JEANNINE HALL GAILEY Issue 26. 2022. Page 12.

WHEN I TRY TO WRITE AN ELEGY

I try to make it pastoral. You know, bunnies and deer
and flowers. It’s not as if they’re ever out of the picture –
when things go wrong, there’s always a fox crouching
under a lunar eclipse on the drive to the hospital

or a bluebird singing above your house
as you lose consciousness. Even now,
I’m considering chemo, the cherry trees
are shedding blossoms, such a great metaphor for loss,

those damn petals all over the blacktop.
I wish I could have it all back: the people
I’ve lost, the nights, the years I spent in the hospital,
the memories, and lately, my reflexes,

the ability to walk without a cane, the ability
to wrap up a math problem or recite a poem
without difficulty. I’ve said before nature
is treacherous. Is there anything more treacherous

than the promise of cottony rabbits waiting to eat my dahlias
when I turn my back, the deer tearing at the camellias?
Is there anything worse than a moon that turns dark as blood
just as you are learning to rely on its silver light for salvation?

THE WHEELCHAIR

        I wanted to save it, to store it
                with her things,
collectibles and figurines, and all memories
hidden in coat pockets from our afternoon
walks, before her legs became thin filaments
immobilized by the deathtrap of disease, when
she’d pick clover from the grass, where now
I gather acorns in the meadow, fallen on
her tombstone as if nature is trying to
camouflage her years, erase the dash of her
existence with droppings of fallen fruit —
        I wanted to save it to remember
                the shifting
shape of her, our journey to the shower
in morning, to the table’s afternoon tea,
to the mirror’s reflection where all I could see
was the one who gave me life, whose
countenance reflected defeat, muddling
the cause, as if her will to leave was crushed
by a daughter prolonging misery, a pause
in (h)ours with love my only motive –
        I wanted to save it for sedentary
                moments
to know the sense of being stuck in
the midst of movement of having nowhere
to go without another’s force guiding the ride –
maybe it was empathy, so I might understand
the desire of giving up or giving in – still, I pushed
the bars with sturdy hands and placed a bow
of flowers wrapped within strands of ribbon
over chrome, that chair that took her back
and forth from home –
        I wanted to save it, to let it cradle
                my body,
experience the world from an amputated point
of view, become hostage along our path where
magnolias grew and bloomed in magnificence
and yet, I gave it to the lady across the street,
who said she couldn’t stand for long, how it would
come in handy when she wanted to linger,
to sit and watch the sparrows and jays in her
garden, and maybe if it wasn’t too much trouble
I could drop by now and again, for a visit.

BLANK PAGE

This is the place where hope floats
on top of flowers, in small spaces.

This is where ants are white
and memory’s grip isn’t quite enough.

This is home. This is the sea
licking hands, the worst cold sea

since the singing rubber fish
of Honolulu vanished a year ago.

This is the hour of darkness that shrinks
into a father, the shady season of change

that mistakenly paints the town green,
the sleep that’s a jar of facial hair.

This is the tiny change in the cloud
over a parasite, the wizard who flirts

online with sorority sisters, whose
birthday escalates into fisticuffs.

This is the play that doesn’t go away.
This is truly the new gathering smoke.

WHAT LANGUAGE

The murmuring of bees long absent,
is replaced by rasping of wasps sniffing
loosestrifes. A sedge wren on the tips
of reeds, opens her beak, sings
a choir along the mud road alone.

What sound, what language can I use
to find you? Tens of thousands of words in
the dictionary scant — word love
is fluid — amassing river’s time
secretly under our knowing.

Milky way fades in
the white noise of cities’ lights –
the way I lost you.
You sense it, my body knows it.

Even without words, uphill is
yucca’s story — the plant & the moth,
perfectly timed pollination and seeds,
survive together — tacitly.

At least I can learn the wren’s
song, she sings back to me.

But I’m still waiting for the bees’
humming — their stoical, ardent living
unwittingly making the world bloom.

LOST IN SUTZKEVER
——And this is the ballad of my life; that I mumble strange syllables before the people of silence.
   — Avrom Sutzkever, Yiddish poet of Holocaust

Clouds burned off
and the sky dilated, opening
a door into history
with its brilliance and bile.
For hours, the afternoon shut
on the piping of song sparrows
and complaints of blue herons
camped in eucalyptus nearby.
So the nomads conjugate
their verbs: you stay, I wander,
all is lost in exile but sorrow.
Time stutters in condemned tongues.
Un-sutured, the wounds bleed fluently.
Today I read about conflagrations.
Today I also read love poems
without mourning the lovers
but the mountain of readers
who will never be born.
I read and I read until I looked
out the window for a breadth of sky,
where a red-shouldered hawk —
hunched in its plumage — lifts
from the phone wire, and streaks
after a mouse in the field,
swift, elegant, righteous,
one death in just proportion
that brings me back to my life.

WHEN IT COMES DOWN TO IT

few things matter so much in life
as a really good spoon. A silver skin
that slides along the thumb, no pits,
no burrs. It bears the heft of an important
question; a girl with any grace at all
can balance it on the fleshy pad of her
first finger. A teaspoon is always superior

to a soup spoon, even for soup,
so long as the bowl is generous. The bevel
should be blunt enough to impose
on a reluctant baby without insult,
the well deep enough to convey
a slip of lukewarm consommé. Even now,
sudsy spoons clatter against porcelain,

conundrum of convex and concave. I hold
one under the faucet, narrow the stream
to a thread, let the pool swell until it rises
above the tip, its curved edge a horizon
that cannot hold. I break it with my lips, sip.
The tang of metal washes over me — benediction
of July, the garden hose upright
in my sister’s hand, me dancing
on hot concrete crying my turn, my turn.

STEVE MUESKE Issue 25. 2021. Page 7.

SCAR
     "Show me your weirdest scar" – Twitter post

Run your fingers along the pink ridge
& remember what was removed.
A canary from the coal mine.
A loaf of bread. Scuffed shoe.
A field of daffodils. Joey Ramone’s
leather jacket. The view from
the hill. What was taken whole
or in pieces. Tested. Found benign.
Cut out. Cauterized. Having sat
in the nest against your optical nerve.
Show me the smiling line, the exclamation,
the stretched seam silken with age.
A beautiful wreck of gnarled whorls.
Give me the purple, the new,
the opened belly closed against
the storm. Give me your body
remade. Healed. Grown over &
vined. The garden of you. Give me
the broken vase. What the years
have stretched into a long
& pearlescent river. Give me the trip
over the handlebars, the air suddenly
a form of water.

YOUR NUMBER (ARCHITECTURE 64)

Heroic meaning is in the other room eating bacon as I’m returning 
from my health risk assessment screening. 
I usually faint with needles. They say it’s anxiety, and I apologize, 
because it scares people when my blood pressure drops to 60 / 35 
and my eyes roll. To distract me, the phlebotomist tells me 
about the stand-up comedy career she’s hoping to get going. 
She’s working up a routine centered around her life as a senior citizen, “dementia 
keeps people guessing,” she says, so she has a lot to work with. 
But there’s courage in that, too, the way my mother 
talked about Old Timer’s Disease, the way she called Scenic Hills, 
where she lived her last 30 years, “Senile Hills.” 
So we assess the risks. Statistical analysis. 

This is the grand procession of the stars: you blink, 
and the nurse calls your number. Stan Lee died today. 
So the meaning of today is “Stan Lee.” Comic books. 
Superheroes. It’s game time. The #1 song on the day you were born 
is the meaning of your life. Wednesday, January 6th, 1965: 
“I Feel Fine,” by The Beatles, is the meaning of my life. 

My total cholesterol is 197, my HDL is 78, as a natural history 
of sitting by this window, holding my screening summary 
like the book of daily prayer. I’m not religious, so this is what I have, 
along with the selected poems of John Ashbery. Thank you, 
screening summary, it all makes sense now. My glucose is 93. 
I was fasting, mostly, though I forgot and had a cup of coffee 
and some grapes. The receptionist said that’s fine. Thank you, receptionist 
who says that’s fine, by The Beatles, 1965. My blood pressure 
is 108/56. My BMI is 23. Thank you, O happy asemic summer days 
carrying us along in a fog of flies. And then it’s November, 
and it’s just me and this one fly, circling the health screening room, 
low slow arcs, that I’m naming The Soul, or maybe Stan, as it floats by. 

PORTAL

I once believed that shells contained the sound of the sea. 
I lived in a gabled house then, painted lake-blue 
under a dense, florid sky, a thousand miles from shore. 

From shells I learned the power of curved things: 
bells, bowls, my hands cupped against my two ears.
I once believed that shells contained the sound of the sea. 

My body was an ear, bone & hair & nerve. I could turn
any sound into salt wind, waves, and seagull cries
under a dense, florid sky, a thousand miles from shore. 

Growing up meant losing beautiful things.
How is it possible to lose an ocean?
I once believed that shells contained the sound of the sea. 

Silence could not be trusted, its weight like layers of silt. 
I feared the silence of inland places, of walking alone
under a dense, florid sky, a thousand miles from shore.  

I am not through with believing. I stroll on the beach today.
The wind and the waves take me back to the time
when I once believed that shells contained the sound of the sea, 
under a dense, florid sky, a thousand miles from shore. 

UPON DISCOVERING SHE IS IRREVERSIBLE

At any given time, she owns only a nub of lint, 
a dark photo in a back pocket, eared and creased. 

In a year of earthquakes, she learns a fondness 
for the way nothing is granted anyone 

but the forwardness of time. She tries to wrap 
her mind around the second law of thermodynamics, 

has felt her entropy wane, her parts pulling apart.
She wonders sometimes if she is a quick joke 

issued from the throat of a truant God. Every day 
her wool sags. Her thoughts, like burned out 

filaments, follow her, cold coils blackened and brittle. 
At any given time, the earth could whim, yawn, 

could surge her power at the speed of expansion, 
the arrow of time long past.

MARCESCENCE

The garden still held flames into winter
but in a way no one remembered.
They didn’t see brown as part of fire
in the oak leaves hung in angles. 
Shouldn’t they all have come down by now
people asked each other, ready to burn
or bag them or blow them down storm drains.
In rain, the shade of the leaves deepened
as a signal. The air moved through them, 
and the angels. Wrens worked around houses
while children watched them. Another pine
turned orange from the damage the beetles 
were doing until it died, then stood until it fell.
People left the trees where they lay.

HEARTLAND

You want me to have faith,
     but there’s a dog under your porch,
a stray dog and he’s dying.
     You tell me names of gods I do not recognize
so I can blame them for my insomnia,
     so you can blame them
for the dog who appeared with a limp
     and trembled, who stumbled deep
beneath your deck to hide away.
 
I’m leaving for somewhere
     because I’ve never been to Walla Walla
and you are praying for good news,
     but the dog is a simple breath now
next to the food and water you left,
     near the stair, next to the leap of cliff
you live by. The topic is not the overhang,
     how far we have to fall, but closer – 
how do we live when there is so much
     dying?
 
The tomatoes are no longer growing
     in the garden, instead their leaves are black.
There was a surprise cremation
     of an evergreen wrapped with ivy
by a man with the axe.
     And everyone knows someone
who is living with/dying from cancer
     depending on your optimistic wording.
 
I am pouring myself a gravestone
     of iced tea and going on a slow ride
down a long highway because everyone
     is trying to keep this dog
alive, and what I can’t take is another life
     I couldn’t save, and honestly,
I’ve never seen the heartland
     or been to Walla Walla where
the onions are sweet
    and you can drive by farm after farm
not knowing what skeletons
     are buried deep within their fields.

JEN HUANG Issue 24. 2020. Pages 8-9.

ONCE A GIRL
     after Eric Morris

Plaits with no ribbons, no ties. Without looking.
She mimes a pretzel, a God’s eye, a bud.
 
Bones bridge structure into presentation. 
Outside artistry. La naïf. The waif.
 
A girl is given rations, decoration. 
The matching brush and comb. The cowrie shells.
 
The lidded boxes sliding neatly closed 
with matching breath: one square exhalation. 
 
Each slat adjoins, and just one 
correct fit. No variation. 
 
The obstacle course, hand-drawn maps. 
The architecture ruined from within, revised. 
 
The terrorizing genes demanding
new poetic forms. Consuming, substituting,
 
blocking out vision with new desires.
An achievement: so much knowledge 
 
damped out the guttural fires. The skies
can ruin mud for us, a trick of light
 
and trajectory of vision. Now she gets it:
how to fake easily sprouts from her nature 
 
of plenty. How to weaponize good
luck, filing it blunt and pointing 
 
at whomever. Where she once had space 
to whistle at her shoes, the air suffused 
 
with preterm judgment, baby scorn.
Those hard children have fatted out
 
towards inertia. There is no hiss and spit, 
the swan songs witnessed early.

Minus melody. We’ve been timed out
by something vigorous, a new model
 
wired in and seething neon, digital. 
Trees torn out by the roots, depilatory
 
country here, but the replaced houses
look the same – more sprawling, glutted
 
white. Her tracklist of assaults barely
replays, it is old business. Half of them
 
dear friends. The earth tries to maintain
mystery, but that’s been done to death. 
 
We are a plundering sort, we call it 
sharing. A girl before the sum total of parts.
 
And after? Brazen sort of queen, 
ablaze and legislated to the stake. 

UNDECIDABILITY IN THE SPECRAL GAP

Because it took about twenty years to discover that we weren’t actually clouds,

chilling in the backyard bomb shelter with the Wet Wipes

and the grain drums, but rather as any thumbed species

saddled with massive overhead and buyer’s remorse, that this world

is preparation and never mind the sucky decor. This is not a bill; this is the idea

of a bill. This voice tells the child, Don’t lasso somebody who doesn’t want

to be lassoed. We weren’t eating this and we weren’t eating that,
 
birds massed on the wire beyond the flamed-out woods,

hordes of adrenalized squirrels trolling the perimeter

somewhere between the bouquet toss staging area and the vomitorium.

Because of asymmetrical haircuts and wallet chains, the never-enough-room-

-in-the-duckblind, finally-go-back-to-school-and-get-that-cropdusting degree

moments. We Need A Moment. We’re Having A Moment. We learned it in

The Idiot’s Guide to Whatever. I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable

of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching

after fact & reason, wrote Keats which is kind of shorthand for Que Sera, Sera.
  
Also Been There, Done That, Bought The T-Shirt.

Also, check out all these wadded-up notes in the pockets of my old jean jacket,

all of which begin, Why do you always and Why don’t you ever

HEARING SHOSTAKOVICH

We joke about our mother being made out of popcorn
kernels. The car’s too warm, my father’s urostomy

fitting bugbear and boondoggle. They would’ve
given him a pig’s bladder if not for the urethra

he lost. He asks that I take him to JoAnn
Fabrics for a strip of Velcro. The bag will

secure under his accord. He built me 
a time capsule in 1989, took the corpus

of a mailbox – what else do you call 
a rectangle without a pole? – stenciled

its 100-year leap, the 2089 school day
beginning with biodome-and-tell. I have

a friend whose house was a transitional 
dwelling for nuns between convent and 

hospice. When he pulled the attic stairs 
down (because I’d never seen it done), 

they jammed like stalagmites above 
the stove until he retracted a mechanism 

that cajoled the steps toward their nook. 
Real estate’s not a seventy-six-year-old 

man, yet there’s a forbearance whim 
that slides him back – organs before 

something attached. We forward the CD 
to Shostakovich’s E minor Piano Trio –  

cello harmonics christen its outset
stenciling disembodied brawn. 

THE CUT OF FEATHERS
     “My full-time occupation is smashing birds.”—King George III (1738-1820)

Look how they go on without us,
the birds, or their shadows.

See how light entering the body
makes a kind of music, or nearly does.

Then close your eyes as if willing
yourself toward blindness,

as when saying goodbye to someone you love,
knowing you’ll never see them again,

or leaving your child in a mental hospital 
against her will.

The sound of everything unsaid
whispering through the trees,

like the pleasures we must invent,
in order to pretend to believe

we can make it through another day.
Where are you now as fists outgrow skin?

The body contains its bruises
like a world turned inside out, 

or a stranger coming to the door,
one you’d swore you’d never see again.

ERASURE

I record dates in pencil, always have. 
Forty-two annual pocket calendars 
crowd a file drawer at home; 
my life in scribbled appointments.  
I’ve always felt that flexibility 
is paramount to be able to drop 
an obligation as easily as make 
a new one. Today, most pleasure 
comes from erasure, expunging 
cancelled commitments. 

What happens to these calendars 
when I die? Buried with me, perhaps,
so in the afterlife I can continue
this same habit, like Pharaohs
buried with their jewelry. Or my little
books will be tossed with other 
detritus of my life into the maw 
of that dumpster the kids will rent 
to sit outside our house, rain curling 
the pages till all writing’s gone. 

icon   (memory care facility)

when you tumble     in the shower
I rush right over     & praise Whomever

no bones broken     only shaken     & you
shrunken     in your blue     bathrobe

aides & nurses     wandering off
to never-ending     dismal     duties

neighbors too     to rehearse     routine
unlovely     idiosyncrasies

slumped on the couch     you     lean against me
then slowly     unfold     the crumpled 

parchment of your body     to lie across my lap
if anyone     returns     they’ll see 

living sculpture     almost familiar     
son & mother     perverse Pietà

DEREK ANNIS Issue 23. 2019. Page 8.

ELEGY FOR SUICIDAL IDEATION

Potted plants, brought in 
for winter, wilt. 
Shriveled tomatoes cling
to the branches
before dropping – seedless –
onto the soil. 

No matter, there’s whisky 
in my glass, and outside, blades 
of frost-brittle grass, 
which would shatter underfoot 
were I to walk across the lawn. 
I won’t; what need 
to leave marks on the earth?

Out by the back fence, the compost heap
full of broccoli stems, pits
of peach, and wilted lettuce,
is frozen mid-rot. 
Not even the raccoons 
can claw into it. They jump
onto the fence, stare 
at me through the window;
I have nothing to give.

My little dog lies beside me 
on the couch, she and her dreams
kick me in the kidney.

In the distance, a pack 
of ambulances howls 
across evening toward
a fresh kill. Tonight I feel
dawn’s fingernails scrape
across concrete, approaching.

FAIRY TALE REDACTED

Once I was born in a place I do not recall.
The seashore, a peach blossom, an island of selkies. 
Once I lost an arm and became part swan. 
My brothers flew in circles in the sky. 

My father the King lost my mother when I was young
and insisted on marrying me, so I fled
with only a fur coat, a gown of stars and a gown of sun,
as well as a magic ring. I hid inside tree trunks 
and was taken in by monks. I didn’t speak of it
for years. The prince fell in love with my soup.
It held all my secrets. We wed in a shower of gold.

My first child was born in an egg. My second child
a mermaid. They were taken and raised in secret. 
The prince left me and I became a dragon. 
I sing at night, flying around the city.
They say rage, I say mourning. 
The castle walls are not enough to stop me. 

Every fairy tale is a tale of murder, of incest,
of things no one wants to see. A mother-in-law
full of poison, a father unsafe, a family that leaves its babies 
in the woods. The lesson is carved into trees, 
turned into stories of saints, murmured into the ears 
of children until they become like psalms, 
the sound of the sea, the rush of wings, 
reminding us of secrets, of things unseen. 

Por mi hermanito Mateo I never realized that protecting you meant telling you to shrink yourself so small that you can fit into the pocket of someone else’s privilege & I had no clue how to comfort you after that little girl’s mom in the fuschia Lilly Pulitzer skirt told her not to play with hispanics because the same thing happened to me & I never knew how to make friends after that & I wish I didn’t have to tell you that your name is too ethnic just like our dad who had to change the name on his resume from José to Joe & I wasn’t sure how to explain to you what the man in the red baseball cap at Walmart meant when he shouted build the wall because the only walls you’d ever known were those sturdy ones that kept us safe not those imaginary ones that kept us out & I couldn’t find the words to explain to you why our father tries so hard to make sure he’s using the right form of there/their/they’re so he doesn’t seem like just another illiterate immigrant & I could never make you understand that the reason our parents push us so hard to get all A’s is because we have to work twice as hard only to get turned down because they can’t pronounce our names & I wish I didn’t have to explain to you what to do when a cop approaches you so you can stay whole & I hoped I would never have to explain what people meant when they asked if you were legal because how could a person be illegal besides we’re from Massachusetts & I don’t know how to guide you through this because I’m still getting through it myself & all I know is you need to be the perfect student & well-behaved & not like the others & not too loud & not too ethnic & esperanzado y ruidoso y confidente y rebelde y exigente y vibrante y valiente y amoroso y orgulloso.

MAKING DINNER FOR YOU
I didn’t know my hands would look bloody
from rubbing the skin off 
of cooked beets. Stuck like lip 
stain after New Year’s Eve, I look guilty 
all evening. You notice
the countertop is wet (I always 
fling my hands to dry them) and soak up
the water with a towel, reaching 
around me. This isn’t even my kitchen 
and I shouldn’t be here, but I needed to do 
an ordinary thing with you. Like clean your 
stovetop with that special stovetop cleaner, 
a thing made only for this one specific act. 
Ordinary like stepping on your feet 
as I maneuver clumsy from the sink
to the cutting board on the island, apologizing
for nothing but giving you a kiss on the neck 
anyway. You look stately 
in the low light coming through the stained 
glass. You look good even in the neon 
light of a shitty bar, blue eyes almost purple. 
I worry that that the scotch will make me 
an even more inept chef, that you’ll
see right through this carefully learned 
chopping technique to the fresh burn 
on my palm from forgetting
how hot the pan’s handle was. The salad
doesn’t look half bad with the bright
red beets and fresh arugula, but honestly I 
chose it because it seemed hard to fuck up.
So I know it’s bullshit when you say this
is the best steak you’ve had in years, but
I appreciate the fib. You pull me in close 
when you thank me for the food, hands tight
around my ribs. My body has grown waif-thin 
except for my ass that fills your eager hands. 
I know you want me to sit on your lap
by the fire outside, and you touch my
hot face like it’s the first face you’ve ever held,
like you’re tracing my freckles on a map. 
I get caught up, like I always do, when you’re just 
on the cusp of kissing me, the split second when 
I feel your facial hair before I feel your mouth. 
You laugh at my still-rouged hands, and we both 
know I’ll never get the beet juice out from under 
my fingernails. That you’ll have blazing red 
scratches down your back later. That neither of us 
will know what to do when it stains your pillowcase.  

A HISTORY OF GARDENING

My grandfathers have gardens; I have what remains
– another winter in an uncold place, my parents
waiting the other side of a phone, an empty table
in an empty room. I say make what you will
of imagery. Somewhere else, a hawk pierces
the corona of the sun. A car bisects perfectly
a suburban driveway. There are hands, hand-offs,
and hand-me-downs. They all work singlehandedly.

I can tell you a story about gardens, a history
of peering over a grandfather’s shoulder; I can
make you believe I know what I am saying.
But when my sweat falls to the earth, it is rejected
out-of-hand, and I don’t mind. I straighten my back,
crack my neck, and go inside for the day.

When I write this down, I mean to say something small
and adjacent to the truth. The way a watering can
is meant to service a patch of land, not an expanse.
Summer means to warm and stop, not pass into fall
and winter. We want our garden friends to settle down, 
pick our yard for their home. When they move away
we let them. Make do with their new-green remains.

bottom feeders

you grew up by the ocean. the two-minute walk 
           to the beach, the sand beneath your soft,
                     uncallused feet: you stayed there till you didn’t.

                     a bar is something like an ocean: the darkness 
           trips you up, the green glow 
of neons the only lighthouse for miles: to be drunk 

is to be drowning. you hover in the corner of the bar 
           by the bathroom, sipping 
                     a tequila sunrise made with too much 

                     grenadine. you can’t remember the last time 
           you weren’t here. you’ve had six 
drinks, each a little less 

memorable, each a little quicker 
           sliding down your throat: every man 
                     here seems to want something from you.

                     you give yourself in threes: to the blue-eyed 
           boy who just couldn’t love you, to the man with drug-
hunger and thick tattooed arms, 

to right-place-right-time barflies, one 
           after another. each time, you’re a little
                     less. you feel a little 

                     less. you keep a little less
           of yourself in this ocean, this deep-sea-exorcism – 
to be drunk is to drown.

MEGAN WILDHOOD Issue 22. 2018. Page 8.

ORAL HISTORY

No blood. No needles. Just spit.
So far, the DNA test kit is no different
than hanging out with Grandma. 

If you hock a loogie into this measured
flask – supposedly an upgrade from the cheek swab – 
and ship it to their analysis center,

they’ll tell you things like your eye color,
skin color, expected height. Then,
they’ll tell you the why behind all those things,

much farther back than Grandma can go.
Why meaning that your eyes are green 
because your forbearers are from Ireland

whereas all Grandma can tell you is 
her grandparents’ parents survived
the potato famine by the skin of their teeth.

Why meaning that, when their special
machine at the lab sequences your
personal double helixes,

the lab will tell you that your great, great
great grandparents’ parents 
were Scandinavian.

All Grandma knows is that her 
grandmother’s father had Marfan syndrome
and he treated it with slouching

and shoulder hunching. Why meaning 
that the miniscule globules of your saliva
will reveal a proclivity toward bilateral 

breast cancer whereas all Grandma knows are 
the sexless stares of strangers
and the taste of chemicals on her tongue. 

TO ONE WHO FEARS CAMERAS

I learned in school when I was seven

that God can see into every human heart.

It was a cloudy day. The sky was made of 

aluminum. The classroom was dark with 

theology. We read about the first murderer. 

His name was Cain. Also there were pickles 

with the name Cain stamped on the labels 

glued to the jar on the second pantry shelf.

It occurred to me that pickles could kill. 

Meanwhile Cain slew Abel and hid himself

under a rock he wished were a mountain.

God said unto him, You cannot hide for I 

see all and am inside as well as around you.

Thus it is that surveillance cameras cannot 

make me cringe. You can’t scare me with

your beady eye between bank and Circle K.

The red dot does not make me sweat. 

Nor do I hoard pens, for the writing I do is 

in pencil on the Big Chief tablet of the soul, 

which is an old idea. On the blackboard 

painted, not in chalk, was numbered the 

twelve tribes of ciphers with 1 in the upper 

left corner and ending with 144 in the lower 

right which were graven in my brain and 

by which I number the syllables beaten 

into the silver bells of shepherd’s psalms.

FISH BONES

Late on a Monday, I swish stale coffee, drink
the black slime, chew soggy grounds as the call
comes, my sister’s voice, a ghost through the machine,
to bring something solid, distract us from the cold
sheets, frosted eyes, the chill of your skin
as you pull back your shoulder, as I turn out the lights.

Like a whisper you’re gone before light
strikes the windows. Rolling across the bed, I drink
your absence, brush back hair, wash my skin
in dusty memories. A childish moment, I call
out, bury my ears from the echo. It’s too cold
on Tuesday to pretend. Stagger, start the coffee machine.

I catch you Wednesday, eyes black like a tired machine
switching off, an expired battery, a tree rejecting light.
You don’t notice how pale I’ve become, bobbing in cold
waves, flitting between dirty clouds and water I can’t drink.
There’s something skeletal here, something starving. You call
it routine, but I smell a performance in your skin.

Thursday evening and the salmon bakes, skin
sizzling over the glow of the elements, a shrewd machine
vaporizing the charred meat you would call
too tough. I bend down, envision the orange light
branding my face. Two fillets, two cups, many drinks
as I peer into the oven, eyes dry, your fish cold.

You grew a beard, but it never keeps out the cold,
solid cheeks flushed from the wind, skin
chapped from trying, forgetting to care. I drink,
savor Friday when you need me, the machine
of your core melting, cogs cracked in the light
blazing from my body. I appear when you call.

Saturday brings deep layers of snow, and you call
it fortunate, the way of solitary creatures, always cold
and barely alive, the world insulated. Light
a cigarette on the portico, cup the smoke and rub your skin,
perpetuate the metallic vision, the oiled machine,
a kiss you don’t feel, water you don’t drink.

A blizzard lights snow over our skin.
Sunday and the wind calls, but you’re not cold,
an animal machine that never rests, never will drink.

TEMPORARY CATHEDRAL

Like what isn’t there.
Like a mouth is rarely a mouth,
but a doorway. And when it is speaking,

it is daylight. There is cathedral I walk into
where an artist has painted the Milky Way
across the ceiling and it dazzles me.

I am walking down an aisle
where a woman who is older than me
makes an O with her mouth,

as if life is smoke rings and longing,
as if she is looking at the world
in awe. Life doesn’t astonish me

except all those many moments I fall
to my knees overwhelmed
by beauty, realizing the cathedral

is a calendar and what I thought
was the universe, was a clock,
and what I thought was an old woman

was a mirror, and I fall again because
who knew the windows were made of smoke,
who knew this cathedral couldn’t be owned?

HUSH, THEN

This is not about the narrow streets. Not about the creeping cold. I drove along the road and up and over with my headlights, with hurtles and verticals, my eyes on the radio backbeats, the homeless, the waltz of the ravens. It was nearly enough – to reach a dark room and a number of days in one afternoon. Every week this dangling, a pouring of bottles. The door found its exit but stayed half inside when I ambled over stones to watch the pitch of his mouth, my name when he said it, a point of view I accepted. The cadence when he asked for my gasps. My answer needed statistics, but I couldn’t manage the math, so offered the exact color of a smile. He took that as welcome. At the table, the knives were all clean. At the table, any minute was borrowed. And I leaned back and saw blue in the shiny corners of eyes where no one asked which and no one said who.

THE IDEA OF NORTH

Adam’s dead father’s car points like a compass needle – driving North past years of construction on Boston’s Tobin Bridge, miles of auto lots, my own father’s favorite restaurant on the Route 1 strip. This is three weeks after Adam’s eulogy about his dead father tossing a baseball with him in their backyard. This is January, cold and grey. Adam driving his dead father’s car past lobster shacks closed for the season, billboards for steakhouses and Chinese restaurants. Past Salisbury and Seabrook. We do not stop at the discount liquor store as Adam’s father would have. We do not stop at the greasy diner, order a hamburger and fries, like my father. Past the Maine state line. Adam weaves his dead father’s car past snow banks three feet high, pulls onto I-95 where 18-wheelers rumble with lumber. After stopping at a gas station, opening a bag of potato chips and a bottle of Gatorade, we do not discuss returning home. We drive past Orono listening to a dead man’s CDs which are not my father’s CDs. Past Dyer Brook in a car that is not my father’s car. My father who abuses my mother. My father who leans his burning face into hers, blames her for every failed decision he’s made. I do not tell Adam that he is at home watching television. My father who runs five miles a day – fifty pushups, a hundred sit-ups. The man I hide from in my bedroom even though I’m twenty-one. Hours of moose crossing signs. Hours of silence as we keep driving without a destination, the Canadian border seventy miles away. If there’s an idea of North it’s in the sleet now falling – the highway threatening us with the inevitability of ice. It’s buried under miles of evergreen trees, arctic tundra, snow that promises never to melt. Adam’s dead father’s car pushes into a wind that feels North. The heater cranking. This dead man’s car with a dead man’s winter coat in the backseat. A dead man’s cancer that never wrecked my father’s body. A dead man’s drinking that also led to abuse – our thoughts circle this but we do not know how to discuss it. North which is night and a dirty windshield, stars terribly clear in the winter cold. North which is not my father waking me on a July morning when I am seven, carrying me to the car for a family vacation. My father who this time does not intimidate with anger but covers me with a blanket. His baseball glove packed next to mine. Adam’s father who will no longer walk into their backyard, pick a baseball up off the ground. I listen to the heater in this car that is not my father’s. I lean toward the warmth as Adam stares into darkness.

JENNIFER MACBAIN-STEPHENS Issue 21. 2017. Page 6.

A big gulp situation is not paid for. It’s a heart attack in progress. But he (it) has no heart just a command center. START. BEEP. Human stops relate to brain and heart. (it) cannot compute this. (it) lacks eye crinkles so it cannot be trusted. The magnitude and coldness of a square torso sheathed in a cotton plaid preppy cover, a material we can relate too, creates a softness. I want to thrust my fist upon it. But he (it) does not open no matter what buttons I push. The air tight seals are hurricane disaster solid. There are some mini vents where some voice beeps make a run for it.

THE FLOWERS HERSELF
   Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
   – Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

What happens is this: a child
trusts a wolf to point her in
the right direction.

When the heart of the music
teacher at the private high school
breaks in two, all the girls come forward.

I learn of his crimes when
they are no longer news.

I used to sit in the front row
of his class rereading Virginia Woolf.

Whole note. Treble clef. Rest.

He’d say, Miss Z, always reading.
And, it’s funny to call roll
for a girl always lost
in a book.

So it was.

He went after the choirgirls mostly,
while I hardly ever opened my mouth.

All year long, Clarissa Dalloway
was still buying the flowers herself.

LOS SURREALISTAS, ALSO KNOWN AS LOS ESPECIALISTAS (1960)
   Bridget Tichenor (1917-1990)
   Oil on Masonite

los surrealistas: us, veiled / like brides, not / like
brides / nor maids / pure royalty, avian / six women,
a row / of cone-headed burkas / wrapped mysterious
/ bound, armless / only our eyes show, dark / against
glowskin, mist / wisps / white paint as fallen fog /
can’t distract us / our vision / as if, as in / it matters,
our bodies unsexed / restricted to this / minor island,
we huddle, certain / of dark skies / before us, two
children, metallic / eggs / hard shells gleaming /
calcium rust / thin hands fragmented / small bodies
wrapped / in black, soon / we all will hatch / wetbodied
stretch / of newborns / beware our smiles, /
our mouths, our teeth / our wings

SELF-PORTRAIT AS APPALACHIAN BALLAD

There’s a baby buried somewhere among reeds.
I myself am a ghost that haunts these blue mountains
in a ring of foxfire. You’ll hear my voice
in the mist and follow it to your death.

I’m a murdered woman hidden among shivering pines.
I’m the murderer waiting for my hanging.
I regret the stabbing. I regret following him into the hills
with only promises and my long dark hair.

I regret the lone riderless horse and the torn hem.
I’m an empty cabin with dark windows waiting for untold horrors.
These stories are re-written for new generations
but the dulcimer and fiddle are just as mournful

as they might have been in Ireland, or Scotland,
the green fields and soggy moors of ancestors
before they climbed into this new world,
a world they would populate with the phantoms

of their old-world tragedies, the names keep changing
but the dark shadows – a woman betrayed or strangled, a father or lover
left for dead on the train tracks, an infant never named –

are the same. If only I could alter the narrative in some way,
but I’m trapped in minor keys and sinister refrains.

BABY JANE’S BODY-LESS NAME

1.
Baby Jane’s body lies
on the bed; Baby Jane is not
friends with the body anymore.
Baby Jane leaves the body by itself
with the body of the man.
I am leaving Baby Jane says
to the body. I am taking my name.

The blank barrier above her lets her in:
white ceiling white ceiling white ceiling white ceiling.
Words unbuckle back to sounds.
Everything dies but her bodiless name,
the heartbeat mostly gone,
the almost-breath leaving
and entering the lungs while they lie still.

The bad things happen
only to her body. Not to her name.
No, not even her body now.
Somebody else’s body.
Some body not named Jane.

She begins to carve her name
into the unchiseled tombstone above
white ceiling Jane white ceiling Jane white
but her body pulls her back in
beside the pillow with the pocket for her babyteeth
beneath the purple or blue or Big Bird blanket
after the other bodies shudder and creep away.
No matter how long they stay,
she never finishes dying.

Of course her brain, blank
as the ceiling, protects the men
from what they did and the women
attached like Legos to them.

Why unhush the silence
that let Jane and everyone else live
as Lazarus lived?
With and without her name, Baby Jane
grows into Jane. Jane’s name comes and goes.

Jane’s blood wants the blade
to let it out. I will find my name,
Jane’s blood says. I will find my name.
The dark is moving in the corner.
In this place, nothing lost can be found.

The blade slides softly in.
Legs opened that way once.
Over and over again.
But they were not her legs.
Not then.

2.
Mary, named for the North Star,
I am lost. When I leave my body,
no shadow to follow home.
Which way? Which way?

Beloved Mary, how can I ever know
what the body knows but cannot say,
what moved in the darkness
of the babysitter’s house on Brown Street,
in the darkness of the body’s secret rooms
when it had no name and wanted to cry
why hast thou forsaken me
but its mouth was a sealed tomb,
its vocal cords two dead worms?

Beloved because you are walking with my body
through the valley’s cold shadow,
through the somehow heavy shadow,
my mouth remembers the shape of my name.
If you hold my hand, my name – a darting bird
startling from danger – will find the way.

When you cried, Mary, my name
was not alone anymore.
My remembered body, not alone.

Mary, Mary, sculptor of brains,
when will this clay be ready
for the heat pulsing in the kiln?

The storm returns, Mary, and I am drowning.
Throw me an umbilical cord and pull
with every pulse. I am waterlogged, heavy
infant that I am. If your arms grow tired, I am sorry.
If your arms ache and tremble, let me go.
The ocean will hold me in its womb again
until my body disappears,
the waves spelling my name.

3.
A storm blows on the waters
where Jane is teaching Baby Jane to walk,
is teaching her yesterday self,
the body-shell that fills and unfills.
Maybe Mary’s voice says Peace, be still.
Maybe it says May I feel safe. Maybe it says Love.
Language regresses to sounds,
but these are good sounds.
Baby Jane and Jane like these sounds.
The waves and the winds obey.

Jane’s brain remembers her body
rose after every end. Rose again
rose again rose again rose again rose again.
Her name poured back into each fattening cell.
I shall be called Jane,
Princess of Peace in the family.
The ceiling became a communion wafer
transubstantiating her name
whenever her body was too full
with other bodies, other names.

WEDDING SONG
   after Chagall’s Les Amoureux Dans Le Bouquet de Fleurs

He hid me in lilacs. He wanted me a bride forever.
He said the crystals on my gown seemed stars had broken
and found a home there. They were only cut glass
but a man needs his dreams and his visions.

He kept painting me over and over. I floated above our village
sideways and upside down, oh how he tried to keep me
from gravity. Sometimes I rode on a rooster
so red, its feathers seemed dipped in sunsets.

Once I was swept up in the unblinking eye of a cloud
But I could still hear the clown play a purple clarinet
and the bells from the green roofed church
that we never would enter.

It went on like that for years, he was in love
with indigo, for him it held the sweet
stain of our marriage, and the sound of a blue violin.
He said he opened a window and I blew in.

Angie Macri Issue 20. 2016. Page 6.

YOUNG SEAHORSE VIEWED AS A TRANSPARENT OBJECT

The seahorse in the desert
hangs, transparent

in the cube of water, and only its eye
is clearly defined

like a bullet hung midfire,
its outline, a soft line

of skin in rings. A man has brought
this combination

of horse and sea monster
to the turquoise

in this desert. A man
rode to find water, a grand

river, transparent. A man
rode to mine mountains

in shafts of hard lines. A man has taken
the seahorse, vibrating,

from the shallow ocean
and holds it

in the cube of water, and only his eye
is clearly defined.

BECOMING

What we are (work
hard) (adaptable)
negotiates
(don’t complain)

with what we were
(dropout poor) (unemployed)
(dreams
of (___________))

we value where
we know (province)
(city streets) (southern
suburbs) (barrio)

where we were (mango
groves) we wrap
presence (work) (sleep)
(sorrow) in time

and distance (dress
they couldn’t afford)
(always open
doors) (comfort zone)

(not forgotten)
negotiates with
what we can be
(resident of (_____))

(opportunity)
(migrant) (contented)
to become (transform)
what we came from

(sardines and rice)
(polite) (cement block
hamlet) (two-stop
jeep ride) shapes us

(diligent) (contract
worker) (thankful)
positioned (on
whose foot) (call me

(____)) we (narrative
passengers) can
become (money
to send) (name it)

(blank stare audience)
we make internal
transfers ((new) home)
(make-believe peers)

grasp (cultural
essence) what we
can (fish-head soup
both of us cook)

THE EMPTY DRESS

The dress fattened alone
at the back of the wood-cold closet.

The dress cold as a tree
lost in all the winters of the closet,
which was dark as everything the house lost at night.

     I measured the dress by how many buttons could be counted,

     how many times it could be folded
     into blush-wooded pages
             in the book of lace
     when it blushes
     beyond the rosewood readings of spring.

The dress smelled of rosemary
     and ginger
             and green tea,
     all the cures of the house when it was cold.

     We exchanged nuances of ginger,
     kisses of Himalayan salt crystals.

The dress was ripe
with a search party of wounded apples,

     voluptuous with the chill of cider

     and I put them there, in the dress
     where no woman
                           aroused
     the sky at dusk
     from a man’s shy pockets.

The dress advanced with love
for the way my lips and my hands
and the skipping hearts of my hair admired it

because there was no woman there,

no woman that could be folded
and put in some drawer.

And here the pure dress revealed its only wish:

to admire what’s best at being not-there,
best at being gone.

THE OBSERVER EFFECT IS NOT THE SAME AS THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE

The family moved to town after all the bridges had been replaced, skeletons of the old ways looming beside the new. The rivers dried up. The family tried to understand where they had arrived, what their neighbors did for wonder. So much rain in the spring. So much death in the summer. Hard to see both at the same time. They hired a dowser. Where his stick bobbed, they dug a well, then dug another. It was not the stories they needed to understand, it was the space between. Learning to use that space is how we keep our species alive. At the edge of the dry riverbed, a great blue heron stood each morning. Waited for fish that had died a full season before. The sun sustains what it cannot destroy.

THE CROSSING
   Between us was the melancholy river,
   the dream water, the narcotic crossing.
      – Eavan Boland

It’s late at night, or
early morning rather,
and I’m caught

between
the waking world
and the turned earth

of sleep. In sleep,
at least, dreams shiver
into semblance, straddle

the deep seams between
memory and meaning.
Not so

the given world, streamed
on neural filaments
finer than

fiber-optic cable. It is
a world of the oryx
and the ibis, the circlet

and the scow. It
comes rivering down
the mountain,

a translucent sheet
of winter-melt and silt
over stones. But

there is nothing
in this silence
save October wind

shaking crabapple
leaves, the purr
and hum

of the computer,
the high-pitched
insistence of tinnitus.

What then is this
third world I desire, built
of words

and conjuring,
this panoptic view
that includes

and occludes,
deliberate and wild
as domestic

buckthorn
and creeping Charlie?
By accident and

will, the self
is torn from history
and circumstance,

chancing some new
version of itself.
Let my eyes burn

with seeing. Let
my ribs crack
and split.

Let my skin
peel back to reveal
the whole

bloody machinery
of becoming.
I am nothing

more than windkissed
mud, a man
made more

by thinking. I am
what I am, a fish
in the pregnant water.

Gabrielle Bates Issue 19. 2015. Page 7.

INFATUATION

I.

Among the coils inside your baby’s mattress:
an egg sac like a cream mâché balloon             broken.
A thousand black widow spiders

          tumbling out, unseen.

II.

Gray tufts, ash flakes
helicoptering
         down to rest
like snowcrust on your collarbone
                  until the heat singes through to the veins.
You are at once
a pile of sizzles in the yard.

III.

There is wood rot
          in your puppet’s hand-carved eyes:
The blue unblinking charm and painted glint
nibbled and digested like Muenster
by the blooms of mold.

IV.

A dead peacock. From the side
of the road, its long
lifeless plumes
                  pop up like a trick high five,
          shocked back to life by the wind.

THE GOLDEN HILLS OF CALIFORNIA

This light began in lamentation,
but I don’t want to think
about the unmaking, the burning
hopes and homes a hundred miles
from here. This light is strangely
sewn with honey as if thimbled
from the flight of bees. It drifts down
through maples and the cedar,
burnishes our scarred floorboards
to yellow oak this morning,
our walls to butter. In the fabled state
we live in, somewhere always is on fire –
dry grasses torching, shingles searing,
latches melting, miles of forest
reduced to the single syllable of ash –
while elsewhere that combustion blends
light and gold we can savor like wine,
which also begins with crushing.

POEM FOR TONY HAYWARD

Needing wood, screws, some paper
for sanding, you fill the car with gas.
You believe that cars in general drive
too fast & remember your daughters
sinking teeth in the chocolate shells,
ice cream underneath. You believe
suffering should be eased or buried.
You trust this easing should be easy
which isn’t enough: it isn’t like rain
pouring memoriam so incur the rain,
you who are building kitchen shelves
& peering into your hands for news.
Now a soda, imagine foaming orange
where those awful fish wash ashore,
globular, a vital world as if nothing
but midnight thrives. It’s Saturday,
you don’t recognize your daughters
anymore for now they are bronzed.
You can’t help the fish, nor anyone.
Nothing is easier than acting slowly,
painting shelves, then donning gloves
to watch the land dry an ugly brown.

THE ROOSTER IS NOWHERE IF NOT AWAKE

There he is again, declaring the presence of civilization over unclear forces, crying out in the open, crowing up sound of a chickeny crowbar to have at the windows of light.

Wasn’t it noon not long ago? Weren’t we already awake? Has someone died, giving him the throne?

Maybe he’d fallen asleep in the shadow of cars, and after opening his eyes, believed he’d left the roost behind. And who wants to exist in loneliness at the edge of who knows where?

Again, he’s throttling up, reporting his remote location and compliance, divining his own countervalence out of blood-red marrow, knowing what holds or goes off gray might need a push.

SCHEDULING

Love, it seems, was out of scope –
the timeline did not allow for fraternizing,
yet there it was, in the way she stirred
creamer into her coffee,
in the way he spread cream cheese
across his bagel.
                      Our superiors
in the Bureau were nonplussed
or rather unaware of those moments
when a bare wrist brushed against
a gold watch as she left
the Vladivostok file on his desk.

I would like to tell you
they lived happily ever after,
but the deadlines, as ever, were
looming like the gaping maw
of an alligator.
                        And now,
when she sees him in the hallway
they nod, and he thinks back
to summertime when the scent of lilac
meant his jersey was clean,
and with the rains, there would be mud
to tumble into – thick, viscous mud.

PANE/GLASS GLASS/PANE

. . . then in this there’s a glass/pane reflection
what do you see we’ve all become Ancestors.
The mighty ceiba – like the pine
       that covers as a mantle breathes
scent of millennia or another era.
       Throwback to a gilded age:
were one lived off the land
       then you’ve become an Ancestor.
what does this mean?
       Plants can live more longitude
it’s not like a lighter shade of brown,
       have you seen the Sequoias touch the sky?
What has been bequeathed of Ancient Mexico:
       the Tule tree in Hidalgo – span of life
going on three millennia?
       Just look outside your window how on leaves – dew
there’s a tear drop of the heavens to view…

ANDREA SPOFFORD Issue 18. 2014. Page 8.

TUNDRA

I.

The first time I walk on tundra my feet sink.
I wish I was lighter, my feet larger,
like snowshoes strapped down, the broadness of mammoths
spread across landscape, hills that
turn into softness and drown
lichen deep into permafrost.
Layer me here beneath bearberry and crowberry,
beneath pink salmon berries like flowers,
cloudberries of orange, beneath cold.

II.

The first time I walk on tundra I am aware
of bear grass like cotton, questions of gathering,
weaving, how yak wool is combed from the chest
not shorn, how to tear ground
and roll beneath it, to sleep and brave winter,
struggle this storm as one knit into sod and sewn
into skins of caribou, returning everything as it was.

III.

The first time I walk on tundra I think of felled trees
dropping and total decay,
the sponginess of warmth beneath elements,
pine needles and leaves and cones and eventual soil,
how suddenly my feet dip but do not burst,
all trees intact just bending,
the becoming of one thing into another, how quickly
we can change.

THE IDEA OF BRAD

You went home with so many men
you once thought you’d write a book,
titling each chapter after a single name.
But it could’ve been a series because
there were so many Brads born in 1982
and you’re sure you’ve fucked them all.
You once peed on a Brad’s front porch
listening to him fuck his girlfriend
right inside the door.
It wasn’t your fault so many men lied
to you or forgot to mention the women
in their lives. You don’t know how many
women called and left messages
that they would find you and kill you.
One woman asked you to meet her
at Applebee’s and explain
why a woman would ever need a man
to hold her against the wall when they fucked.
You dated a man who couldn’t get hard
and he found you on his washing machine
making out with his roommate.
Another man gave you a shot of Tequila Rose
and kissed the drops from your lips,
his girlfriend in the next room.
Before college, you learned how
to get men to think about fucking you
by saying words like blow job
and backseat and by licking your lips,
and this was adulthood
and you didn’t say no because a no
meant you had no control.
No left you bleeding
on the steps in a rainstorm,
your cigarettes stolen,
dignity an illusion.
Enough tequila and you’d bend
time with the bodies of men.
When you met your husband
you wouldn’t let him fuck you
how he wanted. Now he refuses
to fuck you at all and all you think about
is where all the fucking
comes from and where it goes
and how we can feel its blur.

FOR THE SPOKEN-WORD POET-FRIEND WHO DROVE UP TO BATON ROUGE TO TELL HIS GIRLFRIEND 
TO GET LOST AND AFTER 36 HOURS OF BOTH CRYING, SHE DIDN’T GET LOST, AND HE WAS GLAD

Why sing if your song isn’t ready?
Your song isn’t ready, and you don’t have the chops?
You don’t have the chops and your voice isn’t there?
Your voice isn’t there and you don’t have the breath, the look, the ear,
and you don’t have a love, don’t have the love, and the walls have collapsed,
and your silences come like terrible screams from an abandoned dream
you had long ago, and you’ve forgotten the dream but remember the scream?
The good of a vase is the space in the vase.
The three-legged dog does not check your credentials.
You passed the interview with a greasy sleeve.
You dance like a frog but he loves you because he doesn’t feel love
because he has had so much, so much, so much
of people who might or will, will not, move, move along,
that with light or without light, you are no threat and no lie
because your hungers collide and colliding they make the big bang
of no hunger, no wanting, no nothing, and no nothing is all,
as nothing is all. You made a corral for yourselves,
and as you made it, you made it from the inside, and you left
no door, no gate, and in making you became the horses in it.
The smaller the corral, the more restless you became,
no room, no room (wild panic) frantic: I can’t breathe or be like this.
And one horse said, “We should have built a larger corral.”
The other one said, “We should be smaller horses.”
And a crow came down, perched on the first post, and said,
“I fly in stillness. Even when the little birds attack, I am still;
in stillness the bars of the corral are a thousand miles away.”

And exhausted and weak from loss of blood and everything.
you went still, more still still, until the corral grew and grew
and encircled the field, the ranch, the plain, the country, the continent
and you and you ran in your freedom and did not crash
into the bowed boards warping somewhere farther in the sun.

Because of that you sing when your song isn’t ready.

EXPERIENCE & ART

Skin with fat of the salmon there in the fridge just in case we don’t make it out past today’s brilliant, heaven-sent, chaotic snowfall I put my sunglasses on to see, after waking up late, feeling good about yesterday’s assembly, when individuals in the crowd asked all the right questions to bring out & illuminate a practice toward language, including heightening all the senses, setting down a swirling Vortex allowing Everything in at the same Time, perhaps especially Benjaminian Now-Time, which includes History & a bit of the Future, after waiting through the Vigil, Kristeva calls a feminine act, for the internal reverberation marking her preverbal construction of the chora constructed on the example from Plato’s Timaeus, shaped like a vessel or womb, so that the flow following that spark is so improvisational that a Music emerges out of the syllables transformed into notes remaining words within the rhythms of the instruments of the entire array of organs chiming in, offering a work, then, that variously turns on the written page into Experience & Art.

PORTRAIT OF FIVE COMPOSERS

I

“. . . we had swallowed Futurism – bones, feathers and all. It is true that in the
process of digestion all sorts of bones and feathers had been regurgitated.”
– Tristan Tzara

Captured aircraft were scrounged
for every available material,
even to the point of draining
lubricants from captured engines
to keep one more plane alive.
You show me the score
to “Suicide in an Airplane”
with its propeller blade obligato.
The logistics of that death
would have been daunting.
The act requires technique,
with the score resembling
barbed wire, but not from
an airplane. The Futurism
we remember is Brancusi birdflight
and typography and Marinetti
caught between puppet
and race car driver.
Roll control through wing-warping.
The kiss of death reveals
its flaws the way engines
sink in butter.
The dying pilot would unfurl
his maps of mechanical orchards.
Until synchronization, bullets
would ricochet off the propellers.
Death by metronome!

II

The last jazz in my ears was Milhaud’s
sardine tins empty of fish.
There is some confusion
about what constitutes a sardine.
A smoked and dried piano key,
for example, packed in oil.
Or fingers. Long Rachmaninoff
fingers. There are no dances
drawn from the harvest of sardines.

III

Sad little sex poems. Sad little poems
about underwear and seaweed.
Sad little poems about pills.
The notion of swallowing bird eggs
appeals to me as a parable.
Little vials of bird eggs where
mockingbirds could thrive.
The idea of symbiosis
must account for Pécou’s
dismantled tangos,
sexy as eternity.
What Picasso mutilated
of Velasquez survives
only by being burnt as fuel.
To keep warm, ultimately.
The butterfly bush
is doing very well on its own.
Sad little sex poems. A circle
of kisses might justify
those long stretches where
nothing seems to happen.

IV

Perfection is rare in quartz
obscured by each crystals’
luxuriant growth.
The mechanisms behind rose
rocks completely elude
tiny hurricanes infested
with mud. I’m not the only exile
who identifies with red dirt.
In his tide-song,
Cowell submerges the Irish air
into mud-swirls, chords
fusing in the way of quartz
in closed spaces.
The crystals must be rooted
in a matrix. I left my last
record player stuck
in Verdigris mud as a snail
habitat when the tides
recede. Too late to be
included in Neruda’s seashell
collection on the Isle
of Negra. Exactly where
is the libretto?

V

Birds do breed in dead wood,
crosstimber scrub oak whose
twisted grain makes it useless
for anything but protection.
I bury lullaby knives in burnt hillsides.
The hurt color I don’t understand –
the plum’s speckled skin
on a blind grackle.
So I assemble the liquid dictionaries,
allocate the necessary
yellows and blues and lavenders –
all that color theory
and Delaunay painted airplanes!
And circles. That suicidal rumble
overhead. Tender rivets, sheep fat,
a fuselage to adorn with geometric
ferns. I almost write geometric
licks, the tongue’s exhaustion
after all those paintings
that taste like bridges
or a vortex of human advance:
a new blind spot in our vision,
a few new blepharospasms or tics,
and perhaps a revised method
of computing time.

Milhaud I’m not done with you.
Boredom of the tohu-bohu.
Objects shine. Wet mollusks
and the stink of decay.
Boxes of putrescent fish.
Sardine tins dried out
in the summer heat.
All without the allure of bedsprings.
Why construct a lute of dead birds?
A calligraphy of confetti and sperm?
I apologize for the reference
to sardines, which can be
fireworks of salt,
waltzes of rancid oil.
I walk down the escalator
listening to Pécou’s Apache chants
that sound like burying
the heads of settlers. Geophytes
survive drought by dying
back to tubers, bulbs, and rhizomes.
Succulent with spines
those African rhythms.
Outremer is a synonym
for lapis lazuli.
Yeats should have had
his Chinamen play kettledrums
with long-legged birds
and let the plums and cherries
bounce on the taut skin.
Rattles strung from dried chiles,
ideograms in butter.
Sick of the fiddle bow?
Make it hot hot hot.

WHAT REMAINS

What thy lov’st well remains, wrote Ezra Pound
in a steel cage near Pisa, where nothing
remained but resolute sun and wind,
the clothes on his back, books, hills in the distance
where black smoke clung to the ruins of old
Europe. But here’s a question Pound begged: remains

after what? In that cage, it’s what remains
after the decades-long mask of “Ezra Pound” –
irritable Odysseus, nearly-old
sojourner through new worlds, talking nothing
but words about words – was stripped off. Distance,
he discovered, increases; the sun, the wind

could care less. But wait. Sometimes that wind
brings gifts: on a shaky web, the remains
of a bug a spider ate. Not too distant:
grape vines, olive groves. On a blade of grass: Pound’s
ant, a centaur in his dragon world. Nothing?
Hardly – these fearful, difficult to see, old

and elemental verities, as old
as the peasant’s bent shoulders, as the wind’s
fingers through a lattice, respecting nothing
as much as itself. But what also remain,
let’s admit this, are illusions, Pound’s
Il Duce, twice crucified, so distant –

so incomprehensibly distant
from terraces . . . the colour of stars. The old,
caged Pound, left with memories of being Pound
in great capitals, troubadour where the wind
blows; eminent hater of men. What remains
for a caged man when the night shows nothing –

not a moon, not meteors or stars, nothing
but a hard mirror? In that awful distance
he saw the uncertain remains
of himself: pull down thy vanity, old
man, how mean thy hates. Even the wind
held its breath for those rhythms, sprung from Pound’s

caged mind, where everything and nothing was old,
briefly. He saw distance in the sun and wind –
the something that remained of Ezra Pound.




Note: Phrases in italics are from Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos.

NICHOLAS WONG Issue 16. 2013. Page 26.

METEOROLOGY

Love makes me take climate more seriously
than myself. All because of her, the weather 

girl, who taught me Spanish by saying 
El Niño & how this has been lingering for decades. 

There are winds & they argue, 
politicians of apostasy. 
Westward draft fears eastward gale,
neither wants its past. 

I wrote her a cento: ascend to the clouds / 
but we’re crustaceans / crunchy ones. My lines 

original like her body, always in the foreground, 
between chroma-keyed high 
& low areas, strangely, not any bigger
than her hands. 

Some rumor the moon is a closet 
traveler moving 3km/year away from us, 
along its orbit of homelessness. I don’t like
the moon, a promiscuous planet – 

crescent, meniscus, eclipse, as if faithfulness 
to form is juvenile. 

Patterns are progress – I fall for 
her, who reports a firmament of temperatures 
every day. Everyone wants her 

to control their future. Not me.
I own her past on a shelf full of tapes, one 
for each forecast, but only the next day

can I know what she’s said is fact or 
allegory, or both. I shouldn’t doubt her 
flaw, her fainting accuracy. I’ve sent

her roses, but calx idly coats calyxes 
when I’m told to expect mild rain.

SAY THE CAUSES

This time tomorrow Jupiter will have spun around twice

and then some,

	light will have climbed down 

the chimney and gold furniture 

	will have been dragged onto the evangelist’s set.

I am sick of lords.

We do not even know where the leatherbacks go,

our own volition,

why move too soon and the bee-wolf startles

	like the one day dead.



Say the causes of Spring are the brains in the bulb roots

of perennials, 

	like crocus thinking all winter in the dark what to do.

Say all they have told us,

the eat and be eaten: live shortly, give in to the wind. 



Prophets have plants in the audience. 

	One wink is plenty and the answer appears.

They are still there, the beasts and the flower eaters, 

depending on what,

	we are still guessing.


Light is a sometime thing in this dimension, dark.

Everything’s not on fire.

Dirt is the dead and the living mixing together.

So what’s a body to do but all it can with its limits,

whatever they are,

	love like there’s no tomorrow 

with nothing but life depending on it.

ORDINARY TIME

When a relative dies we burn a candle in the window and draw the blinds halfway down so the house looks like it’s napping.

“The Bird is dead.” That’s what the Old Man says when he reads he obituaries in the back of the paper today. Mam nods and the kitchen is silent for a long time. The clamor of a trapped mouse changes that and the Old Man raises the rolled-up Irish Press over the creature, all furred and tense in the trap. The mouse makes frantic and the Old Man brings the paper down on the trap with a thump. A trail of yellowish red trickles from its body, and Mam shakes her head and goes to get the brush and pan to clean the floor.

“Who’s the Bird?” I ask.

Mam ignores me, pouring Dettol antiseptic on the sticky mess, wiping the guts up with a J-cloth. The Old Man has gone for his captain’s hat, the one he found on a coastguard ship last year, the bells for Mass having already rung out, and it looks like he won’t linger this morning. There’s no school because it’s a Holy Day, the Presentation of Our Lord, and the Old Man is home from the oil rig for the month of February. At school the Master says it’s the fourth week of ordinary time, but it doesn’t feel ordinary at all.

“Go with your father,” Mam says, pushing me towards the front door where the Old Man is already blessing himself from the Holy Water font. It takes a minute to untangle my school scarf and pull on my anorak, and then I run down the road after him. Mam has gone back to the kitchen to clean the dishes and prepare lunch.

“Who’s the Bird, Da?” I ask again.

“Ach, some old boyfriend of your mother’s. He was planning on marrying her, until I showed up and beguiled her.”

We walk the rest of the way to church in silence, until the Old Man adds, “Oh, the Bird was hopping mad when she began to court me, by God.” There’s a funny look on his face and it seems as if he’s smiling. “I took your mother out to Inch Strand and gave her a rub of the relic and that was the end of it.” He claps his hands together and winks at me.

Later, I ask Mam what a rub of the relic means and she smacks me on the ear.

SURGERY

I wear my scrubs to the living room.
I’m here to reconnect two arteries,
a passage between husband and wife.
 
It will take an unknown amount
of time. Instruments lay on the table:
kind words, honesty, forgiveness.
 
I open her mouth and she says,
“Why aren’t things the way they were?”
A tap on the face and he says, “I 
 
thought everything was all right with us.”
Between their flow of words,
I cut into the red pulse of language.
 
Through “Everything she does hurts me,”
to “I don’t understand what he’s thinking.”
When I discover the argument’s heart,
 
beating roughly under skin, I know
what I must do to help them.
I let each of them touch the organ.
 
If they decide to let it fall, the burst
of a balloon, it’s over.  If they bring it
to their mouths, there is life.  Still, life.

DROPPINGS

It might be the crumbled ash from a match
or toasted sesame seed off a loaf
of multi-grain bread – though my stomach

seems to know right away when there is life
behind the walls – something about the pinched
ends – no different, say, than the slightest lift

in my wife’s voice – the imperfect pitch –
that tells me she’s upset long before she tells
me she’s upset. So we learn to trust speech 

less than language – believe in the subtle
twitch of the eye over the keenly
chosen word – until a fleck of dust settles

in our eyelid just as we’re coming clean.
Or gas rises in our digestive tract,
and our boss assumes that pang in our colon

is proof of a passive-aggressive streak.
What’s left, then, but to try to ignore 
both the imprecise word and the nervous tic – 

put up walls and dismiss the gnawing
behind them, slope bricks across the top
and call it coping. Better to be wrong,

we think, better to unset the traps,
duct tape some holes and settle the mind. 
And then one day we go to fill the teapot

and find a mouse, dead, in the sink – more humane
this way, we think, but now we have to touch 
that limp body, feel its warmth in our hands.

SHE

The older print version weighed in at eleven pounds, the kind of book that demanded its own little display table. With the newly released electronic edition, the relationship between owner and object is normalized – the reader remains clearly in charge. The new version takes up no space at all, but hovers under our fingers, ready for waking at a touch. The editors, no longer limited by physical dimensions, have expanded the entries, operating under a philosophy of abundance. For example the entry under she:

The female person or animal being discussed or last mentioned: She was here but a moment ago. That female, that one, her. A female object or device. A ship, a hand grenade, a bomb. Alexandra, Madeleine, Sarah, Elizabeth, Ann. A man carrying himself as a woman. Archaic: child of either gender. Prepubescence. While man is a sexual being, she is only a container. Nothing has happened to her yet, and she makes nothing happen. She is our template, our stage. A doe, a fawn. A cleft in a rock. She gives us life. Angela, Isabel, Barbara. A particularly potent herb, where the ordinary one has no gender, and the efficacious one, whether anatomically of female gender or not, is she: she-vetch, she-balsam. She-cat. She-cousin. Scottish dialect: you: Has she bumped she little head? She was here a minute ago. You. Where have you gone? I smelled your shampoo on the street. Where was it coming from? I found a note in one of my books, her handwriting so potent, though it was only a list of movie times.

The accompanying illustrations rise under the cursor and with a click take the reader into a full-color video. Under street I found the modern meaning illustrated with a concrete cityscape. This dissolved into a muddy track, and then into a bare impression of paw prints disappearing into the underbrush. The word on the street, street-wise, street-cred, take us to metaphorical situations in which a street doesn’t figure at all. People stand waiting for an elevator. A waiter lays a table. Ice on a puddle trembles. An inner state of feeling that you have moved along a path: I found myself sitting with my back to the window, looking down at my knuckles. Each vignette contains multiple links, leading into or away from other definitions. Antonyms such as victorious are clear enough, as is streetless, with its unvarying gray waves rolling under gray fog, the reader lost at the railing of a wooden ship where the sailors pass behind without a word. Whistling. Whittling. To whittle. To while away the time. I haven’t seen you in awhile.

The instructions for the word origin function are far from intuitive, and embedded in an awkward block usually hidden under the upper ribbon. However, once I mastered the process, I was completely drawn into this fascinating glimpse into a word’s past. For example not twists and squirms under the etymological scalpel, springing apart into no whit, that is, the total absence of a person, a person’s abandonment by creatures living or dead, and ultimately, the loss of the spirit of the earth. The illustrations show the letters in the act of severing, next a snowfall, then a warehouse just about to take fire, and at last a close-up of the face of a radio, from which no sound emerges.

NATHAN E. WHITE Issue 15. 2012. Pages 6-7.

ASSIGNMENT

Twenty-eight is an odd age to die 
     not from a cancer or accident, 
 	                                   but in your sleep.
When you killed yourself I was two and a half. 

         Loss takes direction from you.

I.
From the yard, toward the closest neighbors: orchards
                                                       unattended.
Ten minutes below the house: the soft warning 
                                              of swamp.
Past the old bridge: collective farms with fields
	                          pale, consistent.
An unpaved road to mark the northern front.

II.
Fugitive – the first longing
I learned. You are always absent 
from memory. Not a flash
of you, no shadowing.

Fugitive the conviction
assigned to your name.
Nothing told of you
to keep you unknown,

where you had gone, each 
one answering one
question with another –
Ah, forget it.

III.
I have a picture of you. 
Grandmother says it is you.
I have no doubt, suspicion, or accord.
I see a young woman,
     a portrait whose background is clean, well-lit. 
On that day maybe you thought of your husband,
     how your image 
     he would be sure
     to credit.

Or already you had decided to die
     on the fifth day that November.
			
          Our teeth match.

IV.
Yet I would deny you, even more
would deny those words that nearly encircle you.
The hand that draws you is the hand of your son holding
the watch timing his attempts at breathlessness.
First without moving, then walking side to side
in his room one minute, two minutes, three –
his breathless body no match for you.

V.
I like to think you enjoyed sewing and singing in church.

I know that no degree of faith 
     recovers a suicide. The speculation exhausts me.
									
VI.
I have kept up a reasonable history, Mother.
Twenty-eight years on you. No closer.

How am I to leave you? Which half
is yours, which half circumstantial?
				
On the certificate the cause of death is exclusive.
My word against you.

VII.
There are worse things
than to have lost you 
at two and a half.
I imagine knowing
you first.

THIS TIME OF YEAR

Condensation on the living room windows
is freezing again, creeping
until the window is a sheet
of ice. Darkness comes sooner

each day during the holiday season. Empty
chairs hold the most weight
this time of year. This time 
of year my shoulders curl
toward the center like the drying tips
of fallen leaves and I can’t stop thinking 

about the tunnels 
that run through my grandfather’s heart,
how they keep
closing up. He’s due

for another stent, and I can’t stop 
sneaking cigarettes,
thinking about all the hours I spent 
curled up behind the pipe.

I keep finding dead birds
in my poems, 
and I can’t stop tossing them
from the balcony, 
begging them to fly.

LANGUAGE ACQUISTION

I forget the names of things,
what they stand for. Mountain
is butte. River is river, but not.
Tree is drowned. Cold, not bad.
Unspeakable, cold.
Emma puts sounds together,
names her world with syllables.
Deep in night, she wakes,
forms sounds, and comes to make them to me. 

One arm asleep, I pull her into bed, lay her between
her mother and me. I whisper forest, and she laughs.
I whisper elevation, and she says, goo-la.
I whisper home, and she whispers home.

Her head rests in the bend of my arm,
small breath warm against my skin,
as she blinks her way back to sleep.
I don’t know what woke her,
will never know the dreams
of her unformed language, 
but when she sleeps here, 
dreams until morning in the shelter
of her parents’ bodies,
she makes no noise at all.

BENEVOLENT ME
   Inspired by Mark Strand


I give up my fingers first,
stone pillars at night.

I give you my throat.

I give up my tongue, which paddles
through my thoughts.

I give you my ribs, which embrace my heart.

I give up my lungs like swollen peonies,
who open for the gardener. 

I give you my untrustworthy thighs.

I give up my knees
like two silver bolts.

I give you my womb, a gold sliced pear.

I give you my footsteps, which crow
of my existence. 

In the giving up of me, I become
more than a narrow step in your head.

JELLYFISH

1.
Ancestral, alien, they pulse, 
they press against the water, 
slow as breath. 
They hover, glassed-in: 
hearts kept in a jar, the brain 
suspended in its case; elaborate 
but elemental; otherworldly, 
oddly human, shades. At times, 
among them, I have felt it: 
the privacy of matter, the permeated 
inwardness of flesh; 
from which the mind comes; out of which 
the manifold wet organ blooms 
with all its inwardness intact. 
A kind of consciousness: they ride 
the currents, tracking plankton 
by tracking light, but trail 
their tentacles behind them like a ghost 
whose last gown, tattered, 
floats on air the ghost-flesh doesn’t feel. 
                  
Engines of survival 
made up mostly of their element: 
the sea spits them out and they collapse.
Kids poke at them with flip-flops, shovels, sticks. 
No longer medium to motion it creates, 
their flesh becomes a stubborn bubble, 
the brain’s forgetfulness once all the thoughts are gone. 

But when they move, they matter. They enchant. 
Impersonal, unthinkable, with abstract grace they dance 
on currents they divert with every pulse. 
Only eating, only eating, they exult 
and send a careless ripple down their limbs. 
Nothing else as strange can draw me in. 
Faceless, sideless, eyeless, indistinct, 
they are not us. And yet to watch them is to sense 
the matter of oneself, slowed as light is bent 
by water — light absorbed and light dispersed 
until there is no light at all. Across a net of nerves, 
jellyfish conduct the stuff of thought 
in utter thoughtlessness — nothing gathered, nothing brought 
through time within the tenure of a self. 
No self. No jellyfish. No bell 
inflating like a lung on a machine. 
No less unreal for being seen, 
they spread through thought like ink 
in water, mindlessness in mind —
until, confused with thought, the thoughtlessness breaks down. 

2.
Beneath the water’s surface, the pool became no place, 
my self no self, the shards of sound a sacristy, their grace 
became my grace. I was a kid. I went there to escape. 
It felt profound — my eyes closed, sense deranged. 
Sounds turned into substance, each the same, 
each echoing its medium as it estranged 
all habits except grandeur. That inflamed. 
Air called me back. It sought its level and I went, 
following the pull into a human element 
where sounds were sounds I knew. Up there, the spirit lost its shape, 
a bubble snapping on the surface as the water edged and thinned 
and broke and blew away. Now I need more stable forms 
to call that spirit back. Much more than jellyfish, the norm 
has been the sight of others’ rooms 
when I’m walking home at night. The spirit blooms 
in strangeness, and this is as far as I want to go —
a few blocks down, where living shows
as a potential, a freeing sense that most of what I know
is once again unknown, but knowable;
that this is all, that this can last,
that there is nothing missing here that would be missed.
As I look, a man walks in and pulls a wine bottle from the rack.
The spirit leaps up, summoned, sensing it exists.

THE BIRDHOUSE

In the last box, a pigeon sleeps,
in the last glass box, sleeping 
with her head tucked against her breast, 
head tucked in, wings 
flicking out and tucking in 
in her dreaming, dreaming 
herself away, starting awake 
from the spasm of a dream, 
waking, shaking awake,
shaking, my heart jumps up, 
though I swallow it down, swallow 
hard, as if I’m dreaming, heart jumping —
she has my face,
eyes that wrinkled walnut brown,
my face, locks of hair pulsing 
around her cheeks in the little eddies 
her panting makes, making her face 
at me, her gaze the long-forlorn, 
as my mother used to say, 
and her lips, the long-forlorn, 
moving silently, forlornly, 
I can’t hear you, I say, 
which is true, she has my face, 
which is true, the long-forlorn, 
I guess she wants out, out 
of the silent glass box, out 
of the long-forlorn, 
the little eddies, swallowing, 
I can’t help you, I lie, 
she lifts her belly, 
lifting so I can see her egg, the mess 
she lies in, the shattered, wet 
mess she’s sheltering, she’s 
knocking her toes against the glass, 
I can’t help you, which is true, 
I can’t hear you, 
which is true, I can’t,
the long-forlorn throbbing 
in her throat, her toes knocking 
against the glass, throat 
throbbing in song, Hold, Hold,  
she sings, to the wet, shattered mess, 
to the wet, sheltered mess 
under her belly, she sings, sings, 
this strangest of birds, 
hold, hold, she croons, 
I can’t, I lie, hold, hold 
this strangest of birds, 
I lie against the glass box, 
the silent box she sings inside of, 
lifting her belly, watching the yolky bones, 
I lie against the glass box, 
the silent glass box singing inside itself 
inside me, she sings, watching 
the bones sinking, the yolk and bones 
sinking inside her nest, under her belly, 
sinking, I lie, I hold my belly, sinking, I 
can’t help you, holding the glass, 
lying against the glass, panting, swallowing 
my bony heart, belly throbbing, little eddies 
singing in my belly, lifting, a shattering 
like bones in my belly, I can’t hear you, 
belly sinking, singing, hold, hold 
these yolky bones, the sinking nest, hold,  
hold, the ragged forlorn.

PUMPKIN POEM (UNTITLED)

This pumpkin she is
carved into that small orange dress
of another color
one might call “little black”
but that is a different purpose —
to see her tonight 
is to walk shoeless among the earth
from which she grew
the twirling vines of hair
that coil along the stump of her neck,
when you get there
will you drink the early autumn
rain collected in her collar?
And though she sits  
on the round of her rind
asking you to pick her, she is not
meant for a lover’s tongue,
for the sight of her alone is 
a dance you’ve tried to remember
the taste of from long ago
as the movement of still
winds in your empty mouth.

SIZE

What she thought was large — a 64-ounce Big Gulp, 
boxcars creaking from one end of town to the other, 

Jupiter’s red spot, the silvery, sweeping pinwheel galaxy —
are tinier than the tiniest bone in a pygmy shrew. 

Big, it turns out, is 300,000 light-years wide, 
a dark corona surrounding the Milky Way, 

which it wears like the halo of an angel 
in mourning, a cloud-like penumbra, a gypsy’s 

funereal kerchief ten times the size of every visible star, 
every trace of dust, gasp of gas, each planetary speck. 

Try that on for size. Try on the black babushka 
beyond which everything else is shroud-less mycoplasma. 

This is the size of her thoughts as she walks down row after row 
at the Tomb of the Unknowns, lowers her small and uncloaked head.

LETTER TO AN INMATE IN SOLITARY CONFINEMENT

We all want to know our worth, the value
of a tin can, a newspaper in the rain.

You must remember the rain – its teeth,
its tongue? Think of what it’s been made

into, how it’s been transformed: solid, liquid,
gone. Sometimes I put my fingers in my mouth

and chew on what they’ve done. Do you ever
do that? Do you count the bricks?

That’s what we do on the outside, too.
We make them and then we count them.

I read in the paper they’re closing down the mill,
talking about condos, selling it off at auction

machine by tired machine. But killing something
can take a long time. I cut down a tree

and it took all day. First an ax, then a saw,
then dragging it up the hill like a dead body –

all heavy and already forgotten. I used
some beautiful old blade to strip off the bark in curls.

It smelled like a new house, except I wasn’t
building a house. I left it out in the field

for a year of rain. Try not to ask yourself
what this waiting means or why you’re held inside it.

LETTERS TO ST. PETERSBURG


window to the wistful you kept me
up at nights / puppeteer your strings of light / untether 
us from beds / you’ve framed yourself / not to be framed
unmateable untranslateable you my words shoaled in shallows
you seas I wallow in / I flail to seize you again / see you in 
washed-out image on my office wall / the lurid cathedral
built on spilt blood / this Midwestern sun erases
alluring city in which I lose & lore you
where gradeschool children could not help / but throw snowballs
over the mass grave at Pokrovsky / where I skittered over history
apparition of Gandlevsky shaking shaking Gogol & Dostoyevsky
you unowned & owed / how the cameras came / eras seared on eyes
how many dreams I’ve wandered in our neural galleries 
where your countless winter face framed by kerchief ascended past 
as I descended the terminal escalator sans guile & lyre
turning to you so that I could see what I would love
& lose forever / those interminable days

where saffron insides of apartments gilded the gray outside
where camera the room in which I hide / to hold you
where the mooring of albums & digital nets 
emptied / where my words herded everything but the you of you
this is the same song harped on the same strand of sand
this is the problem of words & now again the ghost ship of a building
skeleton scaffolds where torn plastic tarps masked as unlashed sails
flagellate the stone / shred themselves / a history of the self
where all the windows eye the shoreline 
O inward window / carved from ribcage
& flight / O windward gate of the mouth locked & jawed
I’ve gotten no closer to you, cursed & dear city, than to my death!
to burn posthumously like a word / an echo of dusk
you of the summer sun never ceasing to sing
to you I cede / urn of eyes / to you I turn return to you 
whatever I’ve taken / sudden blood briny in 
my mouth / city 
seeded in me
if only to spread open the holy psalter of you 
& be spread open / voice of my voice, shoulder 

open my soiled throat

TRANSLATIONS

I want to believe we can’t see anything we don’t have a word for.

When I look out the window and say green, I mean sea green,
I mean moss green, I mean gray, I mean pale and also 
electrically flecked with white and I mean green 
in its damp way of glowing off a leaf.

Schiele’s Green, the green of Renaissance painters,
is a sodium carbonate solution heated to ninety degrees
as arsenious oxide is stirred in. Sodium displaces copper,
resulting in a green precipitate that is sometimes used 
as insecticide. When I say green I mean 
a shiny green bug eating a yellow leaf.

Before synthetics, not every painter could afford a swathe 
of blue. Shocking pink, aka neon aka kinky pink,
wasn’t even on the market. I want to believe Andy Warhol 
invented it in 1967 and ever since no one’s eyes
have been the same. There were sunsets before, 
but without that hot shocking neon Marilyn, a desert sky 
was just cataract smears. I want to believe this.

The pale green of lichen and half-finished leaves 
filling my window is a palette very far from carnation
or bougainvillea, but to look out is to understand it is not,
is to understand what it is not. I stare out the window a lot. 
Between the beginning and the end the leaves unfolded. 
I looked out one morning and everything was unfamiliar
as if I was looking at the green you could only see
if you’d never known synthetic colors existed. 

I’ve drawn into myself, people say. 
We understand, they say.

There are people who only have words for red 
and black and white, and I wonder if they even see 
the trees at the edge of the grass 
or the green storms coming out of the west. 
There are people who use the same word for green 
and red and brown, and I wonder if red 
seems so urgently bright pouring from the body 
when there is no green for it to fall against.

In his treatise on color Wittgenstein asked, 
“Can’t we imagine certain people
having a different geometry of colour than we do?”

I want to believe the eye doesn’t see green until it has a name, 
because I don’t want anything to look the way it did before.

Van Gogh painted pink flowers, but the pink faded
and curators labeled the work “White Roses” by mistake.

The world in my window is a color the Greeks called chlorol.
When I learned the word I was newly pregnant
and the first pale lichens had just speckled the silver branches.
The pines and the lichens in the chill drizzle were glowing green
and a book in my lap said chlorol was one of the untranslatable
words. The vibrating glow pleased me then, as a finger
dipped in sugar pleased me then. I said the word aloud
for the baby to hear. Chlorol. I imagined the baby
could only see hot pink and crimson inside its tiny universe, 
but if you can see what I’m seeing, the word for it 
is chlorol. It’s one of the things you’ll like out here.

Nineteenth-century critics mocked painters who cast shadows
in unexpected colors. After noticing green cypresses do drop red
shadows, Goethe chastised them. “The eye demands
completeness and seeks to eke out the colorific circle in itself.”
He tells of a trick of light that had him pacing a row of poppies
to see the flaming petals again and figure out why.

Over and over again Wittgenstein frets the problem of translucence.
Why is there no clear white? 
He wants to see the world through white-tinted glasses, 
but all he finds is mist.

At first I felt as if the baby had fallen away
like a blue shadow on the snow.

Then I felt like I killed the baby
in the way you can be thinking about something else
and drop a heavy platter by mistake.

Sometimes I feel like I was stupid
to have thought I was pregnant at all.

Color is an illusion, a response to the vibrating universe
of electrons. Light strikes a leaf and there’s an explosion
where it lands. When colors change, electromagnetic fields
are colliding. The wind is not the only thing moving the trees.

Once when I went into those woods I saw a single hot pink orchid
on the hillside and I had to keep reminding myself not to 
tell the baby about the beautiful small things I was seeing. 
So, hot pink has been here forever and I don’t even care 
about that color or how Andy Warhol showed me an orchid.
I hate pink. It makes my eyes burn.

MAN REFLECTING ON MAN 

One man made of breath caresses furniture
Left on a lawn overnight. Another 

Man made of sawdust separates when kissed
By wind. He coats the inside of a coffee mug

Waiting to be filled with sunlight.
One man tucks himself behind I. Another

Pours his nearsightedness into a spyglass
Sees the sea lapping itself, sees the forest

Falling open like a mouth, tree limbs hung limp
With fruit. One man dreams himself a stone

Lodged in the slingshot’s jaw, dreams himself
The door of an unspoken word. Another

Hears a voice & echoes the voice he hears.
One man’s lips touch lips smudging

A wine glass, the way one cigarette sets another
One aflame. Then, in the bright doorway

Of the unspoken word, a silhouette appears.

TO WILL:

Well! Here we are together, all alone.
You look a little white, but not angry.
With that loop of rope around your neck, the hole
of your mouth, stunned, you look struck by fear.
You’re pinned neatly in this tree –Whoosh! Wings
flush out in the distant woods, a blue

sound. You know, in the pre-dawn light, everything is blue.
It reminds me of a time I woke up alone,
barefoot, in the woods. I’d been sleepwalking. The sound of wings
woke me up. First I was startled, then angry
at myself for panicking: I was lost with no light. Fear
choked me. How would I find my way home? Holes

in the black sky made chinks of light between pines. Holes
in the ground were visible now: my footprints, blue
in the damp earth. I followed them home without fear.
Will, are you afraid of being alone?
I must admit I feel a little angry
seeing you hanging here. Are you listening? Wings

are pulsing everywhere. Inside us, beyond us, wings
are thundering. I imagine you now in a kind of hole,
a vacuum, no light, no sound, but full of anger.
Do you remember the time I turned blue?
When I woke up, my chest felt bruised. I was alone;
I couldn’t breathe. The world of my mind turned white with fear.

I went to the emergency room where doctors thrushed with fear
like birds in their white coats, fluttering their wings
around the x-rays. They left me on the steel table alone
while they chittered among themselves. I felt myself sink in a hole
of white light, until I was aware of nothing. Blue,
when I woke up. Blue veins, blue gown, blue tube. Angry

wings above my head. White light, pixels of angry
light thrashing madly. The tube was a plastic hole, like fear
running air into my lung, tissue paper, blue,
saying yes pink, saying no blue, my lungs, like wings
catching new wind, my delicate, flimsy hole,
and lo and behold I was still alive and alone.


When they beat their angry wings,
do you feel fear inside your hole?
You bastard, I’m blue, and alone.

SHE JUSTIFIES RUNNING AWAY

I just wanted to be somewhere
I could smell lemon trees in April
where the sea wind wasn’t quite as cold
(you know this damp grows in my lungs
like a plague) and the sky a bit less weepy.
I missed my land of pomegranates and figs,
of ripe cheese and blood orange,
the tart black taste of volcanic soil.
It wasn’t you, sweet prince, or our tiny castle
(the dust mounting in closets) or the crying
wounded mouths of children.
It was sunlight that burned my memory.
It was my lips that craved a sweeter fruit.
It was the citrus blossoms in spring,
the twisted cypresses, the warm salt air.
It was the white, frolicking goats in me that called.
I will shuck myself open to the blue hot world.

SOLITARY (BRAVE)

Everything I know about prison
I learned from you

when I was five. I asked how many 

birthday parties you missed and why
you dug a hole through your closet

into mine with a pencil 

to pass me notes,
both of us huddled in places

where we knew we shouldn’t be.

We heard heavy footfalls
that somehow never found us.

You drew stick figures in striped pajamas.

You said, That’s what we are,
but I thought I wasn’t. 

I could still leave my room.

You weren’t allowed to,
and every note you pushed

through plaster I didn’t understand.

I only saw the alphabet, letters
I was still learning. 

You sat in each corner 

of your room, dreaming 
of sheets tied together 

out the window, 

of scaling walls, of running 
through the woods with me.

ONE WAY OF LOOKING AT THIRTEEN BLACKBIRDS

A black cat crossing your path is bad for luck, it’s said.
But to cross the path of thirteen blackbirds –
that has to be a sign. There’s meaning
in the way they’re sitting on that line
side by shadowy side,
yellow eyes unblinking,
staring down at you 
all of one mind, 
just waiting
to dive.

TO SURVIVE INSIDE THE WHEEL OF DAYS

“Crocodile mama, crank open those jaws,
let twenty wriggling pipsqueaks out to swim,” we say

to a human soul that’s lay too long in its swamp bottoms,
to a spark of God suffocating in a muddy mind. If 

the soul’s chilled by a deadly bond to what should’ve been lost, 
we call, “Mountain wind, snap gold from the aspen nodes, 

cover the summer-dun fields with flutter and color.” In our 
bethel of remedies, we, the blue-striped lizard ladies, 

welcome all bedraggled spirits — those with hands 
that do nothing but pick at blisters, the whimperers, those with hair 

that’s forsaken its snake-power, all of its nerve – and we feed them
the savory decay of a desert sheep baked on the boulders, 

horns and all. We keep the coyotes away so they, 
the human souls, can limp and dither their way to a meal,

and when they’re sated, we bathe their hands in the salt-and-sage-
spiced blood of jack-rabbits and ask them to do what they came here for: 

“Scrape off those brittle old skins you slither around in,” which aren’t 
their bodies, but the doubts of their bodies, crusted and constricting. 

We cache away earthquakes, stone knives, burst clouds, flowers, 
cures for every form of heartache . . . but try to make 

a grab for us, we’ll break tail and run. Instead, 
step sideways into our sandstone home, light as a dusky 

breeze that’s come from the river. If you wait with the flooded 
senses and tensile crouch of a kangaroo mouse, we’ll find you 

varnished with shadows, your layered fears a carving surface 
for our primal glyphs: paw, talon, feather, scale, maw.

BODY OF STUFFED FEMALE FOX, NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM

Nothing ever was this slinking, vicious, 
glass eye embedded in its slitted red, skin
husked and sealed forever in a vacuum — 
the false gray sedge where no dog hunts
and it’s lost its sleekness as it’s lost its sun.

She ages terribly behind her glass.
Nothing ever was this slinking, vicious,
so why should we admire or hate her,
husked and sealed forever in a vacuum,
the frozen attitude of cunning

strung over wire, the razor nails replaced
and aging terribly behind glass?
Imagine the raw, wet wounds in the body
she could open up. Why admire or hate her for them,
why not call her existence, simply, honest:

an animal practicing its craft designed by nature?
Now it’s strung over wire, the razor nails replaced
with plastic as her forest was itself replaced
by us, the raw, wet wounds we tear into its body.
Years ago, signs across the neighborhood

listing all the cats found mutilated declared
a man was busy practicing his craft, nature redesigned
by violence. We have to find the killer, they said, 
before the forested park fills with bodies, 
the cats turned into girls and the girls into women. 

Months later, the signs were torn down, the notices
listing all the cats found mutilated declared
a mistake. The culprit was a fox. But now, behind glass
we’ve found the killer: the violence 
we think we cannot be or feel more than, 

the once-red body that fascinates us 
turned female, signs beside it torn, the notes
on its habitat in disarray due to construction.
The culprit is a fox. Behind the glass
lighting flickers, throws down shadows so that

we cannot see her. She raises up a paw
and the once-red body that fascinates us
freezes in its shabby immortality, stands disfigured 
in its habitat, in disarray due to our construction
of a world that keeps her always different from us;

in our imagination of ourselves, degraded.
We cannot see her. She raises up a paw
as if in supplication, cone nose tasting the air
frozen in its shabby immortality, disfigured
by the box we’ve locked it in, as we’ve locked in her,

imagining how she’d slink from the forest to drink
at a puddle of rain, the picture of herself degraded
by a car’s sudden headlights that cut across the surface.
She lifts her head, cone nose tasting the air
as the wind lifts too, riffling the grasses, the trees,

the fur at her throat; a movement which,
as she stops to drink at her puddle of rain,
could be herself or God or nothing: an absence 
in the headlights that cut across the surface.
She looks into her puddle of rain

but cannot imagine more, does not need to, like us,
a wind riffling through grasses, a movement 
like rain running down a glass room.
Nothing ever was this slinking, vicious. 
She could be herself or God or nothing. Instead, 
she’s husked, red. Sealed forever in a vacuum.

RARA AVIS

My mother was born with wings on her ankles. 
She’s been cutting them off since she could hold 
a butcher knife. They grow back. She cuts them off. 
She can’t fly. The wings are useless. They reappear 
with the promise of flight, the false hope of escape. 
She tries to ignore them. They itch like scabs. 
She cuts them off. She dreads the day she loses 
her strength and lets them grow untamed. She fears 
she might be tricked by the arc of their shadows 
into believing in their power, the moon and the stars 
inviting her, the open window examining her faith.

LUKE

I’m driving back to the McDowell Colony over
the night roads of New Hampshire: Route Ten
from Hanover to Newport, turn right at Goshen
on route Thirty-one, my little Sube straining
up Lovewell Mountain, lights puncturing fog
and snow at the same time, road lost, yellow line
faded because they don’t have taxes in New Hampshire:
Live Free or Die. I crest a hill and there’s
a dog, dead, big German Shepherd, snow on his fur,
dog blood frozen on the road. I stop the car.
A man comes out of his house through the snowy fog:
he’s old, he’s in long underwear, he’s weeping, he
says, “You killed him, mister, you take him away.”
I tie a rope from my bumper to the dog’s neck. 
“Don’t drag him,” the man says. “His name was Luke.”
I haul the carcass into the rear seat and drive,
blood on my clothes, blood on my brand-new car, 
searching the radio but there’s nothing but NPR:
Garrison Keillor reading from Robert Frost, He will not
mind my stopping here to watch his woods fill up with snow.
Bullshit, I say to Luke. He will. He’ll call the
New Hampshire State Police. What does Frost know? He
is as dead as you are. I stop next to some snowy woods
to throw Luke out, but I can’t do it. I am divorced.
My kids are off at school. He’s all I’ve got. I turn
south on 202 and reach McDowell but there’s no one up,
a light in just one studio, somebody writing late.
It’s snowing again. It’s cold. I open the rear door
and pick Luke up, but he seems lighter, he feels warm,
I open his chest up like a winter coat. I put it on,
I pull his back over my shoulders, big Shepherd head
over my own. I am amazed that the eyes work, the nose
breathes, the mouth opens when I move my lips. I walk
to the lighted window and look in. He’s in there with his
Pepsi and his computer, trying to write a poem but he can’t
get the last line, and he can’t sleep. I rub my nose against
his window. I want to play, I want him out here, I want
a stick thrown over the wet snow. I pull the fur tighter,
I rub a paw over the pane, but he won’t hear. He lights
up a cigar, what does he care, he’s got the photos of
his ex-wife, his kids, why would he need a dog?
It feels like time to get down on all fours and find
some action, but the only light comes from the blind moon,
blind smell of snow, woodsmoke and porcupine, somewhere
a distant horse, giving his harness bells a shake. Maybe
the cooks have started breakfast: smell of brown sugar,
strawberries, French toast, then something bitter, maybe
one of the visual artists coming into heat, I’m not quite
sure. It’s fun. I frisk my tail. I follow my nose and run.

When Asked Why I Write Poems About Japanese Mythology
   — A letter from the suburbs of Seattle to the suburbs of Tokyo

I will send my voices out over the water
where the same cedars that litter my coast
used to tower over yours. Once green,
your cities have nibbled forests into bonsai. 
Our hinoki trees are shipped across the ocean
for your sacred temples now.
Postcards of volcanoes rise from a blue sky
in the background of our homes, we share
zones of tsunami, seasons of weeping cherry. 

I read about women’s spirits 
haunting peony lanterns in the forest. 
Men follow them, fall in love 
with women long dead. In shallow graves 
rotted with tree roots, they still sing. 
And here in pages hammered 
from your language into mine,
sometimes with clumsy fists,
I have listened to the bush-warbler
mourn her children, the fox-wife’s eyes
in the darkness have warned me 
of the growling of dogs and fire. 
And when they disappear in silence,
it is not really silence. Their echoes
burn themselves into stone,
into the living screens of my childhood,
fill my mouth with ghosts.

Ghosts sit in my mouth and sing.
Our grandfathers were at war.
I grew up in the birthplace
of bombs that poisoned children,
burned holes into your sacred earth.
Their poison is part of me.

In the shelter of a shrine, a small girl
holds an umbrella. She becomes a white bird.
She whispers and a thousand cranes, 
a thousand burning flowers
pile up inside me, spill out onto these pages.
Forgive me, ghosts, for my hard,
unbeautiful hands, for my tripping tongue,
as you demand a healed future, some untorn prayer.

SOMETIMES I SEE MY COUNTRY

First, you must understand how I live in a borrowed country, 
The sky wide as a storm, but one that never gets off the ground.

There is far too much room out west to get lost in. 
Back east, our sky supported itself on clouds of late summer oak.

Winter, we knew, would bring that world to its knees.
Trees starved year after year. Sometimes, we hardly held on. 

But still the hills broke, frozen waves against fields.
Dry corn stooped and shuffled its brittle limbs.

In a country like that, the sky seems to fit. 
Sometimes it gathered itself into rain that fell between hills
To be reborn a river. 
People wore the right clothes: leather boots with hard soles.

And all the times we came to wear ourselves out, you could believe it.

It’s just that the sky here doesn’t fit — it’s not that I haven’t touched it. 
It works its rain into me like nails. Timber here is that soft.

Out back, past the star magnolias, I found rhubarb growing near
Some dumpsters along a warehouse wall.

I thought of my grandmother, who planted rhubarb and corn
In a sky so large she couldn’t keep it from pushing through the fences.
I carry that garden around in my heart —
I don’t know, I guess I just like the toughest plants.

I moved to this city on a whim.
I thought I might learn to love its car lots, 
Its newspapers blown under busses, the men who rest their carts 
Under the dogwoods and drink their Steel Reserve.

I thought I might believe in my fortune: Soon you will be sitting
On top of the world. I haven’t the strength to argue.

I lost many things that move: a lover, a dog, money, respect.
Meaning everyone else lost all respect for me.
All my hills gone bald, my skull prickling with bare oaks.

Is it any wonder sometimes I see what is left of my country?
That it makes sense to me why the skin of the fruit grows bitter?
Home, we think, is where you hang your head, or hang around, or just hang.
We live under a fantastic sky, it’s true, but here they call it 
Poverty with a view.

In less than a week, all the stars fell from the trees.

THE GOD OF THE NORMANDY COAST

When the God of the Normandy Coast
sits down for His afternoon pastry,

the waiter asks Him if He wants coffee
or wine with His snack and if He notices

the dead man in the car just off Main
and Grand. The God is rearranging napkins

into white crosses. Such neat little rows.
That is why He is the God and you are

the dishwasher watching Him through slits
in the dumbwaiter. He chooses wine,

which was predictable. The dead man
comes up to Him, sits down, asks,

“Well, what’s the verdict?” The God
shrugs His shoulders. Over fifty years

now and still the shrugging of shoulders
You’d think the only real dead were

in the past. You feel like shaking
His shoulders, shouting, “Come out

of it!” But you are dead too, waiting
in line, washing those dishes till they shine.

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At the company town hall meeting,		                         //in the movie theater again
we see the same slides. The financial guys	                         //old plots, new faces
spin the numbers again, a visual rhetoric	                         //fake stars painted on the scene
of gray bars rising adjacent to red. Someone	                 //dull plastic, factory-made 
tells a politically safe joke, and we laugh on cue,                   //generic and eggshell-empty
our hands already under our chairs 		                        //hostages to paychecks and bills
searching in vain for a taped envelope of tickets                   //or any way out of here
or some coupon for a show we will never 	                       //not in this life, dear Buddha,
have time to see. A trim woman who is stuck	               //with an echoing palatial home 
in her mid-twenties comes forward in her $3000 suit,          //and its invisible seams
smiles, and tells us nothing. It’s been another great year,   //resplendent in its impeccable lie
we hear through the gleam of clinically bleached teeth,      //perfectly timed clicking
but the market has been tough. Too bad about bonuses.    //nothing gained, nothing at all

WITHOUT WORDS

When we were not speaking,
I wondered how to tell you without words
where I was going, how I would walk
outside and breathe slowly
to catch my heart before it raced
into the swamp of singing
that prowls about us.
It was before we invented fire,
before words,
before the shape of words.
When we did not speak,
the air still burst with visions,
animals purring, yowling,
chaos parting air and water,
the moon rising from underground gardens.
When we did not speak,
our fists formed meaning —
unmistakable, furious
curled into our mouths,
too blue to utter,
too red to grasp,
too green to listen.
We wove baskets of grief,
killed ferrets and doves,
skinned them and ate.
When we learned to speak,
the words became round beads
we put on strings, chains of meaning
to hang around our necks —
too many syllables rivering
through our veins like prophecy.
We invented god to interpret the heavens for us,
realized our tongues are small instruments
if we wish to speak to the stars.

THINGS
     for W.S. Merwin

     If you look for me in this street

     you’ll find me with my violin

     prepared to break into song, 

     prepared to die.
          from “For Everyone,” Pablo Neruda
                                     
You translated his love poems and went on to other things —
Beowulf, The Cid, Lorca, your palm trees, your own work 

while Neruda lived here in those years, building his third home, 
adding room after room to fill with things and more things. 

It is easy to forget the dusty beach towns — Algarrobo, El Quisco —
their graffiti and crowds when you turn off toward Isla Negra. 

Cypress and monkey pines cling to the cliffs. Black volcanic rock 
juts from the Pacific below; seaweed whirls in wild blue water. 

It is February summer. I want to take it all in, the things, his 
‘blue shore of silence’ above his ‘university of the waves.’ 

A giant glassy-eyed fish watches from the roof. An ancient 
red train engine guards the walk’s pink profusion of flowers. 

A caretaker’s house he bought in ’39 with earnings from books 
sold since his teens, he re-designed it to look like a ship, adding 

rooms to hold his collections. Though terrified of water, 
he gathered everything he could find from ships and the sea. 

‘I traveled building joy,’ he carved on the weathered wood
lintel under the red tin-roof. You enter walking the seashell floor 

in the foyer, then cross sliced tree trunks sunk into the concrete 
floor of the dining room. Shelves on every wall hold rainbows 

of colored glass: three hundred old bottles from France, hundreds 
of green, blue, and red glass piano leg protectors, dishes from Turkey, 

Russia, Sweden. Ships in bottles, masks from everywhere, closets filled
with colorful hats for costume parties. The heavy wood dining table still 

set for nine waits for Neruda to take the biggest captain’s chair. 
“I am the captain of dry land,” he often said, looking out from his
many telescopes, collecting hundreds of painted ships’ frontispieces.  

Six thousand shells he gave to a museum; another spiky, spiny, 
pearly thousand reside here in his shell room. In his study, where 

he wrote only in green (the color of hope), washing his hands 
before and after writing, he kept cases of blue and yellow butterflies; 

big, ugly beetles, the Chilean beetle, longer than a finger, his favorite. 
He wrote surrounded by photographs of his mentors: Baudelaire 

to the right on his carved desk; Whitman, ‘his poetic father’ on the left;  
Lorca, whom he loved and grieved in Spain on the wall above. 

And meerschaum pipes, hundreds of their carved white heads resting 
in cases. Murals of stone and rock on the way to the horse room, 

his ‘happiest horse’ sculpture, larger than life-size, acquired after 
forty-five years of negotiation, inviting his friends to his horse party 

asking them to bring the horse gifts when the horse’s parlor 
and men’s bathroom pasted with dirty postcards were finished. 

Enter the Kovache (‘cozy’ in Mapuche language) room filled 
with wooden animals  ‘A house of toys,’ he said, ‘to play with 

from morning to night.’ Not just his own interests, but the local
women he helped, whose hundreds of pieces of embroidery he sold

on his travels, the thousands of Spanish Civil War refugees he paid 
for and re-settled in Chile. You catch your breath outside sitting 

on Tiburon, the red and white wood fishing boat he built for cocktail 
parties overlooking the Pacific. His passions are clearer now — poems

about his socks, an ear of corn, a tuna on ice, a chestnut on the ground, 
salt, a lemon. Things. So many things. I have tried to take it all in 

as a gift to myself, to you who made him ours long ago — these common 
things still singing above the sea to a very uncommon man. 

IN MICHAEL ROBINS' CLASS MINUS ONE

At the desk where the boy sat, he sees the Chicago River.
It raises its hand.
It asks if metaphor should burn.
He says fire is the basis for all forms of the mouth.
He asks, why did you fill the boy with your going?
I didn’t know a boy had been added to me, the river says.
Would you have given him back if you knew?
I think so, the river says, I have so many boys in me,
	I’m worn out stroking eyes looking up at the day. 
Have you written a poem for us, he asks the river,
	and the river reads its poem, 
	and the other students tell the river 
	it sounds like a poem the boy would have written,
	that they smell the boy’s cigarettes 
	in the poem, they feel his teeth 
	biting the page.
And the river asks, did this boy dream of horses
	because I suddenly dream of horses, I suddenly dream.
They’re in a circle and the river says, I’ve never understood
	round things, why would leaving come back 
	to itself? 
And a girl makes a kiss with her mouth and leans it
	against the river, and the kiss flows away
	but the river wants it back, the river makes sounds
	to go after the kiss.
And they all make sounds for the river to carry to the boy. 
And the river promises to never surrender the boy’s shape 
	to the ocean.

RELATIVITY

Leaves are jumping from the trees.
At the sales meeting I wonder if suicide is catching. 
While Dave in his cumulus shirt reviews figures 
on the growth rate of suckers, I leave the room 
through a wormhole of boredom and have a child 
named Carla. In the seconds I don’t listen 
to the horse galloping through Dave’s lips, 
Carla plays softball and grows into a woman 
who is symmetrical and happy. Dave sits down 
and leaves are still brightly killing themselves. 
I think of dialing 911 but am plagued by the sense 
I learned a different way to cut a PBJ, 
just for Carla, a style no one else knows, 
that she’s inside the light years, looking out 
for me, imagining I’m just over the hill, tie off, 
under a maple catching every bit of orange 
before it shrouds the ground, as I do 
each fall to weave the dress she calls 
“fire fire, I’m on fire.”

PHOTOGRAPH OF JOHN BERRYMAN ON THE BACK OF LOVE & FAME     
   I have no idea whether we live again
   — John Berryman

I see the man who wrote his 11 intemperate letters
to the Lord is the man half grateful near his end,
a man almost at ease and deep behind his whiskers here.
A charmer who won’t be completely run to ground,

grizzled as the granite going to pieces at his back,
he’s channeling his last cloud-split reasoning
directly at the doubtful sky, uncovering any worth
or last ditch redeeming chance, and carefully

subscribing to that. Who then knows about the soul —
chipped away with age, grey with cosmic grit,
some evanescent paste holding together beyond
our bones? I have some interest in this late line

of questioning, that desperate dodge and grab at
conviction while balancing on one foot, the sinking
weight of everything you likely know on the other.
I have a friend who revered and loved the man, as,

I imagine, God intended us to respect that knot
of light burning in the rare and fervent few among us.
33 years ago, Berryman posed, nonchalant
before the lens in Ireland — Latinate, distilled,

high lonesome ad jazzy riffs mixed with reflex
and a syntactic ear for idiosyncrasy, inward
somnambulism — a sober self-estimate that held him
steady amid the wobbling flames, dreaming

in the distracted atmosphere with love and fame
trailing a ways off from where he later waved
then stepped away, dawdling toward the glory
of the dust. For a man who could not much love

himself he came generous with his love and trust
at last in God. O, time wears us away to little
more than salt or sea air — here us elsewhere, but how
to know which metaphysical hammerlock’s going

to pin us down the years and force capitulation?
Yet, he’s still credible, walking the edge, a famous
sparkle of doubt in the eyes, teetering in the blind
up-drafts of belief — both sides of the street in play,

sand beneath the soft soles of his feet. He expects
to fall and will blame, ex post facto and no doubt
rightly, logically so, God, when he is not there,
to swoosh out of the unphysical aether to hold,

metaphorically, his hand, in His infinite one,
that ardent strope of flesh and blood above
the common traffic of the world, where sooner or
later all our blood and bony minds fall to wreck,

one afternoon. One day to the next, I find myself
as reasonably sure as Berryman about the afterlife,
and I would, at 50-something, line up behind him,
my right hand raised into the air in hope of one.

But my heart’s not finally in it; it’s still half bitter
like a root vegetable they always said was good
for you, and so will not likely lift me, heavy out
of this world, as his must have — singing praising

purely the fog thick invisible source, the blind-
spot in creation sustained by desperate lines,
and he dead-grateful for his gift, disavowing
eloquence alone. Yet somehow her firmly clutched

in one mildly shaking hand a glass half-full of Faith.
For any proof, I have only, as I said, the friend who
knew him, this photo, his clipped and thorny song —
the conflicted pledges of an absent minded God . . .

ARS POETICA VIII: AFTER HIKING MANY MILES TO HEAR THE MASTER SPEAK

When asked for a definition of poetry, the master said, “beware all 
     enterprises that require new clothes.”  
When asked for a definition of poetry, the master took his hatchet to the 
     shed and shredded two quarter logs for kindling.  
When asked for a definition of poetry, the master kissed the questioner 
     on the forehead then cuffed an ear.  
When asked, the master said, “In the shadow of the mountain, snow will 
     last long into August, however hot the afternoons.” 
When asked, “Six girls without pants is not an excuse for wisdom.” 
When asked, the master sighed and replied, “There are things in the 
     world that can kill you, and one of them is rats.” 
When asked, the master rose from his wooden bench and sliced a kitten 
     in half.  
Shouted: “The last thing Icarus thought.”  
When asked the definition of poetry, the master points at his heart, 
     “Somewhere, wildflowers and trout, somewhere the sparrow lives 
     without fear of its shadow.”
 

THE MOTHER OF THE MOUNTAINS

     But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the
        thickening center; corruption
     Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s feet    
        there are left the mountains.1
                                                         —Robinson Jeffers
	
I. Hearing Takes More than Ears 

If a mama bear gets angry, imagine the Mother of the Mountains.
Mess with Her children, She’ll dust off an avalanche; 

step out of line, She’ll realign your bones. 
She’s a blue-eyed beauty,

and the mountains have their Mother’s eyes: deep lakes. 
Gaze into them, you’ll see their thoughts like fish—

quick schools, slow rainbows-—look deeper, 
and you’ll learn to dream like a stone.

What does She feed them? Rain for breakfast.
Anything else? She peels them the sun for lunch.

And at night? Big helpings of quiet, 
then the Mother of the Mountains sings them to sleep with snow.

The trees are Her grandkids; She brings them birds to play with.
Whenever it’s their birthday, She gives them an owl

’cause though She’s a blue-eyed beauty, She’s still kind.
Even soft . . . even fragile. . . .

Wolves howl to Her to show their gratitude. What about you? 


II. Not Even the Mother of the Mountains Knows How She was Born 

She might have been fire and twilight—fire in the Earth’s womb, 
waiting like an egg, and everywhere evening 

seeking a way inside.
She might have been fire and ocean.

Or just the answer to fire’s question, Why all this heat?
She can’t remember,

but She wears the colors of those elements:
red and orange and yellow, and under them blue.

She can’t remember.
But Her children are burning rock; we know that much;

and Her love for them is the water we drink
and that love made the valleys we live in. . . .

None of us know where we come from, not really.
Questions climb higher than answers.

Still, the Mother of the Mountains raised Her children up skyward,
giving us places greater than ourselves to look.


III. Some Mountains are Strays. None are Orphans. 

Of course She’s happy when they stay together,
but the Mother of the Mountains understands being apart.

You can draw Orion with your eyes each night;
it doesn’t change the fact they’re separate stars.

You can join any group—there are millions—but joining
can’t subtract you; you’re still one.

One peak in the Andes.
In the Himalayas. In the Alps.

One astonishing face of the Tetons.
One shoulder of the Okanogans.

One slender arm
or curving hip of the North Cascades. . . . 

But you’re no more beautiful, maybe less, than Mauna Loa
off in the ocean, surrounded by all that blue.

You’re no surer than Kilimanjaro
though he stands apart from a continent,

away and above, like his Mother, in thinner air.


IV. The Mother of the Mountains in Disguise 

Sometimes She puts on eagle’s wings and comes near.
Not often, and not to give us an omen;

eagles and mountains are both brown and white, 
and that’s all. 

I’ve seen it: 
Once, at the summit, She circled above and flew on. 

Another time She was riding the wind straight down . . . 
like the wind is a river, like the wind has edges

and waterfalls. 
Then yesterday She perched on the roof of my dream:

my back yard wider, the mountains closer,
the stream running cold 

where I’ve always imagined a stream.
I woke up thirsty, 

and those first drops splashing on the window screen
made the whole day smell of rain.

It wasn’t a sign. Don’t be an interpreter.
Desire has meaning like a bird has meaning; that’s all.

Who wouldn’t be an eagle? Who hasn’t looked at what they love
and felt a lifting, or gliding, or plunge?


V. Adding It Up 

1.  Bears belong to the mountains, not to us.
2.  And lakes belong to the mountains, not to us.

3.  The full moon silhouettes the mountains first,
     and when bears bend down to drink, they drink its light.

4.  Forests are the mountains’ children,
     so we’d better write good stories for our shelves, 

     stories that last as long as trees last, that grow 
     in widening circles. . . . 

5.  Deer may take from our gardens.
6.  We get back magic in return:

     a small amazement, illusion of floating,
     a sudden now-you-see-’em, now-you-don’t.

7.  Sex at the top of a mountain makes a boy;
     at night, on the lakeshore, a girl.

8.  We can’t ignore what’s happening. 
9.  Feeling’s not a choice. It’s everyone’s job.

10. In that hour before daybreak, even a city might concentrate,
     might quiet itself awhile

     and sense an older, deeper pulse.


VI. Rising and Falling and Rising 

The Mother of the Mountains has long red hair, long as the horizon.
Mornings, when She braids it, She sets the new world turning.

Evenings, when She combs it out,
Her hair is the western sky.

It is here, in this night time,
that Her dreams come open like the stars.

I like the one about a man and a woman,
how their bodies fit together, and sometimes their minds.

Sometimes the woman has long red hair
and the man is standing at the window

and she crosses the space between them
to look out too. . . . 

Sometimes she’s reading at the table,
the words appearing like days—a page at a time;

skip ahead, they’re still empty.
When he asks her what comes next, she doesn’t know.

It is here, in this dreaming, that the Mother of the Mountains
is like us: full of love and aloneness.

And it’s this dream She’s had, about a man and a woman,
if the city wakes blanketed with snow.
 

VII.  Wolves Howl to Her to Show Their Gratitude. What About You? 

When people remember what counts most,
they measure time by their children.

So to speak with the Mother of the Mountains
takes 28 days. You must learn to be patient.

Ask the lynx. It carries that waiting all winter,
then turns that waiting into speed.

Ask the moon, never closing the distance.
Both of them know fullness won’t last long;

there’s always more beginning, more going;
tell the Mother of the Mountains something new.

Tell Her your story if you have to,
but make it tie the river to the wind 

and lift up the green smell of moss
and the memory of someone’s body

you never got to touch
and the jumping drum of your heart. . . . 

If one day you see a heron—a long blue stillness
at the water’s edge, or a blue impossible flying—

then the Mother of the Mountains did listen.
And Her answer is yes.





1. Jeffers, Robinson. “Shine, Perishing Republic,” The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Ed. Tim Hunt. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2001. P 23. 

Mail Order Bride

A strange star, liquid skies, no smoking please.
I make you good wife: slender figure, coffee eyes.
You will recognize me by the flames
surrounding my head. 
You will recognize me in a little black number.
Insert obligatory comments here 
about excess of love and varicose veins 
but love itself is a blue and protruding thing.
Panties . . . this is where it all starts.
I want a gentleman with strong forearms.
I want long talks late at night,
a clean scent, the cool ruin.
I want an annual income of at least one-hundred thousand.
I’m most happy when dot dot dot
The first thing people usually notice about me is dot dot dot
I like weekends at the beach,
the arp of seals, gasping the sodium 
but what’s a mermaid to do with so many crushed anemones?
“Eucalyptus wind!”
Someone shouts from the high cliffs.
There is someone out there.
That someone could be you.
She smiles often, makes friends easily,
her peeves are well hidden in polite societies.
“Will you marry me?” I say        three second delay.
A plane, a snore, blue candy in wax paper.
You will recognize me walking on coals
near the terminal.
You will recognize me by my red hat.
Miss now Mrs. 
Now immigration procedures 
now frantic signatures. We are fumbling and fumbling
unzipping the zippers that lead to nowhere. 

The Selected poems
        All things are tragic when a mother watches!
                                                          —O’Hara

I won’t concentrate enough for the joy in novels
& would much rather set my gaze on Hopper
or at least his grave where he lies with Josephine.
Look at me, smoking a cigarette, it’s much better
for breathing & easier for the mouth than words.
It’s true I pushed our chairs apart, but haven’t
I said that already? How oranges are delicious
with seeds? I see a blossomed tree in the landfill
& I like “The Hunger,” but skip the longer ones.
It’s true I never liked your fun, how you picked
that fabulous nose, at a dinner table nonetheless.
I am not the violent man, but I’m man enough
by evening to leave this blood across the walls.
Oh yes, living: the ant in the shadow of the heel.

As Water Reflects What is Above My Head

Our woeful rowboat, Kismet named,
the stars above and below us.
Everything drifts. 
The oar that was in my hand
is now not in my hand. 
My little stacks of paper blow away. 
Something tickles the edge of my eyelid.
The water’s surface trembles. 
The moon reappears in the left-hand corner, 
hardnosed, a robber-baron, 
collecting acres of night
the humble stars have reserved.
This is how it looks from here,
that the moon is greedy and a thief. 
I wish he would be kinder.
My oar floats across his upturned face.
I wish I were a poet.
I want to say something 
foolish. Something flinches.
What a large cage the sky is.
How opaque the bay, and pale
in parts, how it sparkles 
like nailpolish on a girl I saw once 
in a shopping mall in Dallas.
How she is but a speck, how I am. 
How each word is essential 
and tiny. That the universe too 
is essential and tiny, so small
that even my oar disturbs it—See 
how I touch the water in one place 
and it echoes at the other end of the world—
Oar you are so pretty.
I promise to use you as kindling 
as soon we reach the well-earned shore.

One Thousand Chipmunks

One thousand chipmunks
woke him up from a deep sleep

and he mistook them
for angels

when he could simply 
have been amazed at a thousand 
chipmunks in one place.

Godchild

The woman who gave me to God can’t pronounce my name
anymore. Every word was pulled out by the roots.
My godfather, my dentist, used to take me up in his plane, 
used to frighten me with his love. He made me tiny rings out
of gold pulled from other people’s teeth and could fit 
all of his giant hand inside my mouth. Now, my mother tells me 
he is lost on his long legs. Since his wife folded in half, he sits
all day in a dark room rolled up in smoke while the t.v.
shouts and sings and makes no sense.
He named my dad, Curly; my brother, Squirrelly.  Her name
was Queenie, but I am just me and I can’t tell when
he lifts his head up and looks towards my face
if he recognizes that I am his, or feels the same tug,
like bone pulled from bone when I say the word, love.

THE DAY WAS LIKE WIDE WATER

     winding down, a flat gray luster at the last of it.
     Neither of the phones was ringing.
     Flashes fell like a dull weather on the end-table’s leaning heap of mail.
     They were holding the cage open off-screen so the wolf could lurch and stumble out onto the grassy flatland.
     The dogs had let up for a while, the mouse had stopped scrambling inside the bathroom wall.
     They were panning through the sawgrass, the sky sealed off entirely with thin scud.
     The hour was pressed smooth as nickel.
     There was not one message, and nothing overdue.
     It could be spent without consequence, soft and flat and manageable as it was.
     A reply invited, but not required.
     It could be dropped without any jangling alarm.

THE EONS, IN THEIR MILLIONS,

after the story’s one free instant of rising, the singularity, the place where 
   it all seethes uncountable and free, untouchable by law, after 10-43 
   seconds
the eras weigh back down in a gravity like middle age,

the cargo plane stalls tail-down toward the teeming residential streets of a day’s
   overloaded front-page language,
the phrases continually come down, hardening to prose before they hit, 
   before they break, telling what’s left to tell,

the denouement, the fifteen billion years of physical law,
and what flourishes at the end of that long verdict.

“Hello.”
                  
                  Prisoner inside my mouth
                  biting words into my tongue.

“Do you have the time to take a short survey?”

                  Light travels slow without windows.

“What local radio stations do you listen to?”                            

                  If I lie still long enough
                  my aorta will tremble,
                  some birds answer their own calls.

“How many hours a day do you spend watching television?”

                  The octopus’ eye is similar to mine,
                  people still live in Pompeii,
                  trees without leaves are holding their breath.

“What brand of coffee do you prefer?”                                                                   

                  When you’re thinking olive blossoms
                  I can smell the oil on your lips.

“How much do you contribute to charity?”

                  I once bought an opal necklace

                  to prove I don’t believe in ghosts.

“Are you happy with your current credit card?”

                  The future is still trying to escape
                  from lemonade-sour shivers.

“Are you the man of the house?”

                  I am a wind chime underwater.

I always liked the smell of
Christmas in church
not the Christmas that you have to bow
to a pot of frankincense
or the Christmas when
a woman with Tourette’s sits
behind your pew
yelling fucking bitch all mass
but the Christmas when
a really beautiful woman
sans panty-lines
sings “O Holy Night” so
numbingly, that the night
really does seem holy.
I wasn’t sure what to make
of the other woman’s outbursts—
she couldn’t possibly
be mad at God. Maybe she was pissed
at Mary—loose woman—
having an affair with the Almighty
and now we all have to be saved
because of it, because God
couldn’t keep his hands
to himself. We were all perfectly
happy being heathens, we liked
when the world swallowed us
into its flooding belly and we swam
until our arms just gave out
our bodies
sinking to the bottom
where we hear that incessant
beautiful humming
maybe Ave Maria
which the smooth singer
can really belt out. Poor Mary,
she never wanted children.
Imagine your son nailed to a cross.
If I live to be as old as Jesus
I too would hate the horizon
like I hate a toothache
reminding me
my body is rotting.

I will never, despite the spinning,
fly off the Earth. 

It’s just not possible.
The grip that holds it all together—

all the oceans and coffee cups,
wheat fields and butter knives,

porches and the cats on them, cats
who’ve seen it all before;

all the mornings turning birds into music
and streams turning stones into music

and women turning me into music
when they smile, when they tell stories;

all the sunlight and shadows
and moonlight and shadows;

all the many moods of rain, 
and so much more—those hands 

keeping things together
hold me here, despite the unlikelihood;

despite odds of infinity to one, 
they’re a surefire bet. Big hands. Galactic.

Hands building winds in the wind shop
then sawing some down into breezes. 

For every thermal updraft, 
fashioning a hawk.

Hands shaping mice in the mouse shop for food, 
seeds and cones in the wood shop for food 

with enough left over for forests and orchards 
and maples for the pancakes of the world.

Or arranging flowers in the flower shop,
or inventing the smell of cinnamon,

or creating the flavor of peaches, 
the purring in cats . . . none of it necessary, 

no explanation or meaning. 
Which means they’re an artist’s hands,   

means you and I are paintings, 
means daylight and darkness are our frame, 

and we will never, even with the spinning, 
fly off the Earth while we’re alive. 

That’s a fact, but some facts are magic:
Like our minds. Like sex. 

Like every evening the sun sets. 
Like grapes are for much more than vitamins. 

Like a cat’s tail, up and casually flicking, 
is telling us the cat feels at home.