grupo3 [todo rene] (pdf) читать онлайн

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 acupuncture needle
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 a red-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 morningtwilight; 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
hawk perched 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 andtrowel, 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 hurries back—
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 alongthe 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 primary wing 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.
ISBN: 978-1-55659-621-6
elSBN: 978-1-61932-236-3
Support Copper Canyon Press:
If you have enjoyed this title, please consider supporting Copper Canyon Press and our dedica-tion to
bringing the work of emerging, established, and world-renowned poets to an expanding audience through ebooks:
http://www.coppercanyonpress.org/donate/
Contact Copper Canyon Press:
To contact us with feedback about this title send an e-mail to:
ebooks@coppercanyonpress.org

Lannan Literary Selections
For two decades Lannan Foundation has supported the publication and
distribution of exceptional literary works. Copper Canyon Press gratefully
acknowledges their support.
LANNAN LITERARY SELECTIONS

2021

Shangyang Fang, Burying the Mountain
June Jordan, The Essential June Jordan
Laura Kasischke, Lightning Falls in Love
Arthur Sze, The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems
Fernando Valverde (translated by Carolyn Forché), América
RECENT LANNAN LITERARY SELECTIONS FROM COPPER CANYON PRESS

Mark Bibbins, 13th Balloon
Sherwin Bitsui, Dissolve
Jericho Brown, The Tradition
Victoria Chang, Obit
Leila Chatti, Deluge
John Freeman, Maps
Jenny George, The Dream of Reason
Deborah Landau, Soft Targets
Rachel McKibbens, blud
Philip Metres, Shrapnel Maps
Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Oceanic
Camille Rankine, Incorrect Merciful Impulses
Paisley Rekdal, Nightingale

Natalie Scenters-Zapico, Lima :: Limón
Natalie Shapero, Popular Longing
Frank Stanford, What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford
C.D. Wright, Casting Deep Shade
Matthew Zapruder, Father’s Day

Poetry is vital to language and living. Since 1972, Copper Canyon Press has
published extraordinary poetry from around the world to engage the
imaginations and intellects of readers, writers, booksellers, librarians,
teachers, students, and donors.
WE ARE GRATEFUL FOR THE MAJOR SUPPORT PROVIDED BY:

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT UNDERWRITING COPPER CANYON PRESS TITLES, PLEASE
CALL 360-385-4925 EXT. 103

WE ARE GRATEFUL FOR THE MAJOR SUPPORT PROVIDED BY:

Anonymous
Jill Baker and Jeffrey Bishop
Anne and Geoffrey Barker
In honor of Ida Bauer, Betsy Gifford, and Beverly Sachar
Donna and Matthew Bellew
Will Blythe
John Branch
Diana Broze
John R. Cahill
The Beatrice R. and Joseph A. Coleman Foundation
The Currie Family Fund
Laurie and Oskar Eustis
Austin Evans
Saramel Evans
Mimi Gardner Gates
Gull Industries Inc. on behalf of William True
The Trust of Warren A. Gummow
Carolyn and Robert Hedin
Bruce Kahn
Phil Kovacevich and Eric Wechsler
Lakeside Industries Inc. on behalf of Jeanne Marie Lee
Maureen Lee and Mark Busto
Peter Lewis and Johnna Turiano
Ellie Mathews and Carl Youngmann as The North Press
Hank and Liesel Meijer
Jack Nicholson
Gregg Orr
Petunia Charitable Fund and adviser Elizabeth Hebert
Gay Phinny
Suzanne Rapp and Mark Hamilton

Adam and Lynn Rauch
Emily and Dan Raymond
Jill and Bill Ruckelshaus
Cynthia Sears
Kim and Jeff Seely
Joan F. Woods
Barbara and Charles Wright
Caleb Young as C. Young Creative
The dedicated interns and faithful volunteers of Copper Canyon Press

The Chinese character for poetry is made up of two parts: “word” and “temple.”
It also serves as pressmark for Copper Canyon Press.

The poems are set in Minion Pro. Book design and composition by Phil
Kovacevich.

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 calledbrave.

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,
until I 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

Founded as a nonprofit organization in 1980, Milkweed Editions is an
independent publisher. Our mission is to identify, nurture and publish
transformative literature, and build an engaged community around it.
Milkweed Editions is based in Bde Ota Othúŋwe (Minneapolis) within Mni Sota
Makočhe, the traditional homeland of the Dakota people. Residing here since
time immemorial, Dakota people still call Mni Sota Makočhe home, with four
federally recognized Dakota nations and many more Dakota people residing in
what is now the state of Minnesota. Due to continued legacies of colonization,
genocide, and forced removal, generations of Dakota people remain
disenfranchised from their traditional homeland. Presently, Mni Sota Makočhe
has become a refuge and home for many Indigenous nations and peoples,
including seven federally recognized Ojibwe nations. We humbly encourage
readers to reflect upon the historical legacies held in the lands they occupy.
milkweed.org

Milkweed Editions also gratefully acknowledges sustaining support from our
Board of Directors; the Alan B. Slifka Foundation and its president, Riva Ariella
Ritvo-Slifka; the Amazon Literary Partnership; the Ballard Spahr Foundation;
Copper Nickel; the McKnight Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts;
the National Poetry Series; the Target Foundation; and other generous
contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. Also, this activity
is made possible 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. For a full listing of Milkweed Editions
supporters, please visit milkweed.org.

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.