sitting in the high cranked-up bed with the
gown up, around his neck,
to show me the weight he had lost. I looked
where his solid ruddy stomach had been
and I saw the skin fallen into loose
soft hairy rippled folds
lying in a pool of folds
down at the base of his abdomen,
the gaunt torso of a big man
who will die soon. Right away
I saw how much his hips are like mine,
the lengthened, white angles, and then
how much his pelvis is shaped like my daughter’s,
a chambered whelk-shell hollowed out,
I saw the folds of skin like something
poured, a thick batter, I saw
his rueful smile, the cast-up eyes as he
shows me his old body, he knows
I will be interested, he knows I will find him
appealing. If anyone had ever told me
I would sit by him and he’d pull up his nightie

and I’d look at his naked body, at the thick
bud of his glans, his penis in all that
sparse hair, look at him
in affection and uneasy wonder
I would not have believed it. But now I can still

see the tiny snowflakes, white and
night-blue, on the cotton of the gown as it
rises the way we were promised at death it would rise,
the veils would fall from our eyes, we would know everything.

The Race

When I got to the airport I rushed up to the desk,
bought a ticket, ten minutes later

they told me the flight was cancelled, the doctors
had said my father would not live through the night
and the flight was cancelled. A young man
with a dark brown moustache told me
another airline had a nonstop
leaving in seven minutes. See that
elevator over there, well go
down to the first floor, make a right, you’ll
see a yellow bus, get off at the
second Pan Am terminal, I
ran, I who have no sense of direction
raced exactly where he’d told me, a fish
slipping upstream deftly against
the flow of the river. I jumped off that bus with those
bags I had thrown everything into
in five minutes, and ran, the bags
wagged me from side to side as if
to prove I was under the claims of the material,
I ran up to a man with a flower on his breast,
I who always go to the end of the line, I said
Help me. He looked at my ticket, he said
Make a left and then a right, go up the moving stairs and then

run. I lumbered up the moving stairs,
at the top I saw the corridor,
and then I took a deep breath, I said
Goodbye to my body, goodbye to comfort,
I used my legs and heart as if I would

gladly use them up for this,
to touch him again in this life. I ran, and the
bags banged against me, wheeled and coursed
in skewed orbits, I have seen pictures of
women running, their belongings tied
in scarves grasped in their fists, I blessed my
long legs he gave me, my strong
heart I abandoned to its own purpose,
I ran to Gate 17 and they were
just lifting the thick white
lozenge of the door to fit it into
the socket of the plane. Like the one who is not
too rich, I turned sideways and
slipped through the needle’s eye, and then
I walked down the aisle toward my father. The jet
was full, and people’s hair was shining, they were
smiling, the interior of the plane was filled with a
mist of gold endorphin light,
I wept as people weep when they enter heaven,
in massive relief. We lifted up
gently from one tip of the continent
and did not stop until we set down lightly on the
other edge, I walked into his room
and watched his chest rise slowly

and sink again, all night
I watched him breathe.

Wonder

When she calls to tell me my father is dying
today or tomorrow, I walk down the hall

and feel that my mouth has fallen open
and my eyes are staring. The planet of his head
swam above my crib, I did not understand it.
His body came toward me in the lake over the agates,
the hair of his chest lifting like root-hairs—
I saw it and I did not understand it.
He lay, behind beveled-glass doors, beside
the cut-crystal decanter, its future
shards in upright bound sheaves.
He sat by his pool, not meeting our eyes,
his irises made of some boiled-down, viscous
satiny matter, undiscovered.
When he sickened, he began to turn to us,
when he sank down, he shined. I lowered my
mouth to the glistening tureen of his face
and he tilted himself toward me, a dazzling
meteor dropping down into the crib,
and now he is going to die. I walk down the
hall, face to face with it,
as if it were a great heat.
I feel like one of the shepherd children
when the star came down onto the roof.

But I am used to it, I stand in familiar
astonishment. If I had dared to imagine
trading, I might have wished to trade
places with anyone raised on love,
but how would anyone raised on love
bear this death?

The Feelings

When the intern listened to the stopped heart
I stared at him, as if he or I

were wild, were from some other world, I had
lost the language of gestures, I could not
know what it meant for a stranger to push
the gown up along the body of my father.
My face was wet, my father’s face
was faintly moist with the sweat of his life,
the last moments of hard work.
I was leaning against the wall, in the corner, and
he lay on the bed, we were both doing something,
and everyone else in the room believed in the Christian God,
they called my father the shell on the bed, I was the
only one there who knew
he was entirely gone, the only one
there to say goodbye to his body
that was all he was, I held, hard,
to his foot, I thought of the Inuit elder
holding the stern of the death canoe, I
let him out slowly into the physical world.
I felt the dryness of his lips under
my lips, I felt how even my slight
kiss moved his head on the pillow
the way things move as if on their own in shallow water,

I felt his hair rush through my fingers
like a wolf’s, the walls shifted, the floor, the
ceiling wheeled as if I was not
walking out of the room but the room was
backing away around me. I would have

liked to stay beside him, ride by his
shoulder while they drove him to the place where they would
burn him,
see him safely into the fire,
touch his ashes in their warmth, and bring my
finger to my tongue. The next morning,
I felt my husband’s body on me
crushing me sweetly like a weight laid heavy on some
soft thing, some fruit, holding me
hard to this world. Yes the tears came
out like juice and sugar from the fruit—
the skin thins, and breaks, and rips, there are
laws on this earth, and we live by them.

His Ashes

The urn was heavy, small but so heavy,
like the time, weeks before he died,

when he needed to stand, I got my shoulder
under his armpit, my cheek against his
naked freckled warm back
while she held the urinal for him—he had
lost half his body weight
and yet he was so heavy we could hardly hold him up
while he got the fluid out, crackling and
sputtering like a wet fire. The urn had that
six-foot heaviness, it began
to warm in my hands as I held it, under
the blue fir tree, stroking it.
The shovel got the last earth
out of the grave—it must have made that
kind of gritty iron noise when they
scraped his ashes out of the grate—
the others would be here any minute and I
wanted to open the urn as if then
I would finally know him. On the wet lawn,
under the cones cloaked in their rosin, I
worked at the top, it gave and slipped off and
there it was, the actual matter of his being:
small, speckled lumps of bone

like eggs; a discolored curve of bone like a
fungus grown around a branch;
spotted pebbles—and the spots were the channels of his marrow
where the live orbs of the molecules
swam as if by their own strong will
and in each cell the chromosomes
tensed and flashed, tore themselves
away from themselves, leaving their shining
duplicates. I looked at the jumble
of shards like a crushed paper-wasp hive:
was that a bone of his wrist, was that from the
elegant knee he bent, was that
his jaw, was that from his skull that at birth was
flexible yet—I looked at him,
bone and the ash it lay in, chromiumwhite as the shimmering coils of dust
the earth leaves behind it, as it rolls, you can
hear its heavy roaring as it rolls away.

Beyond Harm

A week after my father died
suddenly I understood

his fondness for me was safe—nothing
could touch it. In those last months,
his face would sometimes brighten when I would
enter the room, and his wife said
that once, when he was half asleep,
he smiled when she said my name. He respected
my spunk—when they tied me to the chair, that time,
they were tying up someone he respected, and when
he did not speak, for weeks, I was one of the
beings to whom he was not speaking,
someone with a place in his life. The last
week he even said it, once,
by mistake. I walked into his room, and said “How
are you,” and he said, “I love you
too.” From then on, I had
that word to lose. Right up to the last
moment, I could make some mistake, offend him, and with
one of his old mouths of disgust he could reskew my life. I did not think of it,
I was helping to take care of him,
wiping his face and watching him.
But then, a while after he died,

I suddenly thought, with amazement, he will always
love me now, and I laughed—he was dead, dead!

The Underlife

Waiting for the subway, looking down
into the pit where the train rides,

I see a section of grey rail detach itself, and move along the packed
silt. It is the first rat I have seen
in years, at first I draw back, but then
I think of my son’s mice and lean forward.
The rat is muscular, ash-grey,
silvery, filth-fluffy. You can see
light through the ears. It moves along the rail, it looks
cautious, domestic, innocent. Back
home, sitting on the bed, I see
a tawny lozenge in the sheet’s pattern
begin to move, and of course it’s a cockroach,
it has lived in all the other great cities
before their razing and after it.
Christ you guys, I address these creatures,
I know about the plates of the earth shifting
over the liquid core, I watched the
bourbon and then the cancer pull my
father under, I know all this. And the
roach and rat turn to me
with the swiveling turn of natural animals, and they
say to me We are not educators,

we come to you from him.

Natural History

When I think about eels, I think about Seattle,
the day I went back to my father’s grave.

I knew we had buried ashes, a box
of oily fluff, and yet, as I approached,
it felt as if the length of him
were slung there, massive, slack,
a six-foot amber eel flung down
deep into the hill. The air was clammy,
greenish as the old Aquarium air when we
would enter from the Zoo. Whenever we saw
a carnivore, my father would offer
to feed me to it—tigers, crocodiles,
manta rays, and that lone moray
eel, it would ripple up to us, armless,
legless, lipless as a grin of terror.
How would you like a tasty girl, my
father would ask the eel, a minister
performing a marriage, How would you like
to get in there with that, he’d lift me up the
thick glass, as if I were rising
on the power of my own scream. Later I would
pass the living room, and see him
asleep, passed out, undulant, lax,
indifferent. And at his grave

it was much like that—
the glossy stone, below it the mashed
bouquet of ashes, and under that,
like a boy who has thrown himself down to cry, the
great, easy, stopped curve
of my father. Length to length I lay on it,
and slept.

The Ferryer

Three years after my father’s death
he goes back to work. Unemployed

for twenty-five years, he’s very glad
to be taken on again, shows up
on time, tireless worker. He sits
in the prow of the boat, sweet cox, turned
with his back to the carried. He is dead, but able
to kneel upright, facing forward
toward the other shore. Someone has closed
his mouth, so he looks more comfortable, not
thirsty or calling out, and his eyes
are open—under the iris, the black
line that appeared there in death. He is calm,
he is happy to be hired, he’s in business again,
his new job is a joke between us and he
loves to have a joke with me, he keeps
a straight face. He waits, naked,
ivory bow figurehead,
ribs, nipples, lips, a gaunt
tall man, and when I bring people
and set them in the boat and push them off
my father poles them across the river
to the far bank. We don’t speak,
he knows that this is simply someone

I want to get rid of, who makes me feel
ugly and afraid. I do not say
the way you did. He knows the labor
and loves it. When I dump someone in, he
does not look back, he takes them straight

to hell. He wants to work for me
until I die. Then, he knows, I will
come to him, get in his boat
and be taken across, then hold out my broad
hand to his, help him ashore, we will
embrace like two who were never born,
naked, not breathing, then up to our chins we will
pull the home blanket of earth and
rest together, at the end of the working day.

I Wanted to Be There When My Father Died

I wanted to be there when my father died
because I wanted to see him die—

and not just to know him, down
to the ground, the dirt of his unmaking, and not
just to give him a last chance
to give me something, or take his old loathing
back. All summer he had gagged, as if trying
to cough his whole esophagus out,
surely his pain and sorrow had appeased me,
and yet I wanted to see him die
not just to see no soul come
free of his body, no mucal genie of
spirit jump
forth from his mouth,
proving the body on earth is all we have got,
I wanted to watch my father die
because I hated him. Oh, I loved him,
my hands cherished him, laying him out,
but I had feared him so, his lying as if dead on the
couch had seemed to pummel me, an Eve
he took and pressed back into clay,
casual thumbs undoing the cheekbone
eye-socket rib pelvis ankle of the child
and now I watched him be undone and

someone in me gloried in it,
someone lying where he’d lain in chintz
Eden, some corpse girl, corkscrewed like
one of his bourbon spit-ems, smiled.
The priest was well called to that room,

violet grosgrain river of his ribbon laid
down well on that bank of flesh
where the daughter of death was made, it was well to say
Into other hands than ours
we commend this spirit.

Waste Sonata

I think at some point I looked at my father
and thought He’s full of shit. How did I

know fathers talked to their children,
kissed them? I knew. I saw him and judged him.
Whatever he poured into my mother
she hated, her face rippled like a thin
wing, sometimes, when she happened to be near him,
and the liquor he knocked into his body
felled him, slew the living tree,
loops of its grain started to cube,
petrify, coprofy, he was a
shit, but I felt he hated being a shit,
he had never imagined it could happen, this drunken
sleep was a spell laid on him—
by my mother. Well, I left to them
the passion of who did what to whom, it was a
baby in their bed they were rolling over on,
but I could not live with hating him.
I did not see that I had to. I stood
in that living room and saw him drowse
like the prince, in slobbrous beauty, I began
to think he was a kind of chalice,
a grail, his love the goal of a quest,
yes! He was the god of love

and I was a shit. I looked down at my forearm—
whatever was inside there
was not good, it was white stink,
bad manna. I looked in the mirror, and
as I looked at my face the blemishes

arose, like pigs up out of the ground
to the witch’s call. It was strange to me
that my body smelled sweet, it was proof I was
demonic, but at least I breathed out,
from the sour dazed scum within,
my father’s truth. Well it’s fun talking about this,
I love the terms of foulness. I have learned
to get some pleasure from speaking of pain.
But to die, like this. To grow old and die
a child, lying to herself.
My father was not a shit. He was a man
failing at life. He had little shits
traveling through him while he lay there unconscious—
sometimes I don’t let myself say
I loved him, anymore, but I feel
I almost love those shits that move through him,
shapely, those waste foetuses,
my mother, my sister, my brother, and me
in that purgatory.

My Father Speaks to Me from the Dead

I seem to have woken up in a pot-shed,
on clay, on shards, the glitter paths

of slugs kiss-crossing my body. I don’t know
where to start, with this grime on me.
I take the spider glue-net, plug
of the dead, out of my mouth, let’s see
if where I have been I can do this.
I love your feet. I love your knees,
I love your our my legs, they are so
long because they are yours and mine
both. I love your—what can I call it,
between your legs, we never named it, the
glint and purity of its curls. I love
your rear end, I changed you once,
washed the detritus off your tiny
bottom, with my finger rubbed
the oil on you; when I touched your little
anus I crossed wires with God for a moment.
I never hated your shit—that was
your mother. I love your navel, thistle
seed fossil, even though
it’s her print on you. Of course I love
your breasts—did you see me looking up
from within your daughter’s face, as she nursed?

I love your bony shoulders and you know I
love your hair, thick and live
as earth. And I never hated your face,
I hated its eruptions. You know what I love?
I love your brain, its halves and silvery

folds, like a woman’s labia.
I love in you
even what comes
from deep in your mother—your heart, that hard worker,
and your womb, it is a heaven to me,
I lie on its gentle hills and gaze up
at its rosy vault.
I have been in a body without breath,
I have been in the morgue, in fire, in the slagged
chimney, in the air over the earth,
and buried in the earth, and pulled down
into the ocean—where I have been
I understand this life, I am matter,
your father, I made you, when I say now that I love you
I mean look down at your hand, move it,
that action is matter’s love, for human
love go elsewhere.

from The Wellspring

My Parents’ Wedding Night, 1937

Today, I thought of that blood, rippling out
like the blood that seeps up out of the side

of a trout when the pressed-down blade breaks through,
tough salty sweet fish
of my mother’s maidenhead. It was in the dark,
the harsh shantung blinds drawn down, the
ruffled curtains unloosed at the waist.
She was naked with a man for the first time,
the intricate embroidery silks of her
pudenda moist upright alert
terrified, thrilled, each hair
reaching out and curling back, she was
there in the bed like her own parents,
there at the center of the world. Now
she was the loaf laid into the pan
raw and being fed now into the bright oven.
And I thought of my father, over her,
ivory-white face and brilliantine hair,
up on his elbows like a man pulling himself
out of the ocean onto the beach. The war
had not yet begun, they lay and slept
in blood and peace, no one knew what was coming.
I leave them wrapped in that sheet, double larvum,
they sleep with their mouths open like teenagers

in the smell of champagne and cruor and semen,
they rest but I go back and back to that moment,
looking at it until I get more used to it,
like my childhood God watching Adam and Eve in the garden—
the first springing wrinkle of blood, I
see it as a castaway sees the leap of
life pouring out of the turtle’s throat where the shell severs it.

Japanese-American Farmhouse,
California, 1942

Everything has been stolen that anyone

thought worth stealing. The stairs into the grass
are scattered with sycamore leaves curled
like ammonites in inland rock.
Wood shows through the paint on the frame
and the door is open—an empty room,
sunlight on the floor. All that is left
on the porch is the hollow cylinder
of an Alber’s Quick Oats cardboard box
and a sewing machine. Its extraterrestrial
head is bowed, its scrolled neck
glistens. I was born, that day, near there,
in wartime, of ignorant people.

Killing My Sister’s Fish

I picked up the bottle with its gladiator shoulders—
inside its shirred greyish plastic

the ammonia, more muscular than water, pungent—
I poured one dollop, gleaming genie,
into the bowl with my sister’s goldfish
just because they were alive, and she liked them.
It was in the basement, near the zinc-lined sinks
and the ironing board, next to the boiler,
beside the door to the cellar from which
I could get into the crawl space
under the corner of the house, and lie
on the dirt on my back, as if passed out.
I may have been on my way there
when I saw the bowl, and the ammonia curled
for a moment in the air like a spirit. Then I crawled up
under the floor-joists, into the tangent
where the soil curved up, and I lay there,
at the ends of the earth, as if without
regret, as if something set in motion
long before I had been conceived
had been accomplished.

Mrs. Krikorian

She saved me. When I arrived in 6th grade,
a known criminal, the new teacher

asked me to stay after school the first day, she said
I’ve heard about you. She was a tall woman,
with a deep crevice between her breasts,
and a large, calm nose. She said,
This is a special library pass.
As soon as you finish your hour’s work—
that hour’s work that took ten minutes
and then the devil glanced into the room
and found me empty, a house standing open—
you can go to the library. Every hour
I’d zip through the work in a dash and slip out of my
seat as if out of God’s side and sail
down to the library, solo through the empty
powerful halls, flash my pass
and stroll over to the dictionary
to look up the most interesting word
I knew, spank, dipping two fingers
into the jar of library paste to
suck that tart mucilage as I
came to the page with the cocker spaniel’s
silks curling up like the fine steam of the body.
After spank, and breast, I’d move on

to Abe Lincoln and Helen Keller,
safe in their goodness till the bell, thanks
to Mrs. Krikorian, amiable giantess
with the kind eyes. When she asked me to write
a play, and direct it, and it was a flop, and I

hid in the coat-closet, she brought me a candy-cane
as you lay a peppermint on the tongue, and the worm
will come up out of the bowel to get it.
And so I was emptied of Lucifer
and filled with school glue and eros and
Amelia Earhart, saved by Mrs. Krikorian.
And who had saved Mrs. Krikorian?
When the Turks came across Armenia, who
slid her into the belly of a quilt, who
locked her in a chest, who mailed her to America?
And that one, who saved her, and that one—
who saved her, to save the one
who saved Mrs. Krikorian, who was
standing there on the sill of 6th grade, a
wide-hipped angel, smokey hair
standing up weightless all around her head?
I end up owing my soul to so many,
to the Armenian nation, one more soul someone
jammed behind a stove, drove
deep into a crack in a wall,
shoved under a bed. I would wake
up, in the morning, under my bed—not
knowing how I had got there—and lie
in the dusk, the dustballs beside my face

round and ashen, shining slightly
with the eerie comfort of what is neither good nor evil.

First

He stood in the sulphur baths, his calves
against the stone rim of the pool

where his half-full glass of scotch stood, his
shins wavering in the water, his torso
looming over me, huge, in the night,
a grown-up man’s body, softer and
warmer with the clothes off—I was a sophomore
at college, in the baths with a naked man,
a writer, married, a father, widowed,
remarried, separated, unreadable, and when I
said No, I was sorry, I couldn’t,
he’d invented this, rising and dripping
in the heavy sodium water, giving me
his body to suck. I had not heard
of this, I was moved by his innocence and daring,
I went to him like a baby who’s been crying
for hours for milk. He stood and moaned
and rocked his knees, I felt I knew
what his body wanted me to do, like rubbing
my mother’s back, receiving directions
from her want into the nerves of my hands.
In the smell of the trees of seaweed rooted in
ocean trenches just offshore,
and the mineral liquid from inside the mountain,

I gave over to flesh like church music
until he drew out and held himself and
something flew past me like a fresh ghost.
We sank into the water and lay there, napes
on the rim. I’ve never done that before,

I said. His eyes not visible
to me, his voice muffled, he said, You’ve been
sucking cock since you were fourteen,
and fell asleep. I stayed beside him
so he wouldn’t go under, he snored like my father, I
tried not to think about what he had said,
but then I saw, in it, the unmeant
gift—that I was good at this
raw mystery I liked. I sat
and rocked, by myself, in the fog, in the smell
of kelp, night steam like animals’ breath,
there where the harsh granite and quartz dropped down
into and under the start of the western sea.

Adolescence

When I think of my adolescence, I think
of the bathroom of that seedy hotel

in San Francisco, where my boyfriend would take me.
I had never seen a bathroom like that—
no curtains, no towels, no mirror, just
a sink green with grime and a toilet
yellow and rust-colored—like something in a science experiment,
growing the plague in bowls.
Sex was still a crime, then,
I’d sign out of my college dorm
to a false destination, sign into
the flophouse under a false name,
go down the hall to the one bathroom
and lock myself in. And I could not learn to get that
diaphragm in, I’d decorate it
like a cake, with glistening spermicide,
and lean over, and it would leap from my fingers
and sail, into a corner, to land
in a concave depression like a rat’s nest,
I’d bend and pluck it out and wash it
and wash it down to that fragile dome,
I’d frost it again till it was shimmering
and bend it into its tensile arc and it would
fly through the air, rim humming

like Saturn’s ring, I would bow down and crawl to retrieve it.
When I think of being eighteen,
that’s what I see, that brimmed disc
floating through the air and descending, I see myself
kneeling and reaching, reaching for my own life.

May 1968

When the Dean said we could not cross campus
until the students gave up the buildings,

we lay down in the street,
we said the cops will enter this gate
over us. Lying back on the cobbles,
I saw the buildings of New York City
from dirt level, they soared up
and stopped, chopped off—above them, the sky,
the night air, over the island.
The mounted police moved, near us,
while we sang, and then I began to count,
12, 13, 14, 15
I counted again, 15, 16, one
month since the day on that deserted beach,
17, 18, my mouth fell open,
my hair on the street,
if my period did not come tonight
I was pregnant. I could see the sole of a cop’s
shoe, the gelding’s belly, its genitals—
if they took me to Women’s Detention and did
the exam on me, the speculum,
the fingers—I gazed into the horse’s tail
like a comet-train. I’d been thinking I might
get arrested, I had been half wanting

to give myself away. On the tar—
one brain in my head, another
in the making, near the base of my tail—
I looked at the steel arc of the horse’s
shoe, the curve of its belly, the cop’s

nightstick, the buildings streaming up
away from the earth. I knew I should get up
and leave, but I lay there looking at the space
above us, until it turned deep blue and then
ashy, colorless, Give me this one
night, I thought, and I’ll give this child
the rest of my life, the horses’ heads,
this time, drooping, dipping, until
they slept in a circle around my body and my daughter.

Bathing the New Born

I love with an almost fearful love
to remember the first baths I gave him,

our second child, so I knew what to do,
I laid the little torso along
my left forearm, nape of the neck
in the crook of my elbow, hips nearly as
small as a least tern’s tail
against my wrist, thigh held loosely
in the loop of thumb and forefinger, the
sign that means exactly right. I’d soap him,
the violet, cold feet, the scrotum
wrinkled as a waved whelk, the chest,
hands, clavicles, throat, gummy
furze of the scalp. When I got him too soapy he’d
slide in my grip like an armful of buttered
noodles, but I’d hold him not too tight,
I felt that I was good for him,
I’d tell him about his wonderful body
and the wonderful soap, and he’d look up at me,
one week old, his eyes still wide
and apprehensive. I love that time
when you croon and croon to them, you can see
the calm slowly entering them, you can
sense it in your clasping hand,

the loose spine relaxing against
the muscle of your forearm, you feel the fear
leaving their bodies, he lay in the blue
oval plastic baby tub and
looked at me in wonder and began to
move his silky limbs at will in the water.

41, Alone, No Gerbil

In the strange quiet, I realize
there’s no one else in the house. No bucktooth

mouth pulls at a stainless-steel teat, no
hairy mammal runs on a treadmill—
Charlie is dead, the last of our children’s half-children.
When our daughter found him lying in the shavings, transmogrified backwards from a living body
into a bolt of rodent bread
she turned her back on early motherhood
and went on single, with nothing. Crackers,
Fluffy, Pretzel, Biscuit, Charlie,
buried on the old farm we bought
where she could know nature. Well, now she knows it
and it sucks. Creatures she loved, mobile and
needy, have gone down stiff and indifferent,
she will not adopt again though she cannot
have children yet, her body is like
a blueprint for a woman’s body,
so now everything stops, for a while,
now I must wait many years
to hear in this house again the faint
powerful call of a young animal.

Physics

Her first puzzle had three pieces,
she’d take the last piece, and turn it,

and lower it in, like a sewer-lid,
flush with the street. The bases of the frames were like
wooden fur, guard-hairs sticking out
of the pelt. I’d set one on the floor and spread
the pieces out around it. It makes me
groan to think of Red Riding Hood’s hood,
a single, scarlet, pointed piece, how
long since I have seen her. Later, panthers,
500 pieces, and an Annunciation,
1000 pieces, we would gaze, on our elbows,
into its gaps. Now she tells me
that if I were sitting in a twenty-foot barn,
with the doors open at either end,
and a fifty-foot ladder hurtled through the barn
at the speed of light, there would be a moment
—after the last rung was inside the barn
and before the first rung came out the other end—
when the whole fifty-foot ladder would be
inside the twenty-foot barn, and I believe her,
I have thought her life was inside my life
like that. When she reads the college catalogues, I
look away and hum. I have not grown

up yet, I have lived as my daughter’s mother
the way I had lived as my mother’s daughter,
inside her life. I have not been born yet.

My Son the Man

Suddenly his shoulders get a lot wider,
the way Houdini would expand his body

while people were putting him in chains. It seems
no time since I would help him put on his sleeper,
guide his calves into the shadowy interior,
zip him up and toss him up and
catch his weight. I cannot imagine him
no longer a child, and I know I must get ready,
get over my fear of men now my son
is going to be one. This was not
what I had in mind when he pressed up through me like a
sealed trunk through the ice of the Hudson,
snapped the padlock, unsnaked the chains,
appeared in my arms. Now he looks at me
the way Houdini studied a box
to learn the way out, then smiled and let himself be manacled.

First Formal

She rises up above the strapless, her dewy
flesh like a soul half out of a body.

It makes me remember her one week old,
mollescent, elegant, startled, alone.
She stands quite still, as if, if she moved,
her body might pour up out of the bodice,
she keeps her steady gaze raised
when she walks, she looks exactly forward,
led by some radar of the strapless, or with
a cup runneth over held perfectly level, her
almost seasick beauty shimmering
a little. She looks brave, shoulders
made of some extra-visible element,
or as if some of her cells, tonight,
were faceted like a fly’s eye, and her
skin was seeing us see it. She looks
hatched this moment, and yet weary—she would lie
in her crib, so slight, worn out from her journey,
and gaze at the world and at us in dubious willingness.

High School Senior

For seventeen years, her breath in the house
at night, puff, puff, like summer

cumulus above her bed,
and her scalp smelling of apricots
—this being who had formed within me,
squatted like a wide-eyed tree-frog in the night,
like an eohippus she had come out of history
slowly, through me, into the daylight,
I had the daily sight of her,
like food or air she was there, like a mother.
I say “college,” but I feel as if I cannot tell
the difference between her leaving for college
and our parting forever—I try to see
this apartment without her, without her pure
depth of feeling, without her creek-brown
hair, her daedal hands with their tapered
fingers, her pupils brown as the mourning cloak’s
wing, but I can’t. Seventeen years
ago, in this room, she moved inside me,
I looked at the river, I could not imagine
my life with her. I gazed across the street,
and saw, in the icy winter sun,
a column of steam rush up away from the earth.
There are creatures whose children float away

at birth, and those who throat-feed their young for
weeks and never see them again. My daughter
is free and she is in me—no, my love
of her is in me, moving in my heart,
changing chambers, like something poured

from hand to hand, to be weighed and then reweighed.

The Pediatrician Retires

This is the archway where I stood, next to the
panel of frosted glass, when they told me

there was a chance it could be epilepsy, and
almost before my heart sank
I felt a new-made layer of something fold
over my will and wrap it, in an instant,
as if the body takes care of the parent
who takes care of the child. This is the door
we came through each week while the symptoms slowly
faded. That is the fruit-scale where she had
weighed him, and his arms had flown to the sides
in an infant Moro. And there are the chairs
where one sits with the infectious ones,
the three-year-olds calmly struggling for air, not
listless or scared, steady workers,
pulling breath through the constricted passage,
Yes, she says, it’s bronchial pneumonia
and asthma, the same as last month, the parent’s
heart suddenly stronger, like a muscle
the weight-lifter has worked. There is the room
where she took his blood and he watched the vial fill, he went
greener, and greener, and fainted, and she said,
Next time don’t be brave, next time
shout! And here is the chair where I sat and she

said If the nerve is dead, he will lose only
partial use of the hand, and it’s
the left hand—he’s right-handed, isn’t he?,
the girding, the triple binding of the heart.
This is the room where I sat, worried,

and opened the magazine, and saw
the war in Asia, a very young soldier
hanged by the neck—still a boy, almost,
not much older than the oldest children
in the waiting room. Suddenly its walls seemed
not quite real, as if we all
were in some large place together.
This is where I learned what I know,
the body university—
at graduation, we would cry, and throw
our ceiling-at-four-a.m. hats high in the air,
but I think that until the end of our life we are here.

This Hour

We could never really say what it is like,
this hour of drinking wine together

on a hot summer night, in the living room
with the windows open, in our underwear,
my pants with pale-gold gibbon monkeys on them
gleaming in the heat. We talk about our son disappearing
between the pine boughs,
we could not tell what was chrysalis or
bough and what was him. The wine
is powerful, each mouthful holds
for a moment its amber agate shape,
I think of the sweat I sipped from my father’s
forehead the hour before his death. We talk about
those last days—that I was waiting for him to die.
You are lying on the couch, your underpants
a luminous white, your hand resting
relaxed, along the side of your penis,
we talk about your father’s illness,
your nipple like a pure circle of
something risen to the surface of your chest.
Even if we wanted to,
we could not describe it,
the end of the second glass when I sometimes
weep and you start to get sleepy—I love

to drink and cry with you, and end up
sobbing to a sleeping man, your
long body filling the couch and
draped slightly over the ends, the
untrained soft singing of your snore, it cannot be given.
Yes, we know we will make love, but we’re
not getting ready to make love,
nor are we getting over making love,
love is simply our element,
it is the summer night, we are in it.

Full Summer

I paused, and paused, over your body,
to feel the current of desire pull

and pull through me. Our hair was still wet,
mine like knotted wrack, it fell
across you as I paused, a soaked coil
around your glans. When one of your hairs
dried, it lifted like a bare nerve.
On the beach, above us, a cloud had appeared in
the clear air, a clockwise loop coming
in out of nothing, now the skin of your scrotum
moved like a live being, an animal,
I began to lick you, the foreskin lightly
stuck in one spot, like a petal, I love
to free it—just so—in joy,
and to sip from the little crying lips
at the tip. Then there was no more pausing,
nor was this the taker,
some new one came
and sucked, and up from where I had been hiding I was
drawn in a heavy spiral out of matter
over into another world
I had thought I would have to die to reach.

Am and Am Not

When I’m tilted forward, brushing my teeth,
I glance down. We do not know

ourselves. My cunt, like a hand, stroked him,
such subtle, intricate movement. Central
inside me this one I am and am not,
not only like a palm, more like a snake’s
reticulated body, rings of muscle—
like the penis outside-in, its twin.
Who is it? I lean against the sink, mouth open
and burning with Colgate, nixie palate
scoured with pond-mint; is it my soul
in there, elastic as an early creature
gone out on its own again, is it my
soul’s throat? Its rings ripple
in waves, as if it swallows, but what it
swallows stays, and grows, and grows,
we become one being, whom we hardly know,
whom we know better than we know anyone
else. And in the morning I look down. Who? What has—
what?! Seeing just the skin of the belly—
she is asleep in there, the soul, vertical
undulant one, she is dancing upright in her dream.

True Love

In the middle of the night, when we get up
after making love, we look at each other in

complete friendship, we know so fully
what the other has been doing. Bound to each other
like mountaineers coming down from a mountain,
bound with the tie of the delivery room,
we wander down the hall to the bathroom, I can
hardly walk, I wobble through the granular
shadowless air, I know where you are
with my eyes closed, we are bound to each other
with huge invisible threads, our sexes
muted, exhausted, crushed, the whole
body a sex—surely this
is the most blessed time of my life,
our children asleep in their beds, each fate
like a vein of abiding mineral
not discovered yet. I sit
on the toilet in the night, you are somewhere in the room,
I open the window and snow has fallen in a
steep drift, against the pane, I
look up, into it,
a wall of cold crystals, silent
and glistening, I quietly call to you
and you come and hold my hand and I say

I cannot see beyond it. I cannot see beyond it.

from Blood, Tin, Straw

The Promise

With the second drink, at the restaurant,
holding hands on the bare table,

we are at it again, renewing our promise
to kill each other. You are drinking gin,
night-blue juniper berry
dissolving in your body, I am drinking Fumé,
chewing its fragrant dirt and smoke, we are
taking on earth, we are part soil already,
and wherever we are, we are also in our
bed, fitted, naked, closely
along each other, half passed out,
after love, drifting back
and forth across the border of consciousness,
our bodies buoyant, clasped. Your hand
tightens on the table. You’re a little afraid
I’ll chicken out. What you do not want
is to lie in a hospital bed for a year
after a stroke, without being able
to think or die, you do not want
to be tied to a chair like your prim grandmother,
cursing. The room is dim around us,
ivory globes, pink curtains
bound at the waist—and outside,
a weightless, luminous, lifted-up

summer twilight. I tell you you do not
know me if you think I will not
kill you. Think how we have floated together
eye to eye, nipple to nipple,
sex to sex, the halves of a creature

drifting up to the lip of matter
and over it—you know me from the bright, bloodflecked delivery room, if a lion
had you in its jaws I would attack it, if the ropes
binding your soul are your own wrists, I will cut them.

Know-Nothing

Sometimes I think I know nothing about sex.
All that I thought I was going to know,

that I did not know, I still do not know.
I think about this out of town,
on hotel elevators crowded with men.
The body of knowledge which lay somewhere
ahead of me, now I do not know where it
lies, or in the beds of strangers.
I know of sexual love, with my beloved,
but of men—I think there are women who know
men, I can’t see what it is
they know, but I feel in myself that I
could know it, or could I have been a woman who
would dare that. I don’t mean what she does
with herself, or that she would know more pleasure,
but she knows something true that I don’t know,
she knows fucking with a stranger. I feel
in awe of that, why is she not
afraid, what if she did not like
his touch, or what he said, how
would she bear it? Or maybe she has mercy on pretty much
anything a stranger would say or do,
or maybe it is not mercy, but sex,
when she sees what he’s like, she enflames for that,

and is afraid of nothing, wanting to touch
stone desire, and know it, she is like
a god, who could have sex with stranger
after stranger—she could know men.
But what of her womb, tender core

of her being, what of her breasts’ stiff hearts,
and her dense eggs, what if she falls
in love? Maybe to know sex fully
one has to risk being destroyed by it.
Maybe only ruin could take
its full measure, as death stands
in the balance with birth, and ignorance with love.

Dear Heart,

How did you know to turn me over,
then, when I couldn’t know to take

the moment to turn and start to begin
to finish, I was out there, far ahead
of my body, far ahead of the earth,
ahead of the moon—like someone on the other
side of the moon, stepped off, facing space, I was
floating out there, splayed, facing
away, fucked, fucked, my face
glistening and distorted pressed against the inner
caul of the world. I was almost beyond
pleasure, in a region of icy, absolute
sensing, my open mouth and love-slimed
cheeks stretching the membrane the way
the face of the almost born can appear, still
veiled in its casing, just inside
the oval portal, pausing, about
to split its glistering mask—you eased me
back, drew me back into the human
night, you turned me and the howling slowed, and at the
crux of our joining, flower heads grew
fast-motion against you, swelled and burst without
tearing—ruinless death, each
sepal, each petal, came to the naught

of earth, our portion, in ecstasy, ash
to fire to ash, dust to bloom to dust.

19

When we took the acid, his wife was off
with someone else, there was a hole in their bedroom
wall where the Steuben wedding owl
had flown from one room right through into another,
I was in love with his best friend, who had
gone into a monastery
after he’d deflowered me, so we
knew each other: when he finished, under
my palm, I could feel the circular ribs of his
penis; I finished with my legs wrapped around his
leg, even with my toes pointed, my
feet reached only halfway down
his calf, later I was lying on the bathroom
floor, looking up at him, naked, he was
6′6″, a decathlete,
my eyes followed the inner line of his
leg, up, up, up,
up, up, up, up.
Weeks later, he would pull a wall-phone
out of a wall, he would cross the divider
in his Mustang at 2 a.m. with me and go
sixty, against traffic, crying, I could
hardly hear what he said about the barbed
wire and his father and his balls—but that

acid night, we stayed up all night, I was
not in love with him, so his beauty made me
happy, we chattered, we chatted naked, he
told me everything he liked
about my body—and he liked everything—

even the tiny gooseflesh bumps
around my hard nipples,
he said the way to make love to me
would be from behind, with that sheer angle, his
forefinger drew it, gently, the extreme
hairpin curve of the skinny buttocks,
he said it the way I thought an older
cousin in a dream might give advice
to a younger cousin, his fingertip
barely missing my—whatever, in love, one would
call the asshole—he regarded me with a
savoring kindness, from a cleft of sweet lust in the
human he actually looked at me
and thought how I best should be fucked. Oooh.
Oooh. It meant there was something to be done with me,
something exactly right, he looked at me
and saw it,
willing to not be the one
who did it—all night, he desired me and
protected me, he gazed at my body and unsaw my parents’ loathing, pore by
pore on my skin he closed that couple’s eyes.

That Day

None of the pain was sharp. The sash
was pliant, its cotton blunt, like a bandage

it held my wrist to the chair. And the fierce
glazed string of the woven seat
printed me in deep pink, but I was
used to that, that matter could mark us
and its marks dissolve. That day, no one touched me,
it was a formal day, the nerves lay easy
in their planched grooves. The hunger grew, but
quietly, edgeless, a suckling in my stomach
doubling, it was a calm day
unfolding to its laws. Only the pleasure had been
sharp—the tilt of the squat bottle
over their bed, the way the ink
lowered itself, onto the spread, I had
felt its midnight, genie shape
leave my chest, pouring forth, and it was
India ink, the kind that does not come out,
I sat attached to the chair like Daphne
halfway out of the wood, and I read that blot.
I read it all day, like a Nancy Drew I was
in—they had said You won’t be fed
till you say you’re sorry, I was strangely happy, I would
never say I was sorry, I had left

that life behind. So it didn’t surprise me when she
came in slowly, holding a bowl that
held what swayed and steamed, she sat and
spoon-fed me, in silence, hot
alphabet soup. Sharp pleasure

of my wing-tip hands hung down beside me
slack as I ate, sharp pleasure of the
legible school of edible letters flowed
in, over my taste-buds, B,
O, F, K, G,
I mashed the crescent moon of the C,
caressed the E, reading with my tongue
that boiled Braille—and she was almost kneeling to me
and I wasn’t sorry. She was feeding the one
who wasn’t sorry, the way you lay food
at the foot of an image. I sat there, tied,
taking in her offering
and wildly reading as I ate, S S F
T, L W B B P Q
B, she dipped into my mouth the mild
discordant fuel—she wanted me to thrive, and decipher.

After Punishment Was Done with Me

After punishment was done with me,
after I would put my clothes back on, I’d go

back to my room, close the door,
and wander around, ending up
on the floor sometimes, always, near the baseboard,
where the vertical fall of the wall meets
the level rule of the floor—I would put
my face near that angle, and look at the dust
and anything caught in the dust. I would see
the wedding swags of old-lady-hair—
pelmets carved on cenotaph granite—and
cocoons of slough like tiny Kotexes
wound and wound in toilet paper,
I would see the anonymous crowds of grit, as if
looking down into Piazza Navona
from a mile above Il Duce, I would see
a larval casing waisted in gold
thin as the poorest gold wedding band,
and a wasp’s dried thorax and legs wound love-ring
with a pubic hair of my mother’s, I would see
the coral-maroon of the ladybug’s back
marked with its two, night genes,
I would see a fly curled up, dried,
its wings like the rabbit’s ears, or the deer’s.

I would lie quiet and look at them,
it was so peaceful there with them,
I was not at all afraid of them,
and my sadness for them didn’t matter.
I would look at each piece of lint
and half imagine being it,
I would feel that I was looking at
the universe from a greatdistance.

Sometimes I’d pick up a Dresden fly
and gaze at it closely, sometimes I’d idly play
house with the miniature world, weddings and
funerals with barbed body parts,
awful births, but I did not want
to disarrange that unerring deadness
like a kind of goodness, corner of wetless
grey waste, nothing the human
would go for. Without desire or rage
I would watch that dust celestium as the pain
on my matter died and turned to spirit
and wandered the cloud world of home,
the ashes of the earth.

What Is the Earth?

The earth is a homeless person. Or
the earth’s home is the atmosphere.

Or the atmosphere is the earth’s clothing,
layers of it, the earth wears all of it,
the earth is a homeless person.
Or the atmosphere is the earth’s cocoon,
which it spun itself, the earth is a larvum.
Or the atmosphere is the earth’s skin—
earth, and atmosphere, one
homeless one. Or its orbit is the earth’s
home, or the path of the orbit just
a path, the earth a homeless person.
Or the gutter of the earth’s orbit is a circle
of hell, the circle of the homeless. But the earth
has a place, around the fire, the hearth
of our star, the earth is at home, the earth
is home to the homeless. For food, and warmth,
and shelter, and health, they have earth and fire
and air and water, for home they have
the elements they are made of, as if
each homeless one were an earth, made
of milk and grain, like Ceres, and one
could eat oneself—as if the human
were a god, who could eat the earth, a god

of homelessness.

Leaving the Island

On the ferry, on the last morning of summer,
a father at the snack counter low in the boat

gets breakfast for the others. Here, let me drink some of
Mom’s coffee, so it won’t be so full
for you to carry, he says to his son,
a boy of ten or eleven. The boat
lies lower and lower in the water as the last
cars drive on, it tilts its massive
grey floor like the flat world. Then the
screaming starts, I carry four things,
and I only give you one, and you drop it,
what are you, a baby? a high, male
shrieking, and it doesn’t stop, Are you two?
Are you a baby? I give you one thing,
no one in the room seems to move for a second,
a steaming pool spreading on the floor, little
sea with its own waves, the boy
at the shore of it. Can’t you do anything
right? Are you two? Are you two?, the piercing
cry of the father. Go away,
go up to your mother, get out of here—
the purser swabbing the floor, the boy
not moving from where the first word touched him,
and I could not quite walk past him, I paused

and said I spilled my coffee on the deck, last trip,
it happens to us all. He turned to me,
his lips everted so the gums gleamed,
he hissed a guttural hiss, and in
a voice like Gollum’s or the Exorcist girl’s when she
made the stream of vomit and beamed it
eight feet straight into the minister’s mouth
he said Shut up, shut up, shut up, as if
protecting his father, peeling from himself
a thin wing of hate, and wrapping it
tightly around father and son, shielding them.

The Prepositions

When I started Junior High, I thought
I’d probably be a Behavior Problem

all my life, John Muir Grammar
the spawning grounds, the bad-seed bed, but
the first morning at Willard, the dawn
of 7th grade, they handed me a list
of forty-five prepositions, to learn
by heart. I stood in the central courtyard,
enclosed garden that grew cement,
my pupils followed the line of the arches
up and over, up and over, like
alpha waves, about, above,
across, along, among, around, an
odd comfort began, in me,
before, behind, below, beneath,
beside, between, I stood in that sandstone
square, and started to tame. Down,
from, in, into, near, I was
located there, watching the Moorish halfcircles rise and fall. Off,
on, onto, out, outside, we
came from 6th grades all over the city
to meet each other for the first time,
White tennis-club boys who did not

speak to me, White dorks
who did, Black student-council guys who’d gaze
off, above my head, and the Black
plump goof-off, who walked past and
suddenly flicked my sweater-front, I thought to shame me.
Over, past, since, through,
that was the year my father came home in the
middle of the night with those thick earthworms
of blood of his face, trilobites of
elegant gore, cornice and crisp
waist of the extinct form,
till, to, toward, under, the
lining of my uterus convoluted,
shapely and scarlet as the jointed leeches
of wound clinging to my father’s face in that
mask, unlike, until, up, I’d
walk, day and night, into
the Eden of the list, hortus enclosus where
everything had a place. I was in
relation to, upon, with, and when I
got to forty-five I could start over,
pull the hood of the list down over
my brain again. It was the first rest
I had had from my mind. My glance would run
slowly along the calm electrocardiogram of adobe cloister,
within, without, I’d repeat the prayer I’d
received, a place in the universe,
meaningless but a place, an exact location—

Telegraph, Woolsey, Colby, Russell—
Berkeley, 1956,
fourteen, the breaking of childhood, beginning of memory.

1954

Then dirt scared me, because of the dirt
he had put on her face. And her training bra

scared me—the newspapers, morning and evening,
kept saying it, training bra,
as if the cups of it had been calling
the breasts up, he buried her in it,
perhaps he had never bothered to take it
off, and they had found her underpants
in a garbage can. And I feared the word
eczema, like my acne and like
the X in the paper which marked her body,
as if he had killed her for not being flawless.
I feared his name, Burton Abbott,
the first name that was a last name,
as if he was not someone specific.
It was nothing one could learn from his face.
His face was dull and ordinary,
it took away what I’d thought I could count on
about evil. He looked thin, and lonely,
it was horrifying, he looked almost humble.
I felt awe that dirt was so impersonal,
and pity for the training bra,
pity and terror of eczema.
And I could not sit on my mother’s electric

blanket anymore, I began to have
a fear of electricity—
the good people, the parents, were going
to fry him to death. This was what
his parents had been telling us:

Burton Abbott, Burton Abbott,
death to the person, death to the home planet.
The worst thing would have been to think
of her, of what it had been to be her,
alive, to be walked, alive, into that cabin,
to look into those eyes, and see the human.

Cool Breeze
(for Joseph Davis Gilbert)
You talked to me a lot about your kid sister,
Rebecca, a.k.a. Reebabecka,
and you knew me as my sister’s kid sister,
fourteen, and a late bloomer, and homely,
you talked to me about your family,
and your dream of cutting an LP,
and the Juniors and Sophomores you were in love with, or who
were in love with you, or who maybe you had slept with—
they were White, as I was, but you called me Miss Shary
Cobb, Miss Cool Breeze Herself.
You didn’t mind I was in love with you,
you were Senior Class President.
And you would dance with me, astronomer
who pointed out to me the star
bright of the cervix, when we danced it became
exact to me, far inside me
in the night sky. And you would park with me,
you would draw my hand gently across you, you had
mercy on me, and on yourself. When you would
slide your hand up under my sweater,
my mouth would open, but I’d stop you, and you would
say, rather fondly, Protecting your sacred
virginity? And I would say Yes,

I could always tell you the truth.
When the White cops broke up the dance in your neighborhood,
your friends worked to get us out the back
unseen, if the cops saw us together
they would hurt someone. We crouched behind a hedge,
and I began to understand
you were less safe than me. Squatting
and whispering, I understood, as if
the bending of our bodies was teaching me,
that everyone was against you—the ones I had called
everyone, the White men
and the White women, the grown-ups, the blind
and deaf. And when you died, your LP cut,
and you had married the beauty from your neighborhood,
when you went off the coast road with your White
lover, into the wind off the ocean,
your Jag end over end, catching fire—
I knew that my hands were not free of your
blood, brother—Reebabecka’s brother.

For and Against Knowledge
(for Christa MacAuliffe)
What happened to her? As long as it was she,
what did she see? Strapped in,
tilted back, so her back was toward
the planet she was leaving, feeling the Gs
press her with their enormous palm, did she
weep with excitement in the roar, and in
the lens of a tear glimpse for an instant
a disc of fire? If she were our daughter,
would I think about it, how she had died, was she
torn apart, was she burned—the way
I have wondered about the first seconds
of our girl’s life, when she was a cell a
cell had just entered, she hung in me
a ball of grey liquid, without nerves,
without eyes or memory, it was
she, I love her. So I want to slow it
down, and take each millisecond
up, take her, at each point,
in my mind’s arms—the first, final
shock hit, as if God touched
a thumb to her brain and it went out, like a mercy killing,
and then, when it was no longer she,
the flames came—as we burned my father

when he had left himself. Then the massive bloom unbuckled
and jumped, she was vaporized back
down to the level of the cell. And the spirit—
I have never understood the spirit,
all I know is the shape it takes,
the wavering flame of flesh. Those
who know about the spirit may tell you
where she is, and why. What I want
to do is to find every cell,
slip it out of the fishes’ mouths,
ash in the tree, soot in our eyes
where she enters our lives, I want to play it
backwards, burning jigsaw puzzle
of flesh suck in its million stars
to meet, in the sky, boiling metal
fly back
together, and cool.
Pull that rocket
back down
surely to earth, open the hatch
and draw them out like fresh-born creatures,
sort them out, family by family, go
away, disperse, do not meet here.

The Spouses Waking Up in the Hotel Mirror

The man looked like himself, only more so,
his face lucent, his silence profound as if

inevitable, but the woman looked
like a different species from an hour before,
a sandhill crane or a heron, her eyes
skinned back, she looked insane with happiness.
After he got up, I looked at her,
lying on her back in the bed.
Her ribs and breasts and clavicles had
the molded look of a gladiator’s
torso-armor, formal bulge of the
pectoral, forged nipple, her deltoid
heron-elongated,
I couldn’t get her provenance
but the pelvic bone was wildly curled,
wrung, I could see she was a skeleton
in there, that hair on her body buoyant
though the woman was stopped completely, stilled as if
paralyzed. I looked at her face,
blood-darkened, it was a steady face,
I saw she was very good at staring
and could make up her mind to stare at me
until I would look away first.
I saw her bowled, suffused forehead,

her bony cheeks and jaws, I saw she could
watch her own house burn
without moving a muscle, I saw she could light
the pyre. She looked very much like her father, that
capillary-rich face, and very

much like her mother, the curlicues
at the corners of the features. She was very male
and very female,
very hermaphroditical,
I could see her in a temple, tying someone up
or being tied up, or being made nothing
or making someone nothing,
I saw she was full of cruelty
and full of kindness, brimming with it—
I had known but not known this, that she was human,
she had it all inside her, all of it.
She saw me seeing that, she liked that I saw it.
A full life—I saw her living it,
and then I saw her think of someone who
ignores her rather as her father ignored her,
and the clear, intransigent white of her eyes
went murky grey, the sections of her face pulled
away from each other like the continents
before they tore apart, long before they drifted.
I saw that she had been beaten, I saw her
looking away like a begging dog,
I averted my eyes, and turned my head
as the beloved came back, and came over to her
and came down to me, I looked into his iris

like looking at a rainstorm by moonrise, or a still
winter lake, just as its cleavages
take, or into crystal, when crystal
is forming, wet as nectar or milk
or semen, the first skein from a boy’s heart.

You Kindly

Because I felt too weak to move
you kindly moved for me, kneeling

and turning, until you could take my breast-tip in the
socket of your lips, and my womb went down
on itself, drew sharply over and over
to its tightest shape, the way, when newborns
nurse, the fist of the uterus
with each, milk, tug, powerfully
shuts. I saw your hand, near me, your
daily hand, your thumbnail,
the quiet hairs on your fingers—to see your
hand its ordinary self, when your mouth at my
breast was drawing sweet gashes of come
up from my womb made black fork-flashes of a
celibate’s lust shoot through me. And I couldn’t
lift my head, and you swiveled, and came down
close to me, delicate blunt
touch of your hard penis in long
caresses down my face, species
happiness, calm which gleams
with fearless anguished desire. It found
my pouring mouth, the back of my throat,
and the bright wall which opens. It seemed to
take us hours to move the bone

creatures so their gods could be fitted to each other,
and then, at last, home, root
in the earth, wing in the air. As it finished,
it seemed my sex was a grey flower
the color of the brain, smooth and glistening,
a complex calla or iris which you
were creating with the errless digit
of your sex. But then, as it finished again,
one could not speak of a blossom, or the blossom
was stripped away, as if, until
that moment, the cunt had been clothed, still,
in the thinnest garment, and now was bare
or more than bare, silver wet-suit of
matter itself gone, nothing
there but the paradise flay. And then
more, that cannot be told—may be,
but cannot be, things that did not
have to do with me, as if some
wires crossed, and history
or war, or the witches possessed, or the end
of life were happening in me, or I was
in a borrowed body, I knew
what I could not know, did-was-done-to
what I cannot do-be-done-to, so when
we returned, I cried, afraid for a moment
I was dead, and had got my wish to come back,
once, and sleep with you, on a summer
afternoon, in an empty house
where no one could hear us.

I lowered the salt breasts of my eyes
to your mouth, and you sucked,
then I looked at your face, at its absence of unkindness,
its giving that absence off as a matter
I cannot name, I was seeing not you
but something that lives between us, that can live
only between us. I stroked back the hair in
pond and sex rivulets
from your forehead, gently raked it back
along your scalp,
I did not think of my father’s hair
in death, those oiled paths, I lay
along your length and did not think how he
did not love me, how he trained me not to be loved.

Where Will Love Go?

Where will love go? When my father
died, and my love could no longer shine

on the oily, drink-contused slopes of his skin,
then my love for him lived inside me,
and lived wherever the fog they made of him
coiled like a spirit. And when I die
my love for him will live in my vapor
and live in my children, some of it
still rubbed into the grain of the desk my father left me
and the oxblood pores of the leather chair which he
sat in, in a stupor, when I was a child, and then
gave me passionately after his death—our
souls seem locked in it, together,
two alloys in a metal, and we’re there
in the black and chrome workings of his forty-pound
1932 Underwood,
the trapezes stilled inside it on the desk
in front of the chair. Even when the children
have died, our love will live in their children
and still be here in the arm of the chair,
locked in it, like the secret structure of matter,
but what if we ruin everything,
the earth burning like a human body,
storms of soot wreathing it

in permanent winter? Where will love go?
Will the smoke be made of animal love,
will the clouds of roasted ice, circling
the globe, be all that is left of love,
will the sphere of cold, turning ash,
seen by no one, heard by no one,
hold all
our love? Then love
is powerless, and means nothing.

The Protestor
(for Bob Stein)
We were driving north, through the snow, you said
you had turned twenty-one during Vietnam, you were
1-A. The road curved
and curved back, the branches laden,
you said you had decided not to go
to Canada. Which meant you’d decided to
go to jail, a slender guy of
twenty-one, which meant you’d decided to be
raped rather than to kill, if it was their
life or your ass, it was your ass.
We drove in silence, such soft snow
so heavy borne-down. That was when I’d come to
know I loved the land of my birth—
when the men had to leave, they could never come back,
I looked and loved every American
needle on every American tree, I thought
my soul was in it. But if I were taken and
used, taken and used, I think
my soul would die, I think I’d be easily broken,
the work of my life over. And you’d said,
This is the work of my life, to say,
with my body itself, You fuckers you cannot
tell me who to kill. As if there were a

spirit free of the body, safe from it.
After a while, you talked about your family,
not starting, as I had, with
husband and kids, leaving everyone else out—
you started with your grandparents

and worked your way back, away from yourself,
deeper and deeper into Europe, into
the Middle East, the holy book
buried sometimes in the garden, sometimes
swallowed and carried in the ark of the body itself.

The Summer-Camp Bus Pulls Away from the Curb

Whatever he needs, he has or doesn’t
have by now.

Whatever the world is going to do to him
it has started to do. With a pencil and two
Hardy Boys and a peanut butter sandwich and
grapes he is on his way, there is nothing
more we can do for him. Whatever is
stored in his heart, he can use, now.
Whatever he has laid up in his mind
he can call on. What he does not have
he can lack. The bus gets smaller and smaller, as one
folds a flag at the end of a ceremony,
onto itself, and onto itself, until
only a triangle wedge remains.
Whatever his exuberant soul
can do for him, it is doing right now.
Whatever his arrogance can do
it is doing to him. Everything
that’s been done to him, he will now do.
Everything that’s been placed in him will
come out, now, the contents of a trunk
unpacked and lined up on a bunk in the underpine light.

The Talkers

All week, we talked. Born in the same
year and hospital we had so much to catch

up on we couldn’t stop, we talked
in the morning on the porch, when I combed my hair
and flung the comb-hair out into the air, and it
floated down the slope, toward the valley.
We talked while walking to the car, talked
over its mild, belled roof,
while opening the doors, then ducked down
and there we were, bent toward the interior, talking.
Meeting, in the middle of the day,
the first thing when we saw each other
we opened our mouths. All day,
we sang to each other the level music
of spoken language. Even while we ate
we did not pause, I’d speak to him through
the broken body of the butter cookie,
gently spraying him with crumbs. We talked
and walked, we leaned against the opposite sides of the
car and talked in the parking lot until
everyone had driven off, we clung to its
maroon raft and started a new subject.
We did not talk about his wife, much,
or my husband, but to everything else

we turned the workings of our lips and tongues
—up to our necks in the hot tub, or
walking up the steep road,
stepping into the hot dust as if
down into the ions of a wing, and on the

sand, next to each other, as we turned
the turns that upon each other would have been the
turnings of joy—even under
water there trailed from our mouths the delicate
chains of our sentences. But mostly at night, and
far into the night, we talked until we
dropped, as if, stopping for an instant, we might have
moved right toward each other. Today,
he said he felt he could talk to me forever,
it must be the way the angels live,
sitting across from each other, deep
in the bliss of their shared spirit. My God,
they are not going to touch each other.

First Thanksgiving

When she comes back, from college, I will see
the skin of her upper arms, cool,

matte, glossy. She will hug me, my old
soupy chest against her breasts,
I will smell her hair! She will sleep in this apartment,
her sleep like an untamed, good object, like a
soul in a body. She came into my life the
second great arrival, fresh
from the other world—which lay, from within him,
within me. Those nights, I fed her to sleep,
week after week, the moon rising,
and setting, and waxing—whirling, over the months,
in a steady blur, around our planet.
Now she doesn’t need love like that, she has
had it. She will walk in glowing, we will talk,
and then, when she’s fast asleep, I’ll exult
to have her in that room again,
behind that door! As a child, I caught
bees, by the wings, and held them, some seconds,
looked into their wild faces,
listened to them sing, then tossed them back
into the air—I remember the moment the
arc of my toss swerved, and they entered
the corrected curve of their departure.

The Native

This touching of him, on the borders of sleep,
my sternum and hipbones fitted to his tapered

back, my lap curled to his buttocks,
folded around them like a wing with an umber
eye-spot,
it feels to me like the most real thing,
my hand like elements on him, like
the waters stroking along him inside
his mother, without language, his large
eyes unsated ungrieving not even conscious yet,
the wind traveling the contours of the world,
a wind that comes when those who loved
the dead are allowed to touch them again. This feels like
who I am, I am the caressing of him,
and maybe especially this caressing,
gentle sweeping at the borders of sex,
sweeper of its sills in half-sleep, I
am the curve of his buttock, supple forklightning of each hair, follicle
and pore, and the underlying bone,
the death-god of the skeleton,
and the intricate, thrilling anus, like a
character on a landscape, knob-end
of one of the long drool-bones of the spirit

running the length of the body, and then—
but when we cross from the back of the body
under, then this is over, till the next
morning or night when it is back again,
my home, colorless bliss, which I quietly

walk. I saw it in the Bible, in a sideways
oval, sepia and white, the hills
of the peaceable kingdom, its stream and live oak,
my eyes strolled it, and now my hand
walks, to and fro in the earth
and up and down in it, I am oppositeSatan, I do not want to rule,
only to praise. I think I did not
want to be born,
I did not want to be conceived,
I held to nothing, to its dense parental
fur. Slowly I was pulled away,
but I would not let go, perhaps they had to
knock me off with a stick like someone
clinging to a live, downed wire,
I came away with the skin of the other
world on my palms, and at night, when I touch him,
wander on him, hold to him, and move
on and hold to him, I feel I am home again.

The Knowing

Afterwards, when we have slept, paradisecomaed, and woken, we lie a long time

looking at each other.
I do not know what he sees, but I see
eyes of quiet evenness
and endurance, a patience like the dignity
of matter. I love the open ocean
blue-grey-green of his iris, I love
the curve of it against the white,
that curve the sight of what has caused me
to come, when he’s quite still, deep
inside me. I have never seen a curve
like that, except our sphere, from outer
space. I don’t know where he got
his steadiness as if without self-regard,
almost without self, and yet
he chose one woman, instead of the others.
By knowing him, I get to know
the purity of the animal
which mates for life. Sometimes he is slightly
smiling, but mostly he just gazes at me gazing,
his entire face lit. I love
to see it change if I cry—there is no worry,
no pity, a graver radiance. If we

are on our backs, side by side,
with our faces turned fully to face each other,
I can hear a tear from my lower eye
hit the sheet, as if it is an early day on earth,
and then the upper eye’s tears

braid and sluice down through the lower eyebrow
like the invention of farming, irrigation, a non-nomadic people.
I am so lucky that I can know him.
This is the only way to know him.
I am the only one who knows him.
When I wake again, he is still looking at me,
as if he is eternal. For an hour
we wake and doze, and slowly I know
that though we are sated, though we are hardly
touching, this is the coming that the other
brought us to the edge of—we are entering,
deeper and deeper, gaze by gaze,
this place beyond the other places,
beyond the body itself, we are making
love.

from The Unswept Room

Kindergarten Abecedarian

I thought what I had to do was to read
the very long word, over the chalkboard,

ab-kedev-gi-hij-klem-nop-qurstuv-wix-yiz, but what I had to do
was to look at a crescent moon-shape and to go
k k k k with my mind. It was strange,
like other things—that a very large Boy owned everything,
even a fire, where he could put me for the thoughts
in my head. Each day, I tried to read
the world, to find his name in it,
the trees bending in cursive, the bees
looping their sky script. Crescent moon
was k-k-k. Cereal bowl
uh-uh-uh. Cap-gun puhpuh-puh. K-k, uh-uh, puh-puh,
kk-uhh-puhh, kk-uhh-puhh—
cup. Would God be mad? I had made
a false cup, in my mind, and although
he had made my mind, and owned it, maybe this was
not his cup, maybe he could not
put this cup in hell, and make it
scream the cup-scream. Maybe the paper
world was ours, as the actual one was his—
I was becoming a reader. For a moment I almost remember it,

when I stood back, on the other side
of the alphabet, a-b-c-d-f-g, and took that first
step in, h-i-j-k
-m-n-o-p, and stood astride

the line of the border of literacy,
-r-s, t-u-v,
I would work for a life of this, I would ask
sanctuary: w, x, y, z.

Bible Study: 71 B.C.E.

After Marcus Licinius Crassus

defeated the army of Spartacus,
he crucified 6,000 men.
That is what the records say,
as if he drove in the 18,000
nails himself. I wonder how
he felt, that day, if he went outside
among them, if he walked that human
woods. I think he stayed in his tent
and drank, and maybe copulated,
hearing the singing being done for him,
the woodwind-tuning he was doing at one
remove, to the six-thousandth power.
And maybe he looked out, sometimes,
to see the rows of instruments,
his orchard, the earth bristling with it
as if a patch in his brain had itched
and this was his way of scratching it
directly. Maybe it gave him pleasure,
and a sense of balance, as if he had suffered,
and now had found redress for it,
and voice for it. I speak as a monster,
someone who today has thought at length
about Crassus, his ecstasy of feeling

nothing while so much is being
felt, his hot lightness of spirit
in being free to walk around
while other are nailed above the earth.
It may have been the happiest day

of his life. If he had suddenly cut
his hand on a wineglass, I doubt he would
have woken up to what he was doing.
It is frightening to think of him suddenly
seeing what he was, to think of him running
outside, to try to take them down,
one man to save 6,000.
If he could have lowered one,
and seen the eyes when the level of pain
dropped like a sudden soaring into pleasure,
wouldn’t that have opened in him
the wild terror of understanding
the other? But then he would have had
5,999
to go. Probably it almost never
happens, that a Marcus Crassus
wakes. I think he dozed, and was roused
to his living dream, lifted the flap
and stood and looked out, at the rustling, creaking
living field—his, like an external
organ, a heart.

5¢ a Peek

The day my class was to go to the circus,
I sidled into the bathroom, early,

and stood on tiptoe, up into the bottom
corner of the mirror, and leaned on the sink,
and slowly cut off my eyelashes
down close to the eyelid. I had no idea what I was
doing, or why, I studied the effect
—not bad, a little stark—but when I saw the effect
on my mother, not just anger, but pity
and horror, I was interested.
I think I had almost given up on being
a girl, on trying to grow up to be a woman like my mother,
I wanted to get disadopted
and go home to be the baby with the calf’s head,
home to my birth-mother the bearded lady,
my father the sword swallower stopped mid-swallow,
one with the sword. I had tried to act normal,
but when the inspiration came
I felt I was meant to act on it,
to look at my mom with my gaze trimmed to a seer’s
and see her see me for an instant, see
her irises contract. I did not
imagine I could ever leave my mother,
mostly I was her, in distorted form,

but at least for that second the itsy scissors
spoke to her with their birdy beak,
skreeek, skreeek, witch whinge. And when
my lashes grew back, no thicker no thinner no
shorter no longer, my mother sat me

down, and taught me to bat them, to look
sidelong, blindly, and shudder them at seven beats a second.

Grey Girl
(for Yusef Komunyakaa and Toi Derricotte)
We were walking down Park, on the grates over
the exhaust ducts of the lavish apartments,
we were walking on air, on iron bars,
three abreast—four breasts,
two on either side of the man
who had survived through various wars,
my friend and I proud to walk him through the
evening after his reading. Our skirts
faffled, we were tall, we were his color guard, his
woman of color and woman of no
color guard, we were talking about
family and race, and a greed or lust
rose in me to talk about
disliking myself. I was crouching slightly,
spider-dancing over hot air, and I
said, You want to know about white people?
I’ll tell you about white people,
I lived in close proximity to them
and I was them, that meanness they used on me
was what I was made of. Out of the corner of my
eye, I glimpsed myself for a second
in a store window, a swirl of grey, a
thirster after substance. My companions became

quiet, as if they had pulled back,
a bit, and were holding still, with wary
courtesy. In that second, I could almost
sense myself, whuffolk amok,
one who wanted to win something

in the war of the family, to rant in the faces
of the war-struck about her home-front pain.
It is hard to see oneself as dangerous
and stupid, but what I had said was true,
the people who had hurt me most were my makers,
but there had not been what I saw now as a ring
of haters around us, encircling us.
I had a flash of knowledge of this
on the sidewalk—as we kept going, I sensed
two, living beings, and one halfidiot, a grey girl walking. Who did she
think she was, to relish herself
for hating herself, to savor, proudly,
the luxury of hating her own people?
All evening, I looked at my friends’
womanly beauty, and manly beauty,
and the table with its wines, and meats, and fruits,
and flowers, as if we could go back to the beginning.

Still Life in Landscape

It was night, it had rained, there were pieces of cars and
half-cars strewn, it was still, and bright,

a woman was lying on the highway, on her back,
with her head curled back and tucked under her shoulders
so the back of her head touched her spine
between her shoulder blades, her clothes
mostly accidented off, and her
leg gone, a tall bone
sticking out of the stub of her thigh—
this was her abandoned matter,
my mother grabbed my head and turned it and
clamped it into her chest, between
her breasts. My father was driving—not sober
but not in this accident, we’d approached it out of
neutral twilight, broken glass
on wet black macadam, an underlying
midnight abristle with stars. This was
the world—maybe the only one.
The dead woman was not the person
my father had recently almost run over,
who had suddenly leapt away from our family
car, jerking back from death,
she was not I, she was not my mother,
but maybe she was a model of the mortal,

the elements ranged around her on the tar—
glass, bone, metal, flesh, and the family.

The Wedding Vow

I did not stand at the altar, I stood
at the foot of the chancel steps, with my beloved,

and the minister stood on the top step
holding the open Bible. The church
was wood, painted ivory inside, no people—God’s
stable perfectly cleaned. It was night,
spring—outside, a moat of mud,
and inside, from the rafters, flies
fell onto the open Bible, and the minister
tilted it and brushed them off. We stood
beside each other, crying slightly
with fear and awe. In truth, we had married
that first night, in bed, we had been
married by our bodies, but now we stood
in history—what our bodies had said,
mouth to mouth, we now said publicly,
gathered together, death. We stood
holding each other by the hand, yet I also
stood as if alone, for a moment,
just before the vow, though taken
years before, took. It was a vow
of the present and the future, and yet I felt it
to have some touch on the distant past
or the distant past on it, I felt

the wordless, dry, crying ghost of my
parents’ marriage there, somewhere
in the echoing space—perhaps one of the
plummeting flies, bouncing slightly
as it hit forsaking all others, then was brushed

away. I felt as if I had come
to claim a promise—the sweetness I’d inferred
from their sourness, and at the same time that I
had come, congenitally unworthy, to beg.
And yet, I had been working toward this hour
all my life. And then it was time
to speak—he was offering me, no matter
what, his life. That is all I had to
do, that evening, to accept the gift
I had longed for—to say I had accepted it,
as if being asked if I breathe. Do I take?
I do. I take as he takes—we have been
practicing this. Do you bear this pleasure? I do.

His Costume

Somehow I never stopped to notice
that my father liked to dress as a woman.

He had his sign language about women
talking too much, and being stupid,
but whenever there was a costume party
he would dress like us, the tennis balls
for breasts—balls for breasts—the pageboy
blond wig, the lipstick, he would sway
his body with moves of gracefulness
as if one being could be the whole
universe, its ends curving back to come
up from behind it. Six feet, and maybe
one-eighty, one-ninety, he had the shapely
legs of a male Grable—in a short
skirt, he leaned against a bookcase pillar
nursing his fifth drink, gazing
around from inside his mascara purdah
with those salty eyes. The woman from next door
had a tail and ears, she was covered with Reynolds Wrap,
she was Kitty Foil, and my mother was in
a teeny tuxedo, but he always won
the prize. Those nights, he had a look of daring,
as if he was getting away with something,
a look of triumph, of having stolen

back. And as far as I knew, he never threw
up as a woman, or passed out, or made
those signals of scorn with his hands, just leaned,
voluptuous, at ease, deeply
present, as if sensing his full potential, crossing
over into himself, and back,
over and back.

First Weeks

Those first weeks, I hardly knew how to
love our daughter. Her face looked crushed,

crumpled with worry—and not even
despairing, but just disheartened, a look of
endurance. The skin of her face was finely
wrinkled, there were wisps of hair on her ears,
she looked a little like a squirrel, suspicious,
tranced. And smallish, 6.13,
wizened—she looked as if she were wincing
away from me without moving. The first
moment I had seen her, my glasses off,
in the delivery room, a blur of blood
and blue skin, and limbs, I had known her,
upside down, and they righted her, and there
came that faint, almost sexual, wail, and her
whole body flushed rose.
When I saw her next, she was bound in cotton,
someone else had cleaned her, wiped
the inside of my body off her
and combed her hair in narrow scary
plough-lines. She was ten days early,
sleepy, the breast engorged, standing out nearly
even with the nipple, her lips would so much as
approach it, it would hiss and spray.

And when we took her home, she shrieked
and whimpered, like a dream of a burn victim,
and when she was quiet, she would lie there and peer, not quite
anxiously. I didn’t blame her,
she’d been born to my mother’s daughter. I would kneel
and gaze at her, and pity her.
All day I nursed her, all night I walked her,
and napped, and nursed, and walked her. And then,
one day, she looked at me, as if
she knew me. She lay along my forearm, fed, and
gazed at me as if remembering me,
as if she had known me, and liked me, and was getting
her memory back. When she smiled at me,
delicate rictus like a birth-pain coming,
I fell in love, I became human.

The Clasp

She was four, he was one, it was raining, we had colds,
we had been in the apartment two weeks straight,

I grabbed her to keep her from shoving him over on his
face, again, and when I had her wrist
in my grasp I compressed it, fiercely, for almost a
second, to make an impression on her,
to hurt her, our beloved firstborn, I even nearly
savored the stinging sensation of the squeezing, the
expression, into her, of my anger,
“Never, never again,” the righteous
chant accompanying the clasp. It happened very
fast—grab, crush, crush,
crush, release—and at the first extra
force, she swung her head, as if checking
who this was, and looked at me,
and saw me—yes, this was her mom,
her mom was doing this. Her dark,
deeply open eyes took me
in, she knew me, in the shock of the moment
she learned me. This was her mother, one of the
two whom she most loved, the two
who loved her most, near the source of love
was this.

Diaphragm Aria

It’s curious and sweet to slip it out
and look inside, to see what’s there,

like a treasure hunt, dimestore toys
and dolls tucked into the root-floor of the woods,
or tilt up a stone in the yard and find,
in the groove of her path, the flame-brown newt. Now I
read the shallow cup of dregs,
shreds like clothes torn away in
eagerness, cloth of the bodies, which rips
to a cloud of threads. Here our daughter
never picked her finicky way,
here our son never somersaulted,
here only our not-children
advanced, and dropped, and surged forward
and were cut down, there a coil
of tail, here a ladyfinger, a
curl, a bone of the twin. When I have reached
into myself, and glistened out the dome,
I search its planetarium sky
for its weather, ivory nimbus, reach
of summer showers—these are the heavens
under which the grateful bodies
went to earth, dense with contentment,
moving, together, for those hour-long

moments, in a mattery paradise,
I gaze into the cumulus
of spermicide, I bless the lollers who
stay in that other sphere as we come
like surf on the shore of it.

The Window

Our daughter calls me, in tears—like water
being forced, under great pressure, from densest

stone. I am mad at you, she whispers.
You said in a poem that you’re a survivor,
that’s O.K., but you said that you are
a Jew, when you’re not, that’s so cheap. You’re right,
I say, you’re so right. Did you see the Holocaust
movie, she asks, in a stifled voice,
there’s a window on the third floor of the barracks
and I know it’s a little bathroom, I used it
in Poland the day I was there, and she sobs,
a sound like someone swallowing gravel.
And the rooms hadn’t been dusted, it was
as if everything was left as it was,
and some of the same molecules
might be there in the room. And there were exhibit cases,
one with hair—hair. In my mind
I see the landscape, behind glass,
the human hills and mountains, the intimate
crowning of a private life
now a case of clouds, detritus,
meshes. And there were eyeglasses,
a huge pile of liking to read,
and of liking books, and being able to see, and

then … then there was a display case
of suitcases, and an Orthodox guide was
taking a tour through. She is able, while she cries,
to speak, in a compressed, stopped-down voice
as if a pebble could talk. He was telling

a big class of Bar Mitzvah boys
to look at the names on the suitcases—
some of them had believed … they were going …
on vacation, she says—or something like it.
I cannot hear each word
but sometimes just the creak of rock
on water. I do not want to ask her
to repeat. She seems to be saying she had to
leave the room, to find a place
to cry in, maybe the little bathroom,
I feel as if I am there, near her,
and am seeing, through her, the horror of the human,
as if she is transparent, holding
no gaze to herself. There were people not
crying, just looking, she says, then she says
so much about us is unbearable.
We talk an hour, we are coming back
up as if from inside the ground,
I try to tell her it was not weakness
in her, that it was love she felt,
the helplessness of each life, and the
dread of our species. Yeah yeah, she says,
in the low voice of someone lately
the young in the nest, maybe soon

the nesting one—and that hour, within
her view, the evidence of the wish
that the ark be consumed—and no thought of herself
to distract her, nothing distracts her, not even
the breathing of her own body as she sees.

Fish Oil

One midnight, home late from work,
the apartment reeked of fish boiled

in oil. All the windows were shut,
and all the doors were open—up
from the pan and spatula rose a thick
helix of cod and olive. My husband
slept. I opened the windows and shut
the doors and put the plates in the sink
and oodled Palmolive all over. The next
day I fishwifed to a friend, and she said,
Someone might live with that, and come to
love the smell of a fry. And that evening,
I looked at my beloved, and who he is
touched me in the core of my heart. I sought
a bottle of extra-extra virgin,
and a recipe for sea fillet in
olive-branch juice, I filled the rooms with
swirls of finny perfume, the outlines
in the sand the early Christians drew,
the loop meaning safety, meaning me too,
I remembered my parents’ frowns at any
whiff of savor outside the kitchen,
the Calvinist shudder, in that house, at the sweet
grease of life. I had come to my mate

a shocked being, agog, a salt
dab in his creel, girl in oil,
his dish. I had not known that one
could approve of someone entirely—one could
wake to the pungent day, one could awake
from the dream of judgment.

Wonder as Wander

At dusk, on those evenings she does not go out,
my mother potters around her house.

Her daily helpers are gone, there is no one
there, no one to tell what to do,
she wanders, sometimes she talks to herself,
fondly scolding, sometimes she suddenly
throws out her arms and screams—high notes
lying here and there on the carpets
like bodies touched by a downed wire,
she journeys, she quests, she marco-polos through
the gilded gleamy loot-rooms, who is she.
I feel, now, that I do not know her,
and for all my staring, I have not seen her
—like the song she sang, when we were small,
I wonder as I wander, out under the sky,
how Jesus, the Savior, was born for, to die,
for poor lonely people, like you, and like I
—on the slow evenings alone, when she delays
and delays her supper, walking the familiar
halls past the mirrors and night windows,
I wonder if my mother is tasting a life
beyond this life—not heaven, her late
beloved is absent, her father absent,
and her staff is absent, maybe this is earth

alone, as she had not experienced it,
as if she is one of the poor lonely people,
as if she is born to die. I hold fast
to the thought of her, wandering in her house,
a luna moth in a chambered cage.

Fifty years ago, I’d squat in her
garden, with her Red Queens, and try
to sense the flyways of the fairies as they kept
the pollen flowing on its local paths,
and our breaths on their course of puffs—they kept
our eyes wide with seeing what we
could see, and not seeing what we could not see.

The Shyness

Then, when we were joined, I became
shyer. I became completed, joyful,

and shyer. I may have shone more, reflected
more, and from deep inside there rose
some glow passing steadily through me, but I was not
playing, now, I felt like someone
small, in a raftered church, or in
a cathedral, the vaulted spaces of the body
like a sacred woods. I was quiet when my throat was not
making those iron, orbital, earth,
rusted, noises at the hinge of matter and
whatever is not matter. He takes me
into the endings like another world at the
center of this one, and then, if he begins to
end when I am resting and I do not rejoin him yet
then I feel awe, I almost feel
fear, sometimes for a moment I feel
I should not move, or make a sound, as
if he is alone, now,
howling in the wilderness,
and yet I know we are in this place
together. I thought, now is the moment
I could become more loving, and my hands moved shyly
over him, secret as heaven,

and my mouth spoke, and in my beloved’s
voice, by the bones of my head, the fields
groaned, and then I joined him again,
not shy, not bold, released, entering
the true home, where the trees bend down along the

ground and yet stand, then we lay together
panting as if saved from some disaster, and for ceaseless
instants, it came to pass what I have
heard about, it came to me
that I did not know I was separate
from this man, I did not know I was lonely.

April, New Hampshire
(for Jane Kenyon and Donald Hall)
Outside the door, a tiny narcissus
had come up through leaf mold. In the living room,
the old butterscotch collie let me
get my hand into the folds
of the mammal, and knead it. Inside their room
Don said, This is it, this is where
we lived and died. To the center of the maple
painted headboard—sleigh of beauty,
sleigh of night—there was an angel affixed
as if bound to it, with her wings open.
The bed spoke, as if to itself,
it sang. The whole room sang,
and the house, and the curve of the hill, like the curve between
a throat and a shoulder, sang, in praising
grief, and the ground, almost, rang,
hollowed-out bell waiting for its tongue
to be lowered in. At the grave site,
next to the big, smoothed, beveled,
felled, oak home, like the bole
of a Druid duir—inside it what comes not
close to being like who she was—
he stood, beside, in a long silence,
minutes, like the seething harness-creaking

when the water of a full watering is feeding
down into the ground, and he looked at us,
at each one, and he seemed not just
a person seeing people, he looked
almost another species, an eagle
gazing at eagles, fierce, intent,
wordless, eyelidless, seeing each one,
seeing deep
into each—
miles, years—he seemed to be Jane,
looking at us for the last time
on earth.

The Untangling

Detritus, in uncorrected
nature, in streambeds or on woods floors,

I have wanted to untangle, soft talon
of moss from twig, rabbit hair
from thorn from down. Often they come
in patches, little mattednesses,
I want to part their parts, trilliumspadix, mouse-fur, chokecherry-needle,
granite-chip, I want to unbind them and
restore them to their living forms—I am
a housewife of conifer tide-pools, a parent who would
lift parents up off children, lissome
serpent of my mother’s hair discoiled
from within my ear, wall of her tear withdrawn Red-brown Sea from my hair—she to be
she; I, I. I love
to not know
what is my beloved
and what is I, I love for my I
to die, leaving the slack one, blisspacified, to sleep with him
and wake, and sleep, rageless. Limb
by limb by lip by lip by sex by
sparkle of salt we part, hour by

hour we disentangle and dry,
and then, I relish to reach down
to that living nest that love has woven
bits of feather, and kiss-fleck, and
vitreous floater, and mica-glint, and no

snakeskin into, nectar-caulk and the
solder of sperm and semen dried
to knotted frog-clasps, which I break, gently,
groaning, and the world of the sole one unfastens
up, a lip folded back on itself
unfurls, murmurs, the postilion hairs
crackle, and the thin glaze overall—
glaucous as the pressed brooch
of mucus that quivered upright on my father’s
tongue at death—crazes and shatters,
the garden tendrils out in its rows and
furrows, quaint, dented, archaic,
sweet of all perfume, pansy, peony,
dusk, starry, inviolate.

The Learner

When my mother tells me she has found her late husband’s
flag in the attic, and put it up,

over the front door, for her party,
her voice on the phone is steady with the truth
of yearning, she sounds like a soldier who has known
no other life. For a moment I forget
the fierce one who raised me. We talk about her sweetheart,
how she took such perfect care of him
after his strokes. And when the cancer came,
it was BLACK, she says, and then it was WHITE.
—What? What do you mean? —It was BLACK, it was
cancer, it was terrible,
but he did not know to be afraid, and then it
took him mercifully, it was WHITE.
—Mom, I say, breaking a cold
sweat. Could I say something, and you not
get mad? Silence. I have never said anything
to question her. I’m shaking so the phone
is beating on my jaw. —Yes … —Mom,
people have kind of stopped saying that, BLACK for bad,
WHITE for good. —Well, I’M not a racist,
she says, with some of the plummy, almost sly
pride I have heard in myself. —Well I think
everyone is, Mom, but that’s not

the point—if someone Black heard you,
how would they feel? —But no one Black
is here! she cries, and I say, —Well then think of me
as Black. It’s quiet, then I say, —It’s like some of the
things the kids are always telling me now,
“Mom, nobody says that any
more.” And my mother says, in a soft
voice, with the timing of a dream, —I’ll never
say that any more. And then, almost
anguished, I PROMISE you that I’ll never
say it again. —Oh, Mom, I say, don’t
promise me, who am I,
you’re doing so well, you’re an amazing learner,
and that is when, from inside my mother,
the mother of my heart speaks to me,
the one under the coloratura,
the alto, the woman under the child—who lay
under, waiting, all my life,
to speak—her low voice slowly
undulating, like the flag of her love,
she says, Before, I, die, I am, learning,
things, I never, thought, I’d know, I am so
fortunate. And then They are things
I would not, have learned, if he, had lived,
but I cannot, be glad, he died, and then
the sound of quiet crying, as if
I hear, near a clearing, a spirit of mourning
bathing itself, and singing.

Heaven to Be

When I’d picture my death, I would be lying on my back,
and my spirit would rise to my belly-skin and out

like a sheet of wax paper the shape of a girl, furl
over from supine to prone and like the djinn’s
carpet begin to fly, low,
over our planet—heaven to be
unhurtable, and able to see without
cease or stint or stopperage,
to lie on the air, and look, and look,
not so different from my life, I would be
sheer with an almost not sore loneness,
looking at the earth as if seeing the earth
were my version of having a soul. But then
I could see my beloved, sort of standing
beside a kind of door in the sky—
not the door to the constellations,
to the pentangles, and borealis,
but a tidy flap at the bottom of the door in the
sky, like a little cat-door in the door,
through which is nothing. And he is saying to me that he must
go, now, it is time. And he does not
ask me, to go with him, but I feel
he would like me with him. And I do not think
it is a living nothing, where nonbeings

can make a kind of unearthly love, I
think it’s the nothing kind of nothing, I think
we go through the door and vanish together.
What depth of joy to take his arm,
pressing it against my breast
as lovers do in a formal walk,
and take that step.

The Tending

My parents did not consider it, for me,
yet I can see myself in the woods of some other

world, with the aborted. It is early evening,
the air is ashen as if from funeral-home
chimneys, and there are beginnings of people
almost growing—but not changing—on stalks,
some in cloaks, or lady’s-slippers,
others on little trellises.
Maybe I am one of the gardeners here,
we water them with salt water.
I recall the girl who had a curl
right in the middle of her forehead,
when she was good she was very very good, I was not like that,
when she was bad she was horrid, I am here
as if in a garden of the horrid—I move
and tend, by attention, to the rows, I think of
Mary Mary Quite Contrary
and feel I am seeing the silver bells
set down clapperless, the cockleshells
with the cockles eaten. And yet this is
a holy woods. When I think of the house
I came to, and the houses these brothers and sisters
might have come to, and what they might have
done with what was done there,

I wonder if some here have done,
by their early deaths, a boon of absence
to someone in the world. So I tend them, I hate
for them to remain thankless. I do not
sign to them—their lullaby
long complete,
I just walk, as if this were a kind of home,
a mothers’ and fathers’ place, and I am
among the sung who will not sing,
the harmed who will not harm.

Psalm

Bending over, at the August table
where the summer towels are kept, putting

a stack on the bottom shelf, I felt his
kiss, in its shock of whiskers, on an inner
curve of that place I know by his knowing,
have seen with the vision of his touch. To be entered
thus, on a hip-high table piled with
sheaves of towels, bath and hand,
terry-cloth eden, is to feel at one’s center
a core of liquid heat as if
one is an earth. Some time later,
we were kissing in near sleep, I think
we did it this time, I whispered, I think
we’re joined at the hip. He has a smile sometimes
from the heart; at this hour, I live in its light.
I gnaw very gently on his jaw, Would you want me to
eat you, in the Andes, in a plane crash, I murmur,
to survive? Yes. We smile. He asks,
Would you want me to eat you to survive? I would love it,
I cry out. We almost sleep, there is a series of
arms around us and between us, in sets,
touches given as if received. Did you think
we were going to turn into each other?, and I get
one of those smiles, as if his face

is a speckled, rubbled, sandy, satiny
cactus-flower eight inches across.
Yes, he whispers. I know he is humoring,
rote sweet-talking. A sliver of late
sun is coming through, between the curtains,
it illumines the scaly surfaces
of my knuckles, its line like a needle held,
to cleanse it, above a match. I move
my wedding finger to stand in the slit
of flame. From the ring’s curve there rises
a fan of borealis fur
like the first instant of sunrise. Do not
tell me this could end. Do not tell me.

The Unswept

Broken bay leaf. Olive pit.
Crab leg. Claw. Crayfish armor.

Whelk shell. Mussel shell. Dogwinkle. Snail.
Wishbone tossed unwished on. Test
of sea urchin. Chicken foot.
Wrasse skeleton. Hen head,
eye shut, beak open as if
singing in the dark. Laid down in tiny
tiles, by the rhyparographer,
each scrap has a shadow—each shadow cast
by a different light. Permanently fresh
husks of the feast! When the guest has gone,
the morsels dropped on the floor are left
as food for the dead—O my characters,
my imagined, here are some fancies of crumbs
from under love’s table.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco, and educated at Stanford and
Columbia. Her first book, Satan Says, received the inaugural San
Francisco Poetry Center Award. Her second, The Dead and the Living, was
the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983 and the winner of the National
Book Critics Circle Award. The Father was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot
Prize in England. Sharon Olds was the New York State Poet for 1998 to
2000. She teaches poetry workshops in the Graduate Creative Writing
Program at New York University, and helped to found the N.Y.U.
workshop program at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island. Her most
recent book, The Unswept Room, was a finalist for the National Book
Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She was the James
Merrill Fellow of the Academy of American Poets for 2003 and has just
been named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She
lives in New York City.

The Glass Constellation
New and Collected Poems

Arthur Sze

COPPER CANYON PRESS

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for Carol

Contents
Title Page
Note to Reader
opening poems from The Redshifting Web (1998)
Before Completion
The String Diamond
Kaiseki
Apache Plume
1 The Beginning Web
2 Reductions and Enlargements
3 The Names of a Bird
4 The Architecture of Silence
5 Hourglass
6 Entelechy
7 Apache Plume
8 Anamnesis
9 Starlight
10 Diffraction Grating
Six Persimmons
from The Willow Wind (1972)
Noah’s / Dove
The Wood Whitler
Li Po

Pegasus on a Pipe
Miracles
The Execution of Maximilian
Sound Lag
Sliding Away
Strawberries in Wooden Bowls
The Olive Grove
A Singer with Eyes of Sand
from Two Ravens (1976)
The Taoist Painter
Bruegel
The Silver Trade
He Will Come to My Funeral with a White Flower
Two Ravens
The Waking
North to Taos
Three a.m., in Winter
Lament
No Hieroglyphics
Wang Wei
Morning Shutters
Lupine
Do Not Speak Keresan to a Mescalero Apache
Dazzled (1982)

Viewing Photographs of China
The Moon Is a Diamond
Listening to a Broken Radio
Moenkopi
Written the Day I Was to Begin a Residency at the Penitentiary of New Mexico
Gold Leaf
*
Dazzled
Magnetized
Knife at the Jugular
Pouilly-Fuissé
Alba
The Opal
Pentimento
The Weather Shifts
*
Juniper Fires
Frost
Black Lightning
Piranhas
Impressions of the New Mexico Legislature
Cedar Fires
The Murmur
The Corona
Olive Night
*

The Cloud Chamber
Empty Words
Tsankawi
Antares
The Owl
The Cornucopia
The Chance
The Network
Fauve
Fern, Coal, Diamond
The Axis
River River (1987)
The Leaves of a Dream Are the Leaves of an Onion
The Aphrodisiac
The Ansel Adams Card
New Wave
Every Where and Every When
The Rehearsal
Kayaking at Night on Tomales Bay
Mistaking Water Hemlock for Parsley
Evil Grigri
The Pulse
The Diamond Point
Metastasis
Horse Face

The Negative
Wasabi
The Solderer
Renga
Ten Thousand to One
To a Composer
Shooting Star
The Silence
Keokea
Early Autumn
Nothing Can Heal the Severed Nerves of a Hand?
Splash, Flow
The Moment of Creation
Forget Fez
Shuttle
Throwing Salt on a Path
Edna Bay
Black Java Pepper
The Halibut
Standing on an Alder Bridge over a Creek
Here
Parallax
The Day Can Become a Zen Garden of Raked Sand
The Unnameable River
Archipelago (1995)

Streamers
The Silk Road
Oolong
In Your Honor
The Flower Path
The Great White Shark
Slanting Light
Red Octopus
Whiteout
Ice Floe
The Los Alamos Museum
Spring Snow
The Redshifting Web
X-Ray
Rattlesnake Glyph
A Great Square Has No Corners
Axolotl
Mushroom Hunting in the Jemez Mountains
From the Rooftop
The Shapes of Leaves
Original Memory

Archipelago
Quipo (2005)
Before Sunrise
Earthshine
Ox-Head Dot
Syzygy
La Bajada
Spring Smoke
Haircutting
Lobed Bowl with Black Glaze and White Scalloped Rim
Quipu
Aqueous Gold
Solstice Quipu
Inflorescence
Oracle-Bone Script
The Welt
In the Living Room
Acanthus
The Thermos

Ice Line
The Chromatics of Dawn
Thermodynamics
X and O
The Angle of Reflection Equals the Angle of Incidence
Earthstar
Didyma
The Ginkgo Light (2009)
I
Chrysalis
Labrador Tea
Crisscross
The Gift
Looking Back on the Muckleshoot Reservation from Galisteo Street, Santa Fe
Pig’s Heaven Inn
Retrieval
Tesserae
In the Rose Light
Qualia
The Ginkgo Light
II
Spectral Line
III

The Double Helix
Equator
Pinwheel
Power Line
Grand Bay
Departures and Arrivals
Fractal
The North Window
Yardangs
Virga
After Completion
Compass Rose (2014)
Black kites
After a New Moon
Sticking out
The Curvature of Earth
Begging near
Compass Rose
1 Arctic Circle
2 Fault Lines
3 Glimmer Train
4 Orchid Hour
5 The Curtain
6 2′33″
7 Comet Hyakutake

8 Morning Antlers
9 Compass Rose
10 Red Breath
In relief
Available Light
The Infinity Pool
Strike-Slip
She wrings
The Immediacy of Heat
At the Equinox
Returning to Northern New Mexico after a Trip to Asia
Qiviut
Backlit
An aura reader
Confetti
Spectral Hues
Windows and Mirrors
Midnight Loon
Point-Blank
The Radius of Touch
A cobra rises
The Unfolding Center
Sight Lines (2019)
Water Calligraphy
Stilling to North

No one
Westbourne Street
Cloud Hands
In the Bronx
Unpacking a Globe
During the Cultural Revolution
Traversal
The Radiant’s
Doppler Effect
Adamant
A woman detonates
Python Skin
Lichen Song
Black Center
Under a Rising Moon
Light Echoes
First Snow
Salt cedar
Courtyard Fire
White Sands
Salt Song
The plutonium waste
Sprang
1 Winter Stars
2 Hole
3 Talisman

4 Kintsugi
5 Yellow Lightning
6 Red-Ruffed Lemur
7 This Is the Writing, the Speaking of the Dream
8 Net Light
9 Sprang
A man who built
Transfigurations
Dawn Redwood
Xeriscape
The Far Norway Maples
Sight Lines
The Glass Constellation
The White Orchard: New Poems
Circumference
Entanglement
Eye Exam
Pitch Blue
La Cieneguilla
Ravine
October Dusk
Midnight Flame
Festina lente
Pitch Yellow
Sleepers

Earthrise
Acequia del Llano
Pyrocumulus
Midnight Spark
Whiteout
Invisible Globe
Pitch Magenta
The White Orchard
Rock Paper Scissors
Trawler
Morning Islands
Blackcap
Cloud Forest
The Open Water
Transpirations
Notes
About the Author
Books by Arthur Sze
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Special Thanks

THE GLASS CONSTELLATION

OPENING POEMS FROM

The Redshifting Web
1998

Before Completion
1
I gaze through a telescope at the Orion Nebula,
a blue vapor with a cluster of white stars,
gaze at the globular cluster in Hercules,
needle and pinpoint lights stream into my eyes.
A woman puts a baby in a plastic bag
and places it in a dumpster; someone
parking a car hears it cry and rescues it.
Is this the little o, the earth?
Deer at dusk are munching apple blossoms;
a green snake glides down flowing acequia water.
The night is rich with floating pollen;
in the morning, we break up the soil
to prepare for corn. Fossilized cotton pollen
has been discovered at a site above six thousand feet.
As the character yi, change, is derived
from the skin of a chameleon, we are
living the briefest hues on the skin
of the world. I gaze at the Sombrero Galaxy
between Corvus and Spica: on a night with no moon,
I notice my shadow by starlight.

2
Where does matter end and space begin?
blue jays eating suet;
juggling three crumpled newspaper balls
wrapped with duct tape;
tasseling corn;
the gravitational bending of light;
“We’re dying”;
stringing a coral necklace;
he drew his equations on butcher paper;
vanishing in sunlight;
sobbing;
she folded five hundred paper cranes and placed them in a basket;
sleeping in his room in a hammock;
they drew a shell to represent zero;
red persimmons;
what is it like to catch up to light?
he threw Before Completion:
six in the third place, nine in the sixth.

3
A wavering line of white-faced ibises,
flying up the Rio Grande, disappears.
A psychic says, “Search a pawnshop
for the missing ring.” Loss, a black hole.
You do not intend to commit a series of
blunders, but to discover in one error
an empty cocoon. A weaver dumps
flashlight batteries into a red-dye bath.
A physicist says, “After twenty years,
nothing is as I thought it would be.”
You recollect watching a yellowand-black-banded caterpillar in a jar
form a chrysalis: in days the chrysalis
lightened and became transparent:
a monarch emerged and flexed its wings.
You are startled to retrieve what you forgot:
it has the crunching sound of river
breakup when air is calm and very clear.

4
Beijing, 1985: a poet describes herding pigs
beside a girl with a glass eye and affirms
the power to dream and transform. Later,
in exile, he axes his wife and hangs himself.
Do the transformations of memory
become the changing lines of divination?
Is the continuum of a moment a red
poppy blooming by a fence, or is it
a woman undergoing radiation treatment
who stretches out on a bed to rest
and senses she is stretching out to die?
At night I listen to your breathing,
guess at the freckles on your arms,
smell your hair at the back of your neck.
Tiger lilies are budding in pots in the patio;
daikon is growing deep in the garden.
I see a bewildered man ask for direction,
and a daikon picker points the way with a daikon.

5
He threw Duration;
sunspots;
what is it like to catch up to light?
a collapsing vertebra;
the folding wings of a blue damselfly;
receiving a fax;
buffeted on a floatplane between islands;
a peregrine falcon making a slow circle with outstretched wings;
he crumpled papers, threw them on the floor,
called it City of Bums;
polar aligning;
inhaling the smell of her hair;
a red handprint on a sandstone wall;
digging up ginseng;
carding wool;
where does matter end and space begin?

6
Mushroom hunting at the ski basin, I spot
a bloodred amanita pushing up under fir,
find a white-gilled Man On Horseback,
notice dirt breaking and carefully unearth
a cluster of gold chanterelles. I stop
and gaze at yellow light in a clearing.
As grief dissolves and the mind begins to clear,
an s twist begins to loosen the z-twisted fiber.
A spider asleep under a geranium leaf
may rest a leg on the radial string of a web,
but cool nights are pushing nasturtiums to bloom.
An eggplant deepens in hue and drops to the ground.
Yellow specks of dust float in the clearing;
in memory, a series of synchronous spaces.
As a cotton fiber burns in an s twist
and unravels the z twist of its existence,
the mind unravels and ravels a wave of light,
persimmons ripening on leafless trees.

The String Diamond
1
An apricot blossom opens to five petals.
You step on a nail, and, even as you wince,
a man closes a mailbox, a cook sears
shredded pork in a wok, a surgeon sews
a woman up but forgets to remove a sponge.
In the waiting room, you stare at a diagram
and sense compression of a nerve where
it passes through the wrist and into the hand.
You are staring at black and white counters
on a crisscrossed board and have no idea
where to begin. A gardener trims chamisa
in a driveway; a roofer mops hot tar;
a plumber asphyxiates in a room with
a faulty gas heater; a mechanic becomes
an irrational number and spirals into himself.
And you wonder what inchoate griefs
are beginning to form? A daykeeper sets
a random handful of seeds and crystals into lots.

2
Pin a mourning cloak to a board and observe
brown in the wings spreading out to a series
of blue circles along a cream-yellow outer band.
A retired oceanographer remembers his father
acted as a double agent during the Japanese occupation,
but the Guomindang general who promised a pardon
was assassinated; his father was later sentenced
as a collaborator to life in prison, where he died.
Drinking snake blood and eating deer antler
is no guarantee the mind will deepen and glow.
You notice three of the four corners of an intersection
are marked by ginkgo, horse chestnut, cluster
of pear trees, and wonder what the significance is.
Is the motion of a red-dye droplet descending
in clear water the ineluctable motion of a life?
The melting point of ice is a point of transparency,
as is a kiss, or a leaf beginning to redden,
or below a thunderhead lines of rain vanishing in air.

3
Deltoid spurge,
red wolf,
ocelot,
green-blossom pearlymussel,
razorback sucker,
wireweed,
blunt-nosed leopard lizard,
mat-forming quillwort,
longspurred mint,
kern mallow,
Schaus swallowtail,
pygmy madtom,
relict trillium,
tan riffleshell,
humpback chub,
large-flowered skullcap,
black lace cactus,
tidewater goby,
slender-horned spineflower,
sentry milk-vetch,
tulotoma snail,
rice rat,
blowout penstemon,
rough pigtoe,
marsh sandwort,
snakeroot,
scrub plum,
bluemask darter,
crested honeycreeper,
rough-leaved loosestrife.

4
In the mind, an emotion dissolves into a hue;
there’s the violet haze when a teen drinks
a pint of paint thinner, theincarnadined
when, by accident, you draw a piece of
Xerox paper across your palm and slit
open your skin, the yellow when you hear
they have dug up a four-thousand-year-old
corpse in the Taklamakan Desert,
the scarlet when you struggle to decipher
a series of glyphs which appear to
represent sunlight dropping to earth
at equinoctial noon, there’s the azure
when the acupuncturist son of a rabbi
extols the virtues of lentils, the brown
when you hear a man iced in the Alps
for four thousand years carried dried
polypores on a string, the green when
ravens cry from the tops of swaying spruces.

5
The first leaves on an apricot, a new moon,
a woman in a wheelchair smoking in a patio,
a CAT scan of a brain: these are the beginnings
of strings. The pattern of black and white
stones never repeats. Each loss is particular:
a gold ginkgo leaf lying on the sidewalk,
the room where a girl sobs. A man returns
to China, invites an old friend to dinner,
and later hears his friend felt he missed
the moment he was asked a favor and was
humiliated; he tells others never to see
this person from America, “He’s cunning, ruthless.”
The struggle to sense a nuance of emotion
resembles a chrysalis hanging from a twig.
The upstairs bedroom filling with the aroma
of lilies becomes a breathing diamond.
Can a chrysalis pump milkweed toxins into wings?
In the mind, what never repeats? Or repeats endlessly?

6
Dropping circles of gold paper,
before he dies,
onto Piazza San Marco;
pulling a U-turn
and throwing the finger;
a giant puffball
filling the car
with the smell of almonds;
a daykeeper pronounces the day,
“Net”;
slits a wrist,
writes the characters revolt
in blood on a white T-shirt;
a dead bumblebee
in the greenhouse;
the flaring tail of a comet,
desiccated vineyard,
tsunami;
a ten-dimensional
form of go;
slicing abalone on the counter—
sea urchins
piled in a Styrofoam box;
honeydew seeds
germinating in darkness.

7
A hummingbird alights on a lilac branch
and stills the mind. A million monarchs
may die in a frost? I follow the wave
of blooming in the yard: from iris to
wild rose to dianthus to poppy to lobelia
to hollyhock. You may find a wave in
a black-headed grosbeak singing from a cottonwood
or in listening to a cricket at dusk.
I inhale the smell of your hair and see
the cloud of ink a cuttlefish releases in water.
You may find a wave in a smoked and
flattened pig’s head at a Chengdu market,
or in the diamond pulse of a butterfly.
I may find it pulling yarn out of an indigo vat
for the twentieth time, watching the yarn
turn dark, darker in air. I find it
with my hand along the curve of your waist,
sensing in slow seconds the tilt of the Milky Way.

Kaiseki
1
An aunt has developed carpal tunnel syndrome
from using a pipette. During the Cultural Revolution,
she was tortured with sleep deprivation. Some
of the connections in her memory dissolved
into gaps. “My mind has leaps now,” she says,
as she reaches for bean threads in a boiling pot.
Her son recollects people lined up to buy
slices of cancerous tripe. “If you boil it,
it’s edible,” he says. And a couple who ate
a destroying angel testified it was delicious—
they had not intended to become love suicides.
What are the points of transformation in a life?
You choose three green Qianlong coins and throw
Corners of the Mouth, with no changing lines.
You see red and green seaweed washing onto
smooth black stones along a rocky shoreline,
sense the moment when gravity overtakes light
and the cosmos stops expanding and begins to contract.

2
In the Brazos, he has never found a matsutake
under ponderosa pine, but in the dark
he whiffs it pungent white. Five votive candles
are lined along the fireplace; she has lit
a new candle even though the one burning
holds days of light. The night-blooming cereus
by the studio window is budding from rain.
In his mind, he sees the flyswatter
hanging from a nail on the lintel, a two-eyed
Daruma hanging from the rearview mirror of the car.
He hears the dipping-and-rising pitch of a siren
glide up the street and senses a shift
in starlight, the Horsehead Nebula, and, in the dark,
her eyelashes closing and opening on his skin.

3
He knew by the sound that the arrow was going to miss the target;
pins floating on water;
I saw the collapsing rafters in flames;
the dark side of the moon;
if p then q;
simplicity is to complexity
as a photon is to a hummingbird?
fire turns to what is dry;
when the Chinese woman wore a blond wig,
people grew uneasy;
an egg exploding in a microwave;
morels pushing up through burned ground;
at the cash register,
Siamese fighting fish were stacked in small glass bowls;
she lost all her hair;
digging up truffles;
what is “a quantum unit of light”?

4
Tokpela: sky: the first world; in her mind,
she has designed an exhibit exemplifying
Hopi time and space. He sees the white sash
with knots and strands hanging from the trastero.
He sees the wild rose by the gate,
red nasturtiums blooming by the kitchen door.
She is pressing the blender button and grinding
cochineal bugs into bits; she is sorting
slides of Anasazi textile fragments on a light board.
He recalls when they let loose a swarm
of ladybugs in the yard. It is light-years
since she wove a white manta on the vertical loom,
light-years since they walked out together
to the tip of Walpi and saw the San Francisco Peaks.
Goldfish swim in the pond in the back garden.
The night-blooming cereus opens five white blossoms
in a single night. He remembers looking
through a telescope at craters, and craters
inside craters on the moon. He recalls
being startled at the thought, gravity precedes light.

5
They searched and searched for a loggerhead shrike;
“I can’t believe how you make me come”—
she knew he was married
but invited him to the opera;
diving for sea urchins;
the skin of a stone;
“You asshole!”
the nuclear trigrams were identical;
the wing beats of a crow;
maggots were crawling inside the lactarius cap;
for each species of mushroom,
a particular fly;
a broad-tailed hummingbird
whirred at an orange nasturtium;
“Your time has come”;
opening the shed with a batten;
p if and only if q;
he put the flyswatter back on the nail.

6
The budding chrysanthemums in the jar have the color
of dried blood. Once, as she lit a new candle,
he asked, “What do you pray for?” and remembered
her earlobe between his teeth but received a gash
when she replied, “Money.” He sees the octagonal
mirror at a right angle to the fuse box, sees
the circular mirror nailed into the bark of the elm
at the front gate and wonders why the obsession
with feng shui. He recalls the photograph of a weaver
at a vertical loom kneeling at an unfinished
Two Grey Hills and wonders, is she weaving or unweaving?
The candlelight flickers at the bottom of the jar.
He sees back to the millisecond the cosmos was pure energy
and chooses to light a new candle in her absence.

7
I plunge enoki mushrooms into simmering broth
and dip them in wasabi, see a woman remove
a red-hot bowl from a kiln and smother it in sawdust.
I see a right-hand petroglyph with concentric
circles inside the palm, and feel I am running
a scrap of metal lath across a drying coat of cement.
I eat sea urchin roe and see an orange starfish
clinging below the swaying waterline to a rock.
I am opening my hands to a man who waves
an eagle feather over them, feel the stretch
and stretch of a ray of starlight. This
black raku bowl with a lead-and-stone glaze
has the imprint of tongs. I dip raw blowfish
into simmering sake on a brazier, see a lover
who combs her hair and is unaware she is humming.
I see a girl crunching on chips at the Laundromat,
sense the bobbing red head of a Mexican finch.
Isn’t this the most mysterious of all possible worlds?

8
A heated stone on a white bed of salt—
sleeping on a subway grate—
a thistle growing in a wash—
sap oozing out the trunk of a plum—
yellow and red roses hanging upside down under a skylight—
fish carcasses at the end of a spit—
two right hands on a brush drawing a dot then the character, water—
an ostrich egg—
a coyote trotting across the street in broad daylight—
sharpening a non-photo blue pencil—
the scar at a left wrist—
a wet sycamore leaf on the sidewalk—
lighting a kerosene lamp on a float house—
kaiseki: breast stones: a Zen meal—
setting a yarrow stalk aside to represent the infinite—

9
They threw Pushing Upward—
the pearl on a gold thread dangling at her throat—
a rice bowl with a splashed white slip—
biting the back of her neck—
as a galaxy acts as a gravitational lens and bends light—
stirring matcha to a froth with a bamboo whisk—
brushing her hair across his body—
noticing a crack
has been repaired with gold lacquer—
Comet Hyakutake’s tail flaring upward in the April sky—
orange and pink entwined bougainvilleas blooming in a pot—
“Oh god, oh my god,” she whispered and began to glow—
yellow tulips opening into daylight—
staring at a black dot on the brown iris of her right eye—
water flows to what is wet.

Apache Plume
1 The Beginning Web
Blue flax blossoming near the greenhouse
is a luminous spot, as is a point south
of the Barrancas where two rivers join.
By the cattail pond, you hear dogs
killing a raccoon. In mind, these spots
breathe and glow. In the bath I pour
water over your shoulder, notice the spot
where a wild leaf has grazed your skin.
I see the sun drop below the San Andres
Mountains, white dunes in starlight;
in the breathing chiaroscuro, I glimpse
red-winged blackbirds nesting in the cattails,
see a cow pushing at the wobbly point
in a fence. In this beginning web of light,
I feel the loops and whorls of your fingertips,
hear free-tailed bats swirling out into the dark.

2 Reductions and Enlargements
A Chippewa designer dies from pancreatic cancer
and leaves behind tracing paper, X-Acto knives,
rubber cement, non-photo blue pencils,
a circular instrument that calculates reductions
and enlargements. A child enters a house and finds
a dead man whose face has been eaten by dogs.
Who is measuring the pull of the moon in a teacup?
In a thousand years, a man may find barrels
of radioactive waste in a salt bed and be unable
to read the warnings. Sand is accumulating
at the bottom of an hourglass, and anything—
scissors, green wind chime, pencil shavings,
eraser smudge, blooming orchid under skylight—
may be a radial point into light. When a carp
flaps its tail and sends ripples across the surface
of a pond, my mind steadies into a glow. Look
at a line that goes into water, watch the wake,
see the string pulse and stretch into curved light.

3 The Names of a Bird
You find a downy woodpecker on the bedroom floor.
I am startled and listen in the snowy dark
to deer approach a house and strip yew leaves.
In pots, agapanthuses are opening umbels
of violet flowers. Neither driven by hunger
nor flowering in the moment, what drives an oologist
to distinguish finch eggs from wren or sparrow?
What drives a physicist to insist the word
sokol means falcon in Hungarian? If you know
the names of a bird in ten languages, do you know
any more about the bird? Driving past an ostrich farm,
I recollect how you folded a desert willow blossom
into a notebook; I recollect rolling down
a white dune at dusk, pulling a green jade disk
on a thread at your throat into my mouth.
I know what it is to touch the mole between your breasts.

4 The Architecture of Silence
The gate was unlocked. We drove to the road’s end; grapefruit lay on the ground
not far from a white house whose window caught a glare. December 29, four
p.m. At first we couldn’t find the trail but walked ahead and crossed a river full
of black boulders. Days earlier, we had looked down into the valley from a kukui
grove. There was speckled bark, slanting rain, horses in a field, drenching rain.
We had been walking back from the ocean where we moved from rock to rock
and saw black crabs scuttling along the tide line. We looked into the water, saw
sea cucumbers on rocks. On the way back, white lepiotas among grass and a
small white puffball. I sliced open the puffball, but it was olive-green. Deer,
crossing the road, stopped near the fence line and gazed back at us. I inhaled the
aroma of shredded ginger and saw three pairs of dragonflies overhead, their
wings catching daylight. Where is the one inside the many? Or are there many
inside one? We came to a fork in the trail and noticed an exposed root growing
across the right branch. We twisted left and glimpsed twin waterfalls; wild boar
were stunned in our headlights. In the twilight, we came to another stream with
white water rushing across black boulders and paused:
raindrops
dropping off the eaves
stop dropping

5 Hourglass
Père Lachaise: breaking bread on a green bench
under chestnut trees as rain drizzles down the leaves
and smoke rises out of the crematorium chimney—
is recollection a form of memento mori?
I see papyrus growing in a copper tub in the bedroom;
your hands rub blackthorn oil into my skin.
I close my eyes, feel the warmth of straw-flecked adobe walls—
a white chrysanthemum opens in a cup of boiling water.
Willow leaves on the skylight cast onto an ochre wall
shadows resembling herring under a float house.
Is recollection a form of epistemological inquiry?
I am cradling you as you lean back into me,
flecks of white sand in your hair and on your eyelids.
I am holding you in a white dune as the moon rises,
as white sand begins to touch the bottom of an hourglass.

6 Entelechy
Placing long-stemmed sunflowers in a vase
or staring at a map of Paris
may be a form of ripening.
In the garden, red-leaf lettuce has bolted in the heat.
The surface of water in an old whiskey barrel
twitches with mosquito larvae.
A bingo billboard on a highway
may be a momentary rippling,
but the deeper undulation is shark-womb skin.
Slicing abalone on the counter,
I catch a tidal surge at my fingertips.
By candlelight, a yellow cosmos,
koi roiling the surface of a stream into gold flecks,
your sharp wild cries.

7 Apache Plume
Climbing out of an arroyo, I reach my hand
into a small cactus and see the taro
plant in the backyard unfurl a new leaf.
A great horned owl perched on a ledge
twitches its ears when we approach along
the bottom of a ravine. I spot a hummingbird
at the hollyhock, pear blossoms swirling
on gravel near the gate. When you light
a candle, the flickering shadow on the wall
has the shape of an eagle feather.
In the morning when you do a yoga stretch,
I feel the rhythm with which you sway—
fingertip to fingertip, mouth to mouth,
the shifting course of the Pojoaque River,
white apache plume blossoming to silvery puff.
And as an astronomer catches light echoes
from a nova, when I pull spines out of my palm,
I know this instant moment which is ours.

8 Anamnesis
Wind erases our footprints on a transverse dune.
A yellow yolk of sun drops below the horizon
as a white moon rises. Claret cup cactus
blooms in white sand, while soaptree yuccas
move as a dune moves. The mind reduces a pond
to a luminous green speck and enlarges
a flecked Amanita muscaria cap into a cosmos.
Running my hand along the curve of your waist,
I wonder if knowledge is a form of anamnesis.
When I pour warm water down your spine,
a Boletus barrowsii releases spores into air.
As a stone drops into a pool and red koi
swim toward the point of impact, we set
a yarrow stalk aside and throw Duration,
glimpse a spiral of bats ascending out of a cave;
one by one they flare off into indigo air.

9 Starlight
Here skid marks on I-25 mark a head-on collision;
here I folded an origami crane;
here a man writes in grass style: huan wo he shan;
here black poplar leaves swayed on the surface of clearest water;
here a downy woodpecker drills high in the elm;
here a dog drags a horse’s leg back from the arroyo;
here Keene’s cement burned into my wrist and formed a riparian scar;
here, traveling at night through the Sonoran Desert,
everyone choked when sand swept through the open windows of the train;
here yellow and red ranunculus unfold under a chandelier;
here in the Jemez Mountains a cluster of Clitocybe dilatata;
here we spot eleven dolphins swimming between kelp beds up the coast;
here we look through binoculars at the blue ion tail of a comet in the
northwest sky;
here pelicans are gliding above a cliff;
here when I pour water down the drain, a black cricket pops up;
here the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes
was a cut peony in a glass;
here is the origin of starlight.

10

Diffraction Grating

Sipping kava out of a tea bowl,
I am descending into a cavern that inhales
and exhales once each day. I see an alula
in a tropical greenhouse, the tracks
a bleached earless lizard makes in white sand,
the tracks my fingers make on your skin.
I see a spectrum of origami cranes
strung on thread at a Kurashiki temple,
Manchurian cranes in a cage and a salt
sumo ring. Papyrus stalks arc out of an urn
near the fireplace on the bedroom floor.
Is a solar flare a form of koan?
Blue larkspur in a glass vase.
A stalactite dripping into a pool of water.
Hush: there is nothing in ten dimensions
that is not dilating the pupils of our eyes.

Six Persimmons
1
“Cabrón,” rings in his ears as he walks down
the corridor to death row. Where is the epicenter
of a Los Angeles earthquake? Hypocenter of Fat Man?
He watches a woman pour honey into a jar crammed
with psilocybin mushrooms. A few cells down,
a priest intones and oozes black truffles in olive oil.
He is about to look at the poems of a murderer,
sees a sliced five-thousand-year-old silkworm cocoon.
X: pinhole, eclipse; the, a; shadow of mosquito,
fern frond uncoiling in mist. “Dot,” says a Japanese
calligrapher who draws a dot beginning on the floor
off the page. He looks at the page, shrugs,
there is nothing there, and pictures budding chamisa
in a courtyard, yellow yarrow hanging over a bed.
In Waimea Canyon, ‘apapane, ‘i‘iwi. X: it’s
the shapes of ice in an ice floe, a light-green
glazed lotus-shaped hot-water bowl. He opens his eyes
and recalls staring into her eyes as she comes.

2
A visual anthropologist dies in a head-on collision
and leaves behind an Okinawan bow, arrows, whisk,
Bizen bowl, hammock, New Guinea coffee beans,
calligraphic scroll, “In motion there is stillness.”
Walking along the shifting course of the Pojoaque River,
I ponder the formation of sunspots, how they appear
to be floating islands, gigantic magnetic storms
on the surface of the sun, and, forming cooler regions,
become darker to the human eye. I ponder how
he slowed the very sharpening of a pencil
but sped up La Bajada behind a semi in the dark,
and, when the semi shifted into the right lane,
was sandwiched and smashed into an out-of-state
pickup driving down the wrong side of the highway.
I hold the blued seconds when—Einstein Cross—
he cursed, slammed on the brakes—the car crunched
and flew apart in a noise he could not hear into
a pungent white saguaro blossom opening for a single night.

3
Green dragonflies hover over water. In the mind,
the axis of absence and presence resembles
a lunar eclipse. Hiking a ridge trail in the Barrancas,
we notice the translucent wing feathers of
a red-tailed hawk circling overhead. Once,
inadvertently, I glanced out the bathroom window
and noticed yellow yarrow blooming in sunshine.
A man does not have to gamble his car away
and hitchhike out of Las Vegas for the mind to ripen.
Bill Isaacs slices an agaricus lengthwise, points
to the yellow base of stipe, says, “Xanthodermus.”
Although he has walked up a trail into spruce
and fir, mycelium in his hands has spread out.
Although asthma may be passed from one to another,
one mind may be a sieve, while the other may be
crystals growing up a string. Is sun to earth to moon
as mind to shiitake to knife? When one mind
passes to another, green dragonflies hover over water.

4
Is the recollecting mind an aviary? Once he pushed
through hermetically sealed revolving doors
into a humid forest where he sighted a toucan,
but where is the o‘o a‘a? A pin fits in a pocket,
but how do you put a world inside a world?
Two twins, ex-marines, stretch Okinawan bows
and aim their hips and eyes at the target;
the arrows are not yet not yet released.
As death burns a hole into a piece of paper,
a fern frond in the Alaka‘i Swamp uncoils in mist.
He glows when she puts her hand on his chest;
the sun spins faster at the equator than at the poles.
He lays six blossoming orchid branches on the floor,
stares at the shapes of flower vases on shelves
in the storeroom. It is as if all the possible shapes
of the world were waiting to come into being,
as if a new shape was about to come into being,
when, x, a calico cat scratches at the door.

5
When you stoop to examine a lichen but find
alongside, barely exposed, several gold chanterelles,
I bend to earth in my mind: observe striations
along a white cap, absence of annulus, dig,
unearth a volva. We go on in the woods
and stumble into a cluster of teeth fungi
with dark upturned scales on their caps.
Who notices in the early morning Saturn slip
behind a waning gibbous moon? This year,
a creation spiral slowly incandesces in my hand.
I slip a white elastic band off and loosen
your hair, rub my thumb in your palm. I love
when wet sunlight splashes your face, recall
grilling shrimp near a corner of the screened porch
while rain slants across the field. In the few
weeks of a year when bloodred amanitas push
out of the earth, we push into a splendor of
yellow plumeria, orange hibiscus, bird-of-paradise.

6
Pears ripen in a lacquer bowl on the butcherblock table. A red shimmer arcs across
the northwest sky as a galaxy bends the light
of a quasar. Yellow ranunculus unfold in a glass vase
while fireflies blink in a corner of the yard.
A physicist employs lasers and slows atoms
down to approach absolute zero; a calligrapher
draws the silk radical twice, then mountain,
to form “the most shady recesses in the hills.”
As the ink dries, she lights two red candles
in the bedroom, notices near the curtains
taro in the huge tin tub, and spots a curling leaf.
He hears the gasp when he first unzipped
her jeans, knows the small o is a lotus seed
slowly germinating in his mind, but the
brevity of equation makes him quiver and ache.
When they turn to each other in a wet kiss,
their fingertips glow in the skin of their days.

FROM

The Willow Wind
1972

Noah’s / Dove
The moon is black.
Had I a bird
it would fly,
beat the air into land.
To remain
or trust
the silver leaves of the sea?
What if
I say what is:
no bird, no land.
The sea tossing
its damp wet fish
on the bow,
their lungs exhaling
the sea, taking in
moon air
for the first time …

The Wood Whittler
Whales and fish
sailing
in the sky!
Old saws! Old saws!
Red flakes
falling off the wood
like leaves.
Fire?
The woodcutter
pares the skin
with a
knowing hand.
The blade—rude—
will carve
his / mind’s mastery
in the /
witless earth.

Li Po
Jarred.
The oars creaked in their locks.
Fish beneath the moon.
Cradled his pen
filled with wine.
A goddess stirred,
rocked the cradle of his boat,
let the silent fish know
a dreamer’s silver hands were at work.

Pegasus on a Pipe
He would ride the moon,
prod the slow seahorse with a cake of salt
and when it broke sweat,
urge it ease,
watch the wings sprout, remorseless.

Miracles
His lens misses her,
the leaves cast double reflections
on the glass. The one
is his shadow; as he leans up
he discovers a new perspective,
a range he never considered.
The leaves, shaggy edged,
twirl the light in their hands.
A new source; he must
pay his respects deftly.
They have his power.
He must acquaint them
with this peripheral vision—
the woman walking down the steps
is no longer his wife.

The Execution of Maximilian
Muskets triggered a white smoke,
and it fell like snow,
soft death to purple eyes.
I saw the clean glint of the man’s pants,
and knew what was coming,
hit the ground for the last time.
And the snow covered me like a corpse.
They mistook me for one
who had lain there a long time.
And they rushed on instead
to the crumpled body by the wall,
stuck their bayonets in
laughing, and jostled each other on the shoulder
like friends long unseen, now returned.

Sound Lag
His glazed lips
moved slower
than the
movement of words.
Overhead, black clouds
were poised
in the sky,
then moved on.
In the real sky
they had
no place to go.
The air cooled to zero.
I look again at myself
in the mirror.
The veins of the dark trees
outside
vibrate.
Their song is, at least,
mine, but
I am engaged elsewhere.
I extend my hand
through the glass
into the living world.

Sliding Away
Your hand rigid, curled into its final shape:
the rest of your body breathes.
The dark coals you pour on his grave
continue to breathe.
A snake slides through the
uneven grass
where it has cut a
name for
itself
by
sliding away.

Strawberries in Wooden Bowls
You carry flowers in a jug of green wine,
and the smell is that of the first fires in autumn
when the leaves are blown into their reds and grays.
The sunlight rains through the glass.
As you reach across the table
the fences outside disappear.
The fields are green with their rain
and the wind curls the stars in the cold air.
You stand now, silent, in the window of light
and the milk you pour is glazed.
The strawberries in the wooden bowls
are half-covered with curdled milk.

The Olive Grove
Up on the hill
the morning moon washed clean.
Thin dogs no longer
leap in the sunlight,
and I walk, easily, up the path.
The gatekeeper snores
in his rocking chair,
and only the wind
keeps him moving.
Turning now through the yard
I recall his eyes.
The leaves tinged
with inevitable grays.
With one hand
I pluck the olives
off the white lattice.
Their thick skins
rinsed in the moonshine.

A Singer with Eyes of Sand
A singer with eyes of sand they said—
the western wind
sweeps me home,
and I am carrying you, my desert,
in my hands.

FROM

Two Ravens
1976

The Taoist Painter
He begins with charcoal and outlines
the yellow fringes of the trees.
Then he rubs in the stumps, black
and brown, with an uneasy motion
of his thumbs. Unlike trees in the north,
he says, I have the option of season.
And he paints the leaves in the upswing
of the wind, and the swans craning their necks.
But the sunlight moving in patches
obscures and clarifies his view.
When he walks off in silence
we look at his painting and stand
astonished to see how, in chiaroscuro,
the leaves drift to their death.

Bruegel
The haystacks burned to black moss.
I tilted my head and leveled
the mound; saw three women walking
home in step, hefting hoes, and
weighted by sunlight on the blades.
Three men, of course, circled away,
heads concealed by hats, joking,
clearly drunk on harvest wine.
But then the pageant slipped off
without me; the horse loped across
the ridge, and the sickle mender
tuned his ears to the wind.

The Silver Trade
You will hammer silver into a heart
and the dogs will leap and yell.
No one will stop you though, and
before learning how the body dies,
you will smelt earrings for fuel.
Nail my spine to wood. I cannot live.
Under the open sky the wind
whips the sunlight into stone.
I thread the few stars into a crown
and throw them behind the mountain.

He Will Come to My Funeral with a White Flower
He will come to my funeral with a white flower
and spread the petals, unevenly, on my dress.
Then he will turn, walk down the aisle, and
raise his elbow to accompany his invisible bride.
Oh, though he comes with me to the market
and we buy fruit and vegetables for dinner,
he is a hermit in the mountains, watching
the water and the sunlight on the green stones.
His hands skim the rise and fall, reshaping
the ridges and making the bend a woman’s thigh.
No one can ever be part of his village, don
palm leaves and wear an inscrutable smile.
When he says goodbye, I know the water in his eyes
has been falling for centuries.

Two Ravens
discussed the weather?
or, perhaps, inquired about spring?
Two ravens, lovers, discussed my death
as I watched.

The Waking
Blue plums in the pewter bowl—
may they wake wet in the earth the wren singing
and cull the sweetest violet.
But the children sleep secure in blankets.
I climbed by spinning arms and legs against walls,
awakened waist-deep in the water-well;
wrestled the black bull before an audience,
beat the wind without wings,
paced the steeds along pampas grass …
In the morning chill
I breathe moths in my cupped hands.

North to Taos
The aspen twig
or leaf will snap: bells in the wind,
and the hills, obsidian,
as the stars wheeling halt;
twig and bark curling in the fire
kindle clusters of sparks.
Steer north, then, to Taos, where
the river, running deeper, cuts a gorge,
and at midnight the moon
waxes; minnows scatter
at your step,
the boat is moored to sky.

Three a.m., in Winter
When I went to Zuni,
my mind was a singing arrow; the black desert
was shining, and I flew,
a green peyote bird, in the wind’s eye …
It’s three a.m., and
the road to Zuni is buried in snow.
Thinking of you, I taste green wine,
I touch sparks, I fly.

Lament
Let me pick
olives in the moonlight.
Let me ride
a pale green horse.
Let me taste the autumn fires.
Or else,
let me die in a war.

No Hieroglyphics
No hieroglyphics but the bird singing in the throat of the tree.
When I walk home, my hair bristling, hear you read
by the hearth in slow fire. No calendars
to twist days into years or
months back to seconds.
We live in fear.
But open our
lives to the sea.
Walk on water with the
moon. Stars, stars! No one to
teach. That the long day slips into night.
As the mind withers in the tree. But only to sail
a boat without wind. Down the endless river. The sand running out.

Wang Wei
At my window
the rain raves, raves about dying,
and does not
hear in the bamboo
a zither, which, plucked,
inebriates the birds
and brings closer to the heart
the moon.

Morning Shutters
We extend arms
infinitely long
into the sunrise.
Then the shutters close,
and we begin
the slow, painful
step of learning
shadows in the dark.
My hand goes to your thigh.
The hills
high above us
shine in the heat.
Now, the whites of your eyes
are filled
with the lost years.

Lupine
I planted lupine and nasturtiums
in the dark April dirt. Who heard the passing
cars or trucks? I was held
by your face, eclipsed, in partial light.
I sip hibiscus tea, and am at peace
in the purple dusk.
“Kwan, kwan,” cries a bird, distant,
in the pines.

Do Not Speak Keresan to a Mescalero Apache
Do not speak
Keresan to a Mescalero Apache,
but cultivate
private languages;
a cottonwood
as it disintegrates into gold,
or a house
nailed into the earth:
the dirt road
into that reservation
is unmarked.

Dazzled
1982

Viewing Photographs of China
Viewing photographs of China,
we visit a pearl farm, factories, and
watch a woman stare at us ten
minutes after a surgical operation
with acupuncture.
The mind
is a golden eagle. An arctic tern
is flying in the desert: and
the desert incarnadined, the sun
incarnadined.
The photograph
of a poster of Chang Ch’ing is
two removes from reality. Lin Piao,
Liu Shao-chi, and Chang Ch’ing
are either dead or disgraced.
The poster shows her in a loose
dress drinking a martini; the
issues of the Cultural Revolution
are confounded.
And, in perusing
the photographs in the mind’s eye,
we discern bamboo, factories,
pearls; and consider African wars,
the Russian Revolution, the
Tierra Amarilla Courthouse Raid.
And instead of insisting that
the world have an essence, we
juxtapose, as in a collage,
facts, ideas, images:
the arctic
tern, the pearl farm, considerations
of the two World Wars, Peruvian
horses, executions, concentration

camps; and find, as in a sapphire,
a clear light, a clear emerging
view of the world.

The Moon Is a Diamond
Flavio Gonzales, seventy-two, made jackhammer
heads during the War; and tells me
about digging ditches in the Depression
for a dollar a day. We are busy plastering
the portal, and stop for a moment
in the April sun. His wife, sick for
years, died last January and left a
legacy—a $5,000 hospital bill.
I see the house he built at fifteen:
the ristras of red chile hanging
in the October sun. He sings “Paloma
Blanca” as he works, then stops,
turns: “I saw the TV photos of the
landing on the moon. But it’s all
lies. The government just went out
in the desert and found a crater.
Believe me, I know, I know the moon
is a diamond.”

Listening to a Broken Radio
1
The night is
a black diamond.
I get up at 5:30 to drive to Jemez Pueblo,
and pass the sign at the bank
at 6:04, temperature 37.
And brood: a canyon wren, awake, in its nest in the black pines,
and in the snow.
2
America likes
the TV news that shows you the
great winning catch in a football game.
I turn left
at the Kiska store.
And think of the peripatetic woman
who lives with all her possessions in a shopping cart,
who lives on Sixth Avenue at Eighth Street,
and who prizes and listens to her
broken radio.

Moenkopi
Your father had gangrene and
had his right leg amputated, and now has diabetes
and lives in a house overlooking the
uranium mines.
The wife of the clown at Moenkopi
smashes in the windows of a car with an ax,
and threatens to shoot her husband
for running around with another woman.
A child with broken bones
is in the oxygen tent for the second time;
and the parents are concerned he
has not yet learned how to walk.
People mention these incidents
as if they were points on a chart depicting
uranium disintegration. It is all
accepted, all disclaimed.
We fly a kite over the electrical
lines as the streetlights go on:
the night is silver, and the night
desert is a sea. We walk back
to find your grandfather working in the dark,
putting in a post to protect peaches,
watering tomatoes, corn, beans—making them grow
out of sand, barren sand.

Written the Day I Was to Begin a Residency at the Penitentiary of
New Mexico
Inmates put an acetylene torch to another inmate’s face,
seared out his eyes.
Others were tortured, lacerated with barbed wire,
knifed, clobbered with lead pipes.
I remember going to the state pen to see a performance of Beckett.
I see two inmates play Hamm and Clov.
Clov lifts weights all day,
his biceps are huge.
And Hamm, in a wheelchair with a bloody handkerchief,
dark purple shades,
is wheeled around and around
in a circle in the gym:
as guards watch, talk on walkie-talkies, slam doors,
as a television crew tapes segments.
I do not know whether these two inmates died or lived.
But they are now the parts they played:
locked in a scenario of bondage and desperate need,
needing each other to define themselves.
I tell myself to be open to all experience,
to take what is ugly and find something nourishing in it:
as penicillin may be found in green moldy bread,
or as, in the morning, a child of the earth
floating in a porcelain jar full of rainwater
is something astonishing.
But after the SWAT team has moved in and taken over
the flotsam and jetsam of a prison,
and the inmates are lined up and handcuffed to a chain-link fence,
I figure their chances, without people caring,

are “an ice cube’s chance in hell.”

Gold Leaf
Is the sun a miner, a thief, a gambler,
an assassin? We think the world
is a gold leaf spinning down in silence
to clear water? The deer watch us in the blue leaves.
The sun shines in the June river. We flit
from joy to grief to joy as a passing
shadow passes? And we who think the sun a miner,
a thief, a gambler, an assassin,
find the world in a gold leaf spinning down
in silence to clear water.

Dazzled
Reality
is like a contemporary string
quartet:
the first violinist puts on a crow’s head.
And the cellist
soliloquizes on a white lotus
in the rain.
The violist discusses
love, rage, and terror.
And the second violinist reports on the latest coup
in Afghanistan.
A gazelle leaps
in October light.
I am dazzled.

Magnetized
Jimson weed
has nothing to do
with the blueprint of a house,
or a white macaw.
But an iron bar,
magnetized, has a north and south
pole that attract.
Demagnetized, it has nothing
at either end.
The mind magnetizes
everything it touches.
A knife in a dog
has nothing to do
with the carburetor of an engine:
to all appearances,
to all appearances.

Knife at the Jugular
Sentenced to two consecutive
life terms, Robert Francis may be
paroled in twenty years. He may
walk out of jail at forty,
a free man. But the world travels
at the speed of light.
He will be a miner staggering
out of a collapsed mine. People
will have assumed he died
years ago. And, at forty,
the world will feel like jamais
vu. The barbed wire and
sunlight will be his only
friends. Perhaps, he will discern
freedom as a rat swimming in
a ditch, or pleasure as the
smell of green tea. And the full
moon, crazed with the voices
of dead men, will make him
relive again and again the double
ax murder. And will he know
himself? The Inuit have
thirty words describing varieties
of ice. I see a man in
twenty years walking into the
sunlight. He will know a thousand

words for varieties of pain.
His first act may be a knife
at the jugular, and his ensuing acts
may be terrors of the earth.

Pouilly-Fuissé
1
Foxes and pheasants adorn
the store window. A woman sells
dried anise, dried purple
mallow, and caviar inside.
But we don’t live on purple mallow,
or Pouilly-Fuissé. I think
of the Africans I met
going to pick grapes at
$1.40 an hour.

2
A man trying to sell roses
throws water, and, instead of sprinkling,
drenches the roses. And
an old woman carrying leeks
wears shoes at least three sizes too large,
and walks almost crippled.
But, then, they make a world of
leeks and roses.

Alba
South light
wakes us. I turn
to your touch,
your long hair, and
slow kisses.
A wren sings in
the clear light.
Red cassia
blossoms in your
hands. And all
day the wren sings
in the day’s
branches.

The Opal
Nailing up chicken wire on the frame house,
or using a chalk line, or checking a level at a glance
gets to be easy.
We install double-pane windows
pressurized with argon between the panes
for elevations over 4500’.
And use pick and shovel
to dig for the footing for the annex. Lay cinder blocks,
and check levels. Pour the cement floor, and
use wood float and steel trowel to finish the surface
as it sets.
Nailing into rough, dense, knotted
two-by-twelves, or using a chalk line to mark the locations
of the fire blocks, or checking the level of a
stained eight-by-ten window header gets to be
easier.
In nailing up chicken wire, we learn
how to cut for the canal, pull the wire up over the
firewall, make cuts for the corners, tuck it
around back, and nail two-head nails into the stud.
And when the footing is slightly uneven and we are
laying a first row of cinder blocks, find that a
small pebble under a corner often levels the top
to the row.
And, starting on rock lath, the various
stages of a house—cutting vigas, cleaning aspens for
latillas, installing oak doors, or plastering the
adobe wall—are facets of a cut opal.

Pentimento
In sepia, I draw a face and hands,
a river, a hawk. When I read your letter,
and feel the silences, the slow
changes in perspective, in feeling,
I make a fresco—fading even as it’s painted.
It’s pentimento: knowing the original
sepia lines, and the changes:
the left hand in darkness, a face, effaced,
in fading light, and the right hand
pointing to a Giotto-blue river, a blue hawk,
in a moment of grace.

The Weather Shifts
Unemployed, I recollect setting a plumb
line for the doorjambs to a house,
recollect nailing a rebar through two corbels
locked in a 60° angle into a post; and
smell unpicked cherries, fragrant,
in the dark rich earth. It is a pellucid
night in January: and the mind has its
own shifts in weather: a feel for light
from a star, or for a woman’s voice,
a recognition of the world’s greed,
of a death march on the Philippines, or
of being shot by an arrow dipped in curare.
Drinking tequila, I watch the moon
rise slowly over the black hills; a bird
sings, somewhere, out in the junipers.

Juniper Fires
Juniper
fires burn in the crisp night.
I am inebriated
on juniper smoke. And as my mind clears,
I see a white crane standing, one-legged, in the snow.
And see clearly the
rocks, and shaggy pines, the winter moon, and
creek.

Frost
Notice each windowpane has a different
swirling pattern of frost etched on the glass.
And notice how slowly the sun melts
the glaze. It is indelible: a fossil of a fern,
or a coelacanth, or a derelict who
rummages in his pockets and pulls out a few
apple cores. Notice the peculiar
angle of light in the slow shift of sunrise.
Where is the whir of the helicopter?
The search for escaped convicts in the city?
Be amazed at the shine and the wet.
Simply to live is a joy.

Black Lightning
A blind girl
stares at me,
then types out ten lines
in braille.
The air has a scent
of sandalwood and
arsenic; a night-blooming cereus
blooms on a dark path.
I look at the
short and long flow
of the lines:
and guess at garlic,
the sun, a silver desert rain,
and palms.
Or is it simply
about hands, a river of light,
the ear of a snail,
or rags?
And, stunned, I feel
the nerves of my hand flashing
in the dark, feel
the world as black
lightning.

Piranhas
piranhas
in a wine-dark river.
a radio station on antarctica sends messages
to outer space,
listens to quasars pulsing in the spiral nebula of andromeda.
a banker goes for a drive
in a red mercedes,
smokes black russian sobranie from england.
the sun
rides a red appaloosa to the gold mountains in the west;
then, incognito, shows up in questa:
wearing shades, carrying a geiger counter, and
prospecting for plutonium.
the history of the world
is in a museum in albania;
the price of admission is one dollar.
a kgb agent
has located trotsky’s corpse,
and, under the guise of a gardener, enters his house
and breaks open his casket, and
shatters his cranium with an ice pick.
lepers
in a cathedral are staring up at the rose window.
o window of light:
we are falling
into a bottomless lake full of piranhas—
the piranhas, luminous, opalescent,
in the black water.
o paris, venice, moscow, buenos aires, saigon, kuala lumpur:
we are sailing up the wine-dark
river.

Impressions of the New Mexico Legislature
The lieutenant governor sits in the center
behind an oak desk. Below him, the reader of bills
reads at thirty miles per hour to pass or defeat
a bill depending on his cue.
One senator
talks on the phone to Miss Española; another, a thug,
opens his briefcase, takes out a bottle
of whiskey, a shot glass, and begins drinking.
Bills from various committees are meanwhile passed
without comment. Finally, a bill is introduced,
and the lieutenant governor asks that the
content be explained.
A senator rises, speaks
into a microphone: “Bill 345-B is one of my most
important pieces of legislation. It commemorates
J.D. Arguello and H.R. Lucero who died last year
while firefighting. It also specifically commends
Victor de la Cruz who is now crippled.”
Another
senator rises, introduces a bill to change the
composition of the podiatrists’ board. Two members
of the public are to be on it. The lieutenant
governor asks what the requirements for the public
are. One senator quips, “Athlete’s foot,” is
out of order, and is silenced.
The senators quickly
agree that one member of the public is sufficient.
The lieutenant governor says, “All those in favor
may say ‘aye,’ those opposed may raise their feet.”

Cedar Fires
Cedar fires burn in my heart.
You speak of emeralds, cocaine, and henna.
You are slow rain fragrant in the eucalyptus,
in the silver leaves.
At night we look out at the Pleiades.
I think of the antelope carved in the rock
at Puyé: carved, perhaps, seven hundred
years ago. And, now, we touch the Pleiades.
For two weeks, seven hundred years,
cedar fires burn in my heart.

The Murmur
The doctor flicks on a light,
puts up the X-rays of our three-day-old child,
and diagnoses a shunt between
left and right ventricle,
claims an erratic electrocardiogram test
confirms his findings. Your child,
he says, may live three to six weeks unless
surgery is performed.
Two days later, a pediatric cardiologist
looks at the same X-rays and EKG test,
pronounces them normal,
and listens with disinterest to the murmur.
I think, then, of the birth:
mother and child in a cesarean,
the rush of blood in the umbilical cord
is a river pulsating with light.
And, as water rippling in a pond
ricochets off rocks, the network of
feelings between father and mother
and child is an ever-shifting web.
It is nothing on your doctor’s X-ray
scanner; but, like minerals lit up
under a black light, it is an iridescent
red and green and indigo.

The Corona
Knife-edge
days and shimmering nights.
Our child watches the shifting sunlight and leaves.
The world shimmers, shimmers.
Smoke goes up the flue,
and spins, unravels in the wind.
Something in me unravels after long thought.
And my mind flares:
as if the sun and moon lock in an eclipse,
and the sun’s corona flares out.
It is a fire
out of gasoline and rags
that makes us take nothing for granted.
And it is love, spontaneous,
flaring,
that makes us feel
like a cougar approaching a doe in labor,
makes us pause and move on.

Olive Night
The Jemez
Indians mention the Los Ojos bar.
I think of the Swiss
Army practicing maneuvers in the Alps.
The world is a hit-and-run, an armed robbery, and a fight.
I think of the evening star.
And ripen, as an olive ripens, in a cool
summer night.

The Cloud Chamber
A neighbor
rejects chemotherapy and the hospital;
and, instead, writes
a farewell letter to all her friends
before she dies.
I look at a wasp nest;
and, in the maze of hexagons,
find a few
white eggs, translucent, revealing formed wasps,
but wasps never to be born.
A pi-meson in a cloud chamber
exists for a thousandth of a second,
but the circular track
it leaves on a film
is immortal.

Empty Words
He describes eagle feathers with his hands.
He signs the rustle of pine needles on a mountain
path in sunlight, the taste of green water,
herding sheep in a canyon, the bones of a horse bleached
in sunlight, purple thistles growing in red dirt,
locoweed in bloom.
My mind is like a tumbleweed rolling
in the wind, smashing against the windshields of cars,
but rolling, rolling until nothing is left.
I sit in the sunlight, eyes closed:
empty mind, empty hands. I am a
great horned owl hunting in a night with no moon.
And this Indian, deaf-mute, is like a Serbian
in a twenty-four-hour truck stop,
is a yellow sandhill crane lost in Albuquerque.
I see the red blooms of a nasturtium battered
in a hailstorm. I see the bleached white bones of a horse
at the bottom of a canyon. And I see his hands,
empty hands, and words, empty words.

Tsankawi
The men hiked on a loop trail
past the humpbacked flute player and
a creation spiral petroglyph,
then up a ladder to the top of the mesa
and met the women there.
A flock of wild geese wheeled
in shifting formation over the mesa,
then flew south climbing higher and higher
and disappearing in clear sunlight.
The ceremony was simple: a blessing
of rings by “water which knows no
boundaries,” and then a sprinkling of baskets
with blue cornmeal.
I write of this a week later
and think of Marie, who, at San Ildefonso,
opened the door to her house to us.
And we were deeply moved.
I hear these lines from the wedding:
“In our country, wind blows, willows live,
you live, I live, we live.”

Antares
You point to
Antares.
The wind rustles the cottonwood leaves.
And the intermittent
rain sounds like a fiftystring zither. A red lotus blossoms
in the air. And, touching you,
I am like light from
Antares. It has taken me lightyears to arrive.

The Owl
The path was purple in the dusk.
I saw an owl, perched,
on a branch.
And when the owl stirred, a fine dust
fell from its wings. I was
silent then. And felt
the owl quaver. And at dawn, waking,
the path was green in the
May light.

The Cornucopia
Grapes grow up a difficult and
sloped terrain. A soft line of poplars
shimmers in the disappearing light.
At midnight, the poor move
into the train stations of Italy,
spread out blankets for the children,
and pretend to the police they have tickets
and are waiting for a train.
The statue of Bacchus is a contrast
with his right hand holding a shallow but
wine-brimming cup. His left hand
reaches easily into the cornucopia
where grapes ripen and burst open.
It is a vivid dream: to wake
from the statue’s grace and life force
to the suffering in the streets.
But the truth is the cornucopia
is open to all who are alive,
who look and feel the world in
its pristine beauty—as a dragonfly
hovering in the sunlight over clear
water; and who feel the world
as a luminous world—as green plankton
drifting at night in the sea.

The Chance
The blue-black mountains are etched
with ice. I drive south in fading light.
The lights of my car set out before
me, and disappear before my very eyes.
And as I approach thirty, the distances
are shorter than I guess? The mind
travels at the speed of light. But for
how many people are the passions
ironwood, ironwood that hardens and hardens?
Take the ex-musician, insurance salesman,
who sells himself a policy on his own life;
or the magician who has himself locked
in a chest and thrown into the sea,
only to discover he is caught in his own chains.
I want a passion that grows and grows.
To feel, think, act, and be defined
by your actions, thoughts, feelings.
As in the bones of a hand in an X-ray,
I want the clear white light to work
against the fuzzy blurred edges of the darkness:
even if the darkness precedes and follows
us, we have a chance, briefly, to shine.

The Network
In 1861, George Hew sailed in a rowboat
from the Pearl River, China, across
the Pacific Ocean to San Francisco.
He sailed alone. The photograph of him
in a museum disappeared. But, in the mind,
he is intense, vivid, alive. What is
this fact but another fact in a world
of facts, another truth in a vast network
of truths? It is a red maple leaf
flaming out at the end of its life,
revealing an incredibly rich and complex
network of branching veins. We live
in such a network: the world is opaque,
translucent, or, suddenly, lucid,
vibrant. The air is alive and hums
then. Speech is too slow to the mind.
And the mind’s speech is so quick it breaks
the sound barrier and shatters glass.

Fauve
Caw Caw, Caw Caw Caw.
To comprehend a crow
you must have a crow’s mind.
To be the night rain,
silver, on black leaves,
you must live in the
shine and wet. Some people
drift in their lives:
green-gold plankton,
phosphorescent, in the sea.
Others slash: a knife
at a yellow window shade
tears open the light.
But to live digging deep
is to feel the blood
in you rage as rivers,
is to feel love and hatred
as fibers of a rope,
is to catch the scent
of a wolf, and turn wild.

Fern, Coal, Diamond
The intense pressure of the earth
makes coal out of ferns, diamonds out of coal.
The intense pressure of the earth
is within us, and makes coal
and diamond desires.
For instance, we are a river
flowing and flowing out to sea,
an oak fire flaring and flaring in a night
with no wind, or, protean,
a river, a fire, an oak, a hawk, a wind.
And at first light,
I mark the stages of our growth:
mark fern, coal, diamond,
mark a pressure transforming
even broken nails and broken glass into
clear molten light.

The Axis
I hear on the radio that Anastasio Somoza
has fled Managua, is already in Florida,
and about to disappear on a world cruise.
Investigators in this country are meanwhile
analyzing the volcanic eruptions on Io,
or are studying the erratic respiratory
pattern of a sea horse to find the origin
of life. The fact is, we know so little,
but are so quick to interpret, to fit facts
to our schemata. For instance, the final
collapse of the Nicaraguan dictatorship
makes me wonder if the process of change
is a dialectic. Or is our belief in a
pattern what sustains it? Is the recent
history a clear pattern: a dictatorship
followed by a popular revolt, followed by
a renewed dictatorship exercising greater
repression, ended by a violent revolution?
I want to speak of opposites that depend
on and define each other: as in a
conversation, you feel silence in speech,
or speech in silence. Or, as in a
counterpoint when two melodies overlap and
resonate, you feel the sea in the desert,

or feel that the body and mind are
inseparable. Then you wonder if day and
night are indeed opposites. You knock the
gyroscope off the axis of its spinning,
so that one orientation in the world vanishes,
and the others appear infinite.

River River
1987

The Leaves of a Dream Are the Leaves of an Onion
1
Red oak leaves rustle in the wind.
Inside a dream, you dream the leaves
scattered on dirt, and feel it
as an instance of the chance configuration
to your life. All night you feel
red horses galloping in your blood,
hear a piercing siren, and are in love
with the inexplicable. You walk
to your car, find the hazard lights
blinking: find a rust-brown knife, a trout,
a smashed violin in your hands.
And then you wake, inside the dream,
to find tangerines ripening in the silence.
You peel the leaves of the dream
as you would peel the leaves off an onion.
The layers of the dream have no core,
no essence. You find a tattoo of
a red scorpion on your body.
You simply laugh, shiver in the frost,
and step back into the world.

2
A Galápagos turtle has nothing to do
with the world of the neutrino.
The ecology of the Galápagos Islands
has nothing to do with a pair of scissors.
The cactus by the window has nothing to do
with the invention of the wheel.
The invention of the telescope
has nothing to do with a red jaguar.
No. The invention of the scissors
has everything to do with the invention of the telescope.
A map of the world has everything to do
with the cactus by the window.
The world of the quark has everything to do
with a jaguar circling in the night.
The man who sacrifices himself and throws a Molotov
cocktail at a tank has everything to do
with a sunflower that bends to the light.

3
Open a window and touch the sun,
or feel the wet maple leaves flicker in the rain.
Watch a blue crab scuttle in clear water,
or find a starfish in the dirt.
Describe the color green to the colorblind,
or build a house out of pain.
The world is more than you surmise.
Take the pines, green-black, slashed by light,
etched by wind, on the island
across the riptide body of water.
Describe the thousand iridescent needles
to a blind albino Tarahumara.
In a bubble chamber, in a magnetic field,
an electron spirals and spirals in to the center,
but the world is more than such a dance:
a spiraling in to the point of origin,
a spiraling out in the form of a
wet leaf, a blue crab, or a green house.

4
The heat ripples ripple the cactus.
Crushed green glass in a parking lot
or a pile of rhinoceros bones
gives off heat, though you might not notice it.
The heat of a star can be measured
under a spectrometer, but not
the heat of the mind, or the heat of Angkor Wat.
And the rubble of Angkor Wat
gives off heat; so do apricot blossoms
in the night, green fish, black bamboo,
or a fisherman fishing in the snow.
And an angstrom of shift turns the pleasure
into pain. The ice that rips the fingerprint
off your hand gives off heat;
and so does each moment of existence.
A red red leaf, disintegrating in the dirt,
burns with the heat of an acetylene flame.
And the heat rippling off
the tin roof of the adobe house
is simply the heat you see.

5
What is the secret to a Guarneri violin?
Wool dipped in an indigo bath turns bluer
when it oxidizes in the air. Marat is
changed in the minds of the living.
A shot of tequila is related to Antarctica
shrinking. A crow in a bar or red snapper on ice
is related to the twelve-tone method
of composition. And what does the tuning of timpani
have to do with the smell of your hair?
To feel, at thirty, you have come this far—
to see a bell over a door as a bell
over a door, to feel the care and precision
of this violin is no mistake, nor is the
sincerity and shudder of passion by which you live.

6
Crush an apple, crush a possibility.
No single method can describe the world;
therein is the pleasure
of chaos, of leaps in the mind.
A man slumped over a desk in an attorney’s office
is a parrotfish caught in a seaweed mass.
A man who turns to the conversation in a bar
is a bluefish hooked on a cigarette.
Is the desire and collapse of desire in an unemployed carpenter
the instinct of salmon to leap upstream?
The smell of eucalyptus can be incorporated
into a theory of aggression.
The pattern of interference in a hologram
replicates the apple, knife, horsetails on the table,
but misses the sense of chaos, distorts
in its singular view. Then
touch, shine, dance, sing, be, becoming, be.

The Aphrodisiac
“Power is my aphrodisiac.”
Power enables him to
connect a candlelit dinner
to the landing on the moon.
He sees a plot in the acid
content of American soil,
malice in the configuration
of palm-leaf shadows.
He is obsessed with
the appearance of democracy
in a terrorized nation.
If the price of oil
is an owl claw, a nuclear
reactor is a rattlesnake
fang. He has no use
for the song of an oriole,
bright yellow wings.
He refuses to consider
a woman in a wheelchair
touching the shadow of
a sparrow, a campesino
dreaming of spring.
He revels in the instant
before a grenade explodes.

The Ansel Adams Card
You left a trail of bad checks in forty-six states.
When you were finally arrested on a check for $36.10,
you no longer knew how many aliases you had burned
out. You simply knew you had waited too long at the checkout
counter. The police found five sets of current driver’s
licenses in your car, titles to ten other cars,
two diamond rings, and $2500 cash.
You started by running off with an ex-convict,
forging your mother’s signature at the post office,
collecting her mail, and cashing a check.
You bought a car and groceries with the check:
took off, then, to Chicago. The scenario
was to open a checking account for fifty dollars,
withdraw forty at the end of the day, and use the blank
checks to shop with. Again and again: how many
times until you saw your signature at the checkout counter?
Once, you thought quickly, pulled out a license
with a different name, ran out to your husband
waiting in the car.
And he was scot-free: a tattoo of white lightning
on his arms. Now he is a used-car salesman in Kansas City—
forging car titles and duplicating sales?
I see you as a green leaf in sunshine
after a rain. If you are paroled in July,
what will happen? Surely you won’t forget life in prison,
jumping bail, on the run, the rape, the humiliation,
the arrest? But you are walking on glass.
You are now married to an inmate in Texarkana.
I give you this Ansel Adams card with one aspen, leafy,
against a forest, one aspen bright in the sun.

New Wave
He listens to a punk rock group,
Dead on Arrival,
on his miniature Sony headphones and cassette recorder.
With the volume turned up,
the noise of the world
can’t touch him.
No one’s going to tell him what to do:
whether to drive
his car up an arroyo,
or wire the house with explosives.
He’s given us the rap
on New Wave:
how it’s noise and is disgusting—
though we suspect
whatever he dislikes is New Wave.
His mind is a Geiger counter bombarded with radiation:
the clusters of
click click click click, click click
a daily dose of carcinogens
without which
it would be impossible to live.
He watches us listen to a Jewish astrologer
reading a horoscope,
and glances out the window.
Now he flips
the cassette and turns up the volume.
I can see the headlines now:
Juvenile Detonates House,
pleads temporary insanity
due to the effects of listening to Agent Orange.

Every Where and Every When
1
Catch a moth in the Amazon; pin it under glass.
See the green-swirling magenta-flecked wings
miming a fierce face. And dead—watch it fly.
Throw a piece of juniper into a fire.
Search out the Odeon in Zurich to find Lenin or Klee.
No one has a doctrine of recollection to
bring back knowledge of what was, is?
The Odeon café is not the place to look
for Lenin’s fingerprint. The piece of burning juniper
has the sound of the bones of your hands
breaking. And the moth at the window, magenta-flecked,
green-swirling, is every where and every when.

2
Everything is supposed to fit: mortise and tenon,
arteries and veins, hammer, anvil, stirrup in the ear,
but it does not fit. Someone was executed
today. Tomorrow friends of the executed will execute
the executers. And this despair is the intensifying
fever and chill, in shortening intervals,
of a malaria patient. Evil is not a variety of
potato found in the Andes. The smell of a gardenia
is not scissors and sponge in the hands of
an inept surgeon. Everything is supposed to fit:
but wander through Cuzco and the orientation of
streets and plazas is too Spanish. Throw
hibiscus on a corpse. Take an aerial view;
see the city built in the shape of a jaguar’s head.

3
I pick a few mushrooms in the hills,
but do not know the lethal from the edible.
I cannot distinguish red wood dyed
with cochineal or lac, but know that
cochineal with alum, tin, salt, and lime juice
makes a rosé, a red, a burgundy.
Is it true an antimatter particle
never travels as slowly as the speed of light,
and, colliding with matter, explodes?
The mind shifts as the world shifts.
I look out the window, watch Antares glow.
The world shifts as the mind shifts;
or this belief, at least, increases
the pleasure of it all—the smell of espresso
in the street, picking blueberries,
white-glazed, blue-black,
sieved gold from a river, this moment
when we spin and shine.

The Rehearsal
Xylophone, triangle, marimba, soprano, violin—
the musicians use stopwatches, map out
in sound the convergence of three rivers at a farm,
but it sounds like the jungle at midnight.
Caught in a blizzard and surrounded by wolves
circling closer and closer, you might
remember the smell of huisache on a warm spring night.
You might remember three deer startled and stopped
at the edge of a road in a black canyon.
A child wants to act crazy, acts crazy,
is thereby sane. If you ache with longing
or are terrified: ache, be terrified, be hysterical,
walk into a redwood forest and listen:
hear a pine cone drop into a pool of water.
And what is your life then? In the time
it takes to make a fist or open your hand,
the musicians have stopped. But a life only stops
when what you want is no longer possible.

Kayaking at Night on Tomales Bay
Kayak on the black water,
and feel a gold feather float in the air.
Pick up a red shard in the dirt,
and feel someone light a
candle and sing.
A man may die crashing into a redwood house,
or die as someone pries
open an oyster.
A kayaker may hit a rock, and
drown at the bottom of a waterfall.
Is the world of the dead
a world of memory? Or a world of ten dimensions?
Calculate the number of
configurations to a tangram?
Compute the digits of pi?
Kayak on the black water,
and feel the moonlight glisten the pines.
Drift, drift, and drifting:
the lights of cars on the road take a
thousand years to arrive.

Mistaking Water Hemlock for Parsley
Mistaking water hemlock for parsley,
I die two hours
later in the hospital;
or I turn the shish kebab on the hibachi,
and reel, crash
to the floor, die of a ruptured aorta.
Then you place an ear of blue corn
in my left hand,
tie a single turkey feather
around my right ankle.
I hear the coffin nailed shut,
hear green singing finches in the silence.
And in the silence I float on water,
feel an equilibrium,
feel the gravitational pull of the universe
slow everything down
and begin to draw everything back
to the center.
Then a star is a taste of olives,
a sun the shine on the black wings of ravens.
I wake, and joy and love, and feel
each passion makes me
protean, wiser, stronger.
I want to live and live and live and live.

Evil Grigri
Evil grigri:
taste acid in the word sybaritic.
Feel deer antlers polished in rain and sun;
taste green almonds,
the polar icecap of Mars melting at the tip of your tongue.
Is it possible to wake
dressed in a tuxedo smoking a cigarette staring at a firing squad?
A man is cursed
when he remembers he cannot remember his dream;
taste sugar in the word voluptuous;
feel a macaw feather brush across your closed eyelids.
See the dead laugh at the pile of shoes at Dachau.
See as a man with one eye
the dead alive and singing,
walking down the equinoctial axis of the midnight street.
Now feel how the ocarina of your body
waits for pleasure to blow and make an emerald sound in the air;
make an apotropaic prayer
that the day’s evil become the day’s wild thyme:
say guava-passionflower-hibiscus salt,
say sun-sea wave,
say wind-star, venom-night,
say mango-river, eucalyptus-scented fang.

The Pulse
A woman in a psychiatric ward
is hysterical; she has to get a letter
to God by tomorrow or
the world will end. Which root
of a chiasma grows and grows?
Which dies? An analysis of
the visual cortex of the brain
confines your worldview even as you
try to enlarge it? I walk
down an arroyo lined with old tires
and broken glass, feel a pulse,
a rhythm in silence, a slow
blooming of leaves. I know
it is unlikely, but feel I could
find the bones of a whale
as easily as a tire iron.
I shut my eyes, green water flowing
in the acequia never returns.

The Diamond Point
Use the diamond point of grief:
incise a clear hibiscus in the windowpane.
A child picks apples in autumn light;
five minutes resemble a day?
But an aquamarine instant dropped
into water makes an entire pool shine.
Do you feel the forsythia about to explode?
The flow in a dead seal washed to shore?
I see the sloping street
to your house, bird-of-paradise in bloom:
silence when you lift the receiver off the phone,
shaft of spring light when you say, “Hello.”
I see you smile in a flower dress—
intense pain, intense joy—waving goodbye,
goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye
1947, 1960, 1967, 1972, 1981.
A firework explodes in a purple chrysanthemum:
ooh and aah and then, then
use the diamond point of grief:
incise a clear hibiscus in the windowpane.

Metastasis
Noon summer solstice light shines on a creation spiral petroglyph.
We stare up at a pictograph of a left hand,
a new moon, a supernova of 1054.
I dream of touching a rattlesnake,
want to find a fossil
of a green ginkgo leaf here in Chaco Wash.
I have not forgotten the death of Josephine Miles,
but forget grief,
that fried tripe;
I want to hike the thousand summer trails,
become sun, moon.
A rattlesnake slides into a coil:
if grief, grief, if pain, pain, if joy, joy.
In a night rain
all the emotions of a day become pure and shining.
I think, I no longer think:
metastasis: noon summer solstice light: turpentine, rags:
the new leaves of a peach delicate
and of light-green hue.

Horse Face
A man in prison is called horse face, but does nothing
when everyone in the tailor shop has sharp cold scissors;
he remembers the insult but laughs it off. Even as he
laughs, a Cattaraugus Indian welding a steel girder
turns at a yell which coincides with the laugh and slips
to his death. I open a beer, a car approaches a garage.
The door opens, a light comes on, inside rakes gleam;
a child with dysentery washes his hands in cow piss.
I find a trail of sawdust, walk in a dead killer’s
hardened old shoes, and feel how difficult it is to
sense the entire danger of a moment: a horse gives birth
to a foal, power goes out in the city, a dancer
stops in the dark and listening for the noise that was scored
in the performance hears only sudden panicked yells.

The Negative
A man hauling coal in the street is stilled forever.
Inside a temple, instead of light
a slow shutter lets the darkness in.
I see a rat turn a corner running from a man with a chair trying to smash it,
see people sleeping at midnight in a Wuhan street on bamboo beds,
a dead pig floating, bloated, on water.
I see a photograph of a son smiling who two years ago fell off a cliff
and his photograph is in each room of the apartment.
I meet a woman who had smallpox as a child, was abandoned by her mother
but who lived, now has two daughters, a son, a son-in-law;
they live in three rooms and watch a color television.
I see a man in blue work clothes whose father was a peasant
who joined the Communist party early but by the time of the Cultural
Revolution
had risen in rank and become a target of the Red Guards.
I see a woman who tried to kill herself with an acupunctureneedle
but instead hit a vital point and cured her chronic asthma.
A Chinese poet argues that the fundamental difference between East and West
is that in the East an individual does not believe himself
in control of his fate but yields to it.
As a negative reverses light and dark
these words are prose accounts of personal tragedy becoming metaphor,
an emulsion of silver salts sensitive to light,
laughter in the underground bomb shelter converted into a movie theater,

lovers in the Summer Palace park.

Wasabi
Quinine is to cinchona
as pain is to nerves? No,
as the depletion of ozone is to a city? No,
like a DNA double helix,
the purity of intention
is linked to the botched attempt.
The zing of a circular saw
is linked in time to
the smell of splintery charred plywood dust.
And the scent of red ginger
to a field guide is as
a blueprint to walking out of sunlight
into a cool stone Lama temple?
The mind at chess,
the mind at go: here
the purpose is not to prevail,
but to taste—as ikebana
is to spring cherry blossoms—wasabi.

The Solderer
I watch a man soldering positive and negative speaker
wires to a plug inhale tin-lead alloy smoke.
He does not worry about a shift in the solar wind.
He does not worry about carcinogens.
Are his mind and memory as precise as his hands?
To suffer and suffer is not a necessary and sufficient
condition for revelation; open up a box of
Balinese flowers, roots, bark: the history of civilization
is to know you do not know what to do.
In my mind I practice rubbing a bronze spouting bowl
with both hands. The bowl begins to hum
and a standing wave makes the water splash up into my face.
I am stunned to hear a man who wore a T-shirt
with a silk-screened tie shot himself and is in critical
condition in the hospital. No one wants to
die suspended in air like gold dust flecked by sunlight.

Renga
We hunger for the iridescent shine of an abalone shell
Stare at a newspaper, see the latest terrors
Want the sound of hail on a tin roof to reverberate forever
Want to feel the echo as we wash a rag, pick broccoli, sneeze
The sound does not make us forget the terrors
But the terrors are lived then as water in a stream
We hold, as in a tea ceremony, a bowl with both hands
Turn it a quarter-turn, and another, and another
And when we see the green stillness
See the abalone shine, abalone shine

Ten Thousand to One
The Phoenicians guarded a recipe that required
ten thousand murex shells to make
an ounce of Tyrian purple.
Scan the surface of Aldebaran with a radio wave;
grind lapis lazuli
into ultramarine.
Search the summer sky for an Anasazi turkey constellation;
see algae under an electron microscope
resemble a Magellanic Cloud.
A chemist tried to convert benzene into quinine,
but blundered into a violet
aniline dye instead.
Have you ever seen maggots feed on a dead rat?
Listen to a red-tailed hawk glide
over the hushed spruce and
pines in a canyon. Feel a drop of water roll
down a pine needle, and glisten,
hanging, at the tip.

To a Composer
Red chair, blue chair, white chair, big chair, chair.
No, this is not the taste
of unripe persimmons,
nor standing on a New York street in December inhaling shish kebab smoke.
The dissonant sounds played on a piano
become macaws perched on cages.
A green Amazon parrot with yellow-tipped wings
lands on your shoulder.
The background hum
of loudspeakers becomes a humid environment.
You may open this door and walk into the aviary
when you least expect to,
startled walk on redwood planks over huge-leafed tropical plants
as a red-billed toucan flaps by.
Dirty utensils are piled in the sink,
coffee grounds clog the drain.
So what if the plumber pouring sulfuric acid
gives you a look
when you open the refrigerator
and pull out a just solidified chocolate turkey in a pan?
This is not 5:14 sharpening a pencil
but inhaling deeply and feeling the stream of air poured out through a
shakuhachi
become a style of living.

Shooting Star
1
In a concussion,
the mind severs the pain:
you don’t remember flying off a motorcycle,
and landing face-first
in a cholla.
But a woman stabbed in her apartment,
by a prowler searching for
money and drugs,
will never forget her startled shriek
die in her throat,
blood soaking into the floor.
The quotidian violence of the world
is like a full moon rising over the Ortiz Mountains;
its pull is everywhere.
But let me live a life of violent surprise
and startled joy. I want to
thrust a purple iris into your hand,
give you a sudden embrace.
I want to live as Wang Hsi-chih lived
writing characters in gold ink on black silk—
not to frame on a wall,
but to live the splendor now.

2
Deprived of sleep, she hallucinated
and, believing she had sold the genetic
research on carp, signed a confession.
Picking psilocybin mushrooms in the mountains
of Veracruz, I hear tin cowbells
in the slow rain, see men wasted on pulque
sitting under palm trees. Is it
so hard to see things as they truly are:
a route marked in red ink on a map,
the shadows of apricot leaves thrown
in wind and sun on a wall? It is
easy to imagine a desert full of agaves
and golden barrel cactus, red earth, a red sun.
But to truly live one must see things
as they are, as they might become:
a wrench is not a fingerprint
on a stolen car, nor baling wire
the undertow of the ocean. I may hallucinate,
but see the men in drenched clothes
as men who saw and saw and refuse to see.

3
Think of being a judge or architect
or trombonist, and do not worry whether
thinking so makes it so. I overhear
two men talking in another room;
I cannot transcribe the conversation
word for word, but know if they are
vexed or depressed, joyful or nostalgic.
An elm leaf floats on a pond.
Look, a child wants to be a cardiologist
then a cartographer, but wanting so
does not make it so. It is not
a question of copying out the Heart Sutra
in your own blood on an alabaster wall.
It is not a question of grief or joy.
But as a fetus grows and grows,
as the autumn moon ripens the grapes,
greed and cruelty and hunger for power
ripen us, enable us to grieve, act,
laugh, shriek, see, see it all as
the water on which the elm leaf floats.

4
Write out the memories of your life
in red-gold disappearing ink, so that it all
dies, no lives. Each word you speak
dies, no lives. Is it all
at once in the mind? I once stepped
on a sea urchin, used a needle to dig out
the purple spines; blood soaked my hands.
But one spine was left, and I carried
it a thousand miles. I saw then
the olive leaves die on the branch,
saw dogs tear flesh off a sheep’s corpse.
To live at all is to grieve;
but, once, to have it all at once
is to see a shooting star: shooting star
shooting star.

The Silence
We walk through a yellow-ochre adobe house:
the windows are smeared with grease,
the doors are missing. Rain leaks
through the ceilings of all the rooms,
and the ribs of saguaro thrown across vigas
are dark, wet, and smell. The view outside
of red-faded and turquoise-faded adobes
could be Chihuahua, but it isn’t.
I stop and look through an open doorway,
see wet newspapers are rotting in mud
in the small center patio.
I suddenly see red bougainvillea blooming
against a fresh whitewashed wall,
smell yellow wisteria through an open
window on a warm summer night;
but, no, a shot of cortisone is no cure
for a detaching retina. I might just
as well see a smashed dog in the street,
a boojum tree pushing its way up
through asphalt. And as we turn
and arrive where we began, I note
the construction of the house is
simply room after room forming a square.
We step outside, and the silence is as
water is, taking the shape of the container.

Keokea
Black wattles along the edge of the clearing
below the house: a few koa plants are fenced in.
An old horse nibbles grass near the loquat tree.
Sunburned from hiking twelve miles into a volcano,
I do not know what I am looking at. Koa?
I want to walk into an empty charred house
and taste a jacaranda blossom.
Here Sun Yat-sen pounded his fist, sold opium,
dreamed the Chinese Revolution until blood broke
inside his brain? Marvin Miura is running
for political office; he wants aquaculture
for Maui, a ti leaf wrapped around a black river
stone, and he may get it. But one needs
to walk into a charred house where the sensuous
images of the world can be transformed. Otherwise
we can sit up all night on the redwood decking,
argue greed and corruption, the price of sugarcane,
how many pearls Imelda Marcos owns.

Early Autumn
I almost squashed a tarantula on the road.
And once when I found
earthstars growing under pines
almost sliced one open
but stopped.
The Mayans keyed their lives to the motion of Venus
but timing is human not Hegelian.
A revolutionary never waits
for cities to arrive
at appropriate orthodox Marxist conditions
to act.
A man used a chain saw
to cut yellow cedar,
but when he finished
discovered a minus tide had beached his skiff.
I’ve lived 12,680 days
and dreamed gold plankton flashing in my hands.
It flashes now
as I watch
red dragonflies vanish over water.
A blue tarantula crossed Highway 285.

Nothing Can Heal the Severed Nerves of a Hand?
Nothing can heal the severed nerves of a hand?
No one can stop feeling the touch of things
as the nerves die? A wasp lands on a yellow
but still green-veined leaf floating on water—
two dead flies drift aside. An old man
draws a llama on roller skates, remembers
arguing cases in court, now argues in a wheelchair
with whoever arrives. The nurses hate him,
but forget a life lived without mallet and chisel
is lived without scars. Then think how long
it takes the body to heal, the mind to shine.
An acupuncturist pushes a needle into your ear:
you incandesce. Yes. Yes, more, all, no, less, none.
Prune the branches of a pear at midnight;
taste a pine needle on a branch without touching it;
feel a seed germinate in the dark, sending
down roots, sending up leaves, ah!

Splash, Flow
The unerring tragedy of our lives is to sail
a papyrus sailboat across the Atlantic Ocean,
discover corn fossils in China: splash, flow.
When the bones of a platypus are found at Third Mesa,
the Koyemsi will laugh. Watch a papyrus sailboat
slowly sink into the Mediterranean;
feel how grief, like a mordant, quietly attaches
pain to your nerves. Now splash, flow:
taste the sunrise shining inside your hands,
be jalapeño, wine, salt, gold, fire;
rejoice as your child finds a Malodorous Lepiota
under myrtle, smell the sea at night
as you hold the woman you love in your arms.

The Moment of Creation
A painter indicates the time of day
in a still life: afternoon light slants on a knife,
lemons, green wine bottle with some red wine.
We always leave something unfinished?
We want x and having x want y and having y want z?
I try to sense the moment of creation
in the shine on a sliced lemon. I want to
connect throwing gravel on mud to being hungry.
“Eat,” a man from Afghanistan said
and pointed to old rotting apples in the opened car trunk.
I see a line of men dancing a cloud dance;
two women dance intricate lightning steps
at either end. My mistakes and failures
pulse in me even as moments of joy,
but I want the bright moments to resonate out
like a gamelan gong. I want to make
the intricate tessellated moments of our lives
a floor of jade, obsidian, turquoise, ebony, lapis.

Forget Fez
Algol, Mizar:
I wanted to become pure like the Arabic
names of stars,
but perhaps I have erred.
At sunrise
the song of an ordinary robin startles me.
I want to say vireo,
but it is a robin.
In bed I turn and breathe
with your breath,
remember four days ago opening my hands
to a man who blessed me
and others with an eagle feather.
Betelgeuse, Deneb:
moonshine on a clear summer night,
but the splendor
is to taste smoke in your hair.
Forget Fez.

Shuttle
She is making stuffing for the turkey;
a few pistachio shells are on the kitchen table.
He looks out the window at the thermometer,
but sees a winter melon with a white glaze
in a New York Chinatown store at night.
Large sea bass swim in a tank by the window;
there are delicate blue crabs in a can
climbing and climbing on each other to get out.
She is thinking of a tapestry of red horses
running across a Southwestern landscape
with blue mesas in the distance. A shuttle goes
back and forth, back and forth through
the different sheds. He is talking to a man
who photographs empty parks in New York,
sees the branches of a black magnolia in early December.
She is washing out yarn so it will pack
and cover the warp; perhaps the tension
isn’t right; the texture of Churro fleece
makes her hands tingle; a pot of walnuts
boils on the stove. He turns on the radio,
and listening to Nigerian music
feels the rumble of a subway under the floor,
feels the warmth of his hands
as he watches the snow fall and fall.

Throwing Salt on a Path
I watch you throw salt on the path,
and see abalone divers point to the sun,
discuss the waves, then throw their
gear back into the car. I watch you
collect large flakes of salt off rocks,
smell sliced ginger and fresh red
shrimp smoking over a fire. Ah,
the light of a star never stops, but travels
at the expanding edge of the universe.
A Swiss gold watch ticks and ticks;
but when you cannot hear it tick anymore,
it turns transparent in your hand.
You see the clear gold wheels
with sharp minute teeth catching each
other and making each spin.
The salt now clears a path in the snow,
expands the edges of the universe.

Edna Bay
One day the men pulled a house off float logs
up on land with a five-ton winch and a system of pulleys,
while a woman with a broken tooth chewed aspirin
and watched. A man was cutting down a red cedar
with a chain saw when it kicked back in his face,
cut his chin and hand to bone. A neighbor called Ketchikan
through a marine operator and chartered a plane
out before dark. Life on Kosciusko Island
is run by the weather and tides. Is the rain today
from the southeast or southwest? If southeast,
the men go into the rain forest cursing:
it will be hard to dig out pilings for a house.
I see how these fishermen hate seiners and humpies,
want to spend days and days trolling at twenty-four fathoms.
I watch a great blue heron knife herring at low tide,
see a bald eagle circle and circle the shoreline.
One night with the full moon and a wind
on my face, I went across the bay in a skiff
looking at the rippling black water.
Days I will wake startled dreaming of bear,
see sheets of thin ice floating out in the bay.

Black Java Pepper
Despair, anger, grief:
as a seiner indiscriminately hauls
humpies, jellyfish, kelp,
we must—farouche,
recalcitrant—conversely
angle for sockeye.
Our civilization has no genetic code
to make wasps return
each spring to build a nest
by the water heater
in the shed. We must—igneous,
metamorphic—despite
such plans as to push Mt. Fuji into the ocean
to provide more land—
grind cracked black
Java pepper into our speech
so that—limestone into marble,
granite into gneiss—
we become through our griefs—
rain forest islands—song.

The Halibut
Dipping spruce branches into the calm water
to collect herring eggs
is an azure unthinking moment.
A fisherman never forgets the violet hue of December stars.
Does time make memory or memory make time polychromatic?
Squawk.
In a split second one hears a Steller’s jay, raven,
car tires on gravel, chain saw, fly, wind chime.
This constellation of polychromatic sounds
becomes a crimson moment
that, fugitive-colored, will fade.
But one never forgets lighting kerosene lamps before noon.
In July when one has twenty hours of light
each second is fuchsia dyed.
One might be pouring Clorox down a hose to flush out an octopus
when one feels the moment explode,
when a fisherman using power crank and long line
looks into the water and sees
rising a two-hundred-pound halibut with bulging eyes.

Standing on an Alder Bridge over a Creek
At low tide, midnight, with a flashlight,
we walk along the shore stumbling
on rocks, slightly drunk, step
through a creek where arctic water pours in
over my boots; nothing to do but
go on. We come to a tidal pool,
stop, see the exposed colonies of blue-black
mussels, go up to a trail, come
to an alder bridge; stop:
let the mature mind consider danger,
guess the architecture of a Persian house
in a dream contains the sockeye
an osprey hungers for. If so,
then emerald if: no, despair?
Like the camouflage of snowy plover eggs
in sand and bright sunshine,
we stand on an alder bridge over a creek,
are the April starlight and laugh.

Here
Here a snail on a wet leaf shivers and dreams of spring.
Here a green iris in December.
Here the topaz light of the sky.
Here one stops hearing a twig break and listens for deer.
Here the art of the ventriloquist.
Here the obsession of a kleptomaniac to steal red pushpins.
Here the art of the alibi.
Here one walks into an abandoned farmhouse and hears a tarantella.
Here one dreamed a bear claw and died.
Here a humpback whale leaped out of the ocean.
Here the outboard motor stopped but a man made it to this island with one oar.
Here the actor forgot his lines and wept.
Here the art of prayer.
Here marbles, buttons, thimbles, dice, pins, stamps, beads.
Here one becomes terrified.
Here one wants to see as a god sees and becomes clear amber.
Here one is clear pine.

Parallax
“Kwakwha.”
“Askwali.”
The shift in Hopi when a man or woman says “thank you”
becomes a form of parallax.
A man travels
from Mindanao to Kyushu and says his inner geography
is enlarged by each new place.
Is it?
Might he not grow more by staring for twenty-four hours
at a single pine needle?
I watch a woman tip an ashtray and empty
a few ashes into her mouth,
but ah, I want
other soliloquies.
I want equivalents to Chu-ko Liang sending his fire ships
downstream into Ts’ao Ts’ao’s fleet.
It does not mean
a geneticist must quit
and devote his life to the preservation of rhinoceros,
but it might mean
watching a thousand snow geese drift on water
as the sky darkens minute by minute.
“Kwakwha,”
“Askwali,”
whenever, wherever.

The Day Can Become a Zen Garden of Raked Sand
The day can become a Zen garden of raked sand
or a yellow tanager singing on a branch;
feel the terrors and pleasures of the morning:
in Tianjin all the foreigners are sent to a movie
and they must guess at what the authorities
do not wish them to see; dream a rainy landscape:
the Jemez Mountains breaking up in mist and jagged light
into a series of smaller but dazzling ranges;
to distinguish the smell of calendula from delphinium
is of no apparent consequence, but guess that
crucial moments in history involve an unobtrusive
point flaring into a startling revelation;
now be alive to the flowering chives by the window;
feel the potato plant in the whiskey barrel soak up sun;
feel this riparian light,
this flow where no word no water is.

The Unnameable River
1
Is it in the anthracite face of a coal miner,
crystallized in the veins and lungs of a steel
worker, pulverized in the grimy hands of a railroad engineer?
Is it in a child naming a star, coconuts washing
ashore, dormant in a volcano along the Rio Grande?
You can travel the four thousand miles of the Nile
to its source and never find it.
You can climb the five highest peaks of the Himalayas
and never recognize it.
You can gaze through the largest telescope
and never see it.
But it’s in the capillaries of your lungs.
It’s in the space as you slice open a lemon.
It’s in a corpse burning on the Ganges,
in rain splashing on banana leaves.
Perhaps you have to know you are about to die
to hunger for it. Perhaps you have to go
alone into the jungle armed with a spear
to truly see it. Perhaps you have to
have pneumonia to sense its crush.
But it’s also in the scissor hands of a clock.
It’s in the precessing motion of a top
when a torque makes the axis of rotation describe a cone:
and the cone spinning on a point gathers
past, present, future.

2
In a crude theory of perception, the apple you
see is supposed to be a copy of the actual apple,
but who can step out of his body to compare the two?
Who can step out of his life and feel
the Milky Way flow out of his hands?
An unpicked apple dies on a branch;
that is all we know of it.
It turns black and hard, a corpse on the Ganges.
Then go ahead and map out three thousand miles of the Yangtze;
walk each inch, feel its surge and
flow as you feel the surge and flow in your own body.
And the spinning cone of a precessing top
is a form of existence that gathers and spins death and life into one.
It is in the duration of words, but beyond words—
river river river, river river.
The coal miner may not know he has it.
The steel worker may not know he has it.
The railroad engineer may not know he has it.
But it is there. It is in the smell
of an avocado blossom, and in the true passion of a kiss.

Archipelago
1995

Streamers
1
As an archaeologist unearths a mask with opercular teeth
and abalone eyes, someone throws a broken fan and extension cords
into a dumpster. A point of coincidence exists in the mind
resembling the tension between a denotation and its stretch
of definition: aurora: a luminous phenomenon consisting
of streamers or arches of light appearing in the upper atmosphere
of a planet’s polar regions, caused by the emission of light
from atoms excited by electrons accelerated along the planet’s
magnetic field lines. The mind’s magnetic field lines.
When the red shimmering in the huge dome of sky stops,
a violet flare is already arcing up and across, while a man
foraging a dumpster in Cleveland finds some celery and charred fat.
Hunger, angst: the blue shimmer of emotion, water speeding
through a canyon; to see only to know: to wake finding
a lug nut, ticket stub, string, personal card, ink smear, $2.76.

2
A Kwakiutl wooden dish with a double-headed wolf
is missing from a museum collection. And as
the director checks to see if it was deaccessioned,
a man sitting on a stool under bright lights
shouts: a pachinko ball dropped vertiginously
but struck a chiming ring and ricocheted to the left.
We had no sense that a peony was opening,
that a thousand white buds of a Kyoto camellia
had opened at dusk and had closed at dawn.
When the man steps out of the pachinko parlor,
he will find himself vertiginously dropping
in starless space. When he discovers
that his daughter was cooking over smoking oil
and shrieked in a fatal asthma attack,
he will walk the bright streets in an implosion of grief,
his mind will become an imploding star,
he will know he is searching among bright gold threads
for a black pattern in the weave.

3
Set a string loop into a figure of two diamonds,
four diamonds, one diamond:
as a woman tightens her hand into a fist
and rubs it in a circular motion over her heart,
a bewildered man considering the semantics of set
decides no through-line exists:
to sink the head of a nail below the surface,
to fix as a distinguishing imprint, sign, or appearance,
to incite, put on a fine edge by grinding,
to adjust, adorn, put in motion, make unyielding,
to bend slightly the tooth points of a saw
alternately in opposite directions.
As the woman using her index finger makes
spiral after spiral from her aorta up over her head,
see the possibilities for transcendence:
you have to die and die in your mind
before you can begin to see the empty spaces
the configuration of string defines.

4
A restorer examines the pieces of a tin chandelier,
and notices the breaks in the arms are along
old solder lines, and that cheap epoxy was used.
He will have to scrape off the epoxy, scrub some flux,
heat up the chandelier and use a proper solder.
A pair of rough-legged hawks are circling over a pasture;
one hawk cuts off the rabbit’s path of retreat
while the other swoops with sharp angle and curve of wings.
Cirrus, cirrostratus, cirrocumulus, altostratus,
altocumulus, stratocumulus, nimbostratus,
cumulus, cumulonimbus, stratus: is there no end?
Memories stored in the body begin to glow.
A woman seals basil in brown bags and hangs them
from the ceiling. A dead sturgeon washes to shore.
The sun is at the horizon, but another sun
is rippling in water. It’s not that the angle
of reflection equals the angle of incidence,
but there’s exultation, pleasure, distress, death, love.

5
The world resembles a cuttlefish changing colors
and shimmering. An apprentice archer has
stretched the bowstring properly, but does not know
he will miss the target because he is not aiming in the hips.
He will learn to hit the target without aiming
when he has died in his mind. I am not scared of death,
though I am appalled at how obsession with security
yields a pin-pushing, pencil-shaving existence.
You can descend to the swimming level of sharks,
be a giant kelp growing from the ocean bottom up
to the surface light, but the critical moment
is to die feeling the infinite stillness of the passions,
to revel in the touch of hips, hair, lips, hands,
feel the collapse of space in December light.
When I know I am no longer trying to know the spectral lines
of the earth, I can point to a cuttlefish and say,
“Here it is sepia,” already it is deep-brown,
and exult, “Here it is deep-brown,” already it is white.

6
Red koi swim toward us, and black
carp are rising out of the depths of the pond,
but our sustenance is a laugh, a grief,
a walk at night in the snow,
seeing the pure gold of a flickering candle—
a moment at dusk when we see
that deer have been staring at us,
we did not see them edge out of the brush,
a moment when someone turns on a light
and turns a window into a mirror,
a moment when a child asks,
“When will it be tomorrow?”
To say “A bell cannot be red and violet
at the same place and time because
of the logical structure of color” is true
but is a dot that must enlarge into
a zero: a void, enso, red shimmer,
breath, endless beginning, pure body, pure mind.

The Silk Road
1
The blood in your arteries is contaminated with sugar.
You may hate the adrenal reduction of the mind to
the mind of a dog, but sic, run may be forms of sugar.
You may whet for the smell of rain on a clear summer night.
You may whet for the sugar in red maple leaves.
You may whet for the blue needle of a compass to point
north, and when it points north insist you wanted it
to point north-northwest. No, yes. In a dream
you catch a white turtle in a net and a voice says,
“Kill it, divine with it, and you shall have good luck,”
but discard dream structure for a deeper asymmetry.
You thirst in your mind for an insulin, death:
death in the yellow saguaro flower opening at midnight,
death in a canyon wren’s song at sunrise,
death in red carp swimming in a clear pool of water,
death in an April moonrise. Now the figure-of-eight knot,
overhand knot, thief knot, loop knot, bowline knot,
slide knot, slipknot, sheepshank is pulled tighter and tighter.

2
You may stare out of a south window for hours
and feel the April sunlight dissolve the shifting leaves,
and you may dream sunlight opening a red camellia.
You may eat monkey brains and bear paws,
but, out of disordered passions and a disordered mind,
can you construct yellow doors that open in silence into summer?
You may repeat mistake after mistake so that you
will the mistakes into an accelerating spiral of despair.
A turtle pushes onto the sand of Bikini Island,
and, disoriented by radiation, pushes farther and farther
inland to die; but do not confuse the bones
of a cow bleached in the sun with disordered desire.
You may dream sunlight shining into a cool mountain forest
and wake up inhaling the smell of Douglas fir.
You may dream sea turtles swimming in black water
but wake sunstruck walking in shifting dunes of white sand.
Who can say here, now is metempsychosic delusion?
Can you set out for Turfan today and arrive yesterday at dusk?

3
A man in a hospital is waiting for a heart transplant.
He may fish at night under the stars with a cool salt wind;
he may soar out over the black shining waters of a bay.
He may want to die with sunlight shining on his face;
he may want to die in a tsunami, but his yes and his no
are a void. He may die as a gray squirrel cracks open an acorn;
he may die as a green terrapin slips into a stream.
As a diabetic shivers and sweats, shivers and sweats,
he feels the moonlight shining on the high tide waters of the bay.
He feels the drone of traffic slip into silence, and then
the trivial, the inconsequential stings him, stings him.
As a child, he said to his father, “That man is weird;
why does he wear a pillow under his pants?” And his father laughed,
“He’s fat, so fat.” Then, “The Chinese word for onion
is cong, so a green onion is xiao cong, small onion, yes?”
“Yes.” “Then a large white onion must be da cong, large
onion, yes?” “No, a large white onion is called yang cong.”
“Yang cong?” “Yes.” “Which yang?” “The yang that means ocean.” “Shit.”

4
The, a, this, the, tangerine, splash, hardly:
these threads of sound may be spun in s-spin into fiber:
lighted buoy, whistling buoy, spar buoy, bell buoy, buoy.
Hear the sounds of apricots dropping from branches to the earth;
feel the red vibration of wings before you see a hummingbird.
A man may travel from Mindanao to Macao to avoid
staring into himself; he may search at night in a helicopter
for the shimmer of a fire opal dropped into water;
he may inhale starlight as if it were a pungent yellow
flower opening slowly in the still August night.
To be still: watch a dog listen to sounds you cannot hear,
feel the pull of moonrise on the feathers of an owl.
There are apricots beginning to drop from branches to the earth;
there are apricots not yet beginning to drop from branches;
there are apricots not yet not yet beginning to drop.

5
This sand was black and silver shining in the megalight.
Now the radiation is in my hands and in your face.
You may dream red petals on a mountain path in rain;
I may watch the shimmer of light in the yellowing leaves.
Yes and no, spring and autumn have no power without the mind
that wills them into magnetic north, magnetic south.
A merchant from Xi’an brought ceremonial caps to Kuqa,
but the Kuqa people shaved their heads and tattooed their bodies.
To seal a dime in a red envelope and send it to
an insurance salesman is to send anthurium to a cannibal.
The taste of unripe persimmons, and pale moonlight shining
on the black hills appear to have no use: who
would have dreamed they would become, shibui, an aesthetic?
To argue that you must know the characteristic
that makes all birds birds before you can identify
a bird—and here you must discard antinomies—
postpones auk to that indeterminate time in the fallout
of the future when you shall have knowledge of the form Death.

6
Various proofs for the existence of God
try to predicate existence, but being
is unlike yellow, sour, pungent. That a branch
of the linden has yellow and dropping
leaves hardly enables us to infer that
water flowing through the underground karez
into Turfan is about to stop. If
the passions are the music of empty holes,
hear the blue and gold sounds of angst.
As I stared out the south window, I
saw the leaves of the linden green with no hint
of yellow. No, as I stared out the south
window, I wanted to see the yellowing leaves,
but instead saw, reflected in the glass
back through the space of the room
and out another window, salted skates
hanging on a wire to dry. So what I saw
reflected deflected my intention as now I say now.

Oolong
1
Tea leaves wilted in sunlight are shaken
and bruised so that the edges redden
and veins turn transparent. A man at a counter
eats boiled silk worms and coughs;
a woman stops speaking and stares
at the constellation Perseus. Once,
a merchant smashed a black raku bowl
when it failed to please a tea master,
but, glued back together, the black shards
had the texture of mulberry leaves.
You pass someone bowing talking on the telephone,
and the shock is an incandescent quark
leaving a spiraling track in the mind:
you sense how, in a field guide, it is impossible
to know the growth arc of a mushroom,
but stumble upon shelves of oysters
growing out of dead aspens and
see how nothing in this world is yet yours.

2
True or false:
termites release methane and add to the greenhouse effect;
the skin of a blowfish is lethal;
crosses along roads in Mexico mark vehicular deaths;
the earth is flat;
oysters at full moon contain hepatitis;
no one has ever seen a neutrino;
butterflies dream;
the fins of a blowfish are always edible;
oolong means black dragon, but oo means crow and long means dragon;
he loved the curves of her body;
the sun revolves around the earth;
caffeine stimulates the central nervous system;
light is a wave;
the mind is composed of brightest bright and darkest dark;
context is crucial;
pfennigs, xu, qindarka, centimes, stotinki, qursh are coins;
the raw liver of a tiger blowfish
caught at winter solstice is a delicacy;

I have a knife inscribed with the names of forty-eight fish.

3
You sift curtains of red light
shimmering in the November sky,
sift the mind of a roofer mopping hot tar.
Walking down a hallway, you stop
and sift the brains in a glass bowl,
sift the tag dangling from the wrist of a corpse,
sift the folded wings of a sparrow.
The prevailing notions of the season
are green-stained lactarius prevailing
in the mountains for three days and an hour.
You have to reject ideas of disjunction
and collage, reject advice, praise.
Then you might look at a Song dynasty map
of Hangzhou and see the configuration
of ion channels in the brain. You might look
at an aboriginal sand painting and see
a cosmology of grief. You might look
at the swaying motion of a branch
and feel what it is to be a
burned and shriveled leaf clinging to death.

4
I stare into a black bowl and smell
whisked green tea, see a flap of tails
and orange koi surging in a stream.
Sunlight is dropping down through tallest pines;
I stop on a bridge, and water
passes underneath and through me.
As a potter has a premonition of death
when he avoids using a red glaze on a square dish,
we come to know the form and pressure of an emotion
when it’s gone: a soliloquy of despair
ends as a rope burn in the hands,
and pleasure flares into a gold chrysanthemum.
Is the spinning spinless when nothing is yours?
The mind slows to a green-flecked swirl;
I touch contours of the black shards.
Before sunrise, a man is cutting all
the morning glories blooming in the garden
and places one in a jar in a tearoom.

5
They smuggled his corpse into the city in a pile of rotting abalone;
“Very famous”: they all nodded;
he knew the daphne was a forbidden flower;
“Twerp,” a restaurant inspector muttered
and placed a C in the window;
they slurped noodles and read comic books;
he spits off the subway platform;
the slightest noise so disturbed him he had a soundproof room built:
white walls, white floor;
she kept feeling a snail on her neck;
for tea ceremony,
he cut three gentians and threw them into an Acoma pot;
she buried the placenta in the cornfield;
a hunter discovers a honey mushroom larger than a blue whale;
what opens and closes, closes and opens?
she took his breath away;
he dips his brush
and writes the character flower incorporating the character mind;
a flayed elephant skin;
she stir-fries tea leaves in a wok.

6
Red poppies are blooming along a wall;
I look at green and underlying blue paint
peeling off a bench: you rummage in a shed
and find a spindle, notice the oil of
hands has accumulated on the shaft.
In the rippling shadows, the shimmer of water.
I see yellow irises in a vase on the kitchen table
and smell lightning; commuters at the World
Trade Center may descend escalators to subways:
it is always 5:05; Su-wei brought him
five thousand yellow pills and said if
he swallowed twelve each day it would
restore his hair, but is this a form of
sipping sake steeped in a jar full of vipers?
Footprints underwater in a rice paddy
and on the water’s surface, clouds;
Altair and Vega spin in longing:
the sun dips below the horizon in a watery gold.

7
The mycelium of a honey mushroom
glows in the dark. What does a yellow
Man On Horseback know of winter and spring?
A farmer pushes his fist into clay
and forms a bowl. The world will continue
as long as two aborigines
clack boomerangs and chant?
A woman has the watery shine
of a sapphire and becomes yellow lightning.
She has a dream that resembles a geode:
if we could open it we might
recover the hue of the first world.
The light through a pressed octopus cup
has a rippling texture resembling
a cool undulating shadow over skin.
In the dark, the precession
and nutation of an emotion is a star:
Sirius, Arcturus, Capella, Procyon, Aldebaran:
shadows of mosquitoes are moving
along a rice-paper screen.

In Your Honor
In your honor, a man presents a sea bass
tied to a black-lacquered dish by green-spun seaweed.
“Ah” is heard throughout the room:
you are unsure what is about to happen.
You might look through a telescope at the full
bright moon against deep black space,
see from the Bay of Dew to the Sea of Nectar,
but this beauty of naming is a subterfuge.
What are the thoughts of hunters driving
home on a Sunday afternoon empty-handed?
Their conception of honor may coincide
with your conception of cruelty? The slant
of light as sun declines is a knife
separating will and act into infinitely thin
and lucid slices. You look at the sea bass’s eye,
clear and luminous. The gills appear to move
ever so slightly. The sea bass smells
of dream, but this is no dream. “Ah,
such delicacy” is heard throughout the room,
and the sea bass suddenly flaps. It
bleeds and flaps, bleeds and flaps as
the host slices slice after slice of glistening sashimi.

The Flower Path
Down to the north end of this veranda, behind the view
of 1,001 gold-leafed statues of Kuan-yin looking east,
Wasa Daihachiro, in twenty-four hours in 1686, shot
13,054 arrows of which 8,133 were bull’s-eyes. Today
no one can pull the two-hundred-pound laminated bamboo bow
to send a single arrow with a low trajectory the length
of the thirty-three bays. As you walk on the veranda,
you see a tree full of white bags tied over peaches,
hear the sound of bells at a fish auction,
note the stares of men sitting on tiers under lights;
you are careful not to raise your hand as you examine
a two-hundred-pound tuna smoking just unpacked from dry ice;
at lunch you put a shrimp in your mouth and feel it twitch;
you enter a house and are dazed as your eyes adjust to
a hundred blind Darumas in the room;
you must learn to see a pond in the shape of the character mind,
walk through a garden and see it from your ankles;
a family living behind a flower-arrangement shop
presents the store as a face to the street;
the eldest daughter winces when the eighty-year-old parents
get out wedding pictures of the second daughter;
at night the belching sounds of frogs;
in the morning you look in rice paddies and find only tadpoles;
you are walking down into a gorge along the river,
turn to find stone-piled-on-stone offerings along the path
and on rocks in midstream; in the depths of the cave,
a gold mirror with candles burning;
deer running at dusk in a dry moat;
irises blooming and about to bloom;
you are walking across Moon-Crossing Bridge in slashing rain,
meet a Rinzai monk with a fax machine
who likes to crank up a Victrola with a gold horn;
you see the red-ochre upper walls of a teahouse,

and below the slatted bamboo fences called “dog repellers”;
you stop at the south end of the veranda and look north;
an actor walks off the flower-path ramp cross-eyed amid shouts.

The Great White Shark
For days he has dumped a trail of tuna blood
into the ocean so that a great white shark
might be lured, so that we might touch its fin.
The power of the primitive is parallactic:
in a museum exhibit, a chacmool appears as elegant
and sophisticated sculpture, as art, but
witness the priest rip the still-beating heart
out of the blue victim’s body and place it
pulsing on a chacmool and we are ready to vomit.
We think the use of a beryllium gyroscope
marks technological superiority, but the urge
of ideologies then and now makes revenge inexorable.
The urge to skydive, rappel, white-water kayak
is the urge to release, the urge to die.
Diamond and graphite may be allotropic forms
of carbon, but what are the allotropic forms
of ritual and desire? The moon shining on black water,
yellow forsythia blossoming in the April night,
red maple leaves dropping in silence in October:
the seasons are not yet human forms of desire.

Slanting Light
Slanting light casts onto a stucco wall
the shadows of upwardly zigzagging plum branches.
I can see the thinning of branches to the very twig.
I have to sift what you say, what she thinks,
what he believes is genetic strength, what
they agree is inevitable. I have to sift this
quirky and lashing stillness of form to see myself,
even as I see laid out on a table for Death
an assortment of pomegranates and gourds.
And what if Death eats a few pomegranate seeds?
Does it ensure a few years of pungent spring?
I see one gourd, yellow from midsection to top
and zucchini-green lower down, but
already the big orange gourd is gnawed black.
I have no idea why the one survives the killing nights.
I have to sift what you said, what I felt,
what you hoped, what I knew. I have to sift
death as the stark light sifts the branches of the plum.

Red Octopus
She folds the four corners into the center,
hears the sound of a porcupine in a cornfield,
smells heart-shaped leaves in the dark.
She stops, noticing she has folded the red side out.
She is supposed to fold so that the red is seen
through white as what lies below surface.
So she restarts and folds the creases in air.
She recalls her mother arguing and flashing her party card;
she recalls soldiers at the Great Hall of the People
receiving medals; she recalls her father filming
a chimpanzee smoking a cigarette at the Beijing zoo;
she senses how the soldiers were betrayed.
She makes a petal fold, a valley fold,
an open-sink fold, a series of mountain folds,
pondering how truths were snared by malice.
She makes an inside-reverse fold, crimps the legs,
and, with a quick spurt of air,
inflates the body of the octopus.

Whiteout
You expect to see swirling chunks of ice
flowing south toward open water of the ocean,
but, no, a moment of whiteout as
the swirling ice flows north at sunset.
In a restaurant with an empty screen,
a woman gets up and sings a Chinese song
with “empty orchestra” accompaniment.
Prerecorded music fills the room,
and projection from a laser disc throws
a waterfall and red hibiscus onto the screen.
You are not interested in singing and
following the words as they change color
from yellow to purple across the cueing machine.
Instead, you walk out on blue-green glacier
ice and feel it thin to water in spring.
You notice two moose along the thawing shoreline
browsing for buds, and see the posted sign
No Shooting From Here. But “here” is “there.”

Ice Floe
Nails dropped off a roof onto flagstone;
slow-motion shatter of a windowpane;
the hushed sound when a circular saw cutting through plywood
stops, and splinters of wood are drifting in air;
lipstick graffiti on a living-room wall;
cold stinging your eardrums;
braking suddenly along a curve, and the car spinning,
holding your breath as the side-view mirror is snapped by a sign pole;
the snap as a purple chalk line marks an angular cut on black Cellutex;
dirt under your nails,
as you dig up green onions with your bare hands;
fiber plaster setting on a wall;
plugging in an iron and noticing the lights dim in the other room;
sound of a pencil drawn along the edge of a trisquare;
discovering your blurred vision is caused by having two contacts in each eye;
thud as the car slams into a snowbank and hits a fence;
smell of a burnt yam;
the bones of your wrist being crushed;
under a geranium leaf, a mass of spiders
moving slowly on tiny threads up and down and across to different stems.

The Los Alamos Museum
In this museum are replicas of Little Boy and Fat Man. In Little Boy, a radar
echo set off an explosive which drove a uranium-235 wedge into a larger
uranium target, while in Fat Man the ordinary explosive crushed a hollow sphere
of plutonium into a beryllium core. To the right of these replicas, a computer
gives you the opportunity to design a reentry missile out of aluminum or steel.
The reentry point of the aluminum missile needs to be thicker than the steel one,
but, because it has a lighter atomic weight, when you push the button choosing
the aluminum design, the computer rewards you with blinking lights and sounds.
Farther on in the main room, a model with lights shows the almost instantaneous
release of neutrons and gamma rays from point zero. At point zero, radiant
energy is released at the speed of light, but you can see it here in slow motion.

Spring Snow
A spring snow coincides with plum blossoms.
In a month, you will forget, then remember
when nine ravens perched in the elm sway in wind.
I will remember when I brake to a stop,
and a hubcap rolls through the intersection.
An angry man grinds pepper onto his salad;
it is how you nail a tin amulet ear
into the lintel. If, in deep emotion, we are
possessed by the idea of possession,
we can never lose to recover what is ours.
Sounds of an abacus are amplified and condensed
to resemble sounds of hail on a tin roof,
but mind opens to the smell of lightning.
Bodies were vaporized to shadows by intense heat;
in memory people outline bodies on walls.

The Redshifting Web
1
The dragons on the back of a circular bronze mirror
swirl without end. I sit and am an absorbing form:
I absorb the outline of a snowy owl on a branch,
the rigor mortis in a hand. I absorb the crunching sounds
when you walk across a glacial lake with aquamarine
ice heaved up here and there twenty feet high.
I absorb the moment a jeweler pours molten gold
into a cuttlefish mold and it begins to smoke.
I absorb the weight of a pause when it tilts
the conversation in a room. I absorb the moments
he sleeps holding her right breast in his left hand
and know it resembles glassy waves in a harbor
in descending spring light. Is the mind a mirror?
I see pig carcasses piled up from the floor
on a boat docked at Wanxian and the cook
who smokes inadvertently drops ashes into soup.
I absorb the stench of burning cuttlefish bone,
and as moments coalesce see to travel far is to return.

2
A cochineal picker goes blind;
Mao, swimming across the Yangtze River,
was buoyed by underwater frogmen;
in the nursing home,
she yelled, “Everyone here has Alzheimer’s!”
it blistered his mouth;
they thought the tape of erhu solos was a series of spy messages;
finding a bag of piki pushpinned to the door;
shapes of saguaros by starlight;
a yogi tries on cowboy boots at a flea market;
a peregrine falcon
shears off a wing;
her niece went through the house and took what she wanted;
“the sooner the better”;
like a blindman grinding the bones of a snow leopard;
she knew you had come to cut her hair;
suffering: this and that:
iron 26, gold 79;
they dared him to stare at the annular eclipse;
the yellow pupils of a saw-whet owl.

3
The gold shimmer at the beginning of summer
dissolves in a day. A fly mistakes a
gold spider, the size of a pinhead, at the center
of a glistening web. A morning mushroom
knows nothing of twilight and dawn?
Instead of developing a navy, Ci Xi
ordered architects to construct a two-story
marble boat that floats on a lotus-covered lake.
Mistake a death cap for Caesar’s amanita
and in hours a hepatic hole opens into the sky.
To avoid yelling at his pregnant wife,
a neighbor installs a boxing bag in a storeroom;
he periodically goes in, punches, punches,
reappears and smiles. A hummingbird moth
hovers and hovers at a woman wearing a
cochineal-dyed flowery dress. Liu Hansheng
collects hypodermic needles, washes them
under a hand pump, dries them in sunlight,
seals them in Red Cross plastic bags,
resells them as sterilized new ones to hospitals.

4
Absorb a corpse-like silence and be a brass
cone at the end of a string beginning
to mark the x of stillness. You may puzzle
as to why a meson beam oscillates, or why
galaxies appear to be simultaneously redshifting
in all directions, but do you stop to sense
death pulling and pulling from the center
of the earth to the end of the string?
A mother screams at her son, “You’re so stupid,”
but the motion of this anger is a circle.
A teen was going to attend a demonstration,
but his parents, worried about tear gas,
persuaded him to stay home: he was bludgeoned
to death that afternoon by a burglar.
I awake dizzy with a searing headache
thinking what nightmare did I have
that I cannot remember only to discover
the slumlord dusted the floor with roach powder.

5
On a tanker moored off Qingdao, the pilot
sells dismantled bicycles before sunrise.
Once, a watchmaker coated numbers on the dial
with radioactive paint and periodically
straightened the tip of the brush in his mouth.
Our son sights the North Star through a straw
taped to a protractor so that a bolt
dangling from a string marks the latitude.
I remember when he said his first word, “Clock”;
his 6:02 is not mine, nor is your 7:03 his.
We visit Aurelia in the nursing home and find
she is sleeping curled in a fetal position.
A chain-smoking acupuncturist burps, curses;
a teen dips his head in paint thinner.
We think, had I this then that would,
but subjunctive form is surge and ache.
Yellow tips of chamisa are flaring open.
I drop a jar of mustard, and it shatters in a wave.

6
The smell of roasted chile;
descending into the epilimnion;
the shape of a datura leaf;
a bank robber superglued his fingertips;
in the lake,
ocean-seal absorption;
a moray snaps up a scorpion fish;
he had to mistake and mistake;
burned popcorn;
he lifted the fly agaric off of blue paper
and saw a white galaxy;
sitting in a cold sweat;
a child drinking Coke out of a formula bottle
has all her teeth capped in gold;
chrysanthemum-shaped fireworks exploding over the water;
red piki passed down a ladder;
laughter;
as a lobster mold transforms a russula into a delicacy;
replicating an Anasazi
yucca fiber and turkey-feather blanket.

7
He looks at a series of mirrors: Warring States,
Western Han, Eastern Han, Tang, Song,
and notices bits of irregular red corrosion
on the Warring States mirror. On the back,
three dragons swirl in mist and April air.
After sixteen years that first kiss
still has a flaring tail. He looks at the TLV
pattern on the back of the Han mirror:
the mind has diamond points east, south, west, north.
He grimaces and pulls up a pile of potatoes,
notices snow clouds coming in from the west.
She places a sunflower head on the northwest
corner of the fence. He looks at the back
of the Tang mirror: the lion and grape
pattern is so wrought he turns, watches her
pick eggplant, senses the underlying
twist of pleasure and surprise that
in mind they flow and respond endlessly.

8
I find a rufous hummingbird on the floor
of a greenhouse, sense a redshifting
along the radial string of a web.
You may draw a cloud pattern in cement
setting in a patio, or wake to
sparkling ferns melting on a windowpane.
The struck, plucked, bowed, blown
sounds of the world come and go.
As first light enters a telescope
and one sees light of a star when the star
has vanished, I see a finch at a feeder,
beans germinating in darkness;
a man with a pole pulls yarn out
of an indigo vat, twists and untwists it;
I hear a shout as a child finds Boletus
barrowsii under ponderosa pine;
I see you wearing an onyx-and-gold pin.
In curved space, is a line a circle?

9
Pausing in the motion of a stroke,
two right hands
grasping a brush;
staring through a skylight
at a lunar eclipse;
a great blue heron,
wings flapping,
landing on the rail of a float house;
near and far:
a continuous warp;
a neighbor wants to tear down this fence;
a workman covets it
for a trastero;
raccoons on the rooftop
eating apricots;
the character xuan—
dark, dyed—
pinned to a wall above a computer;
lovers making
a room glow;
weaving on a vertical loom:
sound of a comb,
baleen;
hiding a world in a world:
1054, a supernova.

X-Ray
In my mind a lilac begins to leaf
before it begins to leaf.
A new leaf
is a new moon.
As the skin of a chameleon
reflects temperature, light, emotion,
an X-ray of my hands
reflects chance, intention, hunger?
You can, in X-ray
diffraction,
study the symmetry of crystals,
but here, now,
the caesura marks a shift in the mind,
the vicissitudes
of starlight,
a luna moth opening its wings.

Rattlesnake Glyph
Curve of the earth in emerald water
deepening into blue where water breaks along
the outer edge of a reef. A snake of equinoctial
light is beginning to descend the nine tiers
of a pyramid. You hear a shout reverberate
down the walls of a ball court, find blood
snakes spurting out of the neck of a decapitated man,
the carved stone ring through which a human head
used as a ball must pass. Here is a wall of
a thousand white sculptured-stone skulls
and row after row of heads mounted on spikes.
The darkness drops a mosquito net over a bed:
in blood-scroll skull light, I taste the salt
on your skin and in your hair. We are
a rattlesnake glyph aligning memory, dream, desire.
At dawn the slashing sounds of rain turn out
to be wind in the palms. Waves are breaking white
on the reef. Soon turtles will arrive and lay
eggs in the sand. Leaf-cutting ants in a line
are passing bits of shiny green leaves across a trail.

A Great Square Has No Corners
“Cut.”
An actress feigning death for one hundred seconds gasps.
A man revs
and races a red Mustang up and down the street.
“Cut.”
A potter opens a hillside kiln;
he removes a molten bowl,
and, dipping it
in cold water,
it hisses, turns black, cracks.
In despair, a pearl is a sphere.
“Cut.”
In Bombay, a line of ear cleaners are standing in a street.
On a mesa top,
the south windows of a house shatter;
underground uranium miners
are releasing explosives.
“Cut.”
A rope beginning to unravel in the mind
is, like red antlers,
the axis of a dream.
“Cut.”
What is the secret to stopping time?
A one-eyed calligrapher
writes with a mop, “A great square has no corners.”

Axolotl
I may practice divination with the bones
of an eel, but the world would be
just as cruel were it within my will.
The yellowing leaves of the honey locust
would still be yellowing, and a woman
riding in a hearse would still grieve and grieve.
We don’t live in a hypothetical world,
and yet the world would be nothing
without hypothetical dreaming. I hope no
ultimate set of laws to nature exists;
maybe, instead, there’s only layering.
Maybe you look in a store window and see
twenty-four televisions with twenty-four images:
now the explosion of a napalm bomb,
now the face of an axolotl.

Mushroom Hunting in the Jemez Mountains
Walking in a mountain meadow toward the north slope,
I see redcap amanitas with white warts and know
they signal cèpes. I see a few colonies of puffballs,
red russulas with chalk-white stipes, brown-gilled
Poison Pie. In the shade under spruce are two
red-pored boletes: slice them in half and the flesh
turns blue in seconds. Under fir is a single amanita
with basal cup, flaring annulus, white cap: is it
the Rocky Mountain form of Amanita pantherina?
I am aware of danger in naming, in misidentification,
in imposing the distinctions of a taxonomic language
onto the things themselves. I know I have only
a few hours to hunt mushrooms before early afternoon rain.
I know it is a mistake to think I am moving and
that agarics are still: they are more transient
than we acknowledge, more susceptible to full moon,
to a single rain, to night air, to a moment of sunshine.
I know in this meadow my passions are mycorrhizal
with nature. I may shout out ecstasies, aches, griefs,
and hear them vanish in the white-pored silence.

From the Rooftop
He wakes up to the noise of ravens in the spruce trees.
For a second, in the mind, the parsley is already
bolting in the heat, but then he realizes
the mind focusing rays into a burning point of light
can also relax its intensity, and then
he feels the slow wave of the day.
Mullein growing by the gas meter
is as significant as the portulaca blooming in pots.
Ants are marching up the vine onto the stucco wall
and into the roof. From the rooftop,
he contemplates the pattern of lightning to the west,
feels a nine-pointed buck edge closer to the road at dusk,
weighs a leaf and wonders what is significant,
maybe the neighbor who plays the saxophone
at odd hours, loudly and badly, but with such expanse.

The Shapes of Leaves
Ginkgo, cottonwood, pin oak, sweet gum, tulip tree:
our emotions resemble leaves and alive
to their shapes we are nourished.
Have you felt the expanse and contours of grief
along the edges of a big Norway maple?
Have you winced at the orange flare
searing the curves of a curling dogwood?
I have seen from the air logged islands,
each with a network of branching gravel roads,
and felt a moment of pure anger, aspen gold.
I have seen sandhill cranes moving in an open field,
a single white whooping crane in the flock.
And I have traveled along the contours
of leaves that have no name. Here
where the air is wet and the light is cool,
I feel what others are thinking and do not speak,
I know pleasure in the veins of a sugar maple,
I am living at the edge of a new leaf.

Original Memory
1
White orchids along the window—
she notices something has nibbled the eggplant leaves,
mantises have not yet hatched from the egg.
“Traduttori, traditori,” said a multilinguist
discussing the intricacies of Hopi time and space,
but the inadvertent resonance in the mind
is that passion is original memory:
she is at the window pointing to Sagittarius,
she is slicing porcini and laying them in a pan,
she is repotting a cereus wearing chalcedony and gold earrings,
she is judging kachinas and selecting the simplest
to the consternation of museum employees.
Grilled shrimp in olive oil—
a red sensation pours into his thought and touch:
the sfumato of her face,
shining black hair reaching down to her waist,
he knows without looking the plum
bruises on her thigh from the spikes of a sectional warp.

2
The multilinguist wants to reveal the locations
of shrines on the salt trail in the Grand Canyon
but has been declared persona non grata by the tribe.
He may have disproved the thesis that the Hopi language
has no referents to time, but his obsession led
to angers and accusations, betrayals and pentimenti:
a cry of a nuthatch vanishes into aquamarine air.
Some things you have to see by making a pinhole,
holding a white sheet of paper at the proper focal length?
To try to retrace the arc of a passion is to
try to dream in slow motion a bursting into flame?
You are collecting budding yellow tea plants;
I am feeling a sexual splendor in a new orchid leaf.
What is the skin of the mind?
How do you distinguish “truth” from “true perception”?
When is an apex a nadir and a nadir an opening into a first world?
Italians slice porcini, lay them on screens in the sun,
let the maggots wriggle out and drop to the ground.

3
She is tipping water out of a cloud.
By candlelight, face to face;
the pleasures of existence are caught in a string of pearls.
He remembers her rhythm in a corn dance,
notices the swelling of her left ear from a new earring.
He does not want any distortion—
red leaves falling or beginning to fall,
bright yellow chamisa budding along a dirt road,
snow accumulating on black branches—
to this moment of chiaroscuro in which their lives are a sphere.
Face to face, by candlelight;
the rockwork and doorways form a series of triptychs.
She remembers hiking the trail up to Peñasco Blanco,
sees the Chuska Mountains violet in the west,
and, below, the swerve of Chaco Wash,
the canyon opening up: ruins of rock walls
calcined in the heat, and, in red light,
swallows gathering and daubing mud along the cliff face.

Archipelago
1
I walk along the length of a stone-and-gravel garden
and feel without looking how the fifteen stones
appear and disappear. I had not expected the space
to be defined by a wall made of clay boiled in oil
nor to see above a series of green cryptomeria
pungent in spring. I stop and feel an April snow
begin to fall on the stones and raked gravel and see
how distance turns into abstraction desire and ordinary
things: from the air, corn and soybean fields are
a series of horizontal and vertical stripes of pure color:
viridian, yellow ochre, raw sienna, sap green. I
remember in Istanbul at the entrance to the Blue Mosque
two parallel, extended lines of shoes humming at
the threshold of paradise. Up close, it’s hard to know
if the rattle of milk bottles will become a topaz,
or a moment of throttled anger tripe that is
chewed and chewed. In the distance, I feel drumming
and chanting and see a line of Pueblo women dancing
with black-on-black jars on their heads; they lift
the jars high then start to throw them to the ground.

2
Rope at ankle level,
a walkway sprinkled with water
under red and orange maples along a white-plastered wall;
moss covering the irregular ground
under propped-up weeping cherry trees;
in a corral
a woman is about to whisper and pat the roan’s neck;
an amber chasm inside a cello;
in a business conversation,
the silences are eel farms passed on a bullet train;
a silence in the shape of a rake;
a sheet of ice floating along a dock;
the texture of icy-black basil leaves at sunrise;
a shaggymane pushing up through asphalt;
a woman wearing a multicolored dress of silk-screened naked women
about to peel an egg;
three stones leading into a pond.

3
Desire is to memory as an azalea is to a stone?
During the Cultural Revolution, the youngest brother
of the Peng family was executed against a wall
in Chengdu for being a suspected Guomindang agent.
Years earlier, the eldest brother was executed
at that wall for being a suspected communist.
This Chengdu effect has no end, but if you interiorize,
a series of psychological tragedies
has the resonance of stone-and-gravel waterfalls.
A first frost sweetens the apples; I want them sweeter
but discover a second frost makes the cores mush;
so essential shapes are destroyed starting at the center.
A woman and man must ache from a series of betrayals
before they can begin to bicker at the dinner table.
I water hyacinth bulbs planted in shallow pots
in the cool, dark bathroom, and, though it feels
odd to do so when walnuts are rotting on the ground,
a thought of spring is inadvertent pleasure:
a policeman pushed a dancer against a car, said, “Sure,”
when he insisted he had marigolds, not marijuana.

4
She puts jars in a pit, covers them with sawdust,
adds a layer of shards and covers them,
builds a fire, and, when the burn is intense,
smothers it with sheep dung. She will not know
for a few hours if the jars have turned completely
black and did not break cooling. For now,
no one sees or knows; I inhale smoke, see
vendors along the docks selling grilled
corn smelling of charcoal, the air at dusk
plangent with cries from minarets up on the hill—
the cries resembling the waves of starlings
that always precede the pulsing wing-beat Vs
of sandhill cranes. Oh, you can glow with anger,
but it leaves the soot of an oil burner
on the windows and walls. If anguish is an end
in itself, you walk into a landscape of
burned salt cedar along a river. I remember
seeing hungry passengers disembark at the docks.

5
Men dressed in cottonwood leaves dance
in the curving motion of a green rattlesnake.
I am walking along a sandstone trail
and stop in a field of shards: here is a teal zigzag
and there is a bloodred deer’s breath-arrow.
Women dancers offer melons to the six directions
then throw them to the ground. A wave
rocks through the crowd as the melons are smashed open.
I know I have walked along a path lit
by candles inside open-mesh cast-iron carp.
I stop at a water basin, and as I bend to
ladle water, see reflected a sweet-gum leaf.
As a cornmeal path becomes a path to the gods
then a cornmeal path again, I see the line
of women dancing with black-on-black jars on their heads.
They raise the jars with macaw and lightning patterns
to the six directions then form a circle
and throw them down on the center-marking stones.

6
“Go kiss a horse’s ass.”
“He hanged himself from the flagpole.”
“I just do what I’m told.”
She wanted him to hold her and say nothing.
“Depression is due to loss or guilt.”
Who heard shrieks?
In the morning,
a mutilated body was found behind the adobe church.
He saw that “A or B” was not a choice since A and B had been predetermined.
“I hated that painting painting so I burned it.”
Hair on the woodstove.
“I’m so glad.”
After fallopian surgery, she touches her scar, combs her hair, puts on makeup.
The red phoenix tattoos on the arms of a locksmith.
“A man’s character is his fate.”
He had two cameras but was always pawning one to release the other.
They slept a Mediterranean sleep: sun, sand, water;
the bed had the soft motion of waves.
“No, no, no, no, no, no, no!”
“Water is the koan of water.”

7
I look at fourteen stones submerged at varying depths
in a sea of gravel. I do not know under which stone
is a signature but guess that a pin-sized hourglass space,
separating intention and effect, is a blind point
where anger may coalesce into a pearl. I may sit here
until the stones have a riparian shine and are buoyant
in September starlight, yet never live to see
how grief turns into the effortless stretch of a fisherman
casting a fly onto a stream. When I slept on the float house
I became accustomed to the rise and fall of the tide,
so that when I walked on the rain forest island
I was queasy. I wanted a still pellucid point
but realize the necessary and sufficient condition
is to feel the pin-sized space as a point of resistance,
as a smash that is a beginning wave of light.
The dancers reappear and enter the plaza in two lines.
Shifting feet in rhythm to the shifting drumming,
they approach the crowd under the yellow cottonwood.

8
Mating above the cattails, red dragonflies—
sipping lychee tea, eating fried scallion pancakes—
bamboo slivers under the fingernails—
playing Ping-Pong by candlelight in a greenhouse—
digging up and rotating soil in the flower beds—
pulling and pulling at her throat until it bleeds—
scraping the skin of the earth—
finding shaggymanes have deliquesced into black ink—
releasing endorphins in the brain—
archipelago:
an expanse of water with many scattered islands—
a python coiling around sixteen white oblong eggs—
waking in the dark to pungent hyacinths—
blooming the pure white curve of blooming—
dancers are throwing
licorice, sunflower seeds, pot scrubbers, aprons, plastic bowls.

9
Plastic bowls, aprons, pot scrubbers, sunflower seeds, licorice—
the shadow of a hummingbird—
crab apple blossoms scattering in the street—
a silence in the shape of a chanterelle—
a turkey feather hanging from a branch of mountain ash—
the forms of lightning—
a yellow iris blooming near the house marker, 1932—
river stones marking the noon solstice—
black, blak, blæc—
following the thread
of recollection through a lifetime—
the passions becoming the chiming sounds of jade—
blue corn growing in a field of sand—
the chug chug, ka ka of a cactus wren—
a black-and-yellow butterfly closing then opening its wings—
egrets wading in shallow water at low tide.

Quipu
2005

quipu \’kē-(,)pü\ n [Sp quipo, fr. Quechua khipu] (1704) : a device
made of a main cord with smaller varicolored cords attached and
knotted and used by the ancient Peruvians (as for calculating)

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary

Before Sunrise
The myriad unfolds from a progression of strokes—
one, ice, corpse, hair, jade, tiger.
Unlocking a gate along a barbed-wire fence,
I notice beer cans and branches in the acequia.
There are no white pear blossoms by the gate,
no red poppies blooming in the yard,
no Lepiota naucina clustered by the walk,
but—bean, gold—there’s the intricacy of a moment
when—wind, three-legged incense cauldron—
I begin to walk through a field with cow pies
toward the Pojoaque River, sense deer, yellow, rat.
I step through water, go up the arroyo, find
a dark green magpie feather. This is a time
when—blood in my piss, ache in nose and teeth—
I sense tortoise, flute where there is no sound,
wake to human bones carved and strung into a loose apron.

Earthshine
1
“Fuck you, fuck you,” he repeated as he drove down the dirt road
while tamarisk branches scraped the side of the pickup;
what scrapes in the mind as it dilates to darkness?
“Jodido,” he winced and turned up the whites of his eyes;
“What comes from darkness, I strike with darkness”;
who hears a night-blooming cereus
unfold a white blossom by the windowsill?
crackle of flames in the fireplace;
lapping of waves against rocks
as a manta ray flips and feeds on plankton;
the gasp when he glanced down at the obituaries;
the gasp when she unwrapped flecked rice paper to find a letterpress broadside;
spurt of match into gold as he lights white beeswax candles;
she is running her hair between his toes;
he is rubbing her nipples with his palms;
“What comes from brightness, I strike with brightness”;
his ankles creaked as he tiptoed to the bathroom;
waking to a cat chewing on a mouse in the dark.

2
Hiking up a trail in the Manoa Valley arboretum,
he motions with his hand to stop as he tries
to distinguish whether ared-whiskered or
red-vented bulbul has just landed on a branch.
I spot a macadamia nut on the ground, glance
up into an adjacent tree and am shocked by
two enormous jackfruit suspended from the trunk.
Revelation never comes as a fern uncoiling
a frond in mist; it comes when I trip on a root,
slap a mosquito on my arm. We go on, but stop
when gnats lift into a cloud as we stumble into
a bunch of rose apples rotting on the ground.
Although we continue to a dead end where water
runs down a sheer rock, the mind stops here:
here Amanita muscarias release a cloud of spores
into cool August air; here lovers make
earthshine on a waxing crescent moon; here
the phone rings and I learn of a suicide,
a pinhole grows into an eclipse; here
water drips as I descend into a sloping black lava tube.

3
Say teeth;
say gnawed his teeth in his sleep;
say each spring he scraped peeling blue paint off the windowsill;
say the ocean flickers;
say a squiggly chalk line screeching down a blackboard opens a black rift;
say on a float house yellow cedar smoke rises in the woodstove;
say burn;
say crumpled white papers ripple then burst into yellow twists of flame;
say parallel lines touch in the infinite;
say peel;
say stoplight screech go green laugh;
say screech, rip, slam, thud, body scrapes, bleeds to bone;
say hyena;
say bobcat stripped of skin;
say a black cricket chirps in a corner of the room;
say hang;
say ox shoulder hangs off hook;
say trimming roses, she slashed her left wrist;
say shit-smear hair-sway leaf-gold ooze;
say crack;
say breaking a wineglass in a white napkin recovers a sliver of original light;
say egg-white eyeball splash;
say rinse;
say bend to earth, find a single stalk budding gold.

4
He hanged himself with his belt in the bosque
is no longer a whip that reddens and flays the skin.
“Donkey piss,” he once cracked—but who
knows how the light sizzled and burned a hole
that gnawed and gnawed so that the more he
twisted the more he convulsed into a black pitch?
Orange daylilies are blooming along the driveway;
long-stalked delphinium are bending to earth.
A firework explodes in white-gold then bursts
into a green shimmer. He leaves teeth marks
on her neck; she groans and shows the whites
of her eyes. When a car rushes by on a wet road,
he hears a laborer throw sand against a tilted screen
and realizes twenty-three years ago he threw
sand against a tilted screen. Now, when he
strokes the tendons of her left wrist, she sighs.
They are nowhere everywhere nonesuch;
they are not look back time but full moon first light.

5
She said he said “moon” in his sleep;
when he looked through the potbellied telescope,
the light of the full moon made him wince;
he had to gaze into darkness
and then saw from Mare Cognitum to Mare Serenitatis;
the mind aches to see at such distance such definition;
when she heard the barking dog,
she shined a flashlight and spotted a porcupine on the roof;
as you would spotlight a deer;
a snake slides under the redwood boardwalk by the kitchen;
he kisses her shoulders,
rubs the soles of her feet;
the mind aligns such slivers;
say dragonfly, quartz, cattail, tuning fork, wave;
say earthstar bursting into alpine air;
say c2;
say even the sacred barley drink separates if it is not stirred,
and see how, stirred, one can find repose.

6
Sipping mint tea in the ebbing heat of the day,
I recollect how we stumbled onto a raccoon
squashed between boards leaning against a fence,
tadpoles wriggling at the edge of a pond.
On the living-room table, thirty-six peonies
in a vase dry and become crepe-paper light
to touch. Yesterday you watered blue chamisa
along the county road, while I watered desert grass
under the willow. I recollect opening a brown,
humid box and, stunned, lifted a handful
of morels, inhaling the black aroma of earth.
What is it we give each other—gold, shark’s fin—
other than a renewed sense of the miraculous?
Nanao watched a blip on the radar screen; later,
when he saw the flash, he thought Mt. Fuji
had erupted in a burst of light. Sipping mint tea
on the longest day of the year, I sense how
the balance of a life sways, and a petal may tip it.

7
A steady evening with a first-quarter moon;
numerous craters along the terminator are razor sharp;
I observe the ghostly bluish glow of earthshine
and feel how the moon has no permanent dark side.
A horse neighs by the barbed-wire fence;
we trudge into a wet field, carrying, from under the portal,
a bee’s nest in a basket, place it in a nook
of a silver poplar. Will any bees hatch in spring?
I notice thorns on the bare branches of Russian olives;
you spot coyote scat before the V-shaped gate.
We walk to where the Pojoaque and Nambé flow together—
I am amazed at how we blossom into each other.
I hear the occasional drone of cars on Highway 285,
hear how the living expire into smoke
and the dead inflame the minds of the living.
When I exhale against a cold window, I see
the ever-shifting line along the terminator;
and, as the shadow cast by the rim of Theophilus
slips across the crater’s floor, I feel light
surge into a honeycomb gold—it all goes and comes at once.

Ox-Head Dot
Ox-head dot, wasp waist, mouse tail,
bamboo section, water-caltrop, broken branch,
stork leg, a pole for carrying fuel:
these are the eight defects when a beginning
calligrapher has no bone to a stroke.
I have no names for what can go wrong:
peeling carrots, a woman collapses
when a tumor in her kidney ruptures;
bronze slivers from a gimbal nut
jam the horizontal stabilizer to a jet,
make it plunge into the Pacific Ocean;
“Hyena!” a man shouts into the darkness
and slams shut the door. Stunned, I hear
a scratching, know that I must fumble,
blunder, mistake, fail; yet, sometimes
in the darkest space is a white fleck,
ox-head dot; and when I pass through,
it’s a spurt of match into flame,
glowing moths loosed into air, air
rippling, roiling the surface of the world.

Syzygy
I notice headlights out the living-room window
then catch the bass in a pickup as it drives by.
I am shocked to learn that doctors collected
the urine of menopausal nuns in Italy to extract
gonadotropins. And is that what one draws,
in infinitesimal dose, out of a vial?
I remember a steel-wool splinter in my finger
and how difficult it was to discern, extract
under a magnifying glass; yet—blue mold,
apple dropping from branch—it is hard to see
up close when, at the periphery, the unexpected
easily catches the eye. Last Thursday night,
we looked through binoculars at the full moon,
watched it darken and darken until, eclipsed,
it glowed ferrous-red. By firelight, we glowed;
my fingertips flared when I rubbed your shoulders,
softly bit your ear. The mind is a tuning fork
that we strike, and, struck, in the syzygy
of a moment, we find the skewed, tangled
passions of a day begin to straighten, align, hum.

La Bajada
Driving north before Cochiti exit, he visualizes
a bleeding anthropologist pulled from a wrecked car
but encounters only starlight and wind. Tonight
cars glide past him at eighty. Marine biologists
believed the coelacanth was extinct until a fisherman
off Madagascar pulled one up in a net. After 400,000
photographs in a bubble chamber, technicians had no track
of omega minus and wanted to quit. Sometimes luck
and sometimes perseverance. In the morning he stirred
to agapanthus odor, felt presence and absence
resemble an asymptotic line and curve that squeeze
closer and closer but do not touch. He glances up
at Cassiopeia arcing toward the north-northwest,
wonders if mosquito eggs in the pond are about to hatch,
sees her trim red and orange ranunculus on the counter.
And as he pushes on the gas and begins to ascend
La Bajada, water runs in the acequia
behind the kitchen porch for the first time this year.

Spring Smoke
The minutes ooze into a honeycomb gold.
He reads in a recently discovered notebook
that in 1941 his grandfather refused
to collaborate with the puppet government
and was kidnapped in Shanghai, held
in a smoky loft where he breathed
through a hole in the roof while his captors
unloaded, reloaded revolvers, played
mah-jongg. He pauses to adjust the light,
wonders if the wasp nest lodged on a beam
in the shed is growing. His grandfather
describes a woman who refused to divulge
where her husband was until they poured
scalding tea down her throat and crushed
her right hand in a vise. He glances up
but cannot discern stars through the skylight.
He senses smoky gold notes rising
out of a horn and knows how easy it is
to scald, blister, burst. This morning
when he drew back a wood slat
to swing the gate, he glimpsed a young
pear tree blossoming in the driveway.

Haircutting
She snips his hair with new scissors.
He ponders rain on the skylight, xx;
his father sent him an elephant tusk
carved into a village with lotus ponds
and waterfalls. His son, asleep, left
on the kitchen table in an unwaxed bag
clusters of chanterelles. Who probes
for ice crystals below the moon’s surface?
He recalls a physicist who loved to raft
the Taos Box, complained of recurring
headaches, had a stroke, died. She is
wearing a string of graduated pearls
with a jade clasp. He puts his hands
on her hips, savors unbuttoning her blouse.
When a letter from Peter arrived today,
he slit it open: violin, jarana, harp music
from La Sierra de Zongolica spilled out.
In the aftermath of a miscarriage,
she loops back to a moonrise over White Sands,
to a skunkbush sumac in a transverse dune.

Lobed Bowl with Black Glaze and White Scalloped Rim
Turning from the obituary page,
he hears a screw tighten,
recalls a dead sparrow on a greenhouse floor.
The mind can be dipped in a vat
when you slice an eggplant, sharpen a pencil,
shave. He woke slowly as light
sank through the skylight, brightening
the bedroom. He recalls running
his tongue from her breast to her armpit
as she shivered with pleasure.
An elder holds an eagle feather,
wafts cedar smoke, taps a woman
on her shoulders. He wants a mind
as pure as a ten-lobed bowl
with black glaze and white scalloped rim.
A broad-tailed hummingbird whirs in the air—
and in a dewdrop on a mimosa leaf
is the day’s angular momentum.

Quipu
1
I try to see a bald eagle nest in a Douglas fir
but catch my sleeve on thorns, notice blackberries,
hear large wings splashing water in a lagoon.
I glimpse a heron perched on a post above a tidal flat,
remember red elderberries arcing along a path
where you catch and release a newt among ferns.
And as a doe slips across the road behind us,
we zigzag when we encounter a point of resistance,
zigzag as if we describe the edge of an immense leaf,
as if we plumb a jagged coastline where tides
wash and renew the mind. I stare at abalone eyes,
am startled at how soft a sunflower star is to touch,
how sticky a tentacle of an anemone is to finger.
When we walk barefoot in sand, I sway
to the motion of waves, mark bits of crabs
washed to shore, see—in an instant a dog wrenches
a leash around the hand of a woman, shatters bones—
ensuing loss salamanders the body, lagoons the mind.

2
Here a red horse leaned over a barbed-wire fence
and uprooted a row of corn; here chile plants
rotted after a thunderstorm; here the force of rain
exposed carrot seeds and washed almost all away;
but here two kinds of eggplants flower in a row;
here peas, cucumbers, bell peppers, eggplants,
tomatoes, melons, corn. Is this wave of flowering
the arc of loss? She closes her eyes and aches:
in a white room, the ultrasound picks up yolk sac
and curled embryo: inside the space of a pea,
a head, mouth, neural tube, brain stem, eyes;
but it does not pulse or flicker with a heartbeat.
Across the room, they reach out, but to what?
The room darkens as the screen ionizes, glows.
He visualizes a series of photographic still lifes:
polished tin doorknob against a black background,
whale vertebra seen from afar against a black background,
nineteen stacked pancakes against a black background,
cluster of hazelnuts up close against a black background;
and suddenly when he opens his eyes, he cannot hear.

3
Who touched a quipu and made it explode into dust?
What blooms as briefly as scarlet gaura in sandy soil?
How incandescent is a grief?
Did spun wool delineating the corn of the Incas obliterate in a second?
What incipient white fades into pink?
Did the knots of her loves jaguar in an instant?
What is the tensile strength of a joy?
Who observed a great horned owl regurgitate bones into the arroyo?
What hides in the wave of a day?
A single blue unknotted cord—what does it mean?
How can the mind ply the forms of desire?
From south to north, east to west: which length is greater?
When is a koan not a koan?
Who can unravel the spin of an elegy and counterspin it into an ode?
Who whispered, “as is”?
Where is a passion that orchids the body?
Whose carded cotton fibers are these?

4
7:14: red numbers on the clock incarnadine the time;
he stares at the maroon jar of a kerosene lamp,
the carmine batik hanging under a skylight.
And when he drives home, the red at the Stop sign
is the bright red blood on a sheet;
yet candles in the living room conjure bliss.
He has the urge to stroll down to a spring-fed pond
where he sits on a rusted bench, stares into water;
tiny fish dart near; a green frog lifts its head;
then a vermilion dragonfly hovers near irises,
zigzags back and forth as it weaves an invisible web.
He guesses it eats mosquitoes and midges, though
he can only catch sunlight glint off its wings.
The mind zigzags back—swimming in a tidal pond,
they brushed jellyfish with their arms and legs—
loops a red cord that records loss and loss.
When he trudges back and closes his eyes,
he is startled by a cricket chirping in the fireplace.

5
When he opened the book to the page with quipu,
he glimpsed, through the underside of the sheet,
the image of a quince. Sometimes the thing you want
bleeds in the light. When yellow leaves dropped
off the cottonwood, he spotted, up high, a large nest
and a magpie hopping from branch to branch.
When he stubbed his toe in the dark, he flashed
on how he dug his first matsutake out of the dirt,
fingered brown scales on the cap and stalk.
As he stares into her eyes, she relates how
two men, rescued in the Andes, suffered frostbite:
one had his arms and legs amputated but is
moving with artificial limbs, while the other,
who tried to hold on to his extremities, suffers
in a wheelchair. When he says, “I don’t want
to become that,” the no smears fingerprints on glass.
And he sees a man splashed with blood and scales
stand hip deep in halibut, cleaning them off.

6
Who has heard a flute carved from the wing bone of a crane?
they hung tomato plants upside down in the kitchen;
a dyer poured fermented piss into the dye bath;
explosion of egg and sperm;
a hummingbird nest tucked in some branches
tucked in his mind;
she groaned when he yanked her hair back;
inside the space of a pea,
beginningless beginning and endless end;
he diverts water from the acequia, irrigates slender peach trees;
when he pulled the skeins up,
they gasped when they turned blue in the air;
they folded an ultrasound image inside a red envelope with a white crane,
prayed, set it on fire;
he wove a blue jaguar;
plucking ripened tomatoes, she grazed shriveled leaves;
“All men are mortal”;
they prayed to the sun, burned the blue jaguar at noon;
conception: 186,000 miles per second;
186,000 miles per second;

who has heard a flute carved from the wing bone of a crane?

7
Crows pick at a dead buffalo along the curve
of the river, as Raz trots up with a cow hoof
in his mouth. As: to the same degree or amount;
for instance; when considered in a specified
form or relation; in or to the same degree
in which; as if; in the way or manner that;
in accordance with what or the way in which;
while, when; regardless of the degree to which;
for the reason that; that the result is.
As in a quipu where colored, knotted strings
hang off a primary cord—or as a series
of acequias off the Pojoaque River drop water
into fields—the mind ties knots, and I
follow a series of short strings to a loose end—
stepping barefoot in white sand, rolling
down a dune, white flecks on our lips,
on our eyelids, sitting in a warm dune
as a gibbous moon lifts against the sky’s pelagic,
with the shadows of fourwing saltbushes,
the scent of hoary rosemarymint in the air.

8
I close my eyes—fishhooks and nylon threads
against a black background, cuttlefish
from above against a black background,
blowfish up close against a black background.
The seconds are as hushed as the morning
after steady snowfall when the power is out,
the rooms cold. At one, a snow-heavy branch
snapped the power line; the loose end flailed
clusters of orange sparks. A woman swept
a walkway, missed a porch step, fell forward,
bruised her face, broke both elbows; yet
the body quickens in the precarious splendor
that it would not be better if things happened
to men just as they wish, that—moonglow,
sunrise—the day—scales of carp in frost on glass—
scalds and stuns. In 1,369 days, we’ve set
eagle to eagle feather and formed a nest
where—fishhook joy—the mind is new each day.

9
We bend to enter a cave at Tsankawi, inadvertently
stir some tufa dust, notice it catches a beam
of sunlight. The beam enters a ceiling shaft
at winter solstice noon and forms, on a plastered wall,
a slash, then a small circle of intense light
before it disappears. And when we leave,
you sizzle with the vanished point of light.
I sizzle when I remember how we first kissed,
when I ran my hands along your shoulders,
when you brushed lashes on my neck. And as flying
geese cast shadows on water, and water reflects
the light, a joy stretches and stretches
into the infinite. I recall when we knocked at
our neighbors’ door to drop off a gift, how
they didn’t hear us as they were staring out
at the feeder counting birds—bushtit, sapsucker,
nuthatch, woodpecker—as we counted the blessing
of seconds where heat shimmered and vanished into air.

Aqueous Gold
1
At six a.m., the Big Dipper has swung overhead;
in an hour you will look up to rose-tinged
cirrus clouds. When I shut my eyes, waves
unfurl; I rouse to cries of birds before
sunrise, recall the imprint of our bodies
in white sand; from the beach, water deepens
into teal blue in no time. Aqueous gold
ripples on the surfaces of waves, but when
you reach for it there, it is here, and
when you reach for it here, it vanishes.
The mind craves to make something perdurable
out of something as tenuous as candlelight,
something that becomes more and more itself
through vicissitude. When a selenographer
plots the moon’s seas, does he inscribe
a memory that can batter as well as renew?
We kindle into flame a firelight by which
we incandesce more and more of ourselves.
Inscribed in the motion of birth and death,
we poise, savor the resistance to move too soon.

2
In the impoverishment of memory, you listen
to a cricket crawl in a pipe below the sink
but cannot see it, finger a cracked vase,
yet treasure its sliver of death. When you
reach out to touch a woman on her deathbed,
the flush of her skin is no longer a surprise:
eyes closed, absorbing oxygen through a tube,
she will never hate, love, sing, connive,
speak, stir again. In a barrio apartment,
you pull on a light: cockroaches flick
their forelegs and snap flat their forewings.
You listen to the drone of a refrigerator,
drips from faucets. In a Ketchikan bar,
a man trembles and recounts how a bear swiped
his right eye, how the eye ran like raw egg,
though you surmise he moves from bar to bar
to repeat his pain. You step out into drizzle:
the snow line has dropped to eighty feet
above the docks. Thoughts inch through
memory the way maggots inch through a cèpe.

3
A candle undulates on the mantel; at the end
of winter, water in the pond is clear with
twig and leaf debris clumped at the bottom.
They yearn for an instant that clears the mind;
in the warm yellow light at their fingertips,
they sense what dies is cast into the molten
form of the moment, as prayers are tossed
into the molten cast of a bell: yellow,
this, sun, wet, shudder, shriek, torque, be.
Though a potter can remove with tongs a molten
bowl from a kiln, plunge it in water,
they have nothing but a snake of words
to prove this moment when a chrysanthemum
unfolds in steaming broth in a black bowl;
when it heats, warms their hands; when they
recognize a pale green leaf is beginning
to flare out; apple tree beginning to bud;
when a sliver of moon begins to widen;
when they quiver and end this stillness,
begin to stretch into another glistening stillness.

4
Tying a balloon to the zoo’s iron gate, he catches
the blink of a cashier before she rings
up another fee, hungers for the moment a turtle
slips into water. Inside, he pauses at a tank,
views nothing, puts his hands on glass; at once
a phalanx of piranhas veer and repel light.
He studies their glistening jaws, eyes, incisors,
turns to a peacock pacing back and forth
on the floorboards, scarlet ibises with folded wings.
A single loss can ravel the mind with grief
and—meteor shower—hours days minutes seconds—
make us reach for white narcissi by the window
at sunrise. In the park, crimson and orange
oak leaves burn into transparency: is a moment
of death a seed? A friend once ignited fireworks
over a dry lake to tremble what expires
and what persists: streaming red gossamers,
yellow showers, violet chrysanthemums arcing
into gold into black air. Bending to tie a shoelace,
he confronts pocked craters in the irregular asphalt.

5
In a few minutes the sky lightens so that
branches of the willow flare to the very twig.
The hiss when a molten bowl is plunged into water
is also the hiss when you ladle water onto rocks
in the sauna. It is not in the hoofprints of zebras
or in the shadows of oryxes, but in the scent
of a lynx by a goose pen. The warmth and aroma of wax
in this flickering room is not to be inscribed
on papyrus wrapped around a corpse, nor is it
currency to be burned into the next fearless world.
It is when we true ourselves to the consequence
that we find the yellow lightning of our kiss.
Though we sit inscribed in a circle, we twist
and smell a wild fennel stalk in our hands.
Moose calves with dangling wet umbilical cords
struggle to keep up with their long-legged fastmoving mothers. As we go up a series of wooden steps,
we gaze down, and, as large multicolored koi
leisurely swim in the pool below, one koi
flaps and shivers gold flecks onto the surface.

6
Clusters of wild irises shrivel in the field.
He tries to slide the ring off his mother’s
finger, but rigor mortis has set in; he soaps
her finger, swivels the ring, yanks it off.
I catch the motion with which a man tosses
water from a brush onto a setting cement curb,
while another trowels the cement to an olive shine.
We did not notice when rain stopped striking
the skylight but glance up at a crack that
runs through the glass. “Yum!” a twenty-year-old
exclaims, pours milk onto cornflakes, snot
smeared across his face, while his stepmother
convulses, breaks into sobs. We place hoops
around peonies so that growing buds will not bend
stalks to the ground. I search for swaying lines
of ants, but nothing is there; I survey irregular
white trunks of aspens, but nothing is there.
As that swivels into this, I thread a tiny
screw to fasten the bracelet around your wrist;
you pull back a wooden slat to open the gate.

Solstice Quipu
Hong Kong 87, New York 84;
he studies isobars on the weather map;
ashes accumulate at the tip of an incense stick;
mosquitoes are hatching near the Arctic Circle;
300,000 acres in Arizona scorched or aflame;
the aroma of genmai tea from a teapot with no lid;
where is the Long March now?
And Lin Biao—so what if
he salivated behind a one-way mirror at naked women?
lobstermen color code their buoys;
string sandals number knotted mine the gold of the output of s on—
though things are not yet in their places,
the truth sears his fingertips:
the output of gold mines,
the number of sandals knotted on string;
orange globe of sun refracted through haze;
a two-year-old gasps at hummingbirds lying on a porch;
he notes a torn screen, nods
male and female, black-chinned;
spells the iridescent gorget of spring.

Inflorescence
1
Go sway on a suspension bridge over a gorge;
you do not ponder the beauty of an azure
lotus-shaped wine-warming bowl with five
spurs the size of sesame seeds at the base,
but, instead, inhale the cool mist sliding
over pines, making the white boulders below
disappear and reappear. This is how you
become absent to pancakes smoking on a griddle—
pricked once in thought, you are pinned,
singed back to the watery splendor of the hour:
wisteria leaves thin to transparency on the porch;
a girl relaxes on horseback in the field
while sunlight stipples her neck. You smile,
catch the aroma of pumpkin seeds in the oven,
exult at the airy, spun filaments of clouds.
Before there was above and below, who was there
to query? One marks a bloody trail in water
from a harpooned narwhal, dreams of clustered
igloos lit by seal oil. You flicker, nod:
what one has is steeped in oil, wicked into flame.

2
Whisked back and forth,
a fly
drops on water;
a floating narwhal
resembles a human corpse;
screwdrivers, pliers, CDs,
a duct-taped taillight
strewn in the grass;
running my tongue
along your nape;
singed by
apple leaves
on the windshield;
smooth black stones
in a glass bowl;
where the mind
that is
no-mind is;
fingertips
on a frosted pane.

3
A shrinking loop becomes a noose: at the airport
a Choctaw writer scrawls a few words to his wife,
creases the paper, fires a slug into his chest.
A woman smokes, ruminates on a blank canvas
she does not yet know will remain blank.
I push hoops into the dirt, prop up a few
tomato branches: a single Black Krim has reseeded
from last summer. I uproot some weeds, toss them,
but, in thought, recoil from flies on a squirrel;
raise a lid to a plastic barrel: find hamburger
wrappers, stomped soda cans, irregular bits
of white glass near where I vacuum my car.
As a red snake snags its epidermis, the mind snags,
molts from inside out. Although sand plunges
in an hourglass—soon the last white particles
will vanish from the top—I ache for a second,
sulfur butterfly pinned over black paper, to stop:
but, eelgrass in tidal water, I catch the scent
of tomato leaves on my hands, swing palms near
a horse’s head: flies flit and land, flit and reland.

4
Incise the beginning and end to all motion;
q w e r t y u i o p, in a line above your fingertips;
align river stones for a walkway;
halt at clusters of notes from swinging copper-green wind chimes;
shovel twigs and beer cans out of a ditch;
this wave of pollen light on your face is the end of summer;
rub Maximilian sunflower petals with your hands;
sniff red silk pine-bark patterned gauze unearthed out of a tomb;
splay juniper with an ax;
water brims her eyes when you stroke her wrist;
a Bombyx mori consumes mulberry leaves for seven days;
ponder a missing shade of blue;
sweat when you eat that Chimayó chile stuffed with lamb;
graze patches of faint aquamarine paint on a bathroom door;
revolve a polygon inside a circle;
squint up at a magpie nest in the cottonwood branches;
survey a skater’s mark left on the ice in executing a half-turn;
inscribe the beginning and end to all motion.

5
In the zero sunlight a man at a traffic light
waving today’s newspaper becomes a man
who, wiping windshields at night in a drizzle
as cars come off the Brooklyn Bridge,
opens his hands. Behind your parked car,
you stoop to peruse a speckled brown egg
on the gravel, glance up to sight a ring-tailed
lemur on a branch. Though no red-winged
blackbirds nest in the cattails this summer,
though someone has tried to drain the pond
into a nearby acequia, there is nothing
to drain, and you nod, curse, laugh—
you have nothing, everything in mind.
When I run my fingers between your fingers,
when we wet river wet through white Embudo water,
the hush is a shocked stillness: a black
bug stretches the skin of water and circles out.
As moonlight slants through the screen door,
I mark the span of our lives suspended
over the undulating scritch scratch of crickets.

6
I sip warm wine out of a sky-blue bowl
flecked with agate crystals in the glaze,
press my eyes, squint at walruses on an ice floe.
When you step on stones in plover formation
and enter a tea garden—shift the rhythm
of your body, mind; admire the slender
splayed arc of branches, singed maple leaves
scattered on gravel—you arrive at the cusp
where you push open a blue-planked door,
inhale the aroma of a miniature calla lily
in an oblong vase, bend over a brass trash can
to find a cluster of ants that must have
dropped from the ceiling and, disoriented, died.
And as the configuration at dusk of flaring
willow leaves on the skylight becomes minnows
in water, what is above becomes what is below.
And what appears up close to be a line
becomes, by air, the arc of a circle.

7
A woman and an instructor skydive over an island;
their parachutes fail, and they plunge into a yard,
barely missing someone snipping morning glories.
How long did they free-fall before they knew
the end? We stare at Dungeness crab shells strewn
across the table, pull cupcakes out of the oven,
and, smoothing icing on them to the rhythm of
African drumming, sizzle along a cusp of dream.
Who knows what the Coal Sack in the Milky Way is?
Who cares that the Eta Carinae Nebula is about
9,000 light-years distant? A moment in the body
is beauty’s memento mori: when I rake gravel in
a courtyard, or sweep apricot leaves off a deck,
I know an inexorable inflorescence in May sunshine;
watch a man compose a flower arrangement
in Tokyo using polychrome Acoma pots. And as
a narwhal tusk pokes out of a hole in the ice,
as a thumbprint momentarily forms in thawing frost
on a pane, we heat a precarious splendor,
inscribe the end and beginning to all motion.

Oracle-Bone Script
In oracle-bone script, the character for attunement
is a series of bamboo pipes tied together with string;
if only I had the words to make things that accord
in tone vibrate together. Sunlight streams between slats
of a fence onto the ground. I gaze across the field;
skunks have slipped into the neighbor’s garden
and ravaged corn. At the mouth of an arroyo, someone
has drained engine oil into the sand, thrown quart
containers into the brush. “Goddamn,” I whisper,
bending to pick cherry tomatoes, discover a large
grasshopper sunning on a branch. I imagine holding
a set of black-lacquered panpipes, blowing on them
for the first time in two thousand years. In the wobbly
beginning is a swish, then water trembling through bamboo,
tossed gravel, a dog’s bark, throats slit, sleet,
footsteps, love-cries. I start as notes reverberate
in air; frost has shriveled the leaves into black bits.

The Welt
He longs for a day marked like a Song tea bowl
with indented lip and hare’s-fur markings.
Yesterday they skirted two decomposing lambs
at the entrance to the big arroyo, covered
their mouths as they approached from downwind.
During firing, gravity pulls iron-oxide
slip down to form a hare’s-fur pattern
on the glaze surface. They gagged at the stench,
saw pink plastic twine around the neck
of the mangled one by the post—he only wanted
to view it once. They moved on to the lowvoltage fence, looked for bison but saw none,
tried to spark the fence with a thrown stick.
He likes the plum blossom heat when
their bodies sway and thrash. They returned
along a smaller arroyo. In the aftermath,
cool to touch, a ghost of the body’s heat.
In the morning they woke to sunburn on their necks.

In the Living Room
I turn this green hexagonal tile with
a blue dragonfly, but what is it I am turning?
The vertical scroll on the far wall
has seven characters that roughly translate,
“The sun’s reflection on the Yangtze River
is ten thousand miles of gold.” A Japanese
calligrapher drew these Chinese characters
in the 1890s, but who knows the circumstances
of the event? I graze the crackled paper,
recognize a moment ready to scrape into flame;
gaze at ceiling beams from Las Trampas,
at Peñasco floorboards softened with lye.
Along the wall on a pedestal, a gold-leafed
male and female figure join in sexual embrace.
Hours earlier, my hands held your hips,
your breasts brushed my chest. I close
my eyes, feel how in the circumference
of a circle the beginning and end have no end.

Acanthus
When you shut your eyes, you find a string
of mackerel tied by their tails over and across
the sloping street; pour water into raki
and watch it cloud into “lion’s milk”;
nibble smoked aubergine with yogurt;
point to red mullet on a platter of fish.
You catch the sound of dripping water,
squat to be near to the upside-down Medusa
head at the column base in a cistern:
a drop of water splashes your forehead.
You note carved acanthus leaves, then
eighteen women in singular postures
of mourning along the sides of a sarcophagus;
turn, at a noise, to bright lights:
eighteen men and women in security shirts
swarm through the covered street,
search for heroin. You smell saffron,
cardamom, frankincense, cinnamon, ginger,
galingale, thyme, star anise, fennel:
open your eyes to leeches in a jar
half-filled with water—green powdered henna
in a box alongside white mulberries.
The bells around the necks of goats clink;
you run your fingers along the fragments
of terra-cotta pots built into the stone
walls of houses; blink at the beggar
whose foot has swollen to the size
of his head; stagger up to Athena’s temple
by moonlight; sit on a broken column,
gaze out across the gulf to Lesbos,
where lights glimmer along the curve
of a bay. In waxing moonlight, the water
is riffled, argentine, into wide patches.

You ache at how passion is a tangle
of silk in your hands, shut your eyes,
unstring the silk in one continuous thread.

The Thermos
Poppy seeds from a North Bennington garden
rest in white envelopes on a granero
in Jacona—to travel far is to return.
I am not thinking about the glitter of snow
on top of Popocatepetl, but how beauty
that is not beauty requires distance.
I recall the emerald gleam of glacier ice,
bald eagles perched at the tip of Homer Spit.
When I brought home that turtle-shaped
sandbox, we placed a giraffe, lion, tiger
at the edge. Sarah was happy to tilt sand
from her yellow shovel into a blue pail.
I scooped sand into a funnel and watched it
drain into the box. I do not know how
an amethyst crystal begins to take shape;
I do not know the nanoproperties of
silica or the origin of light, but I
know the moment a seed bursts its husk.
At work I spill tea out of a thermos,
smell your hair and how we quicken each other.

Ice Line
No one has slowed down
and battered mailboxes
at the junction;
at two a.m. a cricket
periodically chirps
in a corner of the bathroom;
earlier in the day,
a horsefly bit
into Sarah’s back,
and her cry
ululated in the air;
later she peered at rain
in a Hiroshige print
where men in bamboo hats
leaned into
the relentless, slanting drizzle
then pointed up at the skylight
where raindrops
were pooled on glass;
each night is a brimming
pool of light,
and the contours are as
intricate and shifting as
the ice line around Antarctica.

The Chromatics of Dawn
Navel oranges ripen on branches near the steps
to a porch. He recalls zigzagging along a path
marked by white stones through a lava flow
to a beach where violet morning glories flared.
Up the coast he once peered into the water
but could not discern the underwater shrine
frequented by black-tipped reef sharks.
He tries to delineate the sheen of rolling waves,
chromatics to this hour when light pales
the unfolded paper shades to the southfacing French doors. Last Wednesday they rolled
architectural plans, along with sun-bleached
red paper inscribed with gold characters,
and torched them in the hearth. As they remodel,
they ponder how a floor of repeating strips
of bolted oak and cement can be replicated;
but, at his fingertips, he finds nothing
can be replicated: neither the hair in her hairbrush
nor the hole in his sock, neither the hue
of sunrise nor waves of opalescent spring sleet.

Thermodynamics
He tips hot water into a cup, stirs the powdered
Lingzhi mushroom, hands it to you. You observe
black specks swirling in the inky tonic: sip,
shudder, sip. It is supposed to treat neurasthenia,
dizziness, insomnia, high serum cholesterol,
coronary disease, rhinitis, asthma, duodenal ulcers,
boost the immune system. You scan the room,
catch crescendos and decrescendos to the flute
music on the stand, pick out the first character,
Spring, written in official script on a scroll—
Warring States bronze mirrors lined up on stands.
You pick up the last strands of glistening jellyfish,
note speckled tracks of grease on the platter,
feel as if you are jostled in a small airplane
as it descends into cumulus clouds. In Beijing
a couple wanted to thank him for arranging
financial sponsorship of their son in America;
under the table, she rubbed her leg against his
and whispered she had tomorrow off from work;
but tomorrow, lust, betrayal, delight, yesterday,
ardor, scorn, forgiveness are music from empty holes,
and you wonder if the haphazard course of a life
follows a fundamental equation in thermodynamics.
He pulls Styrofoam out of a box and reveals
a two-foot-high human figure from the tomb of
the Third Han Emperor; the face and trunk are intact,
though arms and hands are gone. He bequeaths
it to you, though requests that you pass it on
someday to a museum. You nod, sip the cool tonic,
down a few last black specks at the bottom of the cup.

X and O
Someone flips a lit match off the road
near a cluster of cattails, takes
another swig of beer, presses on the gas;
the match is not specifically aimed
at you: you just happen to be there—
at a Stop sign, in a parking lot,
on a ferry, at a terminal; as a lens
narrows sunlight to a point which blackens
into flame, go ahead, zero in, try
to x out a ball of jasmine sprig
that unfurls in boiling water, x out
a red-tailed hawk shifting on a cottonwood
branch at dusk, x out coyotes yipping
as they roam by new moonlight up the road,
x out the dissolving suture threads
in your mouth, x out a dog’s bark,
a baby magpie fallen from a nest
wandering on gravel, x out a flicker
feather in the mud; you can’t x out
diarrhea, x out a barn erupted into flames,
x out firefighters lined up in trucks
along Russian olives, x out the charred
grass and stubs of fence posts, x out
a pang, place of birth or time of death,
x out, at an intersection of abscissa
and ordinate, dark matter that warps
space and time; you can’t x out a cloud,
so make a lens of it the next time
you chop cilantro at a counter, the next
time you push through a turnstile.

The Angle of Reflection Equals the Angle of Incidence
Take that and that and that and that and—
a kid repeatedly kicks a dog near where
raw sewage gurgles onto sand at low tide,
Málaga, 1971. A man rummaging in a ravine
of trash is scrunched by a bulldozer.
If only I had q or r or s dissolves
into floaters in her eyes. Simmer. Scattered
ashes on blue-black Atlantic waves bob
and tinkle in the rippling tide of morning.
How quickly at dawn one makes out power lines,
cloud, fence, blue awning, orchard, plank
over ditch, but twisting chimney smoke
incites one to mark white apple blossoms
by a low gate, whale bones in a backyard,
chile roasting in a parking lot, or the memory
of wrapping an exposed pipe, the sizzle
when our tongues meet. When dead leaves
flowed downstream and encountered a sword,
they were razored in two. One, two,
four, eight: surmise a molten sword has
32,768 pounded layers before a final hissing.
Who believes what is written will never perish?

In 1258 Mongols hurled books into the Tigris
River and dyed the water black with ink.
Although a first record tabulating sheep and goats
has disappeared from a museum, the notation is
never expunged but is always renewed, amplified,
transmogrified. When a woman gives you a sheet
of handmade magnolia paper with mica flecks,
you lift it up to light, a milk snake’s
translucent skin slides off. Though a strand
of silk unfurls to become a kilometer long,
tracks are not the only incubator of dreams.
So you missed the Eta Aquarid meteor shower,
or last week’s total lunar eclipse. When you
sweep cobwebs out of the fireplace, sneeze,
scrutinize the veins of a peony leaf, you mark
the vertiginous moment of your beginning,
catch and release what you cannot hold,
smell kumquats in a glass bowl, stare down
at hundreds of red ants simultaneously fanning
out and converging at a point of emergence.
After a motorcycle blares past the north window,
the silence accretes: a rose quartz crystal
in the night. I garner the aroma of seared
scallops on a bamboo skewer; the ashes of
the woman who savored them scattered on waves.

Can watermelon seeds germinate in this moonlight?
The hairbrush, soap, thermometer by the sink
form a moment’s figure that dissolves
as easily as an untied knot. A plumber fluent
in Sanskrit corrects my pronunciation of dhyana
while he replaces a chrome faucet fixture.
I pore over a cross-sectional drawing of a plum;
is an infinitesimal seed at the crosssectional center of the cosmos? Though a vibrating
crystal can measure increments, time itself
is a black thread. I arrive at a vernal cusp:
the murmur you make on the tide of sleep;
the sleigh-like sounds when we caress.
Who waits and waits at a feeder for yesterday’s
indigo bunting to arrive? A woman curls grape
roots into a sculpture, mentions her husband
died three years ago. We do not shut the eyelids
of the deceased, nor are we tied in quinine-soaked
sheets for delineating the truth. Once you begin,
the branching is endless: miller moths spiral
against a screened porch; we apprehend the shadows
of leaves on leaves, regard a goldfinch
feeding outside a window, a sparrow that keeps
flinging itself into glass. When a minute stillness
is sifted out of the noise, a whirlpool becomes

a spiral galaxy. When I run my tongue along
your clavicle, we dig clamshells out of the sand,
net red crabs at low tide. In the wren song
of brief rain, what matters is that we instill
the darkness with jade, live clear-eyed incising
a peony-blossoming dawn. And as someone transplants bell peppers and onions into a garden,
leaves on a stream approach another sword
but, when they are about to touch, are repelled.
Quinoa simmers in a pot; the aroma of cilantro
on swordfish; the cusp of spring when you
lean your head on my shoulder. Orange crocuses
in the backyard form a line. Once is a scorched site;
we stoop in the grass, finger twelve keys with
interconnected rings on a swiveling yin-yang coin,
dangle them from the gate, but no one claims them.
Our meandering intersects with the vanished
in ways we do not comprehend: as a primary cord
may consist of two-ply two-color s-plied cords
joined by z-spiraling single-colored simple cord:
I note the creaking cottonwood branch overhead;
moon below Venus in morning twilight; in our arms
one season effloresces into another into another.
The polar ice caps of Mars advance and retreat
with their seasons. Sometimes in gazing afar,

we locate ourselves. We were swimming in a river
below a sloping waterfall; I recalled wandering
away from the main peony garden and pausing
in front of blue poppies. To recollect is to
renew, invigorate, regenerate. A papyrus shoot
spikes out of a copper tub. Hang glider, sludge,
pixel, rhinoceros horn, comb, columbarium,
wide-angle, spastic, Leica lens, pincushion—
these have no through-line except that all
things becoming and unbecoming become part
of the floe. When I stare at a photograph
and count two hundred sixty-five hazelnuts,
examine the irregular cracks in their shells,
I recognize fractures in turtle plastrons,
glimpse the divinatory nature of language.
And as a lantern undulating on the surface
of a black pool is not the lantern itself,
so these synapsed words are not the things
themselves but, sizzling, point the way.

Earthstar
Opening the screen door, you find a fat spider
poised at the threshold. When I swat it,
hundreds of tiny crawling spiders burst out.
What space in the mind bursts into waves
of wriggling light? As we round a bend,
a gibbous moon burnishes lava rocks and waves.
A wild boar steps into the road, and, around
another bend, a mongoose darts across our headlights.
As spokes to a hub, the very far converges
to the very near. A row of Siberian irises
buds and blooms in the yard behind our bedroom.
A moth flutters against a screen and sets
off a light. I had no idea carded wool spun
into yarn could be dipped and oxidized into bliss.
Once, hunting for chanterelles in a meadow,
I flushed quail out of the brush. Now
you step on an unexpected earthstar, and it
bursts in a cloud of brown spores into June light.

Didyma
1
Disoriented, a woman wanders in the riverbed
east then west then east, asks us how to get
to County Road 101G. We stare at vertebrae
and long bones that protrude out of her plastic bag,
discern how one day the scavenger will become
the scavenged. At thirteen you dipped leaves
into melted wax in an aluminum pan on a stove,
had an inkling that in order to seal the shapes
you had to asphyxiate the leaves. And as
the area of your knowledge grew, the circumference
of your ignorance was always increased. You had
no idea you would live to recall so many deaths,
that they would become spots along a Pacific
coastline where you would come to gather salt.
You yearn for the ocean spray to quicken your eyes,
yearn for the woman you love to sway and rock.
When she sways and rocks, you sway and rock;
when you sway and rock, she sways and rocks;
when you convulse together, it is not hallucinatory
but a splendor that scavenges days and nights.

2
The shortest distance between two points is a straight line;
“Slob!”
red salamanders spawned in the Tesuque River;
an ocelot placed a paw on his chest while he slept;
he slapped a mosquito between his hands;
the position of beads on the abacus represented nyctalopia;
asphyxiated in a hotel room;
water in the black rubber bucket froze and never thawed;
red-winged blackbirds congregate in the cattails;
when he closed his eyes, she was there;
when he opened his eyes, she was there;
was afraid to cut the deck;
mosquito larvae quiver the water in the barrel;
rubbed her nipples;
sighted a rhinoceros in the crosshairs and went blind;
rearranged a tangram into the shape of a butterfly;
when he took off his glasses,
oncoming headlights became volvox floating on black water;
slashed the waves with ten thousand whips;

sunlight erased blue thumbprints but left the graphite lines unscathed;
“The earth rests upon water.”

3
What can be described can happen, he thought,
and visualized an ice cube sliding through a cup,
water passing through two slits in a wall:
quantum mechanics in the ensuing pattern of waves.
An hour after they ingested psilocybin mushrooms,
he lifted a cantaloupe in the garden, beheld
its weight, started at the intricate fretwork
on its skin; she touched a peach leaf, recalled
when she wrapped the first peach in white cheesecloth,
the juice on their fingers as they each ate half.
She pinched off tips of budding basil plants
and savored the aroma under her fingernails;
a heron landed near the top of a cottonwood,
but though he half expected a cry none came.
They poured and rubbed oil onto each other’s skin;
their sighs and groans made the air tremble,
roil. They erased the plum bruises of a day,
restored themselves at a still point in the waves.

4
Green tomatoes on the windowsill:
if they are exposed to sunlight, will they ripen?
thud: a sparrow flies into kitchen glass;
they planted tulips on the slope behind the kitchen;
“Punks!”
he liked the digging;
she liked the slight weight of a bulb in her hand;
patter of rain on skylight;
they would forget the precise locations
but be surprised in spring;
at the Stop sign,
who slowed and hurled a rock through the window?
as simple as a wavelength;
slivers of glass on the sofa, pillows, rug;
it is impossible to know precisely the velocity and position;
by the time you perceive the brightest yellow of a cottonwood leaf,
it’s somewhere else;
yellow hawthorn leaves on the walkway;
shiver, shiver, shiver, shiver, shiver;
who walked from Miletus to Didyma?

he closed and opened his eyelashes along her ear.

5
A point of exhaustion can become a point of renewal:
it might happen as you observe a magpie on a branch,
or when you tug at a knot and discover that a grief
disentangles, dissolves into air. Renewal is not
possible to a calligrapher who simultaneously
draws characters with a brush in each hand;
it occurs when the tip of a brush slips yet swerves
into flame. A woman offers jasmine, dragonwell,
oolong teas: I inhale the fragrances, sip each one,
see chickens in stacked cages, turtles in tanks.
A man hosed blood off speckled white floor tiles
as we zigzagged toward the restaurant; over lunch,
I thought I heard moans and shrieks; when we left,
I glimpsed two white rabbits hauled by their necks
to a chopping block. The glint of the momentary
might dissolve like snow on water, or it might
burst into flame: yellow incense sticks smoking
in a cauldron, a large thin jasper disk that glows
like a harvest moon, the warmth in a glassed garden,
the way our daughter likes to rub foreheads.

6
Cr-rack! She stopped sewing when she heard the rock
shiver the glass window into shards, then the car
revved and sped up County Road 84 into darkness.
The moments you are disoriented are moments
when ink splatters onto the fibers of white paper.
As the area of your ignorance grows, it is possible
the circumference of your knowledge is increased.
Months after a brain aneurysm, when a man whispers
to his wife, “Nothing you do can ever make me happy,”
she turns to the midnight and sobs. When Xerxes
ordered his army to slash the waves of the Hellespont,
he slashed his own fingers to the tendons. Today
we gaze across the Dardanelles—whitecaps on teal water,
a few freighters zigzag down from the Black Sea.
Sunlight flares at the edges of leaves; heat ripples
up from the noon street and from rusted car tops.
The salt in the air stings my eyes: I lift a latch,
step into a patio: bird-of-paradise in bloom;
but, approaching the window, I find peeled paint,
cobwebs; it’s dingy inside. I turn, wade into sleep.

7
“Do-as-you’re-told scum sucker, you’re the reason there are hydrogen bombs,”
yelled at the postal worker
behind the counter—
it leopards the body—
cringes at strangled
anteaters and raccoons hanging in the market—
it leopards the body—
wakes to pulverized starfish in his shoes—
it leopards the body—
disinterred a man and woman
sealed for 1,855 years
under jade plaques stitched with gold thread—
it leopards the body—
winced at hundreds of cicadas stridulating in the umbrella pines—
it leopards the body—
placed a blackbird with a red gash in the trash bin—
it leopards the body—
catches lamb shank in the smoke—
it leopards the body—
recovers a red tulip from inside a corkscrew dream—
it leopards the body—

combusts when they candlelight touch—
it leopards the body—
cars clunk
as they drive off the ferry at Çanakkale.

8
You walk up the steps and find a double peristyle
with a deep entrance porch filled with columns;
at the base of the columns is an octagonal set
of carved dragons, mermaids, and palmettes.
You turn, stride down a dark and narrow vaulted ramp
that emerges with blinding light into a large hall
open to the sky; a continuous frieze on three walls
has a central acanthus flanked by griffins and lyres.
At the far end, roped off by string, is the foundation
of an inner temple with steps that drop to a spring;
when you walk toward this sanctum and look back,
you see stairs to the platform of epiphanies at the rear.
You gaze up to the top of a sixty-five-foot column,
step up to the cord but can’t get near enough
to see if the spring is dry or wet. You hunger
for insight into the precarious nature of becoming,
gaze at the woman you love, whet at how passion
is water from a spring, realize that yesterday,
exhausted, you were not going to come this far,
but today, having come, you have sunlight in your hands.

9
Because one stirred the entrails of a goat immolated on an altar,
because a magpie flicks tail feathers,
because blush-red tulips bloomed on the walkway,
because one speaks without fear of reprisal,
because a man—crushed in the debris of aluminum doors, steering wheel,
dashboard, shivered windshield—bleeds and moans,
because he had to visualize black petunias in order to spot Black Trumpets on
the forest floor,
because he slowly bites the back of her neck,
because an eagle glides over the courtyard with outstretched wings,
because a woman fasted, chewed laurel leaves, swayed in noon heat,
stammered the here is always beginning;
because she brushes her hair across his eyelids,
because bells tinkle around the necks of goats,
because the ruins of this moment are chalk-white dust in your hands,
because a grain of sand lodged,
because loss is a seed that germinates into all things are full of gods,
because a circle opens in all directions,

10
nine purple irises bloom in a triangular glass vase—
a pearl forms in an oyster—
she folds a prayer and ties it to a green cryptomeria branch—
threaded sponges are hanging in the doorway—
a slug crawls along a railroad tie—
a double bass upstairs suffused the house with longing—
silk tree leaflets fold up when touched—
waking out of her coma, she vowed, “I will dip my hands in ink and drag them
across white mulberry paper”—
a hummingbird, sipping at a columbine, darted off—
red mullets thrash in the water—
one casts to the end of time—
she wore gold-hooped earrings with her black dress—
urn shards were incorporated into the stone walls of houses—
they swam in the Aegean—
blossoming yellow forsythia is the form and pressure of the hour.

The Ginkgo Light
2009

Chrysalis
Corpses push up through thawing permafrost
as I scrape salmon skin off a pan at the sink;
on the porch, motes in slanting yellow light
undulate in air. Is Venus at dusk as luminous
as Venus at dawn? Yesterday I was about to
seal a borax capsule angled up from the bottom
of a decaying exterior jamb when I glimpsed
jagged ice floating in a bay. Naval sonar
slices through whales, even as a portion
of male dorsal fin is served to the captain
of an umiak. Stopped in traffic, he swings from
a chairlift, gazes down at scarlet paintbrush.
Moistening an envelope before sealing it,
I recall the slight noise you made when I
grazed your shoulder. When a frost wiped out
the chalk-blue flowering plant by the door,
I watered until it revived from the roots.
The song of a knife sharpener in an alley
passes through the mind of a microbiologist
before he undergoes anesthesia for surgery.
The first night of autumn has singed
bell peppers by the fence, while budding

chamisa stalks in the courtyard bend to ground.
Observing people conversing at a nearby table,
he visualizes the momentary convergence
and divergence of lines passing through a point.
The wisteria along the porch never blooms;
a praying mantis on the wood floor sips water
from a dog bowl. Laughter from upstairs echoes
downstairs as teenage girls compare bra sizes.
An ex-army officer turned critic frets
over the composition of a search committee,
snickers and disparages rival candidates.
A welder, who turns away for a few seconds
to gaze at the Sangre de Cristos, detects a line
of trucks backed up on an international overpass
where exhaust spews onto houses below.
The day may be called One Toothroad or Six Thunderpain,
but the naming of a day will not transform it,
nor will the mathematics of time halt.
An imprint of ginkgo leaf—fan-shaped, slightly
thickened, slightly wavy on broad edge, twolobed, with forking parallel veins but no
midvein—in a slab of coal is momentary beauty,
while ginkgoes along a street dropping gold
leaves are mindless beauty of the quotidian.
Once thought extinct, the ginkgo

was discovered in Himalayan monasteries
and propagated back into the world. Although
I cannot save a grasshopper singed by frost
trying to warm itself on a sunlit walkway,
I ponder shadows of budding pink and orange
bougainvilleas on a wall. As masons level sand,
lay bricks in horizontal then vertical pairs,
we construct a ground to render a space
our own. As light from a partial lunar eclipse
diffuses down skylight walls, we rock and
sluice, rock and sluice, fingertips fanned
to fanned fingertips, debouch into plentitude.
Venus vanishes in a brightening sky:
the diamond ring of a solar eclipse persists.
You did not have to fly to Zimbabwe in June 2001
to experience it. The day recalls Thirteen Death
and One Deer when an end slips into a beginning.
I recall mating butterflies with red dots on wings,
the bow of a long liner thudding on waves,
crescendo of water beginning to boil in a kettle,
echoes of humpback whales. In silence, dancers
concentrate on movements onstage; lilacs bud
by a gate. As bits of consciousness constellate,
I rouse to a three a.m. December rain on the skylight.
A woman sweeps glass shards in a driveway,

oblivious to elm branches reflected on windshields
of passing cars. Juniper crackles in the fireplace;
flukes break the water as a whale dives.
The path of totality is not marked by
a shadow hurtling across the earth’s surface
at three thousand kilometers per hour.
Our eyelashes attune to each other.
At the mouth of an arroyo, a lamb skull
and ribcage bleach in the sand; tufts
of fleece caught on barbed wire vanish.
The Shang carved characters in the skulls
of their enemies, but what transpired here?
You do not need to steep turtle shells
in blood to prognosticate clouds. Someone
dumps a refrigerator upstream in the riverbed
while you admire the yellow blossoms of
a golden rain tree. A woman weeds, sniffs
fragrance from a line of onions in her garden;
you scramble an egg, sip oolong tea.
The continuous bifurcates into the segmented
as the broken extends. Someone steals
a newspaper while we doze. A tiger
swallowtail lands on a patio columbine;
a single agaric breaks soil by a hollyhock.
Pushing aside branches of Russian olives

to approach the Pojoaque River, we spot
a splatter of flicker feathers in the dirt.
Here chance and fate enmesh.
Here I hold a black bowl rinsed with tea,
savor the warmth at my fingertips,
aroma of emptiness. We rock back and forth,
back and forth on water. Fins of spinner
dolphins break the waves; a whale spouts
to the north-northwest. What is not impelled?
Yellow hibiscus, zodiac, hairbrush;
barbed wire, smog, snowflake—when I still
my eyes, the moments dilate. Rain darkens
gravel in the courtyard; shriveled apples
on branches are weightless against dawn.

Labrador Tea
Labrador leaves in a jar with a kerchief lid
release an arctic aroma when simmered on a stove.
Yesterday when fire broke out in the bosque,
the air had the stench of cauliflower in a steamer
when water evaporates and the pot scalds.
Although Apache plume, along with clusters of
western peppergrass, makes fragrant the wash,
owls that frequent the hole high up the arroyo’s
bank have already come and gone. Yesterday,
though honey locust leaves shimmered
in a gust, no wasp nest had yet formed
under the porch. Repotting a Spathiphyllum,
then uncoiling a hose, I suddenly hear surf
through open slats of a door. Sprinklers come on
in the dark; a yellow slug crawls on a rainslicked banana leaf; as the mind flits, imbibes,
leaves clothed underneath with rusty hairs
suffuse a boreal light glistening on tidal pools.

Crisscross
Meandering across a field with wild asparagus,
I write with my body the characters for grass,
water, transformation, ache to be one with spring.
Biting into watermelon, spitting black seeds
onto a plate, I watch the eyes of an Armenian
accordion player, and before dropping a few
euros into his brown cap, smell sweat and fear.
I stay wary of the red horse, Relámpago, latch
the gate behind me; a thorned Russian olive
branch arcs across the path below my forehead,
and, approaching the Pojoaque River, I recall
the sign, Beware Pickpockets, find backhoe tracks,
water diverted into a ditch. Crisscrossing
the stream, I catch a lightning flash, the whitecapped Truchas peaks, behind, to the east, and in
the interval between lightning and thunder,
as snow accumulates on black branches,
the chasm between what I envision and what I do.

The Gift
The pieces of this jigsaw puzzle
will form King Tut’s gold face,
but, at the moment, they are bits
of color strewn on the floor;
these moments of consciousness
have no jigsaw fit—heartbeat
of a swallow in flight, bobcat
prints across the Winsor Trail,
premonition that joy lurks inside
a match, uprooting sunflower stalks,
tipping an urn from a bridge
so that ashes form a cloud.
The pieces of a life stay pieces
at the end; no one restores papyrus
once it has erupted into flame;
but before agapanthus blooms,
before the body scorches, razes
consciousness, you have time
to puzzle, sway, lurch, binge,
skip, doodle, whine, incandesce.

Looking Back on the Muckleshoot Reservation from Galisteo
Street, Santa Fe
The bow of a Muckleshoot canoe, blessed
with eagle feather and sprig of yellow cedar,
is launched into a bay. A girl watches
her mother fry venison slabs in a skillet—
drops of blood sizzle, evaporate. Because
a neighbor feeds them, they eat wordlessly;
the silence breaks when she occasionally
gags, reaches into her throat, pulls out hair.
Gone is the father, riled, arguing with his boss,
who drove to the shooting range after work;
gone the accountant who embezzled funds,
displayed a pickup, and proclaimed a winning
flush at the casino. You donate chicken soup
and clothes but never learn if they arrive
at the south end of the city. Your small
acts are sandpiper tracks in wet sand.
Newspapers, plastic containers, beer bottles
fill the bins along this sloping one-way street.

Pig’s Heaven Inn
Red chiles in a tilted basket catch sunlight—
we walk past a pile of burning mulberry leaves
into Xidi Village, enter a courtyard, notice
an inkstone, engraved with calligraphy, filled
with water and cassia petals, smell Ming
dynasty redwood panels. As a musician lifts
a small xun to his mouth and blows, I see kiwis
hanging from branches above a moon doorway:
a grandmother, once the youngest concubine,
propped in a chair with bandages around
her knees, complains of incessant pain;
someone spits in the street. As a second
musician plucks strings on a zither, pomelos
blacken on branches; a woman peels chestnuts;
two men in a flat-bottomed boat gather
duckweed out of a river. The notes splash,
silvery, onto cobblestone, and my fingers
suddenly ache: during the Cultural Revolution,
my aunt’s husband leapt out of a third-story
window; at dawn I mistook the cries of
birds for rain. When the musicians pause,
Yellow Mountain pines sway near Bright
Summit Peak; a pig scuffles behind an enclosure;
someone blows their nose. Traces of the past
are wisps of mulberry smoke rising above
roof tiles; and before we, too, vanish, we hike
to where three trails converge: hundreds
of people are stopped ahead of us, hundreds
come up behind: we form a rivulet of people
funneling down through a chasm in the granite.

Retrieval
A train passes through the Sonoran Desert
when a sudden sandstorm at night sweeps
through the windows: everyone gags
and curses—sand, eddying under the dim
ceiling lights, lodges on eyelashes, clothes,
hair. Memory is encounter: each incident,
a bee thrumming in a hive. You catch
the aroma of incense in a courtyard
but fret you have sleepwalked for hours.
Observing grasshopper legs in a nook,
you brood then exult that a bat roosts
under the eave, yet fail to notice
quince fattening on branches, ache
that your insights may be white smoke
to flame. Though you note toothpicks
at a cash register, an elk head with antlers
mounted to the back of a passing trailer,
you are given a penlight but, within
minutes, misplace it. Without premonition,
striding up a cobblestone street,
through a Pátzcuaro doorway, you spot
a raised coffin with dissolving tapers
by each corner, and harbor a sting
then tang, wax then honey on the tongue.

Tesserae
Picking plums on a ladder, I notice a few
beyond my reach; our neighbor has replaced
the trampoline with cast-iron table and chairs;
black ants on the walkway are encircled
by a horde of smaller ones; we returned
to rose petals strewn on the bed; newly planted
cottonwoods curl at the leaf tips; once I
poked a pin through paper, raised and lowered
the sheet until a partial eclipse came into view;
as a child, I brooded over a Life photograph
of bodies piled up in Nanjing; koi mouth
the surface near a waterfall; hours earlier
we lay naked on a redwood deck; black ants
writhe, stiffen; along a south-facing slope,
I find red-capped russulas, aspen boletes,
hedgehogs, a single death cap—deaths form
gaps, no, fissures, in my brain; you crack
a fortune cookie, “Water runs to what is wet.”

In the Rose Light
no red-tailed hawk, no crows,
no geese, no raccoon tracks
by the door; when a magpie
flaps across the road,
disappears beyond the window
frame, I ponder frames—
glasses, doorjamb, beehive,
a moment of stillness—trace
an intimate geography:
son in Albany donating a cell
phone so that someone he
will never meet may call
911; clusters of wild irises
in the field; daughter glimpsed
through the doorway, arms
raised, in a ballerina pose,
then, in five minutes, asleep;
though the pink and orange
bougainvilleas are not yet
budding, I incandesce to
our firelight, to the ten years
we have entwined each other.

Qualia
“Oviparous,” she says, “a duck-billed platypus
is oviparous.” Strapped in her car seat,
she colors an array of tulips on white paper.
Stopped at a light on Highway 285, he stares
at a gas station, convenience store. A man
steps out with a six-pack under his right arm,
while she repeats last night’s queries:
Why does the Nile flow north? Who was Nefertiti?
And as cars accelerate, he perceives the silver
one in the rearview mirror will pass him
on the right before he reaches the hilltop.
She sounds out “red”: what was the shape
and color of a triceratops egg? Though
a chart can depict how height and weight
unfold along time, no chart can depict
how imagination unfolds, endlessly branching.
As sunlight slants over the Sangre de Cristos,
he notices Tesuque Pueblo police have pulled
a pickup off the highway. At school, lined
up for kindergarten, she waves, and he waves
back. As classmates enter, she waves; and again
he waves back, waves at apple blossoms
unfolding white along a studio wall, at
what is shed and slithering into pellucid air.

The Ginkgo Light
1
A downy woodpecker drills into a utility pole.
While you cut stems, arrange tulips in a vase,
I catch a down bow on the A string, beginning
of “Song of the Wind.” We savor black beans
with cilantro and rice, pinot noir; as light slants
through the kitchen window, spring is candlelight
at our fingertips. Ice crunches in river
breakup: someone shovels snow in a driveway,
collapses, and, hospitalized, catches staph
infection; out of airplane wreckage, a woman
identifies the ring on the charred corpse
of her spouse; a travel writer whose wife is in
hospice gazes at a lunar eclipse, the orange moon
at one-millionth of its normal brightness.
A 1300-year-old lotus seed germinates; a ginkgo
issues fan-shaped leaves; each hour teems.

2
A seven-year-old clips magenta lilacs for her mother;
“electrocuted tagging a substation”;
patter of rain on skylight;
manta rays feed along a lit underwater cove;
seducing a patient,
he did not anticipate plummeting into an abyss;
over Siberia, a meteor explodes;
“I am happiest here, now!”
lesser goldfinch with nesting fiber in its beak;
love has no near or far.

3
Near Bikini Island, the atom bomb mushroomed
into a fireball that obsidianed the azure sky,
splayed palm leaves, iridescent black, in wind;
that fireball moment always lurks behind
the retired pilot’s eyes, even when he jokes,
pours vodka, displays his goggles, medal,
leather jacket hanging from a peg. A woman
hums as she works with willow, X-Acto knife,
magnifying lens to restore a Jicarilla Apache
basket; she has no glimmer a zigzag line
is beginning to unravel, does not know within
a decade she will unload a slug into her mouth.

4
Through a moon gate, budding lotuses in a pond;
“You’re it!”
he stressed rational inquiry
then drove south into the woods, put a gun to his head;
vaporized into shadows;
quince and peach trees leafing below the ditch;
succession and simultaneity;
the branch-like shapes in their sheets;
pizzicati:
up the riv-er we will go.

5
August 6, 1945: a temple in Hiroshima 1,130 meters
from the hypocenter disintegrates, while its ginkgo
buds after the blast. When the temple is rebuilt,
they make exit, entrance steps to the left and right
around it. Sometimes one fingers annihilation
before breaking into bliss. A mother with Alzheimer’s
knows her son but not where she lives or when
he visits. During the Cultural Revolution,
Xu-mo scrubbed one million dishes on a tanker
and counted them in a trance. A dew point
is when a musher jogs alongside her sled dogs,
sparing them her weight on the ice to the finish.

6
Loaves of bread on a rack; a car splashes
a newspaper vendor on a traffic island.
On the road of days, we spot zodiacal light
above the horizon. Astronauts have strewn
footprints and streptococci on the moon.
Chance sparks the prepared mind: a Cooper’s
hawkperched on a cottonwood branch
quickens our synapses. In the orchard,
the sound of apricot blossoms unfolding;
mosquito larvae twitch water at the V-shaped
berm that pools runoff to the pond. We do
not believe we trudge around a flaming
incense burner on a road of years. As fireflies
brighten, we long to shimmer the darkness
with streamers. A pickup veers toward
then away, skewing light across our faces.

7
As light skews across our faces, we are
momentarily blinded, and, directionless,
have every which way to go. Lobelia
flowers in a patio pot; a neighbor
hands us three Bibb lettuces over a fence.
A cricket stridulates outside the window;
and while we listen to our exhale, inhale,
ephemera become more enduring than concrete.
Ginkgoes flare out. A jagged crack
spreads across windshield glass: we find
to recoil from darkness is to feed the darkness,
to suffer in time is—dichotomous venation—
to effloresce the time. One brisk morning,
we snap to layers of overlapping
fanned leaves scattered on the sidewalk,
finger a scar on wrist, scar on abdomen.

II

Spectral Line
1
Who passes through the gates of the four directions?
Robin coughs as she tightens a girth, adjusts saddle,
and, leading Paparazzo past three stalls, becomes
woman-leading-horse-into-daylight. Though the Chu
army conquered, how long does a victory last?
The mind sets sliver to sliver to comprehend, spark;
the mind tessellates to bring into being a new shape.
When the Blackfoot architect unveiled his master plan
with a spirit way leading to a center that opened
to the four directions, I saw the approach to
the Ming tombs, with pairs of seated then standing
lions, camels, elephants, horses lining the way.
I snapped when, through the camera lens,
I spotted blue sneakers—but not the woman—protruding
from the sides of a seated horse, and snapped
a white-haired woman with bound feet munching fry bread.
Peripheral details brighten like mating fireflies.
Then Gloria pointed to the east, gasped,
“Navajos will never set foot here: you’ve placed
these buildings in the ceremonial form of a rattlesnake.”

2
Blinking red light on the machine: he presses
the button, and a voice staggers, “I’m back,”
“I don’t know where I am,” “I drive but can’t
recollect how I get to where I am,”—whiteout
when a narwhal sprays out its blowhole and water
crystallizes in air—“thirty-three days.”
He presses replay: the voice spirals, “I lost
four members of my family in a whaling accident”;
he writes down numbers, 424-0590, dials,
“My cousin killed himself after his girlfriend
killed herself” ricochets in his ears; though
the name is blurred, he guesses at bowhead
ribs in a backyard, canisters of radioactive
waste stored inland on Saint Lawrence Island;
twenty below: Yupik children play string games;
when he broke the seal on a jar of smoked
king salmon, he recalled his skin and clothes
reeked of smoke from the float-house woodstove.

3
The stillness of heart-shaped leaves breaks
when a grasshopper leaps. I have never
watched so many inch along branches before.
Though they have devastated butterfly bushes,
they have left these lilacs unscathed, but can I
shrug, be marathoner-running-into-spring-lightover-piñon-dotted-hills? The mind may snag,
still, weigh, sift, incubate, unbalance,
spark, rebalance, mend, release; when one
neighbor cuts grasses infested with grasshoppers,
inadvertently drives them into another’s
organic farm loaded with beets, lettuce, basil,
carrots, kale, chard: we cannot act as if
we were asleep; do not entrench boundaries
but work to dissolve them. From light to dark
is a pass of how many miles? Together they sowed
dark millet and reclaimed the reed marsh.
As we entwine in darkness-beginning-to-tracelight, dew evaporates off tips of grasses.

4
North they headed to Water Bend, what joy awaited them?
“I had to shoot myself or shoot someone else”;
cries of snow geese in the wave of sunrise;
the secretary winked, “I’m wearing edible panties”;
concubines were immolated on the emperor’s death;
the green tips of a leafing apple;
“Here are instructions for when I am dead”;
he was retracing the Long Walk;
when we addressed them as tongzhi, comrades, they laughed;
she swallowed the white sleeping pills and nearly OD’d;
the spring wind blew the ax off the chopping block;
when confronted with plagiarized lines, he shrugged, “I dreamed them”;
the ex-marine checked staff desks at 8:20 for attendance;
from the south, elephants; from the west, horses; from the north, camels;
stepping through the miniature garden, they had no idea
they were writing the character heart;
she danced in a topless bar;
when the army recruiting film previewed in the underground bomb shelter,
the crowd jeered;

she surprised him with a jar of Labrador leaves;
“Try to add to the sum total of human culture”;
though the edges and angles are many, who knows their number?

5
Acoma Pueblo,
Diné,
Crow,
Oglala Lakota,
Menominee,
Northern Ute,
Zuni Pueblo,
Kiowa,
Muckleshoot,
Standing Rock Lakota,
Muscogee,
Ojibwe,
San Ildefonso Pueblo,
Comanche,
Tlingit,
Mescalero Apache,
Siberian Yupik,
Jemez Pueblo,
Pawnee,
Chugach/Alutiiq,
Mohawk,
Swampy Cree,
Osage,
Taos Pueblo,
Arapaho,
Jicarilla Apache,
Paiute,
Haida,
Onondaga,
Cochiti Pueblo,
Sioux,
Eastern Shawnee,
Caddo,
Santa Clara Pueblo,

Northern Cheyenne,
Prairie Band Potawatomi,
Choctaw,
Chickasaw,
Tsalagi,
Inupiat.

6
We forage for black and yellow morels
under tulip poplars, but they are camouflaged
on the forest floor. Wherever I squint,
I mark varicolored leaves, clusters of deer scat;
at first I zigzag a branch back and forth
under leaves, expecting to uncover some,
then learn to spot-check near the trunks,
forage farther out above the roots among
lichened rocks. We bring two dozen back,
sauté them, add to pasta, salad, sip wine;
but what coalesces in the body for weeks
are glimpses of blossoming redbuds while
driving along a road; horses by the second gate;
lights on the porch; a basket of apples,
bread, farm milk set at a downstairs table;
rocking horse upstairs; two tapers lit;
quicksilver kisses, a diamond light; and,
before, tremor when you felt something odd:
pulled a black tick off from behind your ear,
brushed a smaller one out of your hair.

7
Who rescues hunters tipped into arctic waters?
The hour is a cashmere scarf; as a Black man
near a fountain raises saxophone to his lips
and showers the street with shimmering gold,
red lights of an ambulance weaving in traffic
bob into distance. From a dome, a pendulum
swings, almost touches numbers that mark
the hours in a circle on the floor. When
Robin’s coworkers were terminated, she left
her telecommunications job to groom the horses
she loves, even in zero-degree weather; she
cinches a saddle on Nemo even now. A meadow
mushroom, covered overnight under a glass bowl,
releases, onto white paper, a galaxy of
chocolate-brown spores. When you are still,
you spot the chance tracks of the living.
Who can suspend time on a string, make it
arc back and forth while earth rotates around it?

8
Incoming freshmen have been taken hostage,
the letter to the president began; we demand
computers and art supplies; limo service
to the Gathering of Nations; the sum total
of Pell funds be released at once. Benildus Hall
is our headquarters. When the SWAT team
surrounded the building, someone pointed
to the small print: Happy April First.
The mind seizes a spore then releases it.
Descending into the Ming tomb, I discerned
electric lights; a cold iron railing;
people shuffling down steps; camera flashes;
people shuffling across, up the other side,
then out; but nothing was at the center;
only now—the moment when water from six
directions is water from the six directions.
A neighbor listens for wings before dawn;
plums begin to begin to drop from branches.

9
“A driver’s door opened, and a head rolled
out of the burning car”—once she told me,
I could not expunge it. A backhoe beeps
when the driver moves it into reverse, beeps
above the din of morning traffic. A ginkgo
flames into yellow-gold, while, elsewhere,
red tulips flare on a slope. The mind weighs,
balances antinomies: at graduation, a student
speaker carries a black bag to the podium,
unveils bow, arrows, his entire body shaking,
and threatens to take aim at board members—
dissolves into air; a student in the audience
who slurs “far out” after every sentence
dissolves into air; the man who wafts eagle
feather above head, shoulders, along arms,
onto palms—dissolves into air; singers and
drummers who start and end dissolve into air;
and stillness, as we stir to dawn light, breaks.

III

The Double Helix
Marine biologists tracking pods of killer
whales in and out of Prince William Sound
recognize them by their dorsal fins and
by a flood of salmon scales swirling up.
A moose and two calves browse in twilight;
cow parsnip reeks along the road to Fritz Creek.
What does not dissolve in hindsight? The mind
tilts from starboard to port, port to starboard,
but steadies on even keel. Workmen stretch
an orange string to align flagstone steps,
stretch two lime-green strings to delineate
the wall’s thickness. Surveying stones
scattered on grass along the ditch, I observe
the wall rise in an irregular wave; and as
we dine at an oval table, discuss how
a diabetic homeopath endures unremitting pain,
how clusters of oyster mushrooms I forage
appear fresh but, when sliced, expose worms,
we lift and turn the incidents until—
a line of dorsal fins breaks water, blows
hang in air—we find their true and living place.
What neither comes nor goes? I try to converse

with a playwright who once sat in Oppenheimer’s
chair; propped near a table, nodding before
a color TV—within reach of his right hand,
an oblong box of pills: a.m., noon, p.m., night—
while a slurry of news pours in, he struggles,
fails to string a single sentence, yet, when
I stand, gazes point-blank, extends an arm.
A line of yellow-groove bamboo extends
along a backyard fence. Yesterday we drove
into the Jemez Mountains, cut shaggymanes
along Forest Road 144, foraged among spruce
in mist and wavering rain, and though you
found a site where someone had cut
a bolete stipe and cap, though you spotted,
on a rock, as we drove past, a squirrel gnawing
a chunk of cèpe, we found nothing, but
reveled in the Douglas fir. Look out, look in;
what percolates in the dark? Clouds, rain;
we stretch and align ourselves, become one.
Cries of glaucous-winged gulls on the bay:
in the swirling light at summer solstice,
I mark a plethora in the twenty-five-foot
shift between low- and high-tide lines;
a man casts from shore, reels in small halibut;
red-faced cormorants nest in a cliff side;

an otter lazes with head above waves;
at low tide I wander among squirting clams,
make crunching noises stepping on shells,
flip a rock, find nudibranch eggs,
a gunnel fish; spot orange sea stars,
leather star, sculpin, frilled anemones,
a single moon jelly propelling through
water, worn crab shells at the entrance
to an octopus den, mating helmet crabs
below the tide line; but, before I know it,
the tide swerves back, starts to cover
the far shelf of exposed blue mussels;
gulls lift off; green sea urchins disappear
beneath lapping waves—my glimpse expires.
Skunks pass by a screen door in the dark;
once they ravaged ripening corn in our garden
and still crisscross us because a retired
violinist used to feed them. Once a composer—
a killer whale spyhops near a research vessel—
told a patron, “It’s fine if you sleep with
my girlfriend,” though he did not yet know
his out-of-town girlfriend had already dumped
him for a software engineer. We pick winesap,
braeburn, golden delicious apples in a neighbor’s
orchard, press them; and as cider collects

in plastic jugs while a few yellow jackets sip,
time oozes. In a second I scramble
an egg, blink, scissor string, smudge
a photograph with blue ink, and the trigram
for Water transforms into Fire: when a former
soldier testifies that seeds contaminated
with plague were dumped from airplanes
during the growing season, a knife-edge runs
across my palms, but the truth scalds, anneals.
Fishermen fire at killer whales to prevent
them from stripping long lines of black cod.
You do not need to analyze toxins in peregrine
falcons to ascertain if the web is stretched
and stretched. In a Chimayó orchard where
two horses lean over a gate, two children
offer apples, while someone in a stream casts,
and the line snakes, glistens. Laughter
echoes from a table where someone pours
tequila onto ice, and ice crackles in a cup;
women slice sections of apples and toss them
in a wheelbarrow. We do not heed them
as we turn to each other and effervesce:
are we here to unravel, combust,
lightning the patch of ground where we stand?
Although the passions that torrent through

our bodies will one day vanish like smoke—
these words spiral the helix of living into smoke—
we embrace, rivet, inflame to mortal beauty,
to yellow-gold bursting through cottonwoods,
to morels sprouting through charred ground.
And as sky darkens, absorbs magpie nest,
green water tank, canales, pear, quince, slatted
wood fence, we tilt back and forth: though
the time we breathe is millennia when clocked
by a vibrating ray of cesium atoms, seconds
when measured by Comet Hyakutake—the tide
rushes over orange-tipped nudibranchs; silt
plunges underwater into a submarine canyon—
we observe snow on a flagstone path dissolve.

Equator
A bougainvillea thorn catches my sleeve
when I draw the curtain, then something
catches in myself. In Peru, Indians climb
a peak in late June to scan the Pleiades,
forecast the coming season. Meteorologists
have discovered El Niño causes high-level
November winds to blow from west to east,
and the Pleiades, visible low in the northeast sky only as dawn appears, will dim.
I weigh blue nails, step up to a counter,
buy plastic cement, putty knife, gloves,
wrench, paint thinner—glance at my thumb
already stained black—have no way to
forecast year or hour. Lily pollen smeared
my shirt across the right shoulder when
I moved flowers out of the bedroom
for the night. I try to constellate points
by which I could, in clear weather, hike
across an immense lava flow, but find
elegy and ode our magnetic north and south.

Pinwheel
Firecrackers pop in bursts of white light and smoke;
a cymbal crash reverberates in air: mortality’s
the incubator of dreams. Steaming green beans,
or screwing a wrought-iron hook into a post,
I do not expunge the past but ignite the fuse
to a whistling pinwheel. A girl sways under
a lion’s head, while others undulate behind
in an s. Casting back eight years, we entwine:
a tulip sunlight flares along our shoulders.
At Pergamon, we cross a forecourt—in the center
stands a column bearing an Aesculapian snake,
the space we meander through called the incubator
of dreams. We did not foresee sponges dangling
inside a spice shop or the repeating pattern
of swastikas along walls that have led here.
Though it is Year of the Rooster, I pin there
to here: a line of dumplings, noodles, rice cakes
disappears; reverberating hail on the roof suddenly stops.

Power Line
As light runs along the length of power lines,
you glimpse, in the garden, watermelon,
honeydew, broccoli, asparagus, silking corn;
you register the tremor of five screech owls
perched on a railing under the wisteria,
shaggymanes pushing up through pecan shells;
though a microbiologist with a brain tumor
can’t speak—he once intimated he most
feared to be waiting to die and is now
waiting to die—children play tag in spaces
around racks of bowling balls and white tables,
while someone scores a strike, shrieks;
young girls chassé diagonally across a floor;
a woman lays in an imperfection before
she completes her Teec Nos Pos weaving;
a sous-chef slices ginger, scallions,
anticipates placing a wet towel over dumplings,
as light lifts off the length of a power line.

Grand Bay
Gray Spanish moss hangs from the cypresses—
you stroll on an elevated boardwalk over dry swamp,
step off the platform and take a short path
to a green pitcher plant among grasses: it shows
signs of drought but is larger than your arms
can circle. The streaked pitchers resemble yearning
mouths opening at all angles, in all directions.
An alligator has flattened nearby horsetails,
but, famished, must have headed south.
When you take the boardwalk deeper in, climb
the latticed tower and gaze below, an airplane
lifts from a nearby strip and triggers vultures.
They rise in waves, while a lone hawk remains
unperturbed on a black gum branch. Over a hundred
vultures waver in the sky; while a few soar, most
circle, then resettle on branches. You meander
back out, graze the dangling Spanish moss,
find you choose not to avoid anything that comes.

Departures and Arrivals
An accountant leaning over a laptop
frets: I have botched this, bungled that—
he is not focused on numbers or accounts;
a taxi driver at an airport has no time
to contemplate rippling shadows of ginkgo leaves
but swerves between a van and truck;
a reinsurance analyst obsesses over a
one-in-ten probability that a hurricane
will scour the Florida Gulf Coast, while
an air-pollution expert is assigned
the task of designing an early warning
system for a dirty bomb. On an airplane,
waiting out a thunderstorm for two hours,
we cough, sneeze, shuffle, snooze,
flip through magazines, yet find
amethyst in an occasional vein of silence,
think insulin, sandpiper tracks on a beach;
and, when we least expect it, a peahen
strays into a yard; over a fence,
a neighbor passes a bag of organic lettuce
left over from farmers’ market. As we doodle,
snack, brush spruce needles off caps
of boletes then place them in a grocery bag,
give them to friends, we gaze at a board
of departures and arrivals: Anchorage 2:45,
Boston 1:15, Chicago 11:50, Miami 3:10.
Each moment in time is a hub. In the airport
of dreams, why not munch waffles at midnight,
extemporize, ache, joke, converse with
the dead? I’m out of it snaps at the end

of a fiber-optic line, then sizzles at
how we thirst and renew our thirst in each other.

Fractal
Stopped at an intersection,
ruminating on how, in
a game of go, to consider all
the possible moves until
the end would take a computer
longer than the expected
lifetime of the universe,
you flit from piccolo
to stovepipe in a letter,
to scrutinizing faces
while standing in line
at the post office, to weather
forecast—a snowflake
has an infinite number
of possible shapes—
consider, only last weekend,
a wasp threaded along a
screen door in south light,
mark the impulse to—not
see this, do that—water
leafing pear trees along
a curved driveway, relax
the intricate openwork mesh
of spring, recall lifting
a packet of flax seeds
off the counter, and, checking
for an expiration date,
note—red light, green light—
sow when danger of
frost is past, then go, go.

The North Window
Before sky lightens to reveal a coyote fence,
he revels in the unseen: a green eel snaps,
javelinas snort, a cougar sips at a stream.
He will not live as if a seine slowly tightens
around them. Though he will never be a beekeeper,
or lepidopterist, or stand at the North Pole,
he might fire raku ware, whisk them to Atitlán,
set yellow irises at the table, raft them
down the Yukon. He revels at the flavor of
thimbleberries in his mouth, how they rivet
at a kiss. In an instant, raku ware and
the Yukon are at his fingertips. As light
traces sky out the north window, he nods:
silver poplars rise and thin to the very twig.

Yardangs
She who can’t sleep takes a sleeping pill,
then another, and another. A crab apple
in the yard blossoms along the curve
of spring. Along a stone wall, we yearn
for a line of Japanese irises that do not appear,
glimpse a body on a stretcher loaded
into an ambulance. In the winter of spring,
a neighbor frets over air-pollution vectors;
a teenage girl worries her horse slashes
its neck along barbed wire. Prevailing winds:
west-northwest. As a physicist posits
all languages have a single root, I weigh
arête, yardang, strike valley, ciénega,
Tsé Bit’a’í: Shiprock, the rock with wings.
But is there bedrock? Scent of your
breasts and hair. Who is of the Bitter Water Clan?
A red tulip in a glass droops within hours.
Tremor at how z, x, y puts form into danger.

Virga
A quarterback slants a short pass to a tight end,
and the screen fills with tacklers.
He presses a button—
two miles deep in the Atlantic, shrimp hover around
a vent, where the ocean temperature is thirty-six
degrees—
sips a Lingzhi mushroom brew, dozes:
at a banquet with wineglasses raised, the host starts
to say, “Long live”;
teenage girls dressed in red silk
cartwheel past; a line of children trumpet on makeshift
horns;
instrumental in fund-raising the construction
of an elementary school, he has journeyed north
of Yan’an.
Hunting wild ginseng in the hills is rain
that evaporates before it touches the ground;
he has not
seen Orion for a month, nor Sirius, nor read they have
found signs of water on Mars.
Breathing is a struggle:
“I must live along a brightening curve, otherwise
it’s fathomless dark”;
he considers how his wife and son
will navigate, whether a cousin fencing tomb relics
will reinvent himself;
at an underwater peak
in the Coral Sea, shrimp thought to be extinct
for fifty million years, on a large screen, congregate.

After Completion
1
Mayans charted Venus’s motion across the sky,
poured chocolate into jars and interred them
with the dead. A woman dips three bowls into
hare’s-fur glaze, places them in a kiln, anticipates
removing them, red-hot, to a shelf to cool.
When samba melodies have dissipated into air,
when lights wrapped around a willow have vanished,
what pattern of shifting lines leads to Duration?
He encloses a section of garden in wire mesh
so that raccoons cannot strip ears in the dark,
picks cucumbers, moves cantaloupes out of furrows—
the yellow corn tassels before the white.
In this warm room, he slides his tongue along
her nipples; she runs her hair across his face;
they dip in the opaque, iron glaze of the day,
fire each emotion so that it becomes itself;
and, as the locus of the visible shrinks,
waves of red-capped boletes rise beneath conifers.

2
A sunfish strikes the fly
as soon as
it hits the water;
the time of your life
is the line extending;
when he blinks,
a hair-like floater
shifts in his left eye;
when is joy
kindling to greater joy?
this nylon filament
is transparent in water
yet blue in air;
grasshoppers
rest in the tall grass.

3
Perched on a bare branch, a great horned owl
moves a wing, brushes an ear in the drizzle;
he can’t dispel how it reeks of hunger as he
slams a car door, clicks seat belt, turns
the ignition key. Then he recalls casting
off a stern: he knows a strike, and, reeling in
the green nylon line, the boat turns; and as
a striped bass rises to the surface, he forgets
he is breathing. Once, together, using fifty
irregular yarrow stalks, they generated
a hexagram whose figure was Pushing Upward.
What glimmers as it passes through the sieve
of memory? For a decade they have wandered
in the Barrancas and grazed Apache plume.
He weeds so rows of corn may rise in the garden;
he weeds so that when he kisses her eyelids,
when they caress, and she shivers and sighs,
they rivet in their bodies, circumscribe here.

4
A great blue heron
perched
on a cottonwood branch;
tying
a Trilene knot;
a red dragonfly
nibbles the dangling fly
before he casts;
when he blinks,
he recalls their eyelashes;
casting
and losing sight
of the line;
the sky moves
from black to deep blue.

5
Ravens snatch fledgling peregrine falcons
out of a cliff side, but when they try to raid
a great horned owls’ nest, the owls swoop,
and ravens erupt into balls of black feathers.
At Chichén Itzá, you do not need to stare
at a rack of skulls before you enter the ball
court to know they scrimmaged for their lives;
when the black rubber ball rebounded off
a hip up through the ring tenoned in the wall,
spectators shrieked, threw off their robes
and fled. The vanquished were tied into balls,
rolled down stone stairs to their deaths.
In one stela, a player lifts a severed head
by the hair, while the decapitated body spurts
six blood snakes. You become a black mirror:
when a woman pulls a barbed cord through
her tongue, when a man mutilates himself
with stingray spines, what vision is earned?

6
Lifting a tea bowl with a hare’s-fur glaze,
he admires the russet that emerges along the rim;
though tea bowls have been named Dusk,
Shameless Woman, Thatch Hut—this nameless one
was a gift. He considers the brevity of what
they hold: the pond, an empty bowl, brims,
shimmers with what is to come. Their minds brim
when they traverse the narrow length of field
to their reclaimed pond: they have removed
Russian olives, planted slender cinquefoil,
marsh buttercup, blue iris, marsh aster, water
parsnip, riparian primrose, yellow monkey flower,
big blue lobelia, yerba mansa; and though it
will be three to five years before the full effect,
several clusters of irises pulled out of mud,
placed on an island, are already in bloom.
A bullfrog dives, a bass darts into deep water
as they approach, while, above, a kingfisher circles.

7
They catch glimpses of trout in the depths,
spot two yellow ones flickering at a distance.
He thought a dead teal had drifted to shore,
then discerned it was a decoy. Venus rising
does not signify this world’s end. In the yard,
he collects red leaves from a golden rain tree.
Here is the zigzag path to bliss: six trout align
in the water between aquatic grasses, wasps
nuzzle into an apple; cottonwood leaves drift
on the surface; a polar bear leaps off ice.
He does not need to spot their looping footprints
to recognize they missed several chances before
finding countless chanterelles in a clearing.
If joy, joy; if regret, regret; if ecstasy, ecstasy.
When they die, they vanish into their words;
they vanish and pinpoint flowers unfolding;
they pinpoint flowers and erupt into light;
they erupt and quicken the living to the living.

Compass Rose
2014

Black kites with outstretched wings circle overhead—

After a New Moon
Each evening you gaze in the southwest sky
as a crescent extends in argentine light.
When the moon was new, your mind was
desireless, but now both wax to the world.
While your neighbor’s field is cleared,
your corner plot is strewn with desiccated
sunflower stalks. You scrutinize the bare
apricot limbs that have never set fruit,
the wisteria that has never blossomed,
and wince, hearing how, at New Year’s,
teens bashed in a door and clubbed strangers.
Near a pond, someone kicks a dog out
of a pickup. Each second, a river edged
with ice shifts course. Last summer’s
exposed tractor tire is nearly buried
under silt. An owl lifts from a poplar,
while the moon, no, the human mind
moves from brightest bright to darkest dark.

Sticking out of yellow-tongued flames on a ghat, a left foot—
Near a stopped bus, one kid performs acrobatics while another drums—

The Curvature of Earth
Red beans in a flat basket catch sunlight—
we enter a village built in the shape
of an ox, stride up an arched bridge
over white lilies; along houses, water,
coursing in alleyways, connects ponds.
Kiwis hang from branches by a moon
door. We step into a two-story hall
with a light well and sandalwood panels:
in a closet off the mah-jongg room
is a bed for clandestine encounters.
A cassia tree shades a courtyard
corner; phoenix-tail bamboos line
the horse-head walls. The branching
of memory resembles these interconnected
waterways: a chrysanthemum odor
permeates the air, but I can’t locate it.
Soldiers fire mortars at enemy bunkers,
while Afghan farmers pause then resume
slicing poppy bulbs and draining resin.
A caretaker checks on his clients’ lawns
and swimming pools. The army calls—
he swerves a golf cart into a ditch—

the surf slams against black lava rock,
against black lava rock—and a welt
spreads across his face. Hunting for
a single glow-in-the-dark jigsaw piece,
we find incompletion a spark.
We volley an orange Ping-Pong ball
back and forth: hungers and fears
spiral through us, forming a filament
by which we heat into cesium light.
And, in the flowing current, we slice
back and forth—topspin, sidespin—
the erasure of history on the arcing ball.
Snow on the tips of forsythia dissolves
within hours. A kestrel circles overhead,
while we peer into a canyon and spot
caves but not a macaw petroglyph.
Yesterday, we looked from a mesa tip
across the valley to Chimayó, tin roofs
glinting in sunlight. Today, willows
extend one-inch shoots; mourning cloaks
flit along the roadside; a red-winged
blackbird calls. Though the March world
leafs and branches, I ache at how
mortality fissures the lungs:
and the pangs resemble ice forming,

ice crystals, ice that resembles the wings
of cicadas, ice flowers, drift ice, ice
that forms at the edges of a rock
midstream, thawing hole in ice, young
shore ice, crack in ice caused by the tides.
Scissors snip white chrysanthemum stalks—
auburn through a black tea-bowl rim—
is water to Siberian irises as art
is to life? You have not taken care
of tying your shoes—a few nanoseconds,
a few thousand years—water catlaps
up the Taf Estuary to a boathouse—
herring shimmer and twitch in a rising net—
rubbing blackthorn oil on her breasts—
in a shed, words; below the cliff, waves—
where å i åa ä e ö means island in the river—
while a veteran rummages through trash,
on Mars a robot arm digs for ice—
when the bow lifts from the D string,
“This is no way to live” echoes in his ears.
Sandhill cranes call from the marsh,
then, low, out of the southwest,
three appear and drop into the water:
their silhouettes sway in the twilight,
the marsh surface argentine and black.

Before darkness absorbs it all, I recall
locks inscribed with lovers’ names
on a waist-high chain extending along
a path at the top of Yellow Mountain.
She brushes her hair across his chest;
he runs his tongue along her neck—
reentering the earth’s atmosphere,
a satellite ignites. A wavering line
of cars issues north out of the bosque.
The last shapes of cranes dissolve
into vitreous darkness. Setting aside
binoculars, I adjust the side-view
mirror—our breath fogs the windshield.
A complex of vibrating strings:
this hand, that caress, this silk
gauze running across your throat,
your eyelids, this season where
tiny ants swarm large black ones
and pull apart their legs. Hail shreds
the rows of lettuces beyond the fence;
water, running through sprinklers,
swirls. A veteran’s wince coincides
with the pang a girl feels when
she masters hooked bows in a minuet.
And the bowing is a curved line,

loop, scrawl, macaw in air. A redwinged blackbird nests in the dark;
where we pruned branches, starlight
floods in over the earth’s curvature.

Begging near a car window, a girl with a missing arm—
Mynah bird sipping water out of a bronze bowl sprinkled with jasmine petals
—
Twitching before he plays a sarangi near the temple entrance, a blind man—

Compass Rose
1 Arctic Circle
If the strings of a ¾ violin
are at rest, if the two horsehair
bows repose in their case—
the case holds the blue of lakes
and the whites of snow;
she posts on a horse inside a barn;
rain splatters on the skylight
during the night; she inhales
the smell of newly born chickens
in a stall—if the interval
between lightning and thunder
is a blue dagger, if she hears
Gavotte in D Major as he drives
in silence past Camel Rock—
she stirs then drifts into feathered
waves of sleep; a healer rebuilds
her inner moon and connection
to the earth while she plays
Hangman with her mother;
she stops running out into the cold
whirlpool dark; behind his eyelids,
green curtains of light shimmer
across the polar sky; she has difficulty
posting with one foot in the stirrup—
if he stands, at minus fifteen degrees,
a black dot in the snow—she rides
bareback to regain her balance;
he prays that diverging rays
emanate from a single quartz crystal;
he prays that her laughter be
June grass, that the jagged floating

chunks of ice ease and dissolve;
he prays when she lights a tiny
candle on a shelf; reindeer eat
lichens and browse among marshes
at the height of summer—
if she bows and hears applause
then puts her bow to the string,
if she decides, “This is nothing,”
let the spark ignite horse become
barn become valley become world.

2 Fault Lines
He pours water into a cup: at room temperature,
the cup is white, but, after he microwaves it,
and before steeping a tea bag with mint leaves,
he notices outlines of shards have formed
above the water. As the cup cools, the lines
disappear: now he glimpses fault lines
inside himself and feels a Siberian tiger
pace along the bars of a cell—black, orange,
white; black, orange, white—and feels how
the repeating chord sends waves through him.
His eyes glisten, and he tries to dispel the crests,
but what have I done, what can I do throbs
in his arteries and veins. Today he will
handle plutonium at the lab and won’t
consider beryllium casings. He situates the past
in the slight aroma of mint rising in the air.
Sometimes he feels like an astronaut suspended
above Earth twisting on an umbilical cord;
sometimes he’s in the crosshairs of a scope,
and tiger stripes flow in waves across his body.

3 Glimmer Train
Red-winged blackbirds in the cattail pond—
today I kicked an elk hoof off the path,
read that armadillo eaters can catch
leprosy, but who eats armadillo and eats
it rare? Last night you wrote that, walking
to the stables, you glimpsed horses at twilight
in a field. We walk barefoot up a ridge
and roll down a dune; sip raki, savor
shish kebab and yogurt in an arcade.
Once we pored over divination lines incised
into tortoise shells, and once we stepped
through the keyhole entry into a garden
with pools of glimmering water. In the gaps
between my words, peonies rise through hoops
behind our bedroom—peonies are indeed
rising through hoops behind our bedroom—
you comb your hair at the sink as they unfold.

4 Orchid Hour
Orchid leaves are dark against the brighter glass;
two translucent blooms expand at the tip
of a segmented stalk, and, through the window,
an orange hue limns the Jemez Mountains.
At the lab a technician prepares a response
to a hypothetical anthrax attack, and what
is imagined can be: lionfish proliferate
in the Caribbean, traces of uranium appear
in an aquifer, and the beads of an abacus
register a moment in time: the cost of cabbage,
catfish crammed in a bubbling tank—and words
in the dictionary are spores: xeriscape, fugu,
cloister, equanimity. In the orchid hour,
you believe you know where you are, looking
before and through a window, but a pang lodges—
out of all the possible worlds, this, this.

5 The Curtain
Inside each galaxy is a black hole—
we will never see your birth mother’s face—
our solar system has eight, not nine, planets—
we will never know the place of your birth—
who anticipated five dwarf planets
in our solar system
or that ice lodged on one of Jupiter’s moons?
When three caretakers brought three babies
into the room, your mother leapt out of her chair,
knowing at a glance your face.
We do not want anyone to be like the rings of Saturn,
glinting in orbit,
or inhabiting the gaps between rings;
we do not want anyone to be like Uranus.
On a whiteboard, you draw a heart, an infinity sign,
star, and attune to a gyroscope’s tilt.
At night I’ve pulled the curtain
and stopped at the point
where you twirled and transfixed—
but tonight I pull the curtain to the end:
inside our planet is a molten core.

6 2′33″
Land mines in fields are waiting to explode—
from the right lane, a car zips ahead:
you brake, and as it brakes into a leftturn bay, you glance at the movie marquee
and twenty-four-hour grocery store:
at a checkout counter, a clerk scans
an eight-pack of AA batteries, asks
if you’re playing Monopoly; no, no,
and tonight you’re lucky: you don’t need
a kidney transplant; no one angles a shiv
at your throat—a farmer hesitates
to pace a field before planting yams—
his father’s leg tore in a gunpowder burst—
along the riverbed, you spot a few beer
bottles and tire tracks but no elk carcass
in the brush: no snarling dogs leap out—
Orion pulses above the Sangre de Cristos—
and you plunge into highway darkness ahead.

7 Comet Hyakutake
Comet Hyakutake’s tail stretches for 360 million miles—
in 1996, we saw Hyakutake through binoculars—
the ion tail contains the time we saw bats emerge out of a cavern at dusk—
in the cavern, we first heard stalactites dripping—
first silence, then reverberating sound—
our touch reverberates and makes a blossoming track—
a comet’s nucleus emits X-rays and leaves tracks—
two thousand miles away, you box up books and, in two days, will step
through the invisible rays of an airport scanner—
we write on invisible pages in an invisible book with invisible ink—
in nature’s book, we read a few pages—
in the sky, we read the ion tracks from the orchard—
the apple orchard where blossoms unfold, where we unfold—
budding, the child who writes, “the puzzle comes to life”—
elated, puzzled, shocked, dismayed, confident, loving: minutes to an hour—
a minute, a pinhole lens through which light passes—
Comet Hyakutake will not pass Earth for another 100,000 years—
no matter, ardor is here—
and to the writer of fragments, each fragment is a whole—

8 Morning Antlers
Red-winged blackbirds in the cattail pond—
today I kicked and flipped a wing
in the sand and saw it was a shearedoff flicker’s. Yesterday’s rain has left
snow on Tesuque Peak, and the river
will widen then dwindle. We step
into a house and notice antlers mounted
on the wall behind us; a ten-day-old child
looks, nurses, and sleeps; his mother
smiles but says she cries then cries
as emptiness brims up and over.
And as actions are rooted in feelings,
I see how picking spinach in a field
blossoms the picker, how a thoughtless act
shears a wing. As we walk out
to the car, the daylight is brighter
than we knew. We do not believe
flames shoot out of a cauldron of days
but, looking at the horizon, see
flames leap and crown from tree to tree.

9 Compass Rose
Along the ridge, flames leaped and crowned
from tree to tree. We woke to charred pine
needles in the yard; smoke misted then hazed
the orchard. What closes and is literal,
what opens and is figurative? A healer aligns
her east and west, her north and south.
They backfired fires against the larger blaze—
barrels of plutonium on the mesa in white tents.
We do not circumnavigate but pinhole through it.
She leads a horse past stalls; what closes
and is figurative, what opens and is literal?
Through the skylight she watches a rising moon.
The lines hold, and the fire sweeps south
and north. Sometimes a thistle is just
a thistle. We step out of the sauna and take
a cold plunge; cottonwoods in the riverbed
form a curved flame. Through here,
water cascades; she posts a horse into daylight.

10 Red Breath
Shaggy red clouds in the west—
unlatching a gate, I step into a field:
no coyote slants across with a chicken in its mouth,
no wild asparagus rises near the ditch.
In the night sky, Babylonian astronomers
recorded a supernova
and witnessed the past catch up to the present,
but they did not write
what they felt at what they saw—
they could not see to this moment.
From August, we could not see to this moment
but draw water out of a deep well—
it has the taste of
creek water in a tin cup,
and my teeth ache against the cold.
Juniper smoke rises and twists through the flue—
my eyes widen
as I brush your hair, brush your hair—
I have red breath:
in the deep night, we are again lit,
and I true this time to consequence.

In relief, a naked woman arches and pulls a thorn out of her raised heel—
Men carry white-wrapped corpses on bamboo stretchers down the steps—
She undresses: a scorpion on her right thigh—
A boy displays a monkey on a leash then smacks it with a stick—

Available Light
1
Sandalwood-scented flames engulf a corpse—
farther down the ghat, a man carries fire
in his right hand to a shaved body placed
faceup on logs. He circles five times, ignites
the pyre: the dead man’s mouth opens.
Moored offshore, we rock in a creaking skiff,
stiffen at these fires which engulf lifetimes.
A fine soot hangs in the air; in a hotel room,
a woman infected with typhoid writhes,
“Do not let me die,” and a doctor’s assistant
injects her with antibiotics. Today, no one
comprehends how dark energy and dark
matter enlace this world; no one stares
at the heart-shaped leaves of spring
and infers we are ensnared by our illusions.
After someone cuts the barbed wire across
the arroyo, three-wheelers slash ruts into slopes.

2
Huddled by roadside fires—
“In the end, we’re dust streamers
ionized by ultraviolet radiation”—
teens ditch school and ransack mailboxes—
along the dark street, an elephant lumbers—
cracking a skull with a hammer—
a Yield sign riddled with bullet holes—
metastasized to his brain—
gazing in each other’s eyes,
they flow and overflow—
a one-legged girl at a car window.

3
Along a sculptured sandstone wall, a dancer
raises a right foot to fasten ankle bells;
a naked woman arches and scrubs her back;
a flute player wets his lips and blows.
We try to sleep, but a rat scavenges
on the floor; at dawn, pulling a curtain,
you find a showerhead wrapped in plastic,
crank the faucet: red-brown water gurgles out.
Theriomorphic gods pass through the mind,
but an egret may be an egret. Pausing
at a bomb alert on a glass door, I scan cars
jammed into the square; you hand alms
to a one-eyed woman, whiff red chiles
in burlap sacks. Soldiers cordon off a gate,
set rifles with inverted-V mounts on sandbags.
At dusk, someone on a motorcycle throws
acid at two women and grabs a purse.
A woman wraps a leg around her lover;
dressed only in gold foil, a man gesticulates—
we wipe soot off the backs of our necks.

4
By the acequia headgate, a rib cage—
smoking in a wheelchair,
she exhales and forms a rafflesia flower—
pit bull on a leash—
all men are mortal—
he set his Laundromat ablaze—
the rising spires resembling Himalayan peaks—
“I cannn’t talk”—
parrots squawking in the branches of an ashoka tree—
heat death—
when is recollection liberation?

5
Streamers around a bodhi tree, the elongated
leaf tips; under an eave, the hexagonal cells
of a wasp nest. With a wheelbarrow, someone
hauls mixed clay and sand to waiting men.
Once I tilted hawk and trowel, plastered cement
on walls, ran metal lath across the setting coat.
“Their gold teeth and rings burn with their bodies,”
says the boatman. Our love cries vanish into air,
yet my tongue running along your clavicle
releases spring light in the room. Our fingertips
floodgate open: death, no, ardor will be violet
flare to our nights, and the knots of existence
dissolve when we no longer try to grasp them.
The net of the past dissolves when the mixer
stops mixing: cranes stalk fish in shallow ponds;
a woman aligns basil plants in terra-cotta pots;
out of nowhere, a fly strikes a windowpane.

6
At a rink, you step onto ice and mark the lines
already cut, but they are not your lines;
the mind pools what will happen with
what has happened. Moving out and
cutting an arc, you find the locus of creation.
You do not need to draw “nine”
and “four” in ashes to end your attachment
to the dead; you yearn to live as a river
fans out in a delta. A man tosses a pot
of water behind his shoulder and releases
the dark energy of attachment; fires recede
into darkness and become candlelights
bobbing downstream. In this hourglass place,
ants lift grains of sand above brickwork,
creating a series of circular dunes;
two baby robins sleep behind wisteria leaves;
in an attosecond, here and there dissolve.

7
Lifting off a cottonwood, a red-tailed hawk—
carved in a sandstone wall, a woman applies
henna to her right hand. By the papaya tree,
we climb to a rooftop, peer down at wheat
spread out on another roof—pink and madder
clothes pinned to a line in a backyard.
A bull with a swishing tail lumbers past
the flashlight store; and what is complex
is most simple. In a doorway, a girl leaning
into sunshine writes on the stone floor.
We sip chai in a courtyard, inhale the aroma
of neem leaves laced with diesel exhaust.
I hose new grass by the kitchen, guess
to be liberated from the past is to be
freed from the future; and, as sunlight
inclines, making the bougainvillea leaves
by the window translucent, I catch
our fugitive, living tracks as we make our way.

The Infinity Pool
Someone snips barbed wire and gathers
yerba mansa in the field; the Great Red Spot
on Jupiter whirls counterclockwise;
sea turtles beach on white sand. In the sky,
a rose hue floats over a blue that limns
a deeper blue at the horizon. Unwrapping
chewing gum, a child asks, “Where
is the end to matter?” Over time, a puffer
fish evolved resistance to tetrodotoxin
and synthesized it. I try on T-shirts
from a shelf, but not, twenty months later,
your father’s pajamas in the drawer.
Now the stiletto palm-leaves are delineated,
a yellow-billed cardinal sips at a ledge.
By long count, a day’s a drop in an infinity
pool. The rose tips of clouds whiten;
someone sprinkles crushed mica into clay
and sand before plastering an interior wall.

Strike-Slip
Faucets drip, and the night plunges to minus
fifteen degrees. Today you stared at a map
of Africa on a school wall and shook your head
at “Yugoslavia” written along the Adriatic
coast near the top—how many times
are lines drawn and redrawn, and to what end?
This ebony bead yours, that amber one
another’s. A coelacanth swims in the depths
off Mozambique and eludes a net; a crystal
layer forms behind your retinas. Today
you saw the long plastic sheet in the furrow
blown, like a shroud, around elm branches.
A V-shaped aquatic-grass cutter leans
against the porch, and you ponder how things
get to where they are. A young writer
from Milwaukee who yearned to travel calls—
he’s hiked the Himalayas and frets
at what to do: in Nepal, during civil strife,
he and an Israeli backpacker smoked
and yakked all night in the emptied hotel;
now that the snow is dissolving off Everest,
bodies of climbers and trash are exposed.
A glowing eel in the darkness—anguish.
He clacks the beads, how to live, where to go.

She wrings her hair after stepping out of a bath—
A portion of a leograph visible amid rubble—
A woman averts her gaze from the procession of war elephants—
Two boys at a car window receive red apples—
Sipping masala tea in an inner courtyard with blue-washed walls—

The Immediacy of Heat
1
No Trespassing is nailed to a cottonwood trunk,
but the sign vanishes within days. You’ve seen
a pile of sheep bones dumped off the dirt road
to the river; in the arroyo, you’ve heard gunshots
and veered upstream. On the highway, a pickup
tailgates a new car, and red plastic flowers,
at a curve, fade. In the slanted rising light,
men stumble out of brambles along the bosque
and head into town; and you time your trip
to the drugstore so you aren’t accosted
by women hungering for a fix. At the high school,
chains are drawn above the pavement;
the casino parking lot is already dotted with cars.
At the adjoining bowling alley, someone hurls
a strike, and, inside, you lose track of spring.
You catch the clatter of coins—people
blank into themselves. Searching for an exit,
you find you’ve zigzagged and circled a maze.

2
At the mesa’s brink, we eye the road
snaking across the valley toward Pedernal,
where hunters gathered flint. A new moon
and two planets bob in the deepening sky;
I lean into the wind and find this tension
the beginning of a sphere. I bend to a stone
basin and, ladling water, sip. I’m lit
and feel new leaves slide out of branches;
see a child, gathering blue pine needles,
inhale the aroma of earth; a worker
snips and nails metal lath into a firewall.
At our first talk, time grew rounded:
a sparkler scattered sparks in all directions—
though gone, they’re gone into my fingertips.
The beauty of imperfection’s when a potter
slightly pinches a bowl while arcing it
into a second glaze so that, fired,
the bowl marks a crescent hare’s-fur overlay.

3
Under a microscope, I once gazed at algae, at cork cells—
bald eagles at the end of a pier—
a sheep carcass near an arroyo’s mouth—
he plants lettuces in the field, and that night it snows—
a woman has closed her eyelids and will never reopen them—
a crow alights on a branch—
the crunching sounds of inlet ice breaking up—
six cars in the driveway—
the invisible lines of isobars, always shifting—
one thing it is to focus; another, to twig—
some of the plastered exterior walls lack the final color coat—
flowering dogwood—
the circular saw rang out through the cambium of summer—
when she vanishes, he will shiver and shiver—

4
Stepping out of the casino, you blink, but lights
still ricochet off glass. Do not take checks
from Samantha Cruz is posted on a billboard
by the liquor warehouse. Disorientation’s
a rope burn in your hands: are we green flies
drawn to stinkhorns? or shoots leafing
out of time’s branches? You blink:
someone hurls a grenade but detonates
himself. You blink: someone in the hallway
at the Bureau of Indian Affairs shouts, “Fire me.”
You blink, and a profusion of lavender enters
the window. Dipping under incoming waves,
you resurface with a salt sting on your eyelids.
Once you scavenged a burn for morels.
An unemployed carpenter builds his daughter
a harp; you catch yearning, love, solace
as the forty-six strings are tightened.
You can’t pluck them, but the emotions mesh.

5
Vibrating strings
compose matter and force—
as I run a magnetic card
at a subway turnstile, a wave
of people converges and flows
through the gates; people will always
converge and flow
through the gates—always?
If I sprinkle iron filings onto a sheet
of paper, I make visible
the magnetic lines of the moment.
At closing hour,
the manager of a restaurant
sweats and anticipates a dark figure
bursting in and aiming
a gun at his chest, but tonight
no figure appears. In this world,
we stare at a rotating needle
on a compass and locate
by closing our eyes. At dusk
our fingertips are edged with light,
the fifty-four bones of our hands
are edged with light,
and the immediacy of heat
is a spring melt among conifers
gathering into a cascade.

At the Equinox
The tide ebbs and reveals orange and purple sea stars.
I have no special theory of radiance,
but after rain evaporates
off pine needles, the needles glisten.
In the courtyard, we spot the rising shell of a moon,
and, at the equinox, bathe in its gleam.
Using all the tides of starlight,
we find
vicissitude is our charm.
On the mudflats off Homer,
I catch the tremor when waves start to slide back in;
and, from Roanoke, you carry
the leafing jade smoke of willows.
Looping out into the world, we thread
and return. The lapping waves
cover an expanse of mussels clustered on rocks;
and, giving shape to what is unspoken,
forsythia buds and blooms in our arms.

Returning to Northern New Mexico after a Trip to Asia
A tea master examines pellets with tweezers,
points to the varying hues, then pushes
the dish aside. At another shop, a woman
rinses a cylindrical cup with black tea:
we inhale, nod, sip from a second cup—
rabbit tracks in snow become tracks
in my mind. At a banquet, eating something
sausage-like, I’m told, “It’s a chicken’s ball.”
Two horses huddle under leafless poplars.
A neighbor runs water into an oval container,
but, in a day, the roan bangs it with his hoof.
The skunks and raccoons have vanished.
What happened to the End World Hunger project?
Revolutionary slogans sandblasted off
Anhui walls left faint outlines. When
wind swayed the fragrant pine branches
in a Taiwan garden, Sylvie winced, “Kamikaze
pilots drank and whored their last nights here.”

Qiviut
A dog’s bark has use, and so does honey
and a harpoon. The Inuit use the undercoat
wool of the musk ox, qiviut, to make
scarves and hats. The unexpected utility
of things is a calculus: a wooden spoon,
in a ceramic jar by the stove, has flavors
and stains from tomatoes and garlic,
cilantro and potato broth; it has nicks
and scorch lines, the oil of human hands.
Aspirin may be sifted out of willow bark,
but of what use, other than to the butterfly,
are a butterfly’s wings? The weight
of a pin is equivalent to a hundred
postage stamps, and words, articulated
with care, may heal a rift across waters.
An unspoken pang may, like an asymptote,
approach visible speech: it runs closer
and closer but does not touch. As it
runs out of sight, words are mulled:
Venus, a black speck, flies across the sun.

Backlit
You pick the next-to-last apple off a branch;
here’s to ripening, to the bur that catches
on your shoelace and makes you pause,
consider, retrace your path. The cottonwoods
have burst into yellow flame; by the ditch,
someone dumps a pile of butchered bones.
When we saw white droppings on the brick porch,
we turned and looked up to five screech owls
roosting on a dark beam, backlit
through wisteria leaves. By the metal gate,
a bobcat bounds off with a rabbit in his mouth.
You yearn to watch sunlight stream
through the backs of Japanese maples
but see sheet lightning in the dark—
it flows from your toes to fingertips to hair.

An aura reader jots down the colors of your seven chakras—
A bus hits a motorcycle from behind and runs over the driver and his
passenger—
Discussing the price of a miniature elephant on wheels—
Green papayas on a tree by a gate—
Lit candles bobbing downstream into the sinuous darkness—
A naked woman applies kohl to her right eyelid—
The limp tassels of new ashoka leaves in a tomb courtyard—

Confetti
Strike, rub, crumple—rip paper into shreds:
you can make confetti form a quick orange
blossom before it collapses to the ground.
At night, a driver misses a curve and plows
through the wall into a neighbor’s dining room;
twice a day, another neighbor breaks apart
ice with a pick, and her horses dip their heads
into the tub. At dawn, branches scrape,
like rough flint, against the window;
where I stare, a woman once threw a shuttle
back and forth through the alternating sheds
at her loom, and that sound was a needle
sparking through emptiness. Last night,
as sleet hit the skylight, we moved from
trough to crest to radiating wave: even as
shrapnel litters the ground, as a car flips
and scatters bright shards of CDs into the grass.

Spectral Hues
The Chandra telescope tracks
a particle’s X-ray emissions
before it vanishes into a black hole,
but pin your eyes to earth.
At sixty, you do not hunger
to spot an iridescent green
butterfly alighting on moss—
shift your eyes and it’s there.
A great blue heron lands
on a pond island, and all
emotions vibrate in spectral
hues inside the totality
of white light. Driving toward
the Los Alamos mesas,
you pass a yellow spot,
where a cottonwood was chainsawed
after they found
their son dangling from a limb.
You sprinkle dragon well leaves
in a glass cup, add simmering
water, and, after the leaves unfurl, sip.

Windows and Mirrors
Ladybug moving along a cast-iron chair—
translucent pink of a budding lotus
in the pond—you slide along
a botanical wall, recall someone
who stammered to avoid the army
and then could not undo his stutter.
A wasp lays eggs in a tarantula;
a gecko slips under the outdoor grill.
You bite into a deep-fried scorpion
on a skewer: when your father reached
for the inhaler, your mother
stopped breathing. Iridescent green
butterflies pinned to the wall—
a rainbow passing across an island—
striding past ants on a bougainvillea,
you find windows and mirrors
in the refractive index of time.
Tracks of clothes on the floor—
white plumeria on the grass—
hatched wasps consume the tarantula.

Midnight Loon
Burglars enter an apartment and ransack drawers;
finding neither gold nor cash, they flee,
leaving the laundry and bathroom lights on—
they have fled themselves. I catch the dipping
pitch of a motorcycle, iceberg hues in clouds;
the gravel courtyard’s a midnight garden,
as in Japan, raked to resemble ocean waves
in moonshine, whirlpool eddies, circular ripples—
and nothing is quite what it appears to be.
When I unlatch the screen door, a snake
slides under the weathered decking; I spot
the jagged hole edged with glass where a burglar
reached through the window, but no one
marks the poplars darker with thunder and rain.
In moonlight I watch the whirlpool hues
of clouds drift over our courtyard, adobe walls,
and gate, and, though there is no loon,
a loon calls out over the yard, over the water.

Point-Blank
Through the irregular mesh of a web,
you shove an inverted vase down
but, instead of trapping a black widow,
squash it when the glass strikes
the floor. Put your fingers
on the mind’s strings: in the silence,
you do not grasp silence—a thoughtless
thought permeates you. In Medellín,
a man recalls faces but can’t recall
what he wrote or said last night; fretting
at the widening chasm, he runs from X
but does not know if he lunges
this way or to his end. Lifting the vase,
you examine spider legs on the brick floor,
the bulk of the black widow smeared
inside the glass. A yesterday like today,
he wrote, and, in his point-blank gaze,
for a second, you are a spider in a web.

The Radius of Touch
Rising over granite cliffs in an aerial tram,
we view the rippling lights of Albuquerque
and volcanoes to the west. At the summit,
the circumference of peaks dissolves
when I blink; and here I am, at a point
where all lines diverge. In the leafless dark,
I can’t spot the branches of the golden
rain tree; in the kingdom of touch,
a candle flickers then steadies flame.
Some days are windblown sand stinging
my eyes; others, rice grains in a glass jar.
As matsutake mycelium mantles the roots
of red pine, our cries enmesh each other.
Suspended on cables, we rise up through
the moist darkening air, but the molten
wax of this space dissolves distance.
In the kingdom of scents, the chanterelle
patch we stumbled into flowers again,
and, when I blink, all lines converge.

A cobra rises out of a straw basket before a man plays a bulbous instrument—
Corpses consumed by flames and in all stages of burning—
The elongated tip of a bodhi leaf—
Arranged in a star pattern on a white plate, five dates—
On a balcony, in the darkness, smokers staring at a neem tree—
His head golden, and his sex red—
A naked woman gazing at herself in a small, circular mirror—
At sunrise, a girl rummages through ashes with tongs—
Along the river, men and women scrub clothes on stones—

The Unfolding Center
1
Tea leaves in a black bowl:
green snail spring waiting to unfurl.
Nostrils flared, I inhale:
expectancy’s a seed—
we planted two rows
of sunflowers then drove to Colorado—
no one could alter the arrival
of the ambulance,
the bulged artery; I had never
seen one hundred crows
gathered at the river,
vultures circling overhead;
I saw no carcass, smelled no rot;
the angers radiating from him
like knives in sunlight; I sit
at a river branching off a river:
three vultures on cottonwood branches
track my movement;
surrounded by weeds, I cut
two large sunflower heads off
six-foot stalks, Apache plume
blossoms near the gate; we wake
and embrace, embrace and wake,
my fingers meshed

with your fingers. Nostrils flared,
I inhale: time, time
courses through the bowl of my hands.

2
A black-chinned hummingbird chick
angles beak and tail out of a nest
woven of spiderwebs and lichens.
Mature, it will range a thousand
miles between coast and highland.
Once you roamed a spice market for chai,
gazed into a mausoleum’s keyhole entry
and discovered in synaptic memories
linkages that smoke, linkages that flower.
The owls never returned to the hole
high up the arroyo bank: each spring
clusters of wild irises rise in the field.
Leaning on a cedar bench, we view
fireworks bursting into gold arrays
and tilt on the outgoing tide of breath.
Fireflies brighten the darkening air:
desire’s manifest here, here, and here’s
the infinite in the intervening emptiness.

3
—Damn, I’m walking on the roof of hell, I need
a smoke, I’m NOT a procrastinator, this sling
nags me, where’s my arm won’t budge my lighter?
I hobble, fidget, can’t drive, I’m a piece of shit
if I can’t cast overhead and unspool that speckled
fly onto blue flowing water; damn I miss
that bend in the Pecos, I crave Bolivia: when I lift
that serape out of the trunk and finger
the cochineal-dyed weft and reach that slit at the neck,
my mind floods, and I need to hang;
I need another drag, at night if my toes
can’t wiggle out of the sheets and relax,
I can’t sleep, and if I can’t sleep, I can’t fly-fish be—
I’m going to a lodge near Traverse Bay
where a stream shimmers with cutthroats rainbow trout;
why, I’m shrinking inside this body,
let me out, it’s fucking paradise here,
I’ll go back in and, after I needle that willow
into that Apache basket, under the overhead lights
I won’t have to squint, it will all be repaired—

4
I slice oyster mushrooms off an aspen
then, in the next clearing, stumble
into beer cans and plastic bags.
We cannot elude ourselves; we jump
across state lines where four corners touch,
and nothing happens. A point is a period,
an intersection, spore, center of a circle,
or—“Where are my honeymoon panties?”
a woman mutters, rummaging in her purse—
the beginning of a vector in any direction.

5
The Hubble telescope spots a firefly from ten thousand
miles away. Consciousness is an infinite net
in which each hanging jewel absorbs and reflects
every other. A dog licks her fur, and a green fly
pops out; homeless—a teenage girl at a stoplight;
when he ignites yellow cedar in a woodstove,
the float house tilts; they aborted their twins,
and he was forced to bury them by the Mekong River.
Herringbone pattern of bricks on a bathroom floor.
Exhale: spring into sleet here now bursts—
in this world, we walk barefoot on embers, gazing
at irises; she adjusts the light and scrapes plaque
off his teeth; he sips green snail tea and discerns
coincident crystals: they tore off each other’s clothes—
dipping apple slices into honey, they take a first bite—
inhale: here sleet into spring now bursts.

6
If you light a citronella candle, mosquitoes
can’t smell you. A neighbor analyzes air
vectors to prepare a response to a dirty
bomb. Flame on a lake. Diagnosed
with Parkinson’s, a man gives notice
to his wife to vacate the husk of their home.
Have I acted without body? You admire
blossoming red yarrow, but a child comes
along and uproots it. After an aneurysm,
a basket restorer leans on a cane at his exwife’s funeral; smoke issues from his wrists,
and he barks, “Be wind, flame.” Shaggymanes push up through grass near a sandbox.
A daughter gives her father a tin flamingo.
During the night, a raccoon lifts the lid
to a compost can, eats. Before first light
strikes the apricots on branches,
you limn human acts in the visible world.

7
Smashing a jewelry case with
a hatchet, he grabs a necklace
from the splintered glass and races
into oblivion. Oblivion is also
digging up carrots in cool
pungent air, cottonwoods branching
along the river into yellow flame;
it’s in tropical rain where four
thousand people in an amphitheater,
swaying under umbrellas, chant
poesía, poesía—to the far left
and right two streams cascade the steps:
Vietnamese, English, Hindi,
and Spanish ozone the air.
A warm, waxy light flows across
their skin as they make the rough
silk of love; last night
he gazed at the curve of her eyelids
while she slept. A tiny spider
hangs a web between a fishing
rod and thermostat; a biologist
considers how hydra then algae
then frogs repopulate
a lake covered in volcanic ash;
vultures yank on a buffalo;
somewhere a chigger acts
as a vector of scrub typhus.

8
An architect conceived a rectangular pool
inlaid with stones, and, on three sides,
windows in the building, from ankle
to knee level, pass reflections of sky.
Looking east to the opening, you find
this slit of dreams can’t be repeated.
Someone sneezes; a veterinary surgeon,
bicycling to work, is slammed by a car
into a coma. You try shifting the slant
of your pen, the strokes of your ink,
recall when you flung a tea bowl onto
the sidewalk then tried to glue the shards
together. Now hammerhead sharks
whirlpool inside you; in the volcanic
shapes of clouds, visible time; to the driver
who brakes at a red light but rear-ends
his vehicle, the driver shouts, “Horse piss!”

9
—Follow a slate path: you do not come
to an entrance but encounter another blank wall—
I need walls to destroy walls—I ache to give
people azalea persimmon emptiness,
so they can be lit from within: if I place a small
square window in the corner at floor level,
if water spills off a cantilevered roof slab
onto a pool, and you see hear—wait:
what is my grandmother, whisking tea,
saying with her hands: this is no park
where bones and teeth are scattered in the grass—
I need to treat my cast-in-place concrete
like sea urchin a folding paper screen—a white
gravel path leads you past another concrete screen—
so it’s about walls, light, silencing the noise
of trucks and yells in the street—someone
once stuck a Concealed Firearms Prohibited
sign near my recessed entrance—I detest
bayonets—I need a keyless key—you come
to a circular oval lotus pond, and, in the center—
straw mushrooms rise into the visible world—
is a stairway that descends to the entrance—
you step into an alcove foyer where, facing
a blank wall, you sit, and, at sunset, light
sinks in and grazes your shoulders from behind—

10
The sky lightens behind the heart-shaped
leaves. While we slept, a truck filled
with plutonium lumbered down the highway.
At six a.m. the willow branches swing,
and I tilt on waves. I will tilt when I rake
gravel, uncoil a hose, loosen the spigot.
Green are the lilac and willow leaves;
now my tongue runs along your scar,
our sighs bead, and we wick into flame.
Reflected on glass, a row of track lights
is superimposed on cordate leaves
outside the window. A smallmouth bass
aligns with a cottonwood shadow
in the pond. To wait is to ache, joy,
despair, crave, fret, whirl, bloom, relax
at the unfolding center of emptiness.
I tilt on the outgoing tide of my breath.

11
“Dead? How can that BE?”
A woman sobs as
the airplane taxis to the gate;
flames on water; the whir
of a hummingbird behind my eyelids;
these are means
by which we live: joy, grief, delight—
straw mushrooms
rising into the visible world;
wisps of rabbitbrush are all
that remain of generals’ dreams;
a branch of a river rejoins a river;
flip a house and it’s shelter,
flip it again and cabinets
open, wine is poured, dogs yap,
people joke and laugh;
sandhill cranes swirl
and descend into a cornfield;
we ampere each other;
a bus stops: a child gets off,
starts walking on a red-clod road:
nothing in sight
in all directions;
a rose flame under our skin,
hummingbird whirring its wings;
a rose flame,
nothing in sight, in all directions:

Sight Lines
2019

Water Calligraphy
1
A green turtle in broth is brought to the table—
I stare at an irregular formation of rocks
above a pond and spot, on the water’s
surface, a moon. As I step back and forth,
the moon slides from partial to full
to partial and then into emptiness; but no
moon’s in the sky, just slanting sunlight,
leafing willows along Slender West Lake,
parked cars outside an apartment complex
where, against a background of chirping birds
and car horns, two women bicker. Now
it’s midnight at noon; I hear an electric saw
and the occasional sound of lumber striking
pavement. At the bottom of a teacup,
leaves form the character individual
and, after a sip, the number eight.
Snipped into pieces, a green turtle is returned
to the table; while everyone eats,
strands of thrown silk tighten, tighten
in my gut. I blink, and a woodblock carver
peels off pear shavings, stroke by stroke,
and foregrounds characters against empty space.

2
Begging in a subway, a blind teen and his mother stagger through the swaying
car—
a woman lights a bundle of incense and bows at a cauldron—
people raise their palms around the Nine-Dragon Juniper—
who knows the mind of a watermelon vendor picking his teeth?—
you glance up through layers of walnut leaves in a courtyard—
biting into marinated lotus stems—
in a drum tower, hours were measured
as water rising then spilling from one kettle into another—
pomegranate trees flowering along a highway—
climbing to the top of a pagoda, you look down at rebuilt city walls—
a peacock cries—
always the clatter of mah-jongg tiles behind a door—
at a tower loom, a man and woman weave brocade silk—
squashing a cigarette above a urinal, a bus driver hurriesback—
a musician strikes sticks, faster and faster—
cars honk along a street approaching a traffic circle—
when he lowers his fan, the actor’s face has changed from black to white—
a child squats and shits in a palace courtyard—

yellow construction cranes pivot over the tops of high-rise apartments—
a woman throws a shuttle with green silk through the shed—
where are we headed, you wonder, as you pick a lychee and start to peel it—

3
Lightning ignites a fire in the wilderness: in hours,
200 then 2,000 acres are aflame; when a hotshot
crew hikes in to clear lines, a windstorm
kicks up and veers the blaze back, traps them,
and their fire shelters become their body bags.
Piñons in the hills have red and yellow needles—
in a bamboo park, a woman dribbles liquefied sugar
onto a plate, and it cools, on a stick, in the form
of a butterfly; a man in red pants stills
then moves through the Crane position.
A droplet hangs at the tip of a fern—water
spills into another kettle; you visualize
how flames engulfed them at 50 miles per hour.
In the West, wildfires scar each summer—
water beads on beer cans at a lunch counter—
you do not want to see exploding propane tanks;
you try to root in the world, but events sizzle
along razor wire, along a snapping end of a power line.

4
Two fawns graze on leaves in a yard—
as we go up the Pearl Tower, I gaze
through smog at freighters along the river.
A thunderstorm gathers: it rains and hails
on two hikers in the Barrancas; the arroyo
becomes a torrent, and they crouch for an hour.
After a pelting storm, you spark into flame
and draw the wax of the world into light—
ostrich and emu eggs in a basket by the door,
the aroma of cumin and pepper in the air.
In my mouth, a blister forms then disappears.
At a teak table, with family and friends,
we eat Dungeness crab, but, as I break
apart shell and claws, I hear a wounded elk
shot in the bosque. Canoers ask and receive
permission to land; they beach a canoe
with a yellow cedar wreath on the bow
then catch a bus to the fairgrounds powwow.

5
—Sunrise: I fill my rubber bucket with water
and come to this patch of blue-gray sidewalk—
I’ve made a sponge-tipped brush at the end
of a waist-high plastic stick; and, as I dip it,
I know water is my ink, memory my blood—
the tips of purple bamboo arch over the park—
I see a pitched battle at the entrance to a palace
and rooftops issuing smoke and flames—
today, there’s a white statue of a human figure,
buses and cars drive across the blank square—
at that time, I researched carp in captivity
and how they might reproduce and feed
people in communes—I might have made
a breakthrough, but Red Guards knocked at the door—
they beat me, woke me up at all hours
until I didn’t know whether it was midnight or noon—
I saw slaughtered pigs piled on wooden racks,
snow in the spring sunshine—the confessions
they handed me I signed—I just wanted it
to end—then herded pigs on a farm—wait—
a masseur is striking someone’s back,
his hands clatter like wooden blocks—
now I block the past by writing the present—
as I write the strokes of moon, I let the brush
swerve rest for a moment before I lift it
and make the one stroke hook—ah, it’s all
in that hook—there, I levitate: no mistakes
will last, even regret is lovely—my hand
trembles; but if I find the gaps resting places,

I cut the sinews of an ox, even as the sun
moon waxes—the bones drop, my brush is sharp,
sharper than steel—and though people murmur
at the evaporating characters, I smile, frown
fidget, let go—I draw the white, not the black—

6
Tea leaves in the cup spell above then below—
outside the kitchen window, a spray
of wisteria blossoms in May sunshine.
What unfolds inside us? We sit at a tabletop
that was once a wheel in Thailand: an iron hoop
runs along the rim. On a fireplace mantel,
a flame flickers at the bottom of a metal cup.
As spokes to a hub, a chef cleans blowfish:
turtles beach on white sand: a monk rakes
gravel into scalloped waves in a garden:
moans issue from an alley where men stir
from last night’s binge. If all time converges
as light from stars, all situations reside here.
In red-edged heat, I irrigate the peach trees;
you bake a zucchini frittata; water buffalo
browse in a field; hail has shredded lettuces,
and, as a farmer paces and surveys damage,
a coyote slips across a road, under barbed wire.

7
The letter A was once an inverted cow’s head,
but now, as I write, it resembles feet
planted on the earth rising to a point.
Once is glimpsing the Perseid meteor shower—
and, as emotion curves space, I find
a constellation that arcs beyond the visible.
A neighbor brings cucumbers and basil;
when you open the bag and inhale, the world
inside is fire in a night courtyard
at summer solstice; we have limned the time here
and will miss the bamboo arcing along
the fence behind our bedroom, peonies
leaning to earth. A mayordomo retrenches
the opening to the ditch; water runs near
the top of juniper poles that line our length—
in the bosque, the elk carcass decomposes
into a stench of antlers and bones. Soon
ducks will nest on the pond island, and as
a retired violinist who fed skunks left a legacy—
one she least expected—we fold this
in our pocket and carry it wherever we go.

Stilling to North
Just as the blue tip of a compass needle
stills to north, you stare at a pencil
with sharpened point, a small soapstone
bear with a tiny chunk of turquoise
tied to its back, the random pattern
of straw flecked in an adobe wall;
you peruse the silver poplar branches,
the spaces between branches, and as
a cursor blinks, situate at the edge
of loss—the axolotl was last sighted
in Xochimilco over twenty years ago;
a jaguar meanders through tawny
brush in the Gila Wilderness—
and, as the cursor blinks, you guess
it’s a bit of line that arcs—a parsec
made visible—and as you sit,
the imperfections that mark you
attune you to a small emptied flask
tossed to the roadside and the X,
never brewed, that throbs in your veins.

—No one could anticipate this distance from Monticello—

Westbourne Street
Porch light illuminating white steps, light
over a garage door, darkness inside windows—
and the darkness exposes the tenuous.
A glassblower shapes a rearing horse
that shifts, on a stand, from glowing orange
to glistening crystal; suddenly the horse
shatters into legs, head, body, mane.
At midnight, “Fucking idiot!” a woman yells,
shaking the house; along a hedge,
a man sleeps, coat over head, legs sticking out;
and, at eight a.m., morning glories open
on a fence; a backhoe heads up the street.
From this window, he views banana leaves,
an orange tree with five oranges, houses
with shingled roofs, and steps leading
to an upstairs apartment; farther off, palm trees,
and, beyond, a sloping street, ocean, sky;
but what line of sight leads to revelation?

Cloud Hands
A woman moves through a Cloud Hands position,
holding and rotating
an invisible globe—thud, shattering glass, moan,
horn blast—so many
worlds to this world—two men dipnet
sockeye salmon
at the mouth of a river—from a rooftop, a seagull
squawks and cries;
a woman moves through Grasp the Bird’s Tail—
someone on a stretcher
is wheeled past glass doors—a desert fivespot
rises in a wash—
and, pressing her tongue to the roof
of her mouth,
she focuses, in the near distance, on the music
of sycamore leaves.

In the Bronx
Crossing a street, you hear the cry of a strawberry finch,
and, reaching the curb,
catch the smell of a young pig that, minutes ago,
hurtled across the trail;
inhaling a chocolate scent, you approach a small orchid;
nearby, two streaked
pitcher plants have opened lids but opened laterally;
a fern rises out
of the crotch of an ‘ōhi‘a tree, and droplets have collected
on a mule’s foot fern;
up on the ridge, sliding mist veils the palms and eucalyptus;
nearby, a trumpet tree
dangles orange-scented blooms; you stare at the crack
in a blue marble tree,
at a maze of buttressed roots, just as a man holding
a placard, waving people
toward a new doughnut shop, turns and, thud, a wild avocado
has dropped to the ground.

Unpacking a Globe
I gaze at the Pacific and don’t expect
to ever see the heads on Easter Island,
though I guess at sunlight rippling
the yellow grasses sloping to shore;
yesterday a doe ate grass in the orchard:
it lifted its ears and stopped eating
when it sensed us watching from
a glass hallway—in his sleep, a veteran
sweats, defusing a land mine.
On the globe, I mark the Battle of
the Coral Sea—no one frets at that now.
A poem can never be too dark,
I nod and, staring at the Kenai, hear
ice breaking up along an inlet;
yesterday a coyote trotted across
my headlights and turned his head
but didn’t break stride; that’s how
I want to live on this planet:
alive to a rabbit at a glass door—
and flower where there is no flower.

—During the Cultural Revolution, a boy saw his mother shot by a firing
squad—

Traversal
At dawn you dip oars in water, row out
on a lake—the oarlocks creak—and, drifting,
inhale the pines along the shore. A woman
puts water in a pot, lights a stove: before
it steams, she looks out at the glimmering:
between two points, we traverse an infinite set
of paths: here we round a bend in an arroyo
and stumble onto two sheep carcasses;
here peonies and ranunculus unfold in a vase.
The day has the tensile strength of silk:
you card the hours, spin them, dip
the skeins in a dye pot, and grief or anger,
pleasure or elation’s the mordant that fixes
the hue. You find yourself stepping
through a T-shaped doorway: the niches
in a circular ruin mark the sun’s motion;
a woman fries potatoes in a pan and finds,
in the night, mice have slipped through
a hole under the sink and nibbled soap
in a dish; a returning hunter pulls a screen
latch but, hearing a rattlesnake inside,
slams it, stares through the vibrating mesh.

The Radiant’s
the origin point of a meteor shower.
Peaches redden: branches
are propped with juniper posts
and a shovel; steam rises
from a caldera; stepping
through a lava tube, we emerge
into a rain forest dotted
with wild ginger; desire
branches like mycelium.
Carrying a bolete in a basket,
we forage under spruce and fir
in cool alpine air;
a plume rises where lava reaches
the ocean. Who said, Out of nothing,
nothing can come? We do not lie
in a meadow to view the Perseids
but discover, behind a motel,
a vineyard, and gather as we go.

Doppler Effect
Stopped in cars, we are waiting to accelerate
along different trajectories. I catch the rising
pitch of a train—today one hundred nine people
died in a stampede converging at a bridge;
radioactive water trickles underground
toward the Pacific Ocean; nickel and copper
particulates contaminate the Brocade River.
Will this planet sustain ten billion people?
Ah, switch it: a spider plant leans toward
a glass door, and six offshoots dangle from it;
the more I fingered the clay slab into a bowl,
the more misshapen it became; though I have
botched this, bungled that, the errancies
reveal it would not be better if things happened
just as I wished; a puffer fish inflates on deck;
a burst of burnt rubber rises from pavement.

Adamant
Deer browse at sunrise in an apple orchard,
while honey locust leaves litter the walk.
A neighbor hears gunshots in the bosque
and wonders who’s firing at close range;
I spot bear prints near the Pojoaque River
but see no sign of the reported mountain lion.
As chlorophyll slips into the roots of a cottonwood
and the leaves burst into yellow-gold, I wonder,
where’s our mortal flare? You can travel
to where the Tigris and Euphrates flow together
and admire the inventions of people living
on floating islands of reeds; you can travel
along an archipelago and hike among volcanic
pools steaming with water and sulfuric acid;
but you can’t change the eventual, adamant body.
Though death might not come like a curaredipped dart blown out of a tube or slam
at you like surf breaking over black lava rock,
it will come—it will come—and it unites us—
brother, sister, boxer, spinner—in this pact,
while you inscribe a letter with trembling hand.

—A woman detonates when a spam text triggers bombs strapped to her body
—

Python Skin
1
Smoke engulfs a boat in the harbor—we motor
past and recall a flotilla of fishing boats
lashed together and Hong Kong skyscrapers
in the distance—when we dock, I continue
to bob and smell diesel fumes on water;
though medical researchers extract saliva
from Gila monsters, draw blue blood
from horseshoe crabs, seeding a cloud
is never a cure; on a fireplace mantel,
a flame sways then steadies above a pool
of wax, and a tuberose aroma fills the room;
at sunrise, I spot a grapevine leafing out:
though no coyote slants across the field
with a rabbit in its mouth, though no grenade
is hurled over here, I recall fires crackling
in jagged lines along a ridge to the west,
apple trees out the window vanishing in smoke—
haze wherever we look, think, run, stop, be.

2
Beer bottles and diapers thrown out of car windows—
you carry a shovel down to the cattail pond where,
each spring, someone cuts a channel and drains
water into the nearby acequia; you patch the channel
but know by summer it will be cut open again;
no one ever knows who does this; you never meet
the lab technician who works on bombs—I work
on sound: sound waves are odd when they
turn a corner, and their wavelengths stretch,
and you compartmentalize and list your errands:
post office, meeting with water lawyer, buy apples
and yogurt for lunch; and barely notice a hummingbird
darting from columbine to columbine; an accountant
yearns to stroll in a meadow, inhale the alpine
air, listen to water cascading between rocks,
but he squints at numbers in columns; and a lawyer
dates his boss but one day he handcuffs and assaults her,
breaks two bones in her face as she begs for her life—
in jail he takes the prison razor given him to shave,
disassembles it, then slits his throat in the night.

3
The housewives of Königsberg set their kitchen
clocks to when a philosopher walked by the window;
a daily timed walk is a single violin string
out of which all waves rise and fall—deep-fried
crabs are immersed in a basket of Sichuan chiles;
at a subway juncture, a man bows an erhu,
and a melody reverberates down the walkways;
the outlines of branches emerge out of the dark—
I peruse the pale eyes of a cuttlefish crammed
into a tank: what if you ask the vibrating
python skin of an erhu how it feels to make sound—
what if salt or a lichen or the erhu spoke?

4
A cat drops a downy woodpecker at the door—
one day a man wakes to a pain in his chest
and requires a quadruple bypass—he eats
fry bread for lunch; you scan a black
locust whose last branch failed to leaf this spring;
though acknowledging grief assuages the pain,
red dye droplets splash into water and swirl
before vanishing from sight; though the locust
will be stacked as firewood, you observe mounds
ants make in the courtyard and recognize how
their channels of empty spaces extend vital breath;
you do not sense impending doom but deepwater the cottonwood that survived a drought
and shades the house; in an erhu melody
filling the subway walkway, you catch the tremor
of python skin but apprehend another python
snag on a branch and peel off a layer;
as the two strings evoke shadows of candles
flickering red, you gather wild irises
out of the air and peel off mine, yours, his, hers:

5
flitting to the honeysuckle, a white butterfly—
when she scribbles a few phrases by candlelight, a peony buds—
two does bound up from the apple orchard—
he sprays a paper-wasp nest under the portal—
sunlight touches the highest leaves of the silver poplars—
a buck scrapes his rack on a slender aspen trunk—
you slow but drive steadily through a hailstorm until it clears—
walkingstick on the screen door—
swimming back to shore, they spot a few turtles in the shallows—
we stroll up an arroyo then glance back at the S-curve of trees in the valley—
the steady hum of cars driving men to the lab—
red-winged blackbirds nesting in the cattails—
here a peony buds and fragrances the air—
he kisses the back of her neck, and she nestles along his body—
in the sky, not a shred of cloud—

Lichen Song
—Snow in the air you’ve seen a crust on the ceiling wood and never considered
how I gather moisture when you step out of the shower you don’t care that I
respire as you breathe for years you’ve washed your face gazed in the mirror
shaved combed your hair rushed out while I who may grow an inch in a
thousand years catch the tingling sunlight you don’t understand how I can dive
to a temperature of liquefied gas and warm back up absorb water start growing
again without a scar I can float numb in space be hit with cosmic rays then return
to Earth and warm out of my sleep to respire again without a hiccup you come
and go while I stay gripped to pine and the sugar of existence runs through you
runs through me you sliver if you just go go go if you slowed you could discover
that mosquitoes bat their wings six hundred times a second and before they mate
synchronize their wings you could feel how they flicker with desire I am flinging
your words and if you absorb not blot my song you could learn you are not alone
in pain and grief though you’ve instilled pain and grief you can urge the dare and
thrill of bliss if and when you stop to look at a rock at a fence post but you cough
only look yes look at me now because you are blink about to leave—

Black Center
Green tips of tulips are rising out of the earth—
you don’t flense a whale or fire at beer cans
in an arroyo but catch the budding
tips of pear branches and wonder what
it’s like to live along a purling edge of spring.
Jefferson once tried to assemble a mastodon
skeleton on the White House floor but,
with pieces missing, failed to sequence the bones;
when the last speaker of a language dies,
a hue vanishes from the spectrum of visible light.
Last night, you sped past revolving and flashing
red, blue, and white lights along the road—
a wildfire in the dark; though no one
you knew was taken in the midnight ambulance,
an arrow struck a bull’s-eye and quivered
in its shaft: one minute gratitude rises
like water from an underground lake;
another, dissolution gnaws from a black center.

Under a Rising Moon
Driving at night between Chinle and Tsaile,
I fixate on deer along the road: in the headlights,
they’re momentarily blinded but could leap out.
An unglazed pot fired and streaked from ash
will always bear the beauty of chance, while
a man who flies by helicopter and lands
on an iceberg will always bear the crunching
sounds under his feet. This morning we hiked
from the rim down to White House Ruins,
and the scraping of cottonwood leaves
is still in my ears. Diné women tied their infants
on cradleboards, stashed them in crevices
but never came back. Though warned of elk,
I heed the car with a single headlight enlarging
in my rearview mirror—when the mind
is sparked with pixels, it’s hard to swerve
and brake. The Anasazi must have marveled
at the whitening sheen on the cliff, but tonight
tracks of moonlight run ahead of where I can be.

Light Echoes
In the parking lot, we look up at the Milky Way:
a poacher aims a rifle at a black rhinoceros:
a marble boat disappears in smog.
As I gaze at an anthurium, wild cockatoos
cry from the tops of blue marble trees;
a lake forms on an ice sheet: rivers branch
and branch. A guitarist leans into the space
between notes; a stone plummets
down a black well: he does not know
the silence when he will aim a bullet
at himself. On a wall, a red spider;
macaws in cages squawk when we approach:
I scratch letters into the leaf of an autograph tree.
Like lights extending along a bay,
notes from Norteña splay in my ears—
they sparkle then disappear into black sounds.

First Snow
A rabbit has stopped on the gravel driveway:
imbibing the silence,
you stare at spruce needles:
there’s no sound of a leaf blower,
no sign of a black bear;
a few weeks ago, a buck scraped his rack
against an aspen trunk;
a carpenter scribed a plank along a curved stone wall.
You only spot the rabbit’s ears and tail:
when it moves, you locate it against speckled gravel,
but when it stops, it blends in again;
the world of being is like this gravel:
you think you own a car, a house,
this blue-zigzagged shirt, but you just borrow these things.
Yesterday, you constructed an aqueduct of dreams
and stood at Gibraltar,
but you possess nothing.
Snow melts into a pool of clear water;
and, in this stillness,
starlight behind daylight wherever you gaze.

—Salt cedar rises through silt in an irrigation ditch—

Courtyard Fire
At autumn equinox,
we make a fire
in the courtyard: sparks
gust into the black air,
and all seasons are enfolded
in these flames:
snow gathers and tips the lilac twigs;
a stinkhorn rises
out of dirt below a waterspout;
ants climb the peony stalks;
and, gazing into coals,
I skydive and pass through
stages of youth: at first,
I climb a tower and,
looking out, find the world tipped;
then I dash through halls:
if ripening is all,
what can the dead teach us?
We who must rage and lust,
hurtle zigzagging between cars
in traffic, affirm
the call to abandon illusions
is a call to abandon
a condition that requires illusions;
and, as I pull the cord,
spring rips and blooms;

on landing, I sway on earth.

White Sands
—Walking along a ridge of white sand—
it’s cooler below the surface—
we stop and, gazing at an expanse
of dunes to the west,
watch a yellow yolk of sun drop to the mountains—
an hour earlier, we rolled down a dune,
white sand flecked your eyelids and hair—
a claret cup cactus blooms,
and soaptree yuccas
move as a dune moves—
so many years later, on a coast, waves rolling to shore,
wave after wave,
I see how our lives have unfolded,
a sheen of
wave after whitening wave—
and we are stepping barefoot,
rolling down a dune, white flecks on our lips,
on our eyelids: we are lying in a warm dune
as a full moon
lifts against an ocean of sky—

Salt Song
Zunis make shrines on the way to a lake where I emerge
and Miwoks gather
me out of pools along the Pacific
the cheetah thirsts for me
and when
you sprinkle me on rib eye you have no idea how I balance silence with thunder
in crystal
you dream of butterfly hunting in Madagascar
spelunking
through caves echoing with dripping stalactites
and you don’t see how I
yearn to shimmer an orange aurora against flame
look at me in your
hand
in Egypt I scrubbed the bodies of kings and queens
in Pakistan I
zigzag upward through twenty-six miles of tunnels before drawing my first
breath in sunlight
if you heat a kiln to 2380 degrees and scatter me
inside
I vaporize and bond with clay in this unseen moment a potter prays
because my pattern is out of his hands and when I touch your lips you salivate
and when I dissolve on your tongue your hair rises ozone unlocks a single stroke
of lightning sizzles to earth.

—The plutonium waste has been hauled to an underground site—

Sprang
1 Winter Stars
You will never forget corpses wrapped in flames—
at dusk, you watched a congregation of crows
gather in the orchard and sway on branches;
in the dawn light, a rabbit moves and stops,
moves and stops along the grass; and as
you pull a newspaper out of a box, glance
at the headlines, you feel the dew on grass
as the gleam of fading stars: yesterday you met
a body shop owner whose father was arrested,
imprisoned, and tortured in Chile, heard
how men were scalded to death in boiling water;
and, as the angle of sunlight shifts, you feel
a seasonal tilt into winter with its expanse
of stars—candles flickering down the Ganges,
where you light a candle on a leaf and set it
flickering, downstream, into darkness—
dozens of tiny flames flickering into darkness—
then you gaze at fires erupting along the shore.

2 Hole
No sharp-shinned hawk perches
on the roof rack of his car and scans
for songbirds; the reddening ivy
along a stone wall deepens in hue;
when he picks a sungold tomato
in the garden and savors
the burst in his mouth, he catches
a mock orange spray in the air;
and as he relights the pilot
to a water heater, checks thermostats,
the sound of water at a fountain
is prayer; earlier in the summer,
he watched a hummingbird land,
sip water, and douse its wings,
but, now, a widening hole gnaws
at that time; and, glancing
at a spotted towhee nest on a lintel,
he knows how hunting chanterelles
at the ski basin and savoring
them at dinner is light-years away.

3 Talisman
Quetzal: you write
the word on a sheet of paper
then erase it;
each word, a talisman,
leaves a track: a magpie
struts across a portal
and vanishes from sight;
when you bite into sea urchin,
ocean currents burst
in your mouth; and when
you turn, view the white shutters
to the house,
up the canyon, a rainbow
arcs into clouds;
expectancies, fears, yearnings—
hardly bits of colored glass
revolving in a kaleidoscope—
mist rising from a hot spring
along a river: suddenly
you are walking toward Trinity Site
searching for glass
and counting minutes
of exposure under the sun;
suddenly small things ignite.

4 Kintsugi
He slips on ice near a mailbox—
no gemsbok leaps across the road—
a singer tapped an eagle feather on his shoulders—
women washed indigo-dyed yarn in this river, but today gallium and
germanium particles are washed downstream—
once they dynamited dikes to slow advancing troops—
picking psilocybin mushrooms and hearing cowbells in the mist—
as a child, he was tied to a sheep and escaped marauding soldiers—
an apple blossom opens to five petals—
as he hikes up a switchback, he remembers undressing her—
from the train window, he saw they were on ladders cutting fruit off cacti—
in the desert, a crater of radioactive glass—
assembling shards, he starts to repair a gray bowl with gold lacquer—
they ate psilocybin mushrooms, gazed at the pond, undressed—
hunting a turkey in the brush, he stops—
from the ponderosa pines: whoo-ah, whoo whoo whoo—

5 Yellow Lightning
In the five a.m. dark, a car with bright lights
and hazard lights blinking drives directly at me;
veering across the yellow lines, I pass by it
and exhale: amethyst crystals accrete
on a string: I will live to see pear
blossoms in the orchard, red-winged blackbirds nesting in the cattails; I love the sighs
you make when you let go—my teeth gripping
your earlobe—pearls of air rising through water—
and as a white moon rising over a canyon
casts pine shadows to the ground, gratitude
rivers through me: sharpened to starlight,
I make our bed and find your crystal
between the sheets; and when I part the curtains,
daylight’s a strobe of yellow lightning.

6 Red-Ruffed Lemur
You locate a spotted-towhee nest on a beam,
peony shoots rising out of the earth, but a pang
surges in your blood with each systole—
though spring emerges, the forsythia eludes you—
in a coffee shop, a homeless man gathers
a Chinese magazine and two laundered towels
in a clear plastic bag, mutters “Metro,”
and heads out the door—a bird trills
in the blue spruce, but when it stops, the silence
is water running out of thawing glacial ice;
and you mix cement in a wheelbarrow,
haul it, in a bucket, up a ladder to a man
on a rooftop plastering a parapet—cherry buds
unfurl along a tidal basin—a red-ruffed
lemur squints out of a cage at human faces,
shudders, and scurries back into a hole—
and you surge at what’s enfolded in this world:

7 This Is the Writing, the Speaking of the Dream
red bougainvillea blooming against the glass—
she likes it when he pulls her to him—
once you saw murres crowding the cliffs of an arctic island—
thousands of blue-black mussels, exposed and gripping rocks at low tide—
he runs his fingers between her toes—
light reflecting off snow dazzles their eyes—
a tiger shark prowls along the shoreline for turtles—
an aspen leaf drops into a creek—
when he tugs the roots of her hair, he begins to tiger—
this is the writing, the speaking of the dream—
no one knows why ten thousands of murres are dying—
he hungers for sunlight to slant along their bodies on a Moloka‘i slope—
sunlight streams as gold-flecked koi roil the waters and churn—
they roil the waters and churn—
killer whales move through Prince William Sound—

8 Net Light
Poised on a bridge, streetlights
on either shore, a man puts
a saxophone to his lips, coins
in an upturned cap, and a carousel
in a piazza begins to turn:
where are the gates to paradise?
A woman leans over an outstretched
paper cup—leather workers sew
under lamps: a belt, wallet, purse—
leather dyed maroon, beige, black—
workers from Seoul, Lagos, Singapore—
a fresco on a church wall depicts
the death of a saint: a friar raises
both hands in the air—on an airplane,
a clot forms in a woman’s leg
and starts to travel toward her heart—
a string of notes riffles the water;
and, as the clot lodges, at a market
near lapping waves, men unload
sardines in a burst of argentine light.

9 Sprang
Before tracking pods of killer whales
in Prince William Sound, she reads a poem
on deck to start each day. In solstice light,
a moose lumbers across a driveway; I mark
orange and purple sea stars exposed at low tide,
the entrance to an octopus den. Astronomers
have observed two black holes colliding;
and, though the waves support relativity,
we need no equation to feel the sprang of space
and time. A marine biologist gives everything
away, weaves her coffin out of alder branches,
lines it with leaves; a carpenter saws kilndried planks to refurbish a porch; I peruse
the tips of honeycrisp apples we planted
last fall, and, though no blossoming appears,
the air is rife with it; the underground
stirs, and I can only describe it by saying
invisible deer move through an orchard in bloom.

—A man who built plutonium triggers breeds horses now—

Transfigurations
Though neither you nor I saw flowering pistachio trees
in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, though neither
you nor I saw the Tigris River stained with ink,
though we never heard a pistachio shell dehisce,
we have taken turns holding a panda as it munched
on bamboo leaves, and I know that rustle now.
I have awakened beside you and inhaled August
sunlight in your hair. I’ve listened to the scroll
and unscroll of your breath—dolphins arc along
the surface between white-capped waves; here,
years after we sifted yarrow and read from the Book
of Changes, I mark the dissolving hues in the west
as the sky brightens above overhanging willows.
The panda fidgets as it pushes a stalk farther
into its mouth. We step into a clearing with budding
chanterelles; and, though this space shrinks and
is obscured in the traffic of a day, here is the anchor
I drop into the depths of teal water. I gaze deeply
at the panda’s black patches around its eyes;
how did it evolve from carnivore to eater of bamboo?
So many transfigurations I will never fathom.
The arc of our lives is a brightening then dimming,
brightening then dimming—a woman catches
fireflies in an orchard with the swish of a net.
I pick an openmouthed pistachio from a bowl
and crack it apart: a hint of Assyria spills
into the alluvial fan of sunlight. I read spring in
autumn in the scroll of your breath; though
neither you nor I saw the completion of the Great Wall,
I wake to the unrepeatable contour of this breath.

Dawn Redwood
Early morning light: a young red-tailed hawk
glided onto an overhead branch and peered
down at me, but it did not look with your eyes—
a battered and rusted pickup lies in the wash;
Navajo tea buds on the trail—I headed back
and checked, in the boiler room, the traps,
baited with peanut butter—now a gnat
flits against this lit screen: where are you now?
One morning, we walked in a Rhode Island
cemetery and did not look at a single gravestone;
we looked at hundred-year-old copper beeches,
cells burnished purple, soaking up sunshine,
and talked about the dawn redwood,
how the glimmering light at the beginning
of the world was in all things. This morning,
in the predawn darkness, Orion angled
in the eastern sky with Sirius, low,
above the ridgeline; and, before daylight
blotted out the stars, I heard you speak,
the scratched words return to their sleeves.

Xeriscape
When she hands you a whale vertebra,
you marvel at its heft, at a black
pebble lodged in a lateral nook;
the hollyhocks out the window
stretch into sunshine; a dictionary
in the room is open to xeriscape;
the sidewalk and gravel heat all day
and release warmth into the night;
the woman who sits and writes
sees pressed aspen board, framers
setting window headers and doorjambs—here no polar bears rummage
at the city dump, no seal-oil lamps
flicker in the tide of darkness—
you know the influx of afternoon
clouds, thunder, ball lightning,
wavering lines of rain that evaporate
before they strike the ground,
as you carefully set the whale bone
on the glass table next to the television.

The Far Norway Maples
Silver poplars rise and thin to the very twig,
but what thins at your fingertips?
The aspirations of a minute, a day, a year?
Yellow tangs veer in the water and, catching
sunlight, veer again, disappear from sight.
The unfolding of a life has junctures
that rupture plot: a child folds paper
and glues toothpicks, designs a split-level
house with white walls and pitched roof,
but his father snatches the maquette
and burns it. If you inhale and spore this moment,
it tumors your body, but if you exhale it,
you dissolve midnight and noon; sunlight
tilts and leafs the tips of the far Norway maples.

Sight Lines
I’m walking in sight of the Rio Nambé—
salt cedar rises through silt in an irrigation ditch—
the snowpack in the Sangre de Cristos has already dwindled before spring—
at least no fires erupt in the conifers above Los Alamos—
the plutonium waste has been hauled to an underground site—
a man who built plutonium triggers breeds horses now—
no one could anticipate this distance from Monticello—
Jefferson despised newspapers, but no one thing takes us out of ourselves—
during the Cultural Revolution, a boy saw his mother shot by a firing squad—
a woman detonates when a spam text triggers bombs strapped to her body—
when I come to an upright circular steel lid, I step out of the ditch—
I step out of the ditch but step deeper into myself—
I arrive at a space that no longer needs autumn or spring—
I find ginseng where there is no ginseng my talisman of desire—
though you are visiting Paris, you are here at my fingertips—
though I step back into the ditch, no whitening cloud dispels this world’s
mystery—
the ditch ran before the year of the Louisiana Purchase—
I’m walking on silt, glimpsing horses in the field—

fielding the shapes of our bodies in white sand—
though parallel lines touch in the infinite, the infinite is here—

The Glass Constellation
Apple branches whiten in moonlight;
no god with an ibis head and human
body writes on a papyrus scroll here;
in daylight, snow has accumulated
on flagstone and fence posts; for days,
masons cut bricks on the patio:
the sound of a circular saw
echoed in your ears, but now scattered
husks of silence lie on the ground;
in a bowl-shaped fountain, water
rises and brims: if all time brims
at this threshold, a man tosses a beer
can out of a car then wrist-flicks a match:
a brush fire ignites, fans east
across a field toward a house and barn;
as the stench of smoke permeates
your clothes and hair, you lean on a shovel:
brush crackles then bursts into flame.
Shoveling snow off a patio, you spot ice
crystals, run your eyes along the glinting—
a varied thrush swallows a juniper berry;
from the air, we track migrating caribou,

and their shifting bodies make visible
the magnetic lines of the moment;
a magpie hops onto an apple-tree stump,
flies to a fence post, up to a branch;
you want that absorption, that vitality
when you turn a key at the door, step inside;
you consider what you’ve botched:
once you shortened a one-by-eight
so that you could level sand on a portal,
but the foreman stopped and screamed,
“You just sawed off my straightedge!”
Heat waves ripple up from a highway
outside a grapefruit farm near Salton Sea—
the road dissolves into shimmering sand;
you resume shoveling snow off
the walkway and tingle at the hot and cold:
once, in the dark, a large doe stood
behind you—a woman begs outside
the bakery—when he unlatched the gate,
fawns appeared in the orchard—
a temblor torqued the dining room
and silenced the laughter—a spotted towhee
lands on a nest and feeds her fledglings—
gazing into the vortex of the white page:
no jackal-headed god needs to weigh

your heart against an eagle feather—
at sunrise you divert water from the ditch
to sprinklers that swish, spray
the grass—a soldier on point pauses—
who knows the path of a man on crutches
begging at a stoplight?—from the underground uranium mine, a shock wave
shattered windows in the village above—
in the dictionary, you open to cochlea
then pungent—a thinning membrane,
the earth’s atmosphere—you write respire
then listen: nibbling dandelion stalks,
a cottontail—as peonies unfold
in a vase, you smell the back of her neck.
Researchers train honeybees, tagged
with microtransmitters, to track TNT
and locate land mines in fields;
Sun Tzu wrote, to win one hundred
victories in one hundred battles
is not the acme of skill; in the boiler room,
a plumber replaced a zone valve
but inadvertently let air into the water
line; at midnight, in a house
with no heat, you restart the boiler,
but, on the concrete floor, rat shit

is scattered like rice—though you set
a trap with peanut butter, you recall
a coyote munching an apple core,
gazing through the kitchen window,
unblinking in sunlight; a magpie
lands on a buck and eats ticks;
Sun Tzu wrote, musical notes are only
five in number but their melodies
are so numerous one cannot hear them all.
Nasturtium and lobelia planted in pots—
in the silence, a pipa twangs—a cougar
stalks neighborhood dogs in the dark—
you walked up to the acequia
but, finding no water, fingered the silt—
a sniper fires from a second-story window—
fingers start rolling and halting on strings—
where did I put my car keys—I’m pissed late—
what’s this fucking note under the door—
behind on my rent?—that sound of a truck
coming down the street—I need a shot—
not yet—ugh—that sound of glass
breaking—now piss me off I have
to wait until that truck’s gone—maybe
I’ll move to Denver—to back out—
when the caribou arrive, flowering herbs

are starting to wilt—when you type
I have taken too little care—you step
out on a glacial lake at ten below:
ice crystals singe your eyelashes—
you mark the forking branches
of a tree in the darkening air;
minute by minute, your sight shrinks
and shallows until the glass panes
of the door shift from window to mirror;
at that moment, grief and joy tip the ends
of a scale; earlier, you did not know
you would live to see a blue gentian
flower out of air; so often you knew
the page before it burst into flame—
staring at the snowy field of the page,
you tense when an arctic fox
slips past the black trunks of trees:
you blink, and nothing is there;
the blinking cursor marks a pendulum
swinging from a vaulted ceiling
over a marble floor; though no god
fingers your nerves, you write tingle
and tingle as sleet turns to rain.
In the white space a poppy buds—
he runs his fingers through her hair—

the spray of mock orange streams by—
at a fountain, a spotted towhee sips—
clenching his hand, he tugs the roots
of her hair—a fisherman unspools a line
back and forth—relaxes his grip—
a fly drops onto a stream, and a cutthroat
snags it—unfolds a sky-blue poppy—
she is rubbing oil on his chest and nipples—
staccato lightning to the west—
swimming in the Pacific, they look
at two lines of dolphins undulating below—
encircling, one suddenly flips
into the air then plunges into the depths—
sound of a car shifting gears—out of PVC
pipes, water gushes into the orchard—
women are rinsing indigo-dyed yarn
in a river—he sees the zigzag blue
lines in tiles above the fireplace as he has
never seen them before—she sees June
light slanting through glass into the hallway—
before his ashes are scattered at sea,
you stare at a dead apricot tree in moonlight:
what was it like to hear a commotion
in the street and glimpse the last emperor
leave the Forbidden City? Years later,

in West Virginia, coal miners, armed
with sticks of dynamite, rolled on cots
into mine openings and then back out—
detonations in the past are laced
in garlic now; sniffing the air
and leaning his head back and forth,
a coyote trots by the glass door;
last night, coyotes howled before
tearing apart a rabbit; at four a.m.
a baker slides dough into an oven:
the aroma rises from the basement kiln—
and, as you inhale, it drizzles on deck:
three miles from the coastline,
you scattered ashes, and swirling
on waves, they formed a gray,
black-speckled cloud before sinking—
at the beach, you screwed
an umbrella pole into the sand,
heard cry and cry but saw nothing:
then a piping plover, skirting
toward the water, revealed,
behind rocks, four speckled eggs;
after replanting the pole, sitting under
an umbrella, you felt how a skin
separated you from death, how death

contoured the pause between exhale
and inhale, how it flowered inside
the bougainvillea blooming by a glass
door and sparked the white page
into light; and, as glass molecules
slow as the temperature cools
yet never lock into crystal patterns,
you feel how once never locks,
how it vibrates, quickens inside you:
then you level with a taxi driver
swerving between trucks, level
with a potter who mashes a bowl
back into a ball, level with a magpie
that congregates and squawks
with other magpies over a corpse
before flying off, and when you hike
up the ridge, dew rising into
the morning, you ride the flex
of your muscles as you lift the gate—

The White Orchard
NEW POEMS

Circumference
Vanilla farmers in Madagascar sit in the dark with rifles;
at two a.m., after a thunderstorm,
I lurch down the hallway to check the oak floor
under a skylight, place a towel
in a pan. As if armed, waiting for a blue string
to trip a thief, I listen
in the hush at a point where ink flows out of a pen
onto a white Sahara of a page.
Adjusting the rearview mirror in the car before backing
out of the garage, I ask, What
is the logarithm of a dream? How do you trace a sphere
whose center is nowhere?
It is hard to believe farmers pollinate vanilla orchids
with toothpick-sized needles,
yet we do as needed; pouring syrup on a pancake,
I catch the scent of vines,
race along the circumference, sensing what it’s like to sit
in the dark with nothing in my hands.

Entanglement
1
Before sunrise, you listen for deer beyond
the gate: no signs of turkeys roosting on branches,
no black bear overturning garbage bins
along the street. The day glimmers
like waves undulating with the tide:
you toss another yellow cedar log
into the woodstove on the float house;
a great blue heron flaps its wings,
settles on the railing outside the window;
a thin low cloud of smoke hangs over the bay.
When you least expect it, your field
of vision tears, and an underlying landscape
reveals a radiating moment in time.
Today you put aside the newspaper,
soak strawberry plants in a garden bed;
yet, standing on land, you feel the rise
and fall of a float house, how the earth
under your feet is not fixed but moves with the tide.

2
Searching for lightning petroglyphs, I stumble
on a rattlesnake skin between rocks—
at dusk, soldiers set up machine guns
near the entrance to the Taj; others lay
a wall of sandbags—and tense when
a snake glides past my feet—a cow
lumbers through a crowded street,
while a one-armed girl panhandles
at a blinking red light—relax when
a tail without rattles slips into a crevice—
a vendor sells dates and mangoes; my eyes
sting in the soot-laden cardamom air—
when I stop at a pair of zigzag petroglyphs
and ponder if they are lightning or snakes,
I look up at a sandstone temple with chariots
and war elephants carved in the first tier;
above, a naked woman pulls a thorn from her heel;
higher up, a man and woman entwine.

3
You pick grapes from a street vendor
when an ambulance packed with explosives
detonates in a crowd; while I was weeding
in the garden, a fire ant crawled up my jeans
and blistered my leg. I gaze at the white trunks
of aspens and shrinking patches of snow
on the grass; no one can read the script
of Rongorongo, yet we know the urge to carve
with a shark’s tooth. The warmth of sunlight
radiates from a stone wall: a wall formed
of hewed words, fitted without mortar—
piano music wafted like frankincense smoke—
each word, a meteor leaving a track.
The shift from opacity to transparency’s
a form of sunrise; at five a.m. you step outside
and absorb a lunar eclipse; I recall patches
of moonlight rippling down the hallway;
now we are X, collapsing space, collapsing time.

4
Our bodies by firelight—
apple blossoms unfolding at the tips of branches—
aroma of candlelight in the room—
spruce trees, black, against a lightening sky—
leafing willow swaying in the backyard—
a moment of red tulips—
navel-orange slices on a plate—
squares of dark chocolate—
eddies in a river—
a sword razors a leaf coming downstream—
a dog leaps between slats of a fence—
rips a gate off its hinges—
ring, ring, ring, ring, ring—
scent of blackthorn oil—
these rings we’ve worn and worn into sunrise—

5
Along the shore, bald eagles nest in the yellow cedars—
my clothes reek of cedar smoke—
I wrap clothes around glass jars of king salmon in my knapsack—
standing on a dock, I board a floatplane—
floaters in my eyes, wherever I go—
wherever you go, you cannot travel faster than light—
synapses firing in my body are a form of light—
threads of fugitive dye entangled in neural firings—
scent of summer in the blackening leaves—
a black bear swipes a screen door and ransacks a kitchen—
we ransack the past and discover action at a distance—
entangled waves of near and far—
a photon fired through a slit behaves like a wave—
we inhale, and our lungs oxygenate a cosmos—
a fire breaks out of the secret depths of the earth—
revel in the beauty of form.

6
A ring-necked pheasant forages along the road,
while a purple orchid blooms by the window;
when distance collapses, a bloodred
strawberry bursts in your mouth;
you mark the rise and fall of your lungs,
blood coursing to your fingertips and toes;
when you consider gasoline mixed with seawater,
a torch flares out of the past into present:
you dip your brush in the ink of existence
and daub words that blacken, burst into flame—
a child in a boat gnaws stale bread.
Standing in an orchard, listening, aching
at the stars, I hear water drip off
stalactites and splash onto a cavern floor;
by daylight, the apple trees are covered
with blossoms; yet, now, in the dark,
I experience a wave of moonlight
glittering sheets of thin ice bobbing out in the bay.

Eye Exam
E D F C Z P
his eyesight is tethered to shore—
no sign of zebras
but spotted towhees repair their nest;
before the ditch is cleared,
plum trees are blossoming along a riparian bank—
he pauses at the gaps between letters,
notices how his mind has an urge to wander,
how it resists being tethered to question and quick reply—
yellow daffodils are rising in the yard;
behind his eyelids,
a surge of aquamarine water is breaking to shore:
they are stretching,
they are contorting into bliss—
and as the ophthalmologist
rotates lenses, “Is it clearer with 1 or 2?”
he sees how this moment is lens, mirror, spring,
and how, “1,”
D E F P O T E C
sharpens his vision to this o, the earth.

Pitch Blue
I can’t stop—
Wading into a lake—
Skipping one flat stone after another across the surface of a pond—
In a sarcophagus,
lapis inlaid along the eyelids of a death mask—
Wool oxidizing when pulled out of the dye bath—
Like a deserted village with men approaching on horseback—
The moment before collision—
Never light this match—

La Cieneguilla
Today no men shout from the cave and toss beer cans—
meandering along the cliff face, you find
a cluster of petroglyphs: in a procession,
five humpbacked flute players, a dragonfly,
turkey, star—or is it compass?—antelope,
great blue heron with a fish in its beak.
A kestrel glides overhead; glancing
below at a bare marsh, you notice
a desiccation to this site—when you pulled
up to a gas pump on Sunday morning,
a woman in a pickup raced alongside
and demanded money, “I need a tank of gas
to get to Phoenix, no, Las Vegas, Las Vegas—”
and she leaned as if to raise a pistol
to the open window. When you shook
your head, she tore out of the station,
careened down the road. Staring
at a lightning petroglyph, you mark
the zigzag beauty of danger, and how
hunger animates our nights and days;
you visualize corn planted in a sloping arroyo,
green shoots rising after rain, and nod
at the zigzag danger of beauty, then
walk from this site, this point of no—and infinite—return.

Ravine
Stopping to catch my breath on a switchback,
I run my fingers along the leaves of a yucca:
each blade curved, sharp, radiating from a core—
in this warmest of Novembers, the dead
push out of thawing permafrost: in a huge
blotch of black ink that hangs, framed,
on a wall, Gu Cheng wrote the character
fate, and a woman shrugs, “When you look
at me, you’re far away.” Last night, gazing
at Orion’s belt and sword sparkling in the sky,
I saw how we yearn for connection where
no connection exists: what belt, what sword?
Glancing at boulders in the ravine, I catch
a flock of Steller’s jays scavenging along
the ground; I scavenge among pine needles
for one to breathe into flame, gaze
at yuccas whose blades collect dew at dawn
and at dust floating in sunlight above the trail.

October Dusk
Aspen leaves and blue spruce needles dissolve
in the dusk; looking through glass panes,
you see ceiling lights, a Bolivian
textile on a wall: when what’s behind becomes
what’s in front, you wince, draw circles,
and, deepening the graphite tracks on a page,
enact a noose; then a sliver of moon
in the sky’s a sickle; a twig fire crackles
at your feet; you whistle, ache, step
out of a car to find bits of shattered glass
on asphalt resemble the ends of dreams;
as you flip bottles into a recycling bin,
each glass shatters: each dream collapses
into a pile of shards; as you toss the last
glass into the bin, you step out of another
transparent confine; and, as moonlight makes
a road on water, you have no word for
this moment that rides a wave stilling all waves.

Midnight Flame
At midnight, he can’t see
the white picket fence
or the tomato stalks, shriveled,
in the garden, though
he knows the patio,
strewn with willow leaves,
plumes of tall grasses,
upright and still;
and, as he peers into the yard,
he senses a moment
wicking into flame—
walking up an arroyo,
they gaze back
across the Pojoaque valley,
spot the glinting tin roofs,
cottonwoods leafing
along the curves of the river—
a green tide
surges in their arteries
as well as the trees;
tonight, spring infuses fall,
and memory’s wick
draws the liquefied
wax of experience up into flame.

Festina lente
Ping. ping, ping—
I hear nailing across the street and suddenly recall,
in my hands, nailing rebar
through two corbels angled over a post;
after a night of rain,
a young swallowtail sips nectar at a purple flower;
I sip the morning sunrise,
glimpse a trogon between ovate leaves,
a keel-billed toucan on a branch—
on a portal, a neighbor had six hummingbird feeders;
when I tried to discuss the ditch and times for watering,
while a rufous darted from feeder to feeder,
the humming from black-chinned hummingbirds
thrummed out his words;
now I find moments of the past ring like tuning forks—
I follow the tide of my breath
and, in the shoals of daylight,
begin to, festina lente, move,
as a series of concentric circles moves out, over the surface of water,
into a life that synaptically connects the shimmer of a leaf,
my hand in your hair, your hand
on my shoulder, an afternoon thunderstorm
gathering from the west,
as we situate at the brink of this wild-eyed world—

Pitch Yellow
Peony leaf dropping to earth—
A scorpion in amber—
Gluing pieces of a three-masted ship while listening to boxing on the radio—
Gold sieved out of reverie—
Threads, plucked from crocus flowers and dried—
A lit fuse igniting a firework—
Chromium, cobalt, copper particulates downstream—
Crawl, scrape, stagger, stagger out: spelunker—
Be X blossoming into song—

Sleepers
A black-chinned hummingbird lands
on a metal wire and rests for five seconds;
for five seconds, a pianist lowers his head
and rests his hands on the keys;
a man bathes where irrigation water
forms a pool before it drains into the river;
a mechanic untwists a plug, and engine oil
drains into a bucket; for five seconds,
I smell peppermint through an open window,
recall where a wild leaf grazed your skin;
here touch comes before sight; holding you,
I recall, across a canal, the sounds of men
laying cuttlefish on ice at first light;
before first light, physical contact,
our hearts beating, patter of female rain
on the roof; as the hummingbird
whirs out of sight, the gears of a clock
mesh at varying speeds; we hear
a series of ostinato notes and are not tied
to our bodies’ weight on earth.

Earthrise
Zoom in to pink bougainvillea in an ironglazed pot, along the edge of a still pool;
beyond tiled roofs below, surf crashes
against black lava rock; palm fronds
ripple in the air. Miners in an open pit
slog through sludge, panning for gold;
when they find a nugget, a foreman
seizes it; is there endless mire
and exploitation from a patch of ground?
In a wheelchair, an eighty-year-old man
proclaims, “Go in and hit them hard.”
Hit whom hard? From the air, a coastline
dotted with golf courses and sand traps,
whitecapping surf, a cloud forest,
five volcanoes rising out of the ocean,
a shrinking island, earthrise from the moon.

Acequia del Llano
1
The word acequia is derived from the Arabic as-saqiya (water conduit) and
refers to an irrigation ditch that transports water from a river to farms and fields,
as well as the association of members connected to it.
Blossoming peach trees—
to the west, steel buildings glint
above the mesa.
In Santa Fe, New Mexico, the Acequia del Llano is one and a half miles long
and begins at Nichols Reservoir dam. At the bottom of the dam, an outlet
structure and flow meter control water that runs through a four-inch pipe at up to
one hundred fifty gallons per minute. The water runs along a hillside and
eventually drops into the Santa Fe River. Fifteen families and two organizations
belong to this ditch association, and the acequia irrigates about thirty acres of
gardens and orchards.
In the ditch, water flowing—
now an eagle-feather wind.

2
Yarrow, rabbitbrush, claret cup cactus, one-seed juniper, Douglas fir, and scarlet
penstemon are some of the plants in this environment. Endangered and
threatened species include the southwestern willow flycatcher, the least tern, the
violet-crowned hummingbird, the American marten, and the white-tailed
ptarmigan.
Turning my flashlight
behind me, I see a large
buck, three feet away.
Each April, all of the members come, or hire workers who come, to do the
annual spring cleaning; this involves walking the length of the ditch, using
shovels and clippers to clear branches, silt, and other debris.
Twigs, pine needles, plastic bags
cleared today before moonrise—

3
The ditch association is organized with a mayordomo, ditch manager, who
oversees the distribution of water according to each parciante’s (holder of water
rights) allotment. The acequia runs at a higher elevation than all of the land held
by the parciantes, so the flow of water is gravity fed.
Crisscrossing the ditch,
avoiding cholla,
I snag my hair on branches.
Each year the irrigation season runs from about April 15 to October 15. On
Thursdays and Sundays, at 5:30 a.m., I get up and walk about a quarter of a mile
uphill to the ditch and drop a metal gate into it. When the water level rises, water
goes through screens then down two pipes and runs below to irrigate grass,
lilacs, trees, and an orchard.
Across the valley, ten lights
glimmer from hillside houses.

4
Orion and other constellations of stars stand out at that hour. As it moves toward
summer, the constellations shift, and, by July 1, when I walk uphill, I walk in
early daylight. By mid-September, I again go uphill in the dark and listen for
coyote and deer in between the piñons and junipers.
One by one, we light
candles on leaves, let them go
flickering downstream.
The Ganges River is 1,569 miles long. The Rio Grande is 1,896 miles long; it
periodically dries up, but when it runs its full length, it runs from its headwaters
in the mountains of southern Colorado into the Gulf of Mexico. Water from the
Santa Fe River runs into the Rio Grande. Water from the Acequia del Llano runs
into the Santa Fe River. From a length of one hundred paces along the acequia, I
draw our allotment of water.
Here, I pull a translucent
cactus spine out of your hand.

Pyrocumulus
Peony shoots rise out of the earth;
at five a.m., walking up the ridge,
I mark how, in April, Orion’s left arm
was an apex in the sky, and, by May,
only Venus flickered above the ridge
against the blue edge of sunrise.
In daylight, a pear tree explodes
with white blossoms—no blackfooted ferret slips across my path,
no boreal owl stirs on a branch.
At three a.m., dogs seethed and howled
when a black bear snagged a shriveled
apple off a branch; and, waking out
of a black pool, I glimpsed how
fire creates its own weather
in rising pyrocumulus. Reaching
the ditch, I drop the gate: it’s time
for the downhill pipes to fill,
time for bamboo at the house
to suck up water, time to see sunlight
flare between leaves before
the scorching edge of afternoon.

Midnight Spark
A rotating convective column of flames
pulls a cloud of hot smoke 10,000 feet high;
until July 1, the precipitation was 1.25
inches for the year; a few young cottonwoods
along the river have dropped leaves;
wherever you go, you recall yellow tape
and police cars at a gas station; driving past
Kewa Pueblo, you visualize drummers
shifting direction, and, in the realignment,
dancers momentarily pause then step
with the sounds of gourds enacting rain;
approaching La Cienega, you know a wind
capable of bending steel pipes around trees;
and, in the dark, passing cars pulled off the highway,
you no longer see lights and rain but spark
at the gap between lightning and thunder,
a free fall before the cusp of dawn.

Whiteout
Honey mushrooms glow in the dark;
in a sweat, a journalist wakes
to a roadside bomb; when a woman
outside a bakery offers to wash
your car windshield, you give her
some cash, and what will suffice?
Cottonwood seeds swirl in the air;
in Medellín, your host invites you
to lunch at his house; you sip
potato and cilantro soup, glance
at a door open to an enclosed yard
with a hammock and mango tree,
the space a refuge inside bulletpocked walls. A narwhal pokes
its tusk through ice into the air;
it exhales: whiteout: how to live,
where to go: in the yard, you hear
a circular saw rip the length of a plank.

Invisible Globe
Hiking up a trail in the snow, I spot
the rusting orange body of a car;
in midwinter, the sun’s a mirage
of July—a woman begins Taiji
movements and rotates an invisible
globe; a sky-blue morning glory
unfolds on a fence; though
the movements appear to be stretches,
they contain the tips of deflections
and strikes; behind a fence, neighbors
drink beer, grill chicken, laugh—
as snowflakes drop, I guess at
their shapes: twelve-branched,
stellar dendrite, triangular, capped
column—under a ceiling fan,
I recall our hours in a curtained
room—and as I sidestep down,
a capped column dissolves on my face.

Pitch Magenta
A broad-tailed hummingbird sips at a penstemon—
Plunging off a cliff face into an abyss—
Wiping a deer tail across cactus, he collects cochineal bugs in a pan—
When she tugs and bites his lower lip—
Like a fire truck hurtling through traffic—
Embalming a chameleon with coriander seeds,
stitching it closed with silk, placing it on his right shoulder—
Rising notes of a siren as an ambulance passes—
Surge in their bodies, pupils dilated—

The White Orchard
Under a supermoon, you gaze into the orchard—
a glassblower shapes a glowing orange mass into a horse—
you step into a space where you once lived—
crushed mica glitters on plastered walls—
a raccoon strolls in moonlight along the top of an adobe wall—
swimming in a pond, we notice a reflected cottonwood on the water—
clang: a deer leaps over the gate—
every fifteen minutes an elephant is shot for its tusks—
you mark a bleached earless lizard against the snowfall of this white page—
the skins of eggplants glistening in a garden—
our bodies glistening by firelight—
though skunks once ravaged corn, our bright moments cannot be ravaged—
sleeping near a canal, you hear lapping waves—
at dawn, waves lapping and the noise of men unloading scallops and shrimp—
no noise of gunshots—
you focus on the branches of hundred-year-old apple trees—
opening the door, we find red and yellow rose petals scattered on our bed—
then light-years—

you see pear branches farther in the orchard as the moon rises—
branches bending under the snow of this white page—

Rock Paper Scissors
Midnight snow swirls in the courtyard—
you wake and mark the steel-gray light of dawn,
the rhythm in your hands
of scissors cutting paper;
you pull a blade against ribbon,
and the ribbon springs into a spiraling curl
when you release it;
here, one pulled a blade against the ribbon of desire,
a downy woodpecker drilled into a desiccated pear tree—
you consider how paper wraps rock,
scissors snips paper,
how this game embodies the evolution
of bacteria and antibiotic;
you can’t see your fingerprints on a door handle,
but your smudging,
like trudging footprints in snow,
tracks where and how you go
wrapping
a chrysoprase heart in a box—
how you look at a series of incidentals
and pull an invisible thread through them all.

Trawler
In first light, a raucous, repeating cry of a bird—
you squint at the ocean, where the edge
of far water, darker than sky, limns
the curving horizon; a white trawler
inches along the coast, and white specks
of other times appear—bobbing
in waves that break behind you and roll
onto a Kilauea beach; a mushroom
rises below a palm tree, unfolds
a convex cap: the cap flattens and releases
spores into the air—waves of pleasure
run through your body and hers;
in early light, you bathe at an outdoor shower:
shadows of palm leaves against a wall,
a single plumeria blossom on a tree—
and, wherever you are, the moon
pulls in waves breaking
and receding, breaking and receding along a coast.

Morning Islands
Squinting across the water at another island
formed by volcanoes above the ocean,
I hike into and across a crater, stop
at silverswords—palm leaves rustle
in the breeze, and what prognostication
is that for today? In moonlight,
a mongoose darts across our headlights:
we drive along another island’s
coast to the ranch at a lava road’s end;
wandering among boulders and streams,
I slip on a rock, midstream; sipping
kava from wooden bowls, we gaze
at surf below the cliff—I dive
without diving, standing in a Wuji
stance, inhaling as my hands rise
above my head, exhaling as they move down.

Blackcap
V E R G E:
she sets type by hand and loves how the spaces
between letters and between words
are of the same type-metal the letters themselves are cast from:
openwater:
standing along the Malecón, I gaze at the curving horizon of water and sky,
at whitecaps crashing below;
now, walking barefoot on an oak floor,
I expect to see, through the glass panes,
a stag enter the moonlit orchard
where autumn hangs in the branches, like smoked bourbon,
but no, not yet:
to arrive at a place where each letter of each word
rises out of metallic silence,
and in the yearning for this language to blackcap,
I ride a hush, a wave
where the silence will be broken,
when dogs bark at whatever crosses the fence line.

Cloud Forest
Against the mountain slope, incoming fog—
we stood near the maroon strips of bark and inhaled the aroma of a rainbow
eucalyptus—
in the Netherlands, a rising sea-level is stressing dikes—
an ‘akepa is singing—
waves were whitecapping against black lava rock—
on an atoll, nuclear waste was dumped into a concrete vault—
we find these truths to be self-evident—
in a past life, I played the clarinet in a marching band—
now the vault has cracked—
have we not meandered, bewildered, in a cloud forest?—
along this coast, you are tracing the contours of desire—
the pilot veers the helicopter up over the canyon rim as we gasp—
the amaui has vanished—
we step into red-ginger daylight—

The Open Water
1
Peaches redden on branches; in the dark,
I drop the irrigation gate—each month
a woman crosses Havana Bay and, looking
at the open water, reclaims her mother—
I smell the bloodred strawberries
in the garden; at a flaking green tank,
I listen: yellow light shines at a neighbor’s
octagonal window; Orion dims as the sky lightens—
what am I but a wandering speck
rambling, smudging, stumbling, writing—
someone opens a car door and steals quarters—
across the valley, two lights flicker from houses;
standing before a sharp descent, I look
at a waxing moon—the big bang’s
always present—I latch a green metal
gate near the empty stable and smell
your neck as you turn in your sleep;
daylight reaches the porch post columns;
I open a glass door and sit at a table,
where light pools onto the wood floor.

2
A black butterfly opens its wings—
sitting in a bus on a metal seat, I notice the steel above the driver has
corroded, and pinpricks of daylight stream through—
two destroyers moored offshore—
on a scaffold, he uses a roller and paints the building marine blue—
a mime in a silver top hat, silver jacket—hands and face, silvered—inches
through a restaurant—
standing in the shade looking up into the branches and leaves of a thorned
ceiba tree—
a street sweeper emigrates and founds a chain of restaurants—
two men push pig carcasses on a cart through the doorway—
a singer shaking maracas sways to the music—

3
Russian sage scents the air—
the aroma of flickering candles
on the fireplace mantel—
that I am even here standing on a ridge looking at Venus low in the sky—
a black bear overturns a dumpster in the garage
and eats remnants
of a chicken enchilada—
soldiers move through the airport with dogs on leashes—
I rub oil on your breasts—
in Old Delhi, uncovered bins with saffron, cardamom,
ginger, turmeric—
a poster warns of an imminent terrorist attack—
I jot things down so that when I lose them in the darkness
I may recover them quickly with the dawn—
dancers emerge wearing Yoruba masks—
I taste the salt on your neck—
that the rivers of the world flow into the seas—
that I am alive and hear rotating sprinklers jet water onto the grass—
that we go through the day humming in our bodies—
Russian sage emerges out of darkness—

4
In August sunlight, basil plants go to seed—
a mime dressed as a construction worker
with gold skin, gold goggles, helmet,
and sledgehammer, stands in the shady
side of a cobbled street; when you drop
some cash in the box, he smiles and bows—
a woman gives you a book of poetry;
when you read la pobreza del lugar,
you bristle: no place is impoverished
if the mind sparks; if not, the dunes
of a Sahara have no end; the sun sets,
and a cooling range is under the stars—
when the mind seeds, a camel emerges
out of a dune and you ride it to an oasis,
where you imbibe ayahuasca: up all night,
when the man leading the vigil puts on
a jaguar mask and becomes a jaguar,
you raise your hands, and they spark butterflies.

5
A singer shaking maracas sways to the music—
in the street, a Black man pushing a cart with strings of onions dangling from
the frame sings, “Onions for sale”—
a girl with silvered face and hands, blouse and skirt, holds a silver bouquet of
flowers—
a purple 1953 Chevy with polished chrome parked alongside an azure
Bonneville—
in the yard, a flowering boojum tree—
his mother’s father was the owner of a sugar plantation and disinherited his
mother after she married a mulatto street sweeper—
sitting in the oven of a bus—
a mime dressed as a deep-sea diver, helmet in hand, inches up the stairs—
a black butterfly closes its wings—

6
Clusters of conical thorns on the tree trunk—
I recall screech owls perched on a post
protected from sunlight by wisteria leaves,
the hush in the courtyard during a snowfall,
cinders from a forest fire alighting on
the roof, and how winter starlight shifted
to summer sunshine within a single day.
In the eyehook between shelves, I see
the upright primarywing feather of an eagle,
the red and orange bougainvilleas,
entwined, rising from a pot pressing
against the ceiling and against glass doors;
twice I stepped on lye-softened floorboards
and caught splinters. I mark presence
in absence and absence in presence:
as a May snow landing on a walkway
dissolves as it lands, as surf rises
and sweeps across the plazas and boulevards.

Transpirations
Leafing branches of a backyard plum—
branches of water on a dissolving ice sheet—
chatter of magpies when you approach—
lilacs lean over the road, weighted with purple blossoms—
then the noon sun shimmers the grasses—
you ride the surge into summer—
smell of piñon crackling in the fireplace—
blued notes of a saxophone in the air—
not by sand running through an hourglass but by our bodies igniting—
passing in the form of vapors from a living body—
this world of orange sunlight and wildfire haze—
world of iron filings pulled toward magnetic south and north—
pool of quicksilver when you bend to tie your shoes—
standing, you well up with glistening eyes—
have you lived with utmost care?—
have you articulated emotions like the edges of leaves?—
adjusting your breath to the seasonal rhythm of grasses—
gazing into a lake on a salt flat and drinking, in reflection, the Milky Way—

Notes
The poems in this collection span fifty years. I have decided to retain the
spellings of Chinese names in the forms used when the poems were first
published, so Wade-Giles and pinyin romanizations both appear, though there’s
a clear tendency to use pinyin over time. Page numbers indicate the first
occurrence.
p. 10 Man On Horseback: the Tricholoma flavovirens mushroom.
p. 10 s twist, z twist: threads of fiber may be spun in either an s-spin (counterclockwise) or z-spin
(clockwise) direction.
p. 13 A catalogue of endangered species.
p. 18 kaiseki: (Japanese) breast stones; an intricate, multicourse Zen meal that accompanies tea ceremony.
p. 18 Qianlong: Chinese emperor from 1736 to 1799.
p. 19 Daruma: (Japanese) Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen.
p. 21 Tokpela: (Hopi) sky, the name of the first world.
p. 21 trastero: in the Southwest, a cupboard.
p. 23 feng shui: (Chinese) wind and water; the art of balancing and enhancing the environment.
p. 23 Two Grey Hills: a style of Navajo weaving that uses undyed wool in intricate patterns.
p. 26 matcha: (Japanese) a powdered green tea.
p. 30 kukui: Hawaiian name for the candlenut tree.
p. 35 huan wo he shan: (Chinese) return my rivers and mountains.
p. 37 ‘apapane, ‘i‘iwi: names of Hawaiian birds.
p. 40 o‘o a‘a: extinct Hawaiian bird.
p. 76 ristras: in the Southwest, strings of dried red chiles.
p. 87 canal: a waterspout off a roof.
p. 87 vigas: ceiling beams.
p. 87 latillas: stripped aspen poles laid across ceiling beams.
p. 94 Questa: a village in Northern New Mexico.
p. 149 Koyemsi: mudhead kachinas, clowns that serve religious and secular functions at Hopi ceremonies.
p. 159 Kwakwha: (Hopi) thank you (masc).
p. 159 Askwali: (Hopi) thank you (fem).
p. 170 enso: in Zen calligraphy, the circle.
p. 176 shibui: (Japanese) astringent, refined; a Zen aesthetic that finds beauty in restraint and in the
unassuming.
p. 177 karez: irrigation tunnels.

p. 188 The setting for this poem is Sanjusangendo in Kyoto. Thanks to Ken Rodgers for verifying the
spatial orientation at this temple.
p. 189 chacmool: (Mayan) a reclining human figure with flexed knees, head turned to the side, hands
holding a basin at the navel.
p. 198 erhu: a Chinese two-stringed musical instrument held in the lap and played with a bow.
p. 198 piki: (Hopi) an extremely fragile, paper-thin bread made from blue cornmeal.
p. 203 TLV: in the Han dynasty, a series of so-called TLV mirrors appeared; the backs of these mirrors
have geomantic forms resembling the letters T, L, V.
p. 205 xuan: the Chinese character means dark, deep, profound, subtle and is etymologically derived from
dyeing.
p. 215 traduttori, traditori: (Italian) translators are traitors.
p. 227 blak, blæc: the Middle English and Old English spellings of black; they are homophones with the
word black.
p. 231 quipu: Although quipus are usually thought of in connection with the Incas, ancient quipus exist in
Asian cultures as well. In China, one can use the phrase chieh shêng chi shih, which means “the
memorandum or record of knotted cords,” to refer to how Chinese writing evolved before characters were
invented.
p. 232 Lepiota naucina: a mushroom that appears in grass and marks the beginning of autumn.
p. 234 earthshine: sunlight reflected by the earth that illuminates the dark part of the moon.
p. 244 omega minus: a subatomic particle predicted by Murray Gell-Mann in 1962 and verified two years
later.
p. 246 jarana: in Mexico, a small folk guitar.
p. 266 genmai: (Japanese) a combination of green tea and roasted popped brown rice.
p. 271 Bombyx mori: silkworm.
p. 274 Coal Sack: a dark patch of obscuring dust in the far southern Milky Way.
p. 279 raki: (Turkish) an aniseed liqueur, which, with water, turns milky white.
p. 280 granero: in the Southwest, a granary container.
p. 283 Lingzhi: (Chinese) a mushroom that is reputed to provide health and longevity, the “mushroom of
immortality.”
p. 288 dhyana: (Sanskrit) a fixed state of contemplation.
p. 294 Didyma: the site of a Greek oracular sanctuary in Asia Minor that includes the remains of a Temple
of Apollo.
p. 301 Çanakkale: the principal town, situated on the Asian side, at the narrowest point of the strait between
Europe and Asia.
p. 303 Black Trumpets: Craterellus fallax, edible funnel-shaped mushrooms.
p. 317 xun: (Chinese) a globular ceramic-vessel flute with holes.
p. 348 Teec Nos Pos: a style of Navajo weaving that uses wide borders featuring geometric elements around
a center of bold abstract design.
p. 353 yardangs: desert landforms that usually occur in groups; they are narrow, steep-sided ridges carved

into bedrock, with the ridges running parallel to one another and in the direction of the prevailing wind.
p. 353 ciénega: (Spanish) swamp or marsh.
p. 353 Tsé Bit’a’í: (Diné) the rock with wings; Shiprock, located in northwestern New Mexico.
p. 360 Yerba mansa is a perennial flowering plant (Anemopsis californica). In New Mexico, people boil the
roots to make a medicinal tea.
p. 370 This boathouse in Laugharne, Wales, is where Dylan Thomas lived, and the house is set in a cliff
overlooking the Taf Estuary.
p. 370 I first heard that å i åa ä e ö, in Swedish, means island in the river from the Dutch poet K. Michel.
The Norwegian writer Dag Straumsvåg sourced this all-vowel sentence to Swedish poet Gustaf Fröding’s
“Dumt Fôlk” (Stupid People). Thanks to David Caligiuri and Connie Wanek.
p. 372 A sarangi is a short-necked string instrument of India. Of all the East Indian instruments, it is said to
most resemble the sound of the human voice.
p. 394 A leograph is a mythical lion figure.
p. 412 “The Unfolding Center” is also the name of my collaboration with sculptor Susan York, where Susan
made twenty-two graphite drawings that accompany this poem.
p. 412 Green snail spring (Bi Luo Chun) is a green tea that comes from the Dong Ting mountain region in
Jiangsu, China. Picked in early spring, the leaves are rolled into a tight spiral and resemble snail meat.
p. 422 “Flip a house and it’s shelter” and the following three lines are based on an interview with Santa Fe
architect Trey Jordan.
p. 425 “Water Calligraphy” (dì shu): at sunrise in China, elderly men often go to public parks, dip brushes
in water, and write calligraphy on the slate walkways. As the water evaporates, the characters disappear.
p. 436 “Cloud Hands” is for JoAnna Schoon.
p. 456 In “Courtyard Fire,” the italicized lines are a condensation of a sentence from Karl Marx’s “A
Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” (1884).
p. 463 kintsugi: (Japanese) golden joinery, the art of repairing broken pottery with gold-dusted lacquer.
p. 466 This is the writing, the speaking of the dream is Dennis Tedlock’s translation of the beginning of a
series of glyphs on a Mayan ceramic vessel.
p. 471 “Dawn Redwood” is in memory of C.D. Wright. The italicized line is from her poem “Floating
Trees.”
p. 477–8 The italicized lines are from The Art of War by Sun Tzu, translated by Samuel B. Griffith (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1963).
p. 512 Wuji, sometimes called the Emptiness posture, is a warm-up position in Taiji and Qigong practices.
p. 513 Malecón: a seawall that stretches for five miles along the coast in Havana, Cuba.
p. 514 ‘akepa: a small, brightly colored Hawaiian honeycreeper.
p. 514 ‘āmaui: extinct Hawaiian bird.
p. 518 la pobreza del lugar: (Spanish) the poverty of the place; from “Voy a Nombrar Las Cosas” (“I Am
Going to Name the Things”) by Eliseo Diego.

About the Author
Arthur Sze is a poet, translator, and editor. He is the author of eleven books of
poetry, including Sight Lines (2019), for which he received the National Book
Award; Compass Rose (2014), a Pulitzer Prize finalist; The Ginkgo Light (2009),
selected for the PEN Southwest Book Award and the Mountains & Plains
Independent Booksellers Association Book Award; Quipu (2005); The
Redshifting Web: Poems 1970–1998 (1998), selected for the Balcones Poetry
Prize and the Asian American Literary Award; and Archipelago (1995), selected
for an American Book Award. He has also published one book of Chinese poetry
translations, The Silk Dragon (2001), selected for the Western States Book
Award, and edited Chinese Writers on Writing (2010). A recipient of the eighth
annual ‘T’ Space Poetry Award, the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers,
a Lannan Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila Wallace–Reader’s
Digest Writers’ Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing
Fellowships, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, as well as five grants from the
Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, Sze was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe,
where he lives with his wife, the poet Carol Moldaw. From 2012 to 2017, he was
a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and in 2017, he was elected a
fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His poems have been
translated into over a dozen languages, including Chinese, Dutch, German,
Korean, and Spanish. He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American
Indian Arts.

Books by Arthur Sze
Poetry
The Glass Constellation: New and Collected
Poems Sight Lines
Compass Rose
The Ginkgo Light
Quipu
The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998
Archipelago
River River
Dazzled
Two Ravens
The Willow Wind
Translations
The Silk Dragon: Translationsfrom the Chinese
Editor
Chinese Writers on Writing

Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following publications in
which the New Poems, sometimes in earlier versions, first appeared:
Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day (Poets.org): “Rock Paper Scissors,”
“Sleepers”
Big Other: “Blackcap”
Conjunctions: “The Open Water”
FIELD: “La Cieneguilla,” “Pitch Blue”
Harvard Review: “Morning Islands”
Kenyon Review: “Acequia del Llano,” “Eye Exam,” “Pyrocumulus,” “Trawler,”
“The White Orchard,” “Whiteout”
Lana Turner: “Festina lente,” “Pitch Magenta,” “Pitch Yellow”
Los Angeles Review of Books: “October Dusk”
The Massachusetts Review: “Ravine”
New England Review: “Entanglement”
The New Republic: “Cloud Forest”
The New Yorker: “Transpirations”
Plume (online): “Circumference,” “Earthrise”
Poetry: “Midnight Flame”
Reed Magazine: “Midnight Spark”
Tin House: “Invisible Globe”
“The White Orchard” appeared in The Best American Poetry 2019 (Scribner,
2019) and also in the 2020 Pushcart Prize XLIV: Best of the Small Presses
(Pushcart Press, 2019).
Twelve poems, in three groupings of four poems—“First Snow,” “Invisible
Globe,” “Eye Exam,” “Unpacking a Globe”; “Sleepers,” “Light Echoes,”
“Ravine,” “Black Center”; “La Cieneguilla,” “Traversal,” “The White Orchard,”
“Courtyard Fire”— were published as a limited edition letterpress chapbook,
Starlight Behind Daylight (St Brigid Press, 2020).
The following ten books of poetry were first published as listed below:
The Willow Wind (Rainbow Zenith Press, 1972; revised, Tooth of Time Books,
1981)

Two Ravens (Tooth of Time Books, 1976; revised, Tooth of Time Books, 1984)
Dazzled (Floating Island Publications, 1982)
River River (Lost Roads Publishers, 1987)
Archipelago (Copper Canyon Press, 1995)
The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970–1998 (Copper Canyon Press, 1998)
Quipu (Copper Canyon Press, 2005)
The Ginkgo Light (Copper Canyon Press, 2009)
Compass Rose (Copper Canyon Press, 2014)
Sight Lines (Copper Canyon Press, 2019)
Thank you Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Carol Moldaw, Dana Levin, and Jim Moore,
for close readings of these poems.
Thank you, Michael Wiegers, for your unflagging support of my work through
the years.

Copyright 2021 by Arthur Sze
All rights reserved
Cover art: Barbara Takenaga, Clearing, 2018. Acrylic on linen, 35.75 x 38 inches. Courtesy of DC Moore
Gallery.
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elSBN: 978-1-61932-236-3
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ALSO BY ADA LIMÓN

The Carrying
Bright Dead Things
Sharks in the Rivers
This Big Fake World
Lucky Wreck

THE HURTING KIND

POEMS

ADA LIMÓN

MILKWEED EDITIONS

© 2022, Text by Ada Limón
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no
part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written
permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue
South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415.
(800) 520-6455
milkweed.org
Published 2022 by Milkweed Editions

Printed in Canada
Cover design by Mary Austin Speaker
Cover artwork by Stacia Brady
Author photo by Lucas Marquardt
22 23 24 25 26 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Limón, Ada, author.
Title: The hurting kind / Ada Limón.
Description: First Edition. | Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions,
2022. | Summary: “An astonishing collection about interconnectednessbetween the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves-from National
Book Critics Circle Award winner and National Book Award finalist Ada
Limón”- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021050271 (print) | LCCN 2021050272 (ebook) | ISBN
9781639550494 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781639550500 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.
Classification: LCC PS3612.I496 H87 2022 (print) | LCC PS3612.I496
(ebook) | DDC 811/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021050271
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021050272
Milkweed Editions is committed to ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book production practices
with this principle, and to reduce the impact of our operations in the environment. We are a member of the
Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the
world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. The Hurting Kind was printed on acid-free
100% postconsumer-waste paper by Friesens Corporation.

For Brady

CONTENTS
1. SPRING

Give Me This
Drowning Creek
Swear on It
Sanctuary
Invasive
A Good Story
In the Shadow
Forsythia
And, Too, the Fox
Stranger Things in the Thicket
Glimpse
The First Lesson
Anticipation
Foaling Season
Not the Saddest Thing in the World
Stillwater Cove
2. SUMMER

It Begins with the Trees
Banished Wonders
Where the Circles Overlap
When It Comes Down to It
The Magnificent Frigatebird

Blowing on the Wheel
Jar of Scorpions
The First Fish
Joint Custody
On Skyline and Tar
Cyrus & the Snakes
Only the Faintest Blue
Calling Things What They Are
“I Have Wanted Clarity in Light of My Lack of Light”
Open Water
Thorns
The Mountain Lion
3. FALL

Privacy
It’s the Season I Often Mistake
How We See Each Other
Sports
Proof
Heart on Fire
Power Lines
Hooky
My Father’s Mustache
Runaway Child
Instrumentation
If I Should Fail
Intimacy

4. WINTER

Lover
The Hurting Kind
Against Nostalgia
Forgiveness
Heat
Obedience
The Unspoken
Salvage
What Is Handed Down
Too Close
The End of Poetry
Notes & Acknowledgments

I ASK FOR SILENCE
though it’s late, though it’s night,
and you are not able.
Sing as if nothing were wrong.
Nothing is wrong.
ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK
(TRANSLATED BY YVETTE SIEGERT)

1.
SPRING

GIVE ME THIS
I thought it was the neighbor’s cat, back
to clean the clock of the fledgling robins low
in their nest stuck in the dense hedge by the house,
but what came was much stranger, a liquidity
moving, all muscle and bristle: a groundhog
slippery and waddle-thieving my tomatoes, still
green in the morning’s shade. I watched her
munch and stand on her haunches, taking such
pleasure in the watery bites. Why am I not allowed
delight? A stranger writes to request my thoughts
on suffering. Barbed wire pulled out of the mouth,
as if demanding that I kneel to the trap of coiled
spikes used in warfare and fencing. Instead,
I watch the groundhog more closely and a sound escapes
me, a small spasm of joy I did not imagine
when I woke. She is a funny creature and earnest,
and she is doing what she can to survive.

DROWNING CREEK
Past the strip malls and the power plants,
out of the holler, past Gun Bottom Road
and Brassfield and before Red Lick Creek,
there’s a stream called Drowning Creek where
I saw the prettiest bird I’d seen all year,
the belted kingfisher, crested in its Aegean
blue plumage, perched not on a high snag
but on a transmission wire, eyeing the creek
for crayfish, tadpoles, and minnows. We were
driving fast toward home and already our minds
were pulled taut like a high black wire latched
to a utility pole. I wanted to stop, stop the car
to take a closer look at the solitary, stocky water
bird with its blue crown and its blue chest
and its uncommonness. But already we were
a blur and miles beyond the flying fisher
by the time I had realized what I’d witnessed.
People were nothing to that bird, hovering over
the creek. I was nothing to that bird, which wasn’t
concerned with history’s bloody battles or why
this creek was called Drowning Creek, a name
I love though it gives me shivers, because
it sounds like an order, a place where one
goes to drown. The bird doesn’t call the creek
that name. The bird doesn’t call it anything.
I’m almost certain, though I am certain
of nothing. There is a solitude in this world
I cannot pierce. I would die for it.

SWEAR ON IT
Loosen the thin threads
spooling in the rafters
invisible nests in night’s
green offerings, divide
and then divide again.
American linden looming
over the streetlights, so
much taller is the tree,
so much taller is the tree.

SANCTUARY
Suppose it’s easy to slip
into another’s green skin,
bury yourself in leaves
and wait for a breaking,
a breaking open, a breaking
out. I have, before, been
tricked into believing
I could be both an I
and the world. The great eye
of the world is both gaze
and gloss. To be swallowed
by being seen. A dream.
To be made whole
by being not a witness,
but witnessed.

INVASIVE
What’s the thin break
inescapable, a sudden thud
on the porch, a phone
vibrating with panic on the night
stand? Bury the broken thinking
in the backyard with the herbs. One
last time, I attempt to snuff out
the fig buttercup, the lesser celandine,
invasive and spreading down
the drainage ditch I call a creek
for a minor pleasure. I can
do nothing. I take the soil in
my clean fingers and to say
I weep is untrue, weep is too
musical a word. I heave
into the soil. You cannot die.
I just came to this life
again, alive in my silent way.
Last night I dreamt I could
only save one person by saying
their name and the exact
time and date. I choose you.
I am trying to kill the fig buttercup
the way I’m supposed to according
to the government website,
but right now there’s a bee on it.
Yellow on yellow, two things
radiating life. I need them both
to go on living.

A GOOD STORY
Some days—dishes piled in the sink, books littering the coffee table—
are harder than others. Today, my head is packed with cockroaches,
dizziness, and everywhere it hurts. Venom in the jaw, behind the eyes,
between the blades. Still, the dog is snoring on my right, the cat, on my left.
Outside, all those redbuds are just getting good. I tell a friend, The body
is so body. And she nods. I used to like the darkest stories, the bleak
snippets someone would toss out about just how bad it could get.
My stepfather told me a story about when he lived on the streets as a kid,
how hed, some nights, sleep under the grill at a fast food restaurant until
both he and his buddy got fired. I used to like that story for some reason,
something in me that believed in overcoming. But right now all I want
is a story about human kindness, the way once, when I couldn’t stop
crying because I was fifteen and heartbroken, he came in and made
me eat a small pizza he’d cut up into tiny bites until the tears stopped.
Maybe I was just hungry, I said. And he nodded, holding out the last piece.

IN THE SHADOW
The wild pansy shoves its persistent face beneath
the hackberry’s shade, true plum and gold,
with the alternate names: Johnny-jump-up,
heartsease, or my favorite, love-in-idleness.
I bow closer to the new face. I am always superimposing
a face on flowers, I call the violet moon vinca
the choir, and there are surely eyes in the birdeye speedwell,
and mouths on the linearleaf snapdragon.
It is what we do in order to care for things, make them
ourselves, our elders, our beloveds, our unborn.
But perhaps that is a lazy kind of love. Why
can’t I just love the flower for being a flower?
How many flowers have I yanked to puppet
as if it was easy for the world to make flowers?

FORSYTHIA
At the cabin in Snug Hollow near McSwain Branch creek, just spring, all the
animals are out, and my beloved and I are lying in bed in a soft silence. We are
talking about how we carry so many people with us wherever we go, how, even
when simply living, these unearned moments are a tribute to the dead. We are
both expecting to hear an owl as the night deepens. All afternoon, from the
porch, we watched an Eastern towhee furiously build her nest in the untamed
forsythia with its yellow spilling out into the horizon. I told him that the way I
remember the name forsythia is that when my stepmother, Cynthia, was dying,
that last week, she said lucidly but mysteriously, More yellow. And I thought
yes, more yellow, and nodded because I agreed. Of course, more yellow. And so
now in my head, when I see that yellow tangle, I say, For Cynthia, for Cynthia,
forsythia, forsythia, more yellow. It is night now, and the owl never comes. Only
more of night, and what repeats in the night.

AND, TOO, THE FOX
Comes with its streak of red
flashing across the lawn, squirrel
bound and bouncing almost
as if it were effortless to hunt,
food being an afterthought or
just a little boring. He doesn’t
say a word. Just uses those four
black feet to silently go about
his work, which doesn’t seem
like work at all but play. Fox
lives on the edges, pieces together
a living out of leftovers and lazy
rodents too slow for the telephone
pole. He takes only what he needs
and lives a life that some might
call small, has a few friends, likes
the grass when it’s soft and green,
never cares how long you watch,
never cares what you need
when you’re watching, never cares
what you do once he is gone.

STRANGER THINGS IN THE THICKET
What to root for, what to root for, I rub
my hands together and eye the surroundings.
Who’s gonna win in this blasted waste,
save a nickel and ease the masterclass
into your own sorrowful palm. She doesn’t
like the word honey so she won’t like
the whole song that has honey in its
chorus. It’s cold today so the sun’s a lie.
It’s all a lie, my closest confidant replies.
Some raggedy squirrel keeps eating samaras
and scattering their uselessness into the wind.
I don’t know why he is raggedy—could be
fox, could be fence post, something got him.
Still we see him every year, come to drink
deeply from the birdbath, come to forage
in the shade of the lilac and mop cypress.
Sure, sure, it’s so obvious, that’s who to root
for, the thing almost dead
that is, in fact, not
dead at all.

GLIMPSE
In the bathroom our last
cat comes up to me and purrs
even without touch she purrs
and there are times I can
hold her when no one else
can hold her. She once
belonged to my husband’s
ex-girlfriend who is no longer
of the earth and what I’ve
never told him is that some
nights when I touch her
I wonder if the cat is feeling
my touch or just remembering
her last owner’s touch. She
is an ancient cat and prickly.
When we are alone I sing
full throated in the empty house
and she meows and mewls
like we’ve done this before
but we haven’t done this before.

THE FIRST LESSON
She took the hawk wing
and spread it
slightly from the shoulder
down, from the bend
of the wing to the lesser
coverts, from the primary coverts
to the tertials, to the carpal edge.
The bird was dead
to begin with, found
splayed over the white
line of Arnold Drive. She was not
scared of death, she took
the bird in like a stray
thing that needed warmth
and water. She pulled it apart
to see how it worked.
My mother nailed the wing
to her studio wall.
She told me not to be
scared. I watched
and learned to watch
closely the world.

ANTICIPATION
Before I dug
the plot
in our yard,
before we had
a yard, when
grass only grew
between stop
signs and garbage
cans, when I
had one pot
for a pepper
and one pot
for a roma
on the fire
escape, I was
planting my
secret seeds
inside you,
the crimson
linen curtains
billowing in
liquid spring
wind, the future
deepening
in the heat.

FOALING SEASON
1.
In the dew-saturated foot-high blades
of grass, we stand amongst a sea
of foals, mare and foal, mare and foal,
all over the soft hillside there are twos,
small duos ringing harmoniously in the cold,
swallows diving in and out, their fabled
forked tail where, the story says, the fireball
hit it as it flew to bring fire to humanity.
Our friend the Irishman drives us in the Gator
to sit amongst them. Everywhere doubles
of horses still leaning on each other, still nuzzling
and curious with each new image.
2.
Two female horses, retired mares, separated
by a sliding barn door, nose each other.
Neither of them will get pregnant again,
their job is to just be a horse. Sometimes,
though, they cling to one another, find a friend
and will whine all night for the friend
to be released. Through the gate, the noses
touch, and you can almost hear—

Are you okay? Are you okay?
3.
I will never be a mother.
That’s all. That’s the whole thought.
I could say it returns to me, watching the horses.
Which is true.
But also I could say that it came to me
as the swallows circled us over and over,
something about that myth of their tail,
how generosity is punished by the gods.
But isn’t that going too far? I saw a mare
with her foal, and then many mares
with many foals, and I thought, simply:
I will never be a mother.
4.
One foal is a biter, and you must watch
him as he bares his teeth and goes
for the soft spot. He’s brilliant, leggy,
and comes right at me, as if directed
by some greater gravity, and I stand
firm, and put my hand out first, rub
the long white marking on his forehead,
silence his need for biting with affection.
I love his selfishness, our selfishness,

the two of us testing each other, swallows
all around us. Every now and then, his
teeth come at me once again; he wants
to teach me something, to get me
where it hurts.

NOT THE SADDEST THING IN THE WORLD
All day I feel some itchiness around
the collar, constriction of living. I write
the date at the top of a letter; though
no one has been writing the year lately,
I write the year, seems like a year you
should write, huge and round and awful.
In between my tasks, I find a dead fledgling,
maybe dove, maybe dunno to be honest,
too embryonic, too see-through and wee.
I don’t even mourn him, just all matter-offact-like take the trowel, plant the limp body
with a new hosta under the main feeder.
Seems like a good place for a close-eyed
thing, forever close-eyed, under a green plant
in the ground, under the feast up above. Between
the ground and the feast is where I live now.
Before I bury him, I snap a photo and beg
my brother and my husband to witness this
nearly clear body. Once it has been witnessed
and buried, I go about my day, which isn’t
ordinary, exactly, because nothing is ordinary
now even when it is ordinary. Now, something’s
breaking always on the skyline, falling over

and over against the ground, sometimes
unnoticed, sometimes covered up like sorrow,
sometimes buried without even a song.

STILLWATER COVE
It seemed a furtive magic—
sun ricocheting off cresting waves near
Stillwater Cove, the soft rock cliffs
of sandstone and clay, the wind-tilted
cypress trees leaning toward
the blue Pacific—and it was only you
who’d see them. A migrating pod
of gray whales going northward, new
calves in tow, shooting a spray of frothy
expelled water from their blowholes
and making a show of breaching
in the clear spring air off the coastline.
We’d whine that we never
caught a glimpse of a slick back or tail slap,
nary a spy-hopping head raised
above the swirling surface. Too young
to look outward for long, we’d lower
our eyes toward what lived small,
the alligator lizard in the coyote brush,
the bracken fern, orange monkey
flower, the beach fly, the earwig, the tick.
It was your trick, always a whale
as soon as our heads went down. Had
to have been a lie: they’d come up
while we zeroed in on Mexican sage
or the monarch. Distracted

by the evidence of life at our feet,
we had no time for the waiting
that was required. To watch
the waves until the whales surfaced
seemed a maddening task. Now, I am
in the inland air that smells of smoke
and gasoline, the trees blown leafless by
wind. Could you refuse me if I asked you
to point again at the horizon, to tell me
something was worth waiting for?

2.
SUMMER

IT BEGINS WITH THE TREES
Two full cypress trees in the clearing
intertwine in a way that almost makes
them seem like one. Until, at a certain angle
from the blue blow-up pool I bought
this summer to save my life, I see it
is not one tree but two, and they are
kissing. They are kissing so tenderly
it feels rude to watch, one hand
on the other’s shoulder, another
in the other’s branches, like hair.
When did kissing become so
dangerous? Or was it always so?
That illicit kiss in the bathroom
of the Four-Faced Liar, a bar
named after a clock—what was her
name? Or the first one with you,
on the corner of Metropolitan
Avenue, before you came home
with me forever. I watch those green
trees now and it feels libidinous.
I want them to go on kissing, without
fear. I want to watch them and not
feel so abandoned by hands. Come

home. Everything is begging you.

BANISHED WONDERS
The American linden sways nonplussed by the storm,
a bounce here, a shimmy there, just shaking like music
left over from the night’s end wafting into the avenues before sleep.
I remember once walking down Clinton Street, and singing
that line returning, New York is cold, but I like where I’m living.
There’s music on Clinton Street all through the evening. And of course
there was music, though it was me and my incessant remembering.
And here, now, what does one even offer?
Darling Cockroaches of the Highest Order, hard underthings
of hard underworlds, I am utterly suspicious of advice.
What is the world like out there? Are you singing in the tunnels?
I should say nothing sometimes.
I should say, Memory will leap from the mountain.
Dearest purple spiderwort in the ditch’s mud, how did you do it?
Such bravery, such softness, even with all that name-calling and rage.
No one wants to be a pretty thing all the time. But no one wants to be
the weed. Alone in Argentina at a café, I never felt like dancing, I
screwed
my face up so it said nothing and no one and never. Borges lost his sight,
over years, and yet sometimes it is best to be invisible.
What is it to be seen in the right way? As who you are? A flash of color,
a blur in the crowd,
something spectacular but untouchable.

And now the world is gone. No more Buenos Aires or Santiago.
No tango, no samba. No more pisco sours sweet and sticky
and piercing the head’s stubborn brick.
Mistral writes: We dont need all the things that used to give us pleasure.
Still some dense desire, to sneak into the cities of the world
again, a window, to sit at Café Tortoni and refuse an invitation
because I can. Now we endure.
Endure time, this envenomed veil of extremes—loss and grief and reckoning.
Mistral writes: I killed a woman in me: one I did not love. But I do not want to
kill
that longing woman in me. I love her and I want her to go on longing
until it drives her mad, that longing, until her desire is something
like a blazing flower, a tree shaking off
the torrents of rain as if it is simply making music.

WHERE THE CIRCLES OVERLAP
We burrow.
We hunch.
We beg and beg.
The thesis is still a river.
At the top of the mountain
is a murderous light, so strong
it’s like staring into an original
joy, foundational,
that brief kinship of hold
and hand, the space between
teeth right before they break
into an expansion, a heat.
We hurry.
We hanker.
We beg and beg.
When should we mourn?
We think time is always time.
And place is always place.
Bottlebrush trees attract
the nectar lovers, and we
capture, capture, capture.
The thesis is still the wind.
The thesis has never been exile.

We have never been exiled.
We have been in the sun,
strong and between sleep,
no hot gates, no house decayed,
just the bottlebrush alive
on all sides with want.

WHEN IT COMES DOWN TO IT
Trip the door to stick,
we with the bag mouths
yawping in the blank
space where our joy
once lived, little blooming
weed, purple dead nettle:
where have you gone,
good flourishing? Red
feather I found bent
on the wildflower berm,
soaked but not soaked,
simply shadowed, still,
unweighted, insistent
it belongs to flight.

THE MAGNIFICENT FRIGATEBIRD
Is it okay to begin with the obvious? I am full of stones—
is it okay not to look out this window, but to look out another?
A mentor once said, You cant start a poem with a man looking
out a window. Too many men looking out a window.
What about a woman? Today is a haunting. One last orange
on the counter: it is a dead fruit. We swallow dead things.
Once, in Rio near Leblon, large seabirds soared over the vast
South Atlantic Ocean. I had never seen them before.
Eight-foot wingspan and gigantic in their confident gliding, black,
with a red neck like a wound or a hidden treasure. Or both.
When I looked it up, I learned it was the Magnificent Frigatebird.
It sounded like that enormity of a bird had named itself.
What a pleasure to say, I am Magnificent. And, too, they traveled as a team,
so I wondered if they named each other. Generously tapping
one another’s deeply forked tail or their plumage, glistening with salt air,
their gular sacs saying, You are Magnificent. You are also Magnificent.
It makes me want to give all my loves the adjectives they deserve:
You are Resplendent. You are Radiant. You are Sublime.
I am far away from tropical waters. I have no skills for flight or wings
to skim the waves effortlessly, like the wind itself. But from here,
I can still imagine rapture, a glorious caught fish in the mouth of a bird.

BLOWING ON THE WHEEL
It’s getting late, the light’s grayish gold
on the hillside and I’m thinking of car rides
from Brooklyn to the Cape, or up
to Moon Mountain from the City,
or out to Stockbridge that one winter
with H and her sister and cousin
and how we called them the Stockbridges.
And I accidentally said, Have a Norman Mailer
Christmas and not a Norman Rockwell Christmas
and we laughed at how sad a Norman Mailer
Christmas would be. Or how, another time, we
waited for T to put our bags in the car
as if she was not just driving, but
the driver. Or how after T got a ticket
on 6 East she’d go the speed limit but blow
on the steering wheel like it was a sail and say,
Is the car even on? The three of us,
always piling into the back of some cab
and deciding what was next, which was never bed
because there was still so much to figure out.
And how someone once asked H if we
ever just ran out of subjects to keep
talking about, and of course we wouldn’t,
we won’t, it’s endless, even this is endless,
the sky darkening in the way that makes me
wish we were wandering right now around
New York City somewhere or at the Governor
Bradford and not wandering at all, or just talking or
not talking or being happy or not unhappy,
and this is my secret work, to be worthy
of you both and this infinite discourse
where everything is interesting because you

point it out and say, Isn’t that interesting?
And how mostly we say, Remember
that time, and we will nod because we do
remember that time. Except for the few times
we’ve forgotten, like that one time when H
was trying to remind us of something and when
we asked her what, she said, I don’t know,
but you were there and I was there. And we were.

JAR OF SCORPIONS
Translucent and slithering against the beige carpet,
like a dozen fugitive ideas shoved to the back
of the brain’s border—the ideas about hurting yourself
or hurting others—they came into view, the filaments
of nightmares, the stinging slopsuckers, the venomous miscreants,
two pedipalps grasping for prey already in the first hours
of their birth. How strange to think that nearly thirty years later, I see
those nascent scorpions as clear as today’s dead moth
stuck to the screen’s small squares. We did what children do
with tiny and terrible things, we trapped them so we could see
more closely, intimately, investigate their particular evildoing,
behind the thick clear glass of the mason jar. We watched
how they crawled, stingers readied, on top of one another, circling.
Our discovery felt awful, like unearthing mortality.
We were two girls then, and despite our restless fear
we could not bring ourselves to kill them, we grew almost
fond of the way they scurried against the glass, the way they became
almost ours—minuscule marauders, all things of the night captured
in the light’s unforgiving reveal. We do not know what happened to them.
We left the scorplings in the middle of the floor in the glass with a sign
that said, simply, Jar of Scorpions. This is where it ends. Or begins.
What do you want for them? From here, we can make it up.

THE FIRST FISH
When I pulled that great fish up out of Lake Skinner’s
mirrored-double surface, I wanted to release
the tugging beast immediately. Disaster on the rod,
it seemed he might yank the whole aluminum skiff
down toward the bottom of his breathless world.
The old tree of a man yelled to hang on and would
not help me as I reeled and reeled, finally seeing
the black carp come up to meet me, black eye
to black eye. In the white cooler it looked so impossible.
Is this where I am supposed to apologize? Not
only to the fish, but to the whole lake, land, not only for me
but for the generations of plunder and vanish.
I remember his terrible mouth opening as if to swallow
the barbarous girl he’d lose his life to. That gold-ringed
eye did not pardon me, no absolution, no reprieve.
I wanted to catch something; it wanted to live.
We never ate the bottom-feeder, buried by the rosebush
where my ancestors swore the roses bloomed
twice as big that year, the year I killed a thing because
I was told to, the year I met my twin and buried
him without weeping so I could be called brave.

JOINT CUSTODY
Why did I never see it for what it was:
abundance? Two families, two different
kitchen tables, two sets of rules, two
creeks, two highways, two stepparents
with their fish tanks or eight-tracks or
cigarette smoke or expertise in recipes or
reading skills. I cannot reverse it, the record
scratched and stopping to that original
chaotic track. But let me say, I was taken
back and forth on Sundays and it was not easy
but I was loved each place. And so I have
two brains now. Two entirely different brains.
The one that always misses where I’m not,
and the one that is so relieved to finally be home.

ON SKYLINE AND TARZ
At eleven on the rooftop
of our downtown apartment
building, I’d sit cross-legged
in the civil twilight’s crawl
and wait for the pallid bats
to come out from their
pink roosts in the Sebastiani
Theatre into the pale sky.
We were taught to stay
small and watch how they
swerved and flickered free
in a secret dark spectacle.
How unexpectedly they
plummeted and rose and rose
and plummeted. Trouble came
and trouble left and the sky—

CYRUS & THE SNAKES
My brother holds a snake by its head. The whole
length of the snake is the length
of my brother’s body. The snake’s head
is held safely, securely, as if my brother
is showing it something in the distant high grass.
I don’t know why he wants to hold them,
their strong bodies wrapping themselves around
the warmth of his arm. Constricting and made
of circles and momentum; slippery coolness smooth
against the ground. Still, this image of him,
holding a snake as it snakes as snakes
do, both a noun and a verb and a story
that doesn’t end well. Once, we stole an egg
from the backyard chicken coop
and cracked it just to see what was inside: a whole
unhatched chick. Where we
expected yolk and mucus was an unfeathered
and unfurled sweetness. We stared at the thing,
dead now and unshelled by curiosity and terrible youth.
My brother pretended not to care so much,
while I cried, though only a little. Still, we buried it
in the brush, by the creeping thistle that tore up
our arms with their speared leaves, barbed

at the ends like weapons stuck in the rattlesnake grass.
But I knew, I knew that he’d cry if he was alone,
if he wasn’t a boy in the summer heat being a boy
in the summer heat. Years later, back from Mexico
or South America, he’d admit he was tired
of history, of always discovering the ruin by ruining
it, wrecking a forest for a temple, a temple
that should be simply left a temple. He wanted it
all to stay as it was, even if it went undiscovered.
I want to honor a man who wants to hold a wild thing,
only for a second, long enough to admire it fully,
and then wants to watch it safely return to its life,
bends to be sure the grass closes up behind it.

ONLY THE FAINTEST BLUE
Somewhere in the haunted desert
I hitched my callow life to a man
who thought I hadn’t suffered enough.
He might have said that very thing,
You haven’t suffered enough. Young
whiptail lizards lined the cottonwood
path to the river where I walked each
day to remember who I was: She
who had not suffered. My hands tanned
in the sage-green air, I walked until
I was softer, until clouds, until I could
tame my colors and go back and cook
a lazy dinner. Once, he insisted I ride
home with a friend who was clearly drunk
so he could make a call he didn’t
want me to hear—an ex, a lawyer, a dealer,
I don’t know. I knew I didn’t like his friend,
who drove too fast after shots of tequila
at the roadside Mexican dive with fake
spiky cacti in the foyer like stage props.
Maybe this is suffering? I thought.
Am I suffering now? Or now?
I felt most myself by the river. Vast

sorrel river ready to flood or tear down
everything in its way, hard to cross,
rapid and legendary. The color of the earth.
I did not want to throw myself in. Instead
I’d watch the whiptails skitter in dust.
Sisters of the small quiet pleasure of edges
and disappearing to safety. I can still hear
that river in my mind, my teacher, can still
remember the day I left him, the arguing,
the fight where I kept my head down
and packed like fury was a new smart skill.
But mostly I remember the flitting of lizards,
how they had felt like kinship,
how later, I read that the New Mexico whiptail
is an all-female species, reproducing by
parthenogenesis, asexual and yet genetically diverse.
Yellow lines run the length of their gray bodies
with vibrant blue-green tails when they’re young.
And as they age, their scales, their whole body changes,
until only the faintest blue remains, and safer now,
they become the earthen color of the river.

CALLING THINGS WHAT THEY ARE
I pass the feeder and yell, Grackle party! And then an hour later I yell, Mourning
dove afterparty! (I call the feeder the party and the seed on the ground the
afterparty.) I am getting so good at watching that I’ve even dug out the
binoculars an old poet gave me back when I was young and heading to the Cape
with so much future ahead of me it was like my own ocean. Tufted titmouse! I
yell, and Lucas laughs and says, Thought so. But he is humoring me; he didn’t
think so at all. My father does this same thing. Shouts out at the feeder
announcing the party attendees. He throws out a whole peanut or two to the
Steller’s jay who visits on a low oak branch in the morning. To think there was a
time I thought birds were kind of boring. Brown bird. Gray bird. Black bird.
Blah blah blah bird. Then, I started to learn their names by the ocean, and the
person I was dating said, That’s the problem with you, Limón, you’re all fauna
and no flora. And I began to learn the names of trees. I like to call things as they
are. Before, the only thing I was interested in was love, how it grips you, how it
terrifies you, how it annihilates and resuscitates you. I didn’t know then that it
wasn’t even love that I was interested in but my own suffering. I thought
suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the whole
time it was pain.

“I HAVE WANTED CLARITY IN LIGHT OF MY LACK OF LIGHT”
After Alejandra Pizarnik
Fireworks in the background like an incongruous soundtrack,
either celebratory or ominous, a veil of smoke behind
a neighbor’s house, the air askew with booms.
The silver suitcase is dragged down the stairs, a clunk, another clunk,
awkward wheels where wheels aren’t any use. Uselessness of invention.
There is a knocking in the blood that is used to absence but hates this part
the most. The sudden buried hope of illusion.
Lose my number, sadness. Lose my address, my storm door, my skull.
Am I stronger or weaker than when the year began, a lie
that joins two selves like a hinge. Sawdust in the neighbor’s garage
that smells of the men who raised me. What is the other world
that others live in? Unknown to me. The ease of grin and good times.
Once, I loved fireworks so much they made me weep without warning.
I smoked too much pot one young summer and almost missed them
until I simply remembered to look up. Gold valley crackling in chaos.
Now, it is a sound that undoes me, too much violence to the sky.
In this way, I have become more dog. More senses, shake, and nerve.
Better now when the etches in the night’s edges are just bats,
erratic and avoiding the fireflies. How much more drama
can one body take? I wake up in the morning and relinquish my dreams.
I go to bed with my beloved. I am delirious with my tenderness.

Once, I was brave, but I have grown so weary of danger.
I am soundlessness amid the constant sounds of war.

OPEN WATER
It does no good to trick and weave and lose
the other ghosts, to shove the buried deeper
into the sandy loam, the riverine silt; still you come,
my faithful one, the sound of a body so persistent
in water I cannot tell if it is a wave or you
moving through. A month before you died
you wrote a letter to old friends saying you swam
with a pod of dolphins in open water, saying goodbye,
but what you told me most about was the eye.
That enormous reckoning eye of an unknown fish
that passed you during that last-ditch defiant swim.
On the shore, you described the fish as nothing
you’d seen before, a blue-gray behemoth moving slowly
and enduringly through its deep fathomless
North Pacific waters. That night, I heard more
about that fish and that eye than anything else.
I don’t know why it has come to me this morning.
Warm rain and landlocked, I don’t deserve the image.
But I keep thinking how something saw you, something
was bearing witness to you out there in the ocean
where you were no one’s mother, and no one’s wife,
but you in your original skin; right before you died,
you were beheld, and today in my kitchen with you
now ten years gone, I am so happy for you.

THORNS
Armed with our white plastic buckets
we set off in the safety of the noonday
heat to snag the full rubus blackberries
at the bend of her family’s gravel road.
But before we even reached the end
of the driveway, a goose hung strangled
in the fence wire, bloodless and limp. Her
long neck twisted, her hard beak open.
She was dead. Though we had been loosed
like loyal ranch dogs, we knew we should
go back, tell someone, offer help. Still,
sunburned and stubborn in the way only
long free days can make a body, we walked
to the thicket and picked. When we returned,
bloodied by prickles and spattered with stains,
we were scolded, not for secreting
the news of the dead goose, but for picking
too many berries. For picking all day
in the sun without worry for our own scratched
skin. I can still remember how satisfying
it was. How we picked in near silence, two
girls who were never silent. How we knew
to plunder so well, to take and take
with this new muscle, this new gristle
that grew over us for good.

THE MOUNTAIN LION
I watched the video clip over and over,
night vision cameras flickering her eyes
an unholy green, the way she looked
the six-foot fence up and down
like it was nothing but a speed bump,
then cleared the man-made border
in one impressive leap. A glance
over the shoulder, an annoyance,
an As if you could keep me out, or
keep me in. I don’t know what it
was that made me press replay and
replay. Not fear, though I’d be
terrified if I was face to face with
her, or heard her prowling in the night.
It was just that I don’t think I’ve
ever made anything look so easy. Never
looked behind me and grinned or
grimaced because nothing could stop
me. I like the idea of it though, felt
like a dream you could will into being:
See a fence? Jump it.

3.
FALL

PRIVACY
On the black wet branches of the linden,
still clinging to the umber leaves of late fall,
two crows land. They say, Stop, and still I want
to make them into something they are not.
Odin’s ravens, the bruja’s eyes. What news
are they bringing of our world to the world
of the gods? It can’t be good. More suffering
all around, more stinging nettles and toxic
blades shoved into the scarred parts of us,
the minor ones underneath the trees. Rain
comes while I’m still standing, a trickle of water
from whatever we believe is beyond the sky.
The crows seem enormous but only because
I am watching them too closely. They do not
care to be seen as symbols. A shake of a wing,
and both of them are gone. There was no message
given, no message I was asked to give, only
their great absence and my sad privacy
returning like the bracing, empty wind
on the black wet branches of the linden.

IT’S THE SEASON I OFTEN MISTAKE
Birds for leaves, and leaves for birds.
The tawny yellow mulberry leaves
are always goldfinches tumbling
across the lawn like extreme elation.
The last of the maroon crabapple
ovates are song sparrows that tremble
all at once. And today, just when I
could not stand myself any longer,
a group of field sparrows, which were
actually field sparrows, flew up into
the bare branches of the hackberry
and I almost collapsed: leaves
reattaching themselves to the tree
like a strong spell for reversal. What
else did I expect? What good
is accuracy amidst the perpetual
scattering that unspools the world.

HOW WE SEE EACH OTHER
I forget I am a woman walking alone and wave
at a maroon car, assuming it’s a neighbor or a friend.
The car then circles the block and goes past me five times.
One wave and five times the car circles. Strangers.
It is the early evening, the fireflies not yet out,
I trick the hunting car by pretending to walk into
a different house. I am upset by this, but it is life, so I make
dinner and listen to a terrible audiobook on Latin American
literature that’s so dull it’s Dove soap. Violence is done and history
records it. Gold ruins us. Men ruin us.
That’s how the world
was made, don’t you know?
A group of us, to tune out grief every week, are watching
dance movies. Five women watching people leap and grind.
Every time I watch the films, I cry. Each week, even though
we are hidden from each other by distance, I know
I am the first to break into tears. Something about the body
moving freely, someone lifting it, or just the body
alone in movement, safe in the black expanse of stage. The body
as rebellion, as defiance, as immune.
Aracelis writes to tell me she’s had a dream where
I am in Oaxaca wearing a black dress covered with animals.
In her dream I am brushing and brushing my hair with a brush

made out of animal hair. There is a large mirror and a room
full of books.
History comes at us through the sheen of time.
I write back, Was it ominous or was it hopeful?
She says, The word I am thinking of is “strong.”
I kindle the image in my body all day, the mirror, the brush,
the animals, the vast space of the imagination,
the solid gaze of a woman who has witnessed me as unassailable,
the clarity of her vision so clean I feel almost free.

SPORTS
I’ve seen my fair share of baseball games,
eaten smothered hot dogs in Kansas City
and carne asada burritos in San Francisco
in the sunny stands on a day free of fog.
I’ve sat in a bar for hours watching
basketball and baseball and the Super Bowl,
and I’ve even high-fived and clinked
my almost-empty drink with a stranger
because it felt good to go through something
together even though we hadn’t been through
anything but the drama of a game, its players.
If I am honest, what I love, why I love
the sounds of the games even when I’m not
interested, half-listening, is one thing:
When my father and my stepfather had to be
in the same room, or had to drop my brother
and me off during our weekly move from one
house to another, they, for a brief moment,
would stand together in the doorway or
on the gravel driveway and it felt like what true
terror should feel like, two men who were so
different you could barely see their shadows
attached in the same way, and just when
I thought I couldn’t watch the pause
lengthen between them, they’d talk about
the playoffs or the finals or whatever team
was doing whatever thing required that season
and sometimes they’d even shrug or make
a motion that felt like two people who weren’t
opposites after all. Once, I sat in the car
and waited for one of them to take me away
and from the back seat I swear they looked

like they were on the same team, united
against a common enemy, had been fighting,
all this time, on the same side.

PROOF
A kestrel eyes us from a high thin branch
and my husband is surprised it can hold the hunter’s
weight. He’s small, I say. My husband says he’s large.
Obviously, it depends on what you compare him to—
a hawk, a white-crowned sparrow, a ghost,
an abstraction. He looms not large to me, but significant.
A standout. Something cool about him that says today
is the day to test his mettle in the mid-morning air,
flush with dead leaves and the ongoingness of rusted
mums. A surge of relief comes like a check in the mail.
Look, I have already witnessed something other than my
slipping face in the fogged mirror, the dog’s sweet
seriousness at being worshipped from nose to paw.
I have proof a nearly twiglike branch can still hold
a too-heavy falcon. It is not much to go on, I know.

HEART ON FIRE
As a foster child, my grandfather learned not
to get in trouble. Mexican and motherless—dead
as she was from tuberculosis—he practiced words
in a new language and kept his slender head down.
When the other boys begged him to slip into
the music shop’s upper window to steal harmonicas
for each of them, music being important, thievery
being secondary, he refused. When the cops came
to spot the boys who robbed the music store, they
could easily find the ones spitting broken
notes into the air, joyously mouthing the stainless
steel, mimicking men on street corners busking
for coins. But not my grandfather, he knew not
to risk it all for a stolen moment of exultation.
It’s easy to imagine this is who I come from, a line
of serious men who follow the rules, but might I add
that later he was a dancer, a singer, an actor whose best roles
ended up on the cutting room floor. A cutup, a ham
who liked a good story. Who would have told you
life was a series of warnings, but also magic. Once,
he was sent for a box of matches and he put that box
of strike-anywheres in the pocket of his madras shirt
and ran home, he ran so fast to be on time, to be good,
and when he did so, the whole box ignited, so he was
a boy running down the canyon road with what
looked like a heart on fire. He’d laugh when he told
you this, a heart on fire, he’d say, so you’d remember.

POWER LINES
Three guys in fluorescent vests are taking down
a tree along my neighbor’s fence line, which is, of course,
my fence line, with my two round-eyed snakes and my wandering
raccoon. That is, if you go in for ownership. My, my, my.
For weeks the tree they’re cutting grew tight with a neon-pink band
around its trunk. A marking, so you knew it was going to die.
Must have been at least fifty years old, a nonfruiting
mulberry with loads of wintercreeper crawling up the bark.
Still it hung low by the power lines. Its fruitless limbs
leaning over the wire like it didn’t care one bit about power.
Just inching up toward the sun under the hackberry.
The men are laughing between chain saw growls,
the metal jaws of machinery. It is a sound that sounds like killing.
I can barely listen, but then they are conversing in Spanish
and it brings me a mercy to hear them make a joke
about the heat, the lineup of jobs that day. Once,
my friend Mundo wanted palm fronds for his patio
so he put on an orange shirt and climbed a towering palm
right in the center of town. No one ever questions a Mexican
in an orange shirt, he said, and we clinked glasses around
his new tiki bar. My grandfather worked for Con Edison for years.

I thought power was something you could control. Something one
could do at a desk or on a job site, to work in the field of power.
Now the tree is gone. The men are gone, just a ground-down stump
where what felt like wisdom once was.

HOOKY
We skipped that last class, rolled
joints in my clean apartment close to a bar
called Flowers, which we loved and went
to so often that once, Joel’s dad found
his maxed-out credit card statement and said,
Who are you buying all these flowers
for? That day we weren’t bound
for the bar, where Fadi kept a back table
for friends and on busy nights let us hover.
It was a rare Brigadoon day when the sun
bared herself in Seattle’s U District and the trees
were in heat and everything felt wild and illicit
and we decided to get as high as we could
and lie down under the cherry trees. I was
straight As and dean’s list, but could roll
three perfect joints and even add a filter
thanks to three guys I met in a Spanish hostel.
And when we made it to that kaleidoscopic
row of ancient cherry trees we started laughing
hard and scary like, contagious, and the breeze
was blowing pink cherry blossoms through the air
and everyone we saw was stoned and making
out with someone and it seemed so absurd
that we would ever learn anything from inside
the darkness and soon it wasn’t so much funny
anymore but serious. The true and serious beauty
of trees, how it seemed insane that they should
offer this to us, how unworthy we were, bewildered,
how soon we were nearly weeping at their trunks
as they tossed down petal after petal, and we tried
to remember how it felt to receive and notice
the receiving, pink, pink, pink, pink, pink.

MY FATHER’S MUSTACHE
Let us pause to applaud the white bell-bottom suit,
the wide flared collar, the black thick-coiffed hair
in this photo my father has sent of himself
at a gathering off Sonoma Highway in the early ’70s.
I can’t stop looking at the photo. There is a swagger
that feels almost otherworldly, epic, like Lorca
expounding in Buenos Aires, Not the form
but the marrow of form. He is perfect there, my father
in the photo. I feel somehow as if I’m perched on a bay laurel
branch nearby though not born yet. It’s in black and white, the photo.
You can see his grin behind his lush mustache. Is it time
that moves in me now? A sense of ache and unraveling,
my father in his pristine white suit, the eye of the world barely able
to handle his smooth unbroken stride. It’s been a year
since I’ve seen him in person, I miss how he points
to his apple trees and I miss his smooth face
that no longer has the mustache I always adored.
As a child I once cried when he shaved it. Even then,
I was too attached to this life.

RUNAWAY CHILD
The ocean was two things once,
in two places, north it was the high
icy waves of Bodega Bay, Dillon, and Limantour,
and south it was the blue ease
of Oceanside and Encinitas, umbrellas
in a sleepy breeze.
It took me years to realize those two blues
were the same ocean.
I thought they must be separate. Must
be cleaved in the center by a fault line.
On a call just now with my grandmother
she mentions how all the flowers
I’ve sent are from my garden, so I let her
believe it. Sweet lies of the mind.
She says she’s surprised
I like to grow things, didn’t think
I was that kind of girl, she always thought I was
a runaway child.
She flicks her hand away, to show me
her hand becoming a bird, swerving
until it is a white gull in the wind. She repeats:
a runaway child.
Mercy is not frozen in time, but flits

about frantically, unsure where to land.
As children, they’d bring us to the ocean,
divorce distraction and summer,
we’d drift with the tide southward until
we’d almost lose sight of them,
waving dramatically for our return,
shouting until we came back to shore.
Once, when she was watching us,
I tried to run away, four or five years old,
and when I got to the end of the driveway,
she didn’t try to stop me. Even shut the door.
And so I came back. She knew what it was
to be unloved, abandoned by her mother,
riding her bike by her father’s house
with his other children, late afternoons,
before her grandmother would call
her home for supper. Some days, I think
she would have let me leave, some days
I think of her shaking on the shore.
Now, she thinks all the flowers I’ve sent
are from my garden. Grown
from seeds and tended. She gets a kick
out of it, this runaway child
so overly loved, she could dare to drift
away from it all.

INSTRUMENTATION
If I could ever play an instrument for real I like the idea of playing the jawbone,
that rattle of something dead in your hands, that thing that beats back at the sky
and says, I’m still here, even though clearly the donkey isn’t here or the horse
isn’t here, just the teeth and the jaw making music like resurrection or haunting
or just plain need. What I like most is that the jawbone is an idiophone, which I
misread once as ideaphone. But an idiophone is just that it makes music by the
whole thing vibrating without strings. I want that. That kind of reeling in the
wind. All the loose dry teeth, all the old bones of the skull, all the world, and the
figure swaying with its stick to make untuned music even death cannot deny.

IF I SHOULD FAIL
The ivy eating the fence line,
each tendril multiplying
by green tendril, if I should
fail the seeds lifted out
and devoured by bristled
marauders, blame only
me and the strip of sun
which bade me come
to lie down snakelike
on my belly, low snake
energy, and be tempted
by the crevices between
the world and not world,
if I should fail know I
stared long into fractures
and it seemed to me
a mighty system of gaps
one could slither into
and I was made whole
in that knowledge of
a sleek nothingness.

INTIMACY
I remember watching my mother
with the horses, the cool, fluid
way she’d guide those enormous
bodies around the long field,
the way she’d shoulder one aside
if it got too close, if it got greedy
with the alfalfa or apple.
I was never like that. Never
so confident around those
four-legged giants who could
kill with one kick or harm
with one toss of their strong heads.
To me, it didn’t make sense
to trust a thing that could
destroy you so quickly, to reach
out your hand and stroke
the deep separateness
of a beast, that long gap
of silence between you,
knowing it would eat the apples
with as much pleasure from
any flattened palm. Is that why
she moved with them so easily?
There is a truth in that smooth
indifference, a clean honesty
about our otherness that feels
not like the moral but the story.

4.
WINTER

LOVER
Easy light storms in through the window, soft
edges of the world, smudged by mist, a squirrel’s
nest rigged high in the maple. I’ve got a bone
to pick with whoever is in charge. All year,
I’ve said, You know what’s funny? and then,
Nothing, nothing is funny. Which makes me laugh
in an oblivion-is-coming sort of way. A friend
writes the word lover in a note and I am strangely
excited for the word lover to come back. Come back,
lover, come back to the five-and-dime. I could
squeal with the idea of blissful release, oh lover,
what a word, what a world, this gray waiting. In me,
a need to nestle deep into the safekeeping of sky.
I am too used to nostalgia now, a sweet escape
of age. Centuries of pleasure before us and after
us, still right now, a softness like the worn fabric of a nightshirt,
and what I do not say is: I trust the world to come back.
Return like a word, long forgotten and maligned
for all its gross tenderness, a joke told in a sunbeam,
the world walking in, ready to be ravaged, open for business.

THE HURTING KIND
1.
On the plane I have a dream I’ve left half my
torso on the back porch with my beloved. I have to go
back for it, but it’s too late, I’m flying
and there’s only half of me.
Back in Texas, the flowers I’ve left on
the counter (I stay alone there so the flowers
are more than flowers) have wilted and knocked over the glass.
At the funeral parlor with my mother, we are holding her father’s suit,
and she says, He’ll swim in these.
For a moment, I’m not sure what she means,
untilI realize she means the clothes are too big.
I go with her like a shield in case they try to upsell her
the ridiculously ornate urn, the elaborate body box.
It is a nice bathroom in the funeral parlor,
so I take the opportunity to change my tampon.
When I come out my mother says,
Did you have to change your tampon?
And it seems, all at once, a vulgar life. Or not
vulgar, but not simple, either.
I’m driving her now to Hillside Cemetery where we meet
with Rosie, who is so nice we want her to work
everywhere. Rosie as my dentist. Rosie as my president.

My shards are showing, I think. But I do not know what I mean
so I fix my face in the rearview, a face with thousands
of headstones behind it. Minuscule flags, plastic flowers.
You can’t sum it up, my mother says as we are driving,
and the electronic voice says, Turn left onto Wildwood Canyon Road,
so I turn left, happy for the instructions.
Tell me where to go. Tell me how to get there.
She means a life, of course. You cannot sum it up.
2.
A famous poet said he never wanted to hear
another poem about a grandmother or a grandfather.
I imagine him with piles of faded yolk-colored paper,
overloaded with loops of swooping cursive, anemic lyrics
misspelling mourning and morning. But also, before they arrive,
there’s a desperate hand scribbling a memory, following
the cat of imagination into each room. What is lineage,
if not a gold thread of pride and guilt? She did what?
Once, when I thought I had decided not to have children,
a woman said, But who are you to kill your own bloodline?
I told my friend D that, and she said, What if you want to kill
your own bloodline, like it’s your job?
In the myth of La Llorona, she drowns her children
to destroy her cheating husband. But maybe she was just tired.
After her husband of seventy-six years has died, my grandmother
(yes, I said it, grandmother, grandmother) leans to me and says,

Now teach me poetry.
3.
Sticky packs of photographs,
heteromaniacal postcards.
The war. The war. The war.
Bikini girls, tight curls, the word gams.
Land boom. Atchison, Topeka,
and the Santa Fe. Southern Pacific.
We ask my grandma Allamay
about her mother, for a form.
Records and wills. Evidence of life.
For a moment she can’t remember
her mother’s maiden name.
She says, Just tell them she never
wanted me. That should be enough.
Red sadness is the secret
one, writes Ruefle. Redlands
was named after the soil.
Allamay can still
hold a peach in her hand
and judge its number by
its size. Tell you where it
would go in the box
if you’re packing peaches
for a living. Which she did,
though she hated the way
the hairs hurt her hands.

4.
Why do we quickly dismiss our ancient ones? Before our phones
stole the light of our faces, shiny and blue in the televised night,
they worked farms and butchered and trapped animals and swept houses
and returned to each other after long hours and told stories.
In order for someone to be “good” do they have to have
seen the full-tilt world? Must they believe what we believe?
My grandmother keeps a picture of her president in the top drawer
of her dresser, and once, when she was delusional, she dreamt
he had sent my grandfather and her on a trip to Italy. He paid for it all,
she kept repeating.
That same night, on her ride to the hospital, she talks to the medical
technician and says,
All my grandchildren are Mexican.
She says so proudly; she repeats it to me on the phone.
5.
Once, a long time ago, we sat in the carport of my grandparents’
house in Redlands, now stolen by eminent domain,
now the hospital parking lot, no more coyotes or caves
where the coyotes would live, or the grandfather clock
in the house my grandfather built, the porch above the orchard,
all gone.
We sat in the carport and watched the longest snake
I’d ever seen undulate between the hanging succulents.

They told me not to worry, that the snake had a name,
the snake was called a California king,
all slick black with yellow
stripes like wonders wrapping around him.
My grandparents, my ancestors, told me never
to kill a California king, benevolent
as they were, equanimous like earth or sky, not
toothy like the dog Chacho who barked
at nearly every train whistle or roadrunner.
Before my grandfather died, I asked him what sort
of horse he had growing up. He said,
Just a horse. My horse, with such a tenderness it
rubbed the bones in my ribs all wrong.
I have always been too sensitive, a weeper
from a long line of weepers.
I am the hurting kind. I keep searching for proof.
My grandfather carried that snake to the cactus,
where all sharp things could stay safe.
6.
You can’t sum it up. A life.
I feel it moving through me, that snake,
his horse Midge sturdy and nothing special,
traveling the canyons and the tumbleweeds
hunting for rabbits before the war.

My grandmother picking peaches. Stealing
the fruit from the orchards as she walked
home. No one said it was my job to remember.
I took no notes, though I’ve stared too long.
My grandfather, before he died, would have told
anyone that could listen that he was ordinary,
that his life was a good one, simple, he could never
understand why anyone would want to write
it down. He would tell you straight up he wasn’t
brave. And my grandmother would tell you right now
that he is busy getting the house ready for her. Visiting now
each night and even doing the vacuuming.
I imagine she’s right. It goes on and on, their story.
They met in first grade in a one-room schoolhouse,
I could have started their story there, but it
is endless and ongoing. All of this
is a conjuring. I will not stop this reporting of attachments.
There is evidence everywhere.
There’s a tree over his grave now, and soon her grave too
though she is tough and says, If I ever die,
which is marvelous and maybe why she’s still alive.
I see the tree above the grave and think, I’m wearing
my heart on my leaves. My heart on my leaves.
Love ends. But what if it doesn’t?

AGAINST NOSTALGIA
If I had known, back then, you were coming,
when I first thought love could be the thing
to save me after all—if I had known, would I
have still glued myself to the back of his
motorcycle while we flew across the starless
bridge over the East River to where I grew
my first garden behind the wire fencing,
in the concrete raised beds lined by ruby
twilight roses? If I had known it would be you,
who even then I liked to look at, across a room,
always listening rigorously, a self-questioning look,
the way your mouth was always your mouth,
would I have climbed back on that bike again
and again until even I was sick with fumes
and the sticky seat too hot in the early fall?
If I had known, would I have still made mistake
after mistake until I had only the trunk of me
left, stripped and nearly bare of leaves?
If I had known, the truth is, I would have kneeled
and said, Sooner, come to me sooner.

FORGIVENESS
It was the winter of manatees, Captain
Rhonda and her chartered pontoon boat
floating down the Crystal River. It was the winter
you hurt me and that day of dumb hearts
when you brought me truffles and perfume
like a performance. At the tiki bar in the cold
February Florida wind, Rihanna played over
the staticky speakers hidden
behind a fake coconut, something about giving up
or saying something. At the restaurant later, the couple
we laughed at, in their late fifties, for maybe being
swingers, all the uniform tables, identical roses
in cheap plastic vases. Even my deep cleavage
and the layer cake were trying too hard. Still, we
committed to the event of us and made a joke
about not hurting each other again. We weren’t
married yet, everyone was free to leave, and the next
afternoon you went to work and I took a boat
down the river to see the manatees. It was back
when I got lonely often, I called and asked
if I could bring my dog on the boat. I couldn’t.
So tranquil and patient, the manatees moving, so many
mysteries even in the shallow water. Captain
Rhonda showed us their hideouts, their shadowy places.
People took pictures and pointed and you could see
the scars on the older animals from propeller blades

and still they rolled on together in the silent water.
Back on shore, you found me by the too-cold pool
watching a group of loud teenagers drink
in the hot tub. One shirtless boy kept flexing and flexing
while the girls, engrossed in conversation, never noticed.
And aren’t we all alone in the end?
You put your head for a moment against my chest.
Then, all I could hear was our breathing. We were
both human and animal-hearted,
bound to the blades, bound to outrun them.

HEAT
The icicles dripped and sharpened
in my bones. Even my sick dark
mood was shiny like glass,
breakable and almost decorative.
In my world of brittle needles,
I was building my house of ice,
brick by brick and fastened by
sullenness. Then, like a huge feral
animal, you stomped down
the stairs to the ground floor where
I sulked. I did not look up
to see you, talking as you
were on the phone with a comrade
about a horse, or the snow,
or the snow light and how
it reflected on the horse,
and you were all business and I
was all business until I looked
toward you and you, like
some freshly baptized sinner,
were naked, still wet from the shower,
barefoot, bare, and dripping,
and from where I was kneeling
I was made aware of your fineness.
Your body I thought belonged to me,
until I learned about belonging,
was sublime, looming over me
like a gauntlet, and because
you were a challenge, I rose
from the cold to meet you.

OBEDIENCE
The dog lifts her head
from the piles of dead
leaves, and at first she
is calm, until she is not.
She can’t find me. Not
behind the cypress or
the still-bare viburnum.
Betrayer, I am watching
from the window. Warm
behind the doorframe.
What is it to be wholly
loved like this? God,
how desperate she is
to find me. Walking
toward her, I watch her
whole body vibrate
when I come into focus.
I lift her into my arms
because it is what
I want. Who doesn’t want
to hold their individual
god, to be redeemed by
pleasing the only
one you serve?

THE UNSPOKEN
If I’m honest, a foal pulled chest-level
close in the spring heat, his every-which-way
coat reverberating in the wind, feels
akin to what I imagine atonement might
feel like, or total absolution. But what
if, by some fluke in the heart, an inevitable
wreckage, congenital and unanswerable,
still comes, no matter how attached
or how gentle every hand that reached
out for him in that vibrant green field
where they found him looking like he
was sleeping, the mare nudging him
until she no longer nudged him? Am I
wrong to say I did not want to love
horses after that? I even said as much driving
back from the farm. Even now, when
invited to visit a new foal, or rub the long
neck of a mare who wants only peppermints
or to be left alone, I feel myself resisting.
At any moment, something terrible could
happen. It’s not gone, that coldness in me.
Our mare is pregnant right now,
and you didn’t even tell me until someone
mentioned it offhandedly. One day, I will
be stronger. I feel it coming. I’ll step into
that green field stoic, hardened, hoof first.

SALVAGE
On the top of Mount Pisgah, on the western
slope of the Mayacamas, there’s a madrone
tree that’s half-burned from the fires, half-alive
from nature’s need to propagate. One side
of her is black ash, and at her root is what
looks like a cavity hollowed out by flame.
On the other side, silvery-green broadleaf
shoots ascend toward the winter light
and her bark is a cross between a bay
horse and a chestnut horse, red and velvety
like the animal’s neck she resembles. Staring
at the tree for a long time now, I am reminded
of the righteousness I had before the scorch
of time. I miss who I was. I miss who we all were,
before we were this: half-alive to the brightening sky,
half-dead already. I place my hand on the unscarred
bark that is cool and unsullied, and because I cannot
apologize to the tree, to my own self I say, I am sorry.
I am sorry I have been so reckless with your life.

WHAT IS HANDED DOWN
Smoke and sweat seeped through
your waiter’s vest, and nights off you’d play
the harmonica on the rooftop, a man made
out of netting and wire with an unexpected
tenor, made of push-ups and the sound
of typewriter keys, eight-tracks and knowing
all the lyrics to all the songs. I thought you were
a celebrity, the way people shouted your name
when we walked though the plaza. Even as a child,
I noticed your gentle way of fixing. The first time
I saw it, it felt like a trick. The spider plant I killed
because I didn’t care enough about lives other than
my own was soaked in the apartment sink until
it came back to life. My mother’s clock radio you took
apart and put back together good as new, though
the war had made it so you couldn’t hear
the high notes. It’s selfish, I know, but I want to be
the fixer now. Show me how you did it, all those years,
took something that needed repair and repaired it.

TOO CLOSE
Shiny little knives of ice
have replaced the grass
and yes they seem like
blades now more than
any other time before,
they are sharp needles
erupting from the ground
and poor grass, covered
as it is and so cold. In
the near distance, a tree
falls, or large branches,
a roar that sounds as
violent as it is when later
the poor downed Callery pear
divided almost in two,
one part of the trunk
on the ground and another
somehow continuing on.
I could not do any of these
things. In winter, a distance
grows, the world was
breathing, and then suddenly
it was not. Pyrus calleryana breaks
easily because it keeps
its leaves and is known
to split apart in storms.
But haven’t we learned by now
that just because something
is bound to break
doesn’t mean we shouldn’t
shiver when it breaks?

THE END OF POETRY
Enough of osseous and chickadee and sunflower
and snowshoes, maple and seeds, samara and shoot,
enough chiaroscuro, enough of thus and prophecy
and the stoic farmer and faith and our father and ‘tis
of thee, enough of bosom and bud, skin and god
not forgetting and star bodies and frozen birds,
enough of the will to go on and not go on or how
a certain light does a certain thing, enough
of the kneeling and the rising and the looking
inward and the looking up, enough of the gun,
the drama, and the acquaintance’s suicide, the long-lost
letter on the dresser, enough of the longing and
the ego and the obliteration of ego, enough
of the mother and the child and the father and the child
and enough of the pointing to the world, weary
and desperate, enough of the brutal and the border,
enough of can you see me, can you hear me, enough
I am human, enough I am alone and I am desperate,
enough of the animal saving me, enough of the high
water, enough sorrow, enough of the air and its ease,
I am asking you to touch me.

NOTES & ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My deepest appreciation goes to the friends, family, teachers, ghosts, ancestors,
and mentors that these poems were written for, written with, written toward. I
am made better for having listened to you, for your wisdom, for your kindness.
People who read these poems, sometimes daily and as soon as I sent them,
deserve a medal for their generosity and patience. Thank you to Jennifer L.
Knox, Jason Schneiderman, Matthew Zapruder, Rebecca Lindenberg, Adam
Clay, Michael Robins, and my wonderful agent, Rob McQuilkin, who read and
helped to edit the early versions of these poems.
These last years have been hard, grief-ridden, and isolated, and yet I’ve never
been isolated because I’ve had these fine people in my corner. Thank you to
Trish Harnetiaux and Heather Grossmann for always being there, for blowing on
the wheel. Thank you to Vaughan Fielder for keeping me safe and keeping me
going.
Thank you to Kristin Dombek, Dawn Lundy Martin, Stephanie Hopkins, and
Nicole Callihan for your love and deadlines. Thank you to Camille Dungy,
Major Jackson, Natalie Diaz, Dan Walinsky, Corey Stoll, Nadia Bowers, and
Fred Leebron for your friendship and guidance. Thank you to Diana Lee Craig
and Jeffrey Baker for your laughter and for my home on the mountain.
Thank you to Vanessa Holden, Mariama Lockington, Amanda Duckworth, and
Hannah Pittard for keeping the light on during these dark times. Thank you to
Cyrus, Emily, Bryce, and Dimitri Limón for keeping me grounded. Thank you to
the poetry salon unicorns. Thank you to the Guggenheim Foundation for giving
me support when I most needed it. Thank you to my students at various
institutions for giving me hope. Thank you to the poets and poetry quoted here,
including Alejandra Pizarnik, Federico García Lorca, Gabriela Mistral, Mary
Ruefle, and Leonard Cohen. Thank you also, and always, to the trees and
animals.
Thank you to Daniel Slager, Mary Austin Speaker, Joey McGarvey, Joanna
Demkiewicz, Broc Rossell, and everyone at Milkweed Editions who makes and
supports beautiful and necessary books. Thank you to Wayne Miller for your

keen eye and big heart. Thank you to my publicist, Michael Taeckens, for your
bright light.
Thank you to my father and Linda Limón for giving me the confidence and
support to make poems. Thank you to my mother, Stacia Brady, for your
incredible painting that graces the cover. Thank you to my stepfather, Brady T.
Brady, who made this into the book it is and told me, very early on, never to give
up on my poems. Finally, thank you to my love, Lucas Marquardt. I am so
grateful to go through this life with you (and our animals, Lily Bean and Olive).
Thank you to the hardworking editors and fine publications where these poems,
sometimes in earlier versions, first appeared:
Alone Together anthology: “Not the Saddest Thing in the World”
Alta: “Stillwater Cove,” “Calling Things What They Are,” “The First Lesson”
American Poetry Review: “It Begins with the Trees,” “I Have Wanted Clarity in
Light of My Lack of Light,” “Banished Wonders,” “In the Shadow, “The
Magnificent Frigatebird”
Astra: “Blowing on the Wheel,” “Against Nostalgia”
The Atlantic: “The Unspoken”
The Believer (“The Logger”): “Sports”
BOMB: “Hooky,” “Proof”
Columbia Journal: “Stranger Things in the Thicket,” “Swear on It,” “On Skyline
and Tar,” “When It Comes Down to It”
Copper Nickel: “A Good Story”
Greenpeace: “Salvage”
Harvard Advocate: “The First Fish”
Jubilat: “Jar of Scorpions”

The Nation: “Drowning Creek”
New England Review: “Open Water”
New Republic: “My Father’s Mustache”
New Yorker: “The End of Poetry,” “Privacy”
Paris Review: “Power Lines”
Poem-a-Day: “Lover,” “Give Me This”
Poetry Magazine: “Foaling Season”
Poetry Northwest: “Only the Faintest Blue,” “Heart on Fire
Pop-Up Magazine: “Thorns”
The Rumpus: “The Hurting Kind”
Sierra Club: “The Mountain Lion”
Thrush: “Cyrus & the Snakes”
Virginia Quarterly Review: “Intimacy,” “Sanctuary,” “Invasive,” “Forsythia”
Washington Post: “It’s the Season I Often Mistake”

is the author of The Hurting Kind, as well as five other collections of
poems. These include, most recently, The Carrying, which won the National
Book Critics Circle Award and was named a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein
Book Award, and Bright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the
National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the
Kingsley Tufts Award. Limón is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and
her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and American
Poetry Review, among others. She is the host of American Public Media’s weekday poetry podcast, The Slowdown. Born and raised in California, she now lives
in Lexington, Kentucky.
ADA LIMÓN

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Typeset in Garamond
by Tijqua Daiker
Adobe Garamond is based upon the typefaces first created by Parisian printer
Claude Garamond in the sixteenth century. Garamond based his typeface on the
handwriting of Angelo Vergecio, librarian to King Francis I. The font’s
slenderness makes it not only highly readable but also one of the most ecofriendly typefaces available because it requires less ink than similar faces.
Robert Slimbach created this digital version of Garamond for Adobe in 1989 and
his font has become one of the most widely used typefaces in print.