Poetry - The Harvard Advocate

What if the brain’s pink impulses can only disappoint us, what if why, wearing that black,
backless address, is not a who?
We are the ones who do the crimes: and yet you are the wanted one.
The episodic soul is, like a sitcom, filmed in unreal time.
To care about this sort of thing is as wise as a digital clock.
But if the sky weren’t trapped in days’ and nights’ revolving door, the undomesticable
zodiac would use our every coffined litter as a tray.
And arguably London is more spit than shine, for days;
but does it not shine somewhere: somewhere so clean we can see ourselves in everything?
If you can, give voice to the throaty red anthurium, to the window, to the wall
that makes these rooms’ matter, and these stanzas, matter.
Through change, a whipping post becomes postmodern art.
Through change, a Second Advent turns to venture capital.
The episodic soul is moving at a quickening remove
from this unchecked, unbalanced world of checks and balances . . .
Dances a totentanz and sings otototoi
at billions of creatures clocking off into the void.
Then comes to us our luck, like a black cat
in a dark room, purring ergonomically.
Then sends it us, price-guns like tasers at our hips,
to value all the world – its messianic shabbiness.
Both pearls and vinegars have mothers, it now seems,
and the mother of invention is necessity;
and boy do we need you.

The same thing that makes a rat a rat and not a knotweed,
scampering across the third rail at Downtown Crossing.
He is after a half-eaten BLT that somebody has flung
between the tracks. And one of his front teeth is chipped
and he is winning. The thing that makes a knotweed
spread its thighs out west until its veins can supply a body,
then another. What makes a horse a horse if not
the gleeful declaration of such from the seventh train window
that day? There can only be so many poems about
staring Barrels down. A country only being a country at gunpoint
or between the coal-laden tracks of work boots. Instead:
a country is a country because I say so. Because I hold your hand
while waiting for the train and when you reach for my waist
I can think myself a rat stumbling upon a rare feast.
Because when we leave the station the snow will be gray
and falling in lazy circles from the low-hung clouds
like the ash that follows some great fire—
but still, I know we’ll stick our tongues out to catch the flakes
like the small things we are.

Cars angstrom up Abbeyhill, horserace hats bobbing towards
Holyrood Palace with modular suits and kilts. Today’s event is
royal or political just as grace and water are. A car lets a harried taxi
driver out, bestowing the former, while a shop called ‘Return of the
Mac’ advertises sweatshop tartan. And still the beauty of stones and
sash windows, six panelled like the abs of the actor who has a house
nearby and pays tax in fully legal ways. The sky threatens rain and
weather discourse, and I eschew the pub for America like my Irish
ancestors. My America is plundering the other americas for their
coffee beans but I enjoy the seat, peering at ‘Ye Olde Christmas
Shoppe’ through a July fug broken only by steak-bake fumes from
a Greggs van. We go to the polls in two days and the image of
removing soggy pastry past all use and consumption feels too
benign. If the palace walls should fall, water dry up, stone fissure
and windows fall; if the actor’s smile seems only naked-smug, and
all Americas reach for each other; as Christmas becomes neither
here nor there, then or now; if the secular holds and Greggs
crumbles, may we yet find grace beyond spasm of trafficked
generosity. As someone clears their throat in Holyroodhouse, the
taxi driver escapes Abbeyhill and reminds himself to renew his tax.

after Ellen Bass

O black bean boy, O owl eyes,
O package of muscle and fur.
My cautious companion, my
in-love-with-me friend. What will we do
without your low grumbles
your hot-water-bottle body
beside us all winter? O sun-scorched nose,
O wacky teeth that can’t bite a thing, O
fluted, veined callalily ears
taking the world straight to the heart.
There is no guy I’d rather sleep with,
no slinky tuxedo like yours.
When you frolic and hop
in your nightly routine, the sounds
of cracked glass and low howls
are like the heartbeats in a womb.
In that embryonic waterfall, we sleep.
Two lucky mothers.
O bloated bladder, O swollen,
sleepy heart. When we nearly lost you,
we sought you in our grief
to ease our grief. We held your exhausted body
to us. O seeing soul, O aperture closing and
widening, catching the landscape
of more than mere humans can know.
Beloved beast, dear body that heals and heals.
Tiny horse, honeyed contralto,
our leaping, whiskered seal —

In the mountains we chewed melons,
sifting everything as two seeds caught
slippery between the rockiest white teeth,

bald 12,000 foot fists, veined with memoratic
rivers, a small feeling of past lives... you are seeing
visions of the long-haired boy from the river

with your neurons in the dark— a Dutch
sans colors, his leathery belly as barefoot
as the operating floor, your heathery hands

shook like a hummingbird with patchy
instinct, tracing bee-lines with purple
chalk, scooping in the cison, hopscotch

with a coda, round and round
we always gnaw on the same subjects,
teetering over a stanza and landing

on an ant bed of spruce and
the impermanence of first loves—the
mountains hold memories the way

muscles do— a cornsilk glacial tear
greases a fishy earthen canal
which you probe with blue gloves

to count centimeters, calling avalanche
from behind the operatic curtain
which opens like the palms of Atlas

to hold the crying pink sun
chewing oxygen and his mother’s bloody
skyscrape, the world gasping for black

while you stand cataloging carmine
rings on a fallen spruce, wondering
how this time of year, seasonless and

shifty, always reminds you of that boy
from the river, how nothing you studied
in medical school ever made sense and yet

the decomposing shells of birds
smell familiar, and the unstitched
threads of your mind are momentarily loosened,

asking me why the present moment
is never lucid, why light impregnates
through smaller objects

and how could the watermelon-shaped caste
cover horizons unbirthed
to your jealous pale eyes,

scalpels to the bark, each old lover
itching the heart which, like the never-ending
sentence, is inflammatory when left

unoperated.

litter the body open will boy / be boat / shudder upon body / be rockabyed / be strangered in body /
lash like slick oil / be boneless / slump downwards / dissect jawbone / be bodied like oil spill / regret
riverboat home / be rowed / into slick summer, street-signed / be eulogized / split film from lip to /
be gutted open / body foolproof / be a bullet home / sleuth sand dunes / be brown-body / hymn
unraveled / be through with desire / fish impaled on foreign language / be proper noun / split his lip
voweled / be harlot / scale the tectonics of teeth / be punch-drunk / slit silt / be three-eyed, spool
open / this cliff / be want / the cusp whole-bodied / be flayed / listerine limericked / be grunt-work /
sex table-salted neural refrain / be kali / war cling-film on tongue / be gutless / scale spliced outwards
/ be derivative / rivered into forest / be orange tree / peeled by sun-shock / be gummed / grapefruit
rot by heat / be heatstroke / snip open livewire of / be lipped / at crossroads / be exit sign / slick-
signed with / be summer-blood / threadbare scythe-cut / be perfect o / lips imitation exorcism / be
cockwhore / fig-fingered on blood fruit / be tongue / slit into silt / be moondust / infinity slid into
encore

after Tracy K. Smith

What do you have to say for yourself?
Where are the keys? Why do you shake?
Who do you hope to feed with this sweat?
Who are you fueling? With my hands
behind my back, can you guess the lucky fist?
What does your body have to say for itself?
And its body? And the one after that?
Where do you come from? Where are you going?
How far back was the greenhouse? How far
forward is the graveyard? With your hands behind
your back, can you make a fist? Can you reach
the glove box? Whose beating heart do you hope
to kill with this sweat? One of us always tells the truth.
The other one is driving.

We watch a cleft sunset sink. I think of dogs

and their dark downs of fur, circling the bay

/ sestina for the feeling of wanting to shed all your skin, wash it, flip it inside out

When we were boys we boys
Used to dive there from there
From where the ships came in
And they still do— the ships
I mean not so much the boys
Who like gulls would plow their
Feathers like fields. Now boys
We have sheep to herd and fathers
To be, and the sun was already
Setting on that lastly swallowed salt.

i

the first guy i kissed told me you have this crazy thing
where you refuse to settle within reasonable confidence

our plane’s wing slips over the crimson moon
and the man beside me asks for
a bloody mary and I ask for ginger ale
air bubbles I choke through my nose
into my torqued stomach full of
pesto pasta and sun-dried tomatoes
reminiscent of the old salad bar by my

I want to say God and mean it again.

The field is empty but its dead trees are

the best kind of gorgeous. The mountains

Just when I think yellow won’t happen again,
the water gets still enough to hold the sun.
I am reckless enough to believe the world
welcomes me. Just when I think lavender
is over, the meadow wakes up, the butterfly
appears, the sun sets once again. I never
meant to want too much from love, but
the claws of tulips raged through our garden,
and I knew to run west, where horse apples
punctuate the trails and prickly pear asterisks
the edges—a warning not to stray.

‘cause cuz told me u liked it,
playin’ in the dirt           w/ no shoes
but leavin’ ain't the worst thing you did

So we fled the city like whooping cranes. With two pens, I built
cabins. Your laugh erected the foundations. A nearby trickle
of water sounded like money. We lived in lakes. We sunk wet,
muddy toes into the toothless dirt. The heavens closed
their eyes and would not open. White dwarfs, bulging, throats
whooping with laughter. I write outwards, in the muddy margins
of my life. The pines were our pillows; the rain a runny nose. You
wrinkled your face. I love you; I am a thickly-walled house. We swam
at night with our big muscles, pulling spoonfuls of oozing water, blue, abashed. The forest loves to be alone— it builds itself a cabin
of white space with wide margins. Here, you say, are my thoughts. They
drop like mussels from shells to silver spoons. We are out of the city. The city
of money, out of money, I am out alone in the white forest, abashed. I have nothing
but callouses, writing my life like Lincoln Logs lain atop another wooden
body. The fog thickens. Crickets. All things drowning, swimming in
debt. We are deep, deep in the lake.

When I was small, a gopher came to make holes in the yard.
It needed a home, chose the one Daddy had found for us,
A rental with siding of sandpaper slate. The wooden floors
Were food for termites. Hornets ripened in the garage.

Daddy looked at the holes and quietly began,
Pieced together the shotgun I had never known.
He had conjured it for this moment. A serious smell,
Oil and cold metal. The parts clicked and snapped together.

Mother and I watched from the den window.
Her hand on my shoulder. Daddy flooded the holes
With the garden hose. Raised the gun slowly
In the humming pecan and persimmon shade.

When the dark head appeared, the gun blasted
In Daddy’s hands, was broken back into pieces,
Returned to the deep closet. Don’t even touch it,
I was told. I never did.

          Danh Vo, 2013. Leather.

By the border the tunnels stopped
& fell, the tear of fabric forming zigzags

daughter nailed through at the tip like a bullet

the shine of leather, sweat of
          mottled brown backs

          Have a seat, you must be tired;
          at least it wasn’t your son

Used to roam any had no place know both
sound without ever see did close for keep

Choose three things and my first choice would be a gun.
Because that’s one less wound, one less weapon lying around
the place from which I was plucked, as if this casual question-
game could thought-experiment its way out of want for violence.
In this scenario, the expectation would be to hunt, to find
some careless creature and carry on by way of necessity,
as if taking a life was the only way to continue within one.
If I chose gardening gloves next and my favorite painting
of the sky, would you call me out for cheating, for being
too close to home? Because reality relies on perspective:
the sky looks different at different times of day,
but so can a painting: blues kind of brown, kind of gray,
colors tossing themselves atop sea-soft sheets of high tide.
Each morning, a new gun makes its way to shore.
Night-waves ferry them inland like recurring dreams
of exit signs. Chekhov taught us what to expect
and statistics confirm it over and over again—
that hunger never quits. In other words, forget the gun.
Maybe my first choice will be a basket. I’ll search for berries
and pray their juices look enough like blood when
the others come. It is fresh land after all. And men, I know,
are always looking for new things to destroy.

let me pre-empt this and say the warmest parts of my body are the color of the land.
i smell like the soil—rich and rain-soaked, heavy like the dirt in the delta lands.

they ask often where i’m from. i begin the tale thigh-deep in the ocean, begin the tale
in the deltas, on the ships. they ask, isn’t this a story about the land?

what do you want from me? who i am is an exercise in recitation, continuous, unending
and i don’t know the answer. they simplify—your people, they come from what land?

i ask my mother who we are, she counts me back six generations, locates the grit of soil
on the hands of her grandmothers. says: before anything, after anything, we are of the land.

are we? what land and where? i have tried to find the burying place of my people,
but the trail has gone cold. i ask my mother, she says: we who are claimed by the land.

i say, whose land? how claimed? sure, i know the suturing of our feet to the nation but,
i don’t want to name another’s inheritance. i say i do not want to covet stolen land.

my mother, she says: you misunderstand. close your eyes. smell it. red like rust. excess
of iron. dusty dry. we, claimless, our bodies springing up like rice from the lands

which named us. do you see? our people, a movable type, picked up and
deposited. picking up and depositing. the pollinating kind. a kaleidoscope of the lands

which birthed us. place your candles there. where? my mother, she looks,
finds a place where the soil is warm and carves a dish, a cradle in the land.

so you see, i answer your question: i begin hip-deep in the ocean. then i, carrying the
name of farmers, place my hands so deep in the dirt i touch the heart of the land.

1.
When rain stops
I find mushrooms
arranged in a ring.

The dead below us
raise open hands
in an alleluia dance.

Their white-nailed
fingers pierce dank
rotted leaves.

Each winter more friends
join mushroom spirals
of slow dancers.

As a frost moon rises
their circles festoon
even the distant hills.

2.
She said a few hours before death
You will write about this, won’t you.

Not a question.

3. Native Beliefs

When a good person dies
rains come to wash away
fingerprints and footprints.

Sorrows of this life fade.
When a good person dies
mist weeps from the sky.

Sparrows watch mourners
gather to sing and pray
when a good person dies.

No rocks rubbing each other
sparking blue-bolt flashes—
so-called earth lightning—

like struck flintstone igniting
quick fire. No disaster film—
cars tossed off roads like ants

shaken from a picnic blanket. Just
flickers when matter flipflops
capsizing earth. Then it’s over

like Perseid shooting stars
like flutter path of moths
like a phone call about death.

I try to -describe the moment when
books shuffled among themselves
but the house did not collapse.

It’s not necessary to behead the yolk-haired woman
who dances with children in the streets of Eko

Somehow I cannot stomach                         the slow killing of a bug

                     the wasp who’s                            found its way inside
         on the wall to the right                         of me—I shut my eyes and

before you started visiting small-scale extinction events on your brain cells

and after ecstasy or against it

For all the geology of seawater, for all
the time in clay, I am grateful
for a new year. “New” because we say
so. Behold Janus’s two faces.
See how she closes one door in order
to open another. A cracked vessel
blessed my face with water you read
as tears. A fire sewed smoke
into my clothes. The firemen hacked
open the door. For a year I smelled of tar,
like the La Brea monster bird who dreamed
the tar pit as a lake, who tasted
rainwater atop ancient pools of crude, then sank.
Except, I quit the house and the broken
door, and I left the man enmeshed
in December, and the firemen
with their hoses, and the water running
like steps down the stairs. Here,
I spill into January. I shatter
the cracked china because its value
is precisely in its uselessness.
I dust the fossil, the headstone,
and the oyster shell. Stars sprawl
across my shoulders as the moon bears
its wearied repetitions. Still,
there are so many firsts to be had.

Leaves of trees were more alive
than the birds, as my mind went
back to the chauffeur kneeling,
waving his wand—the detector
for explosives under the sedan,
saying, “Just in case.” Then after
checking into The International,

I go upstairs to a room, & I ask,
Have I been here before, standing
at this mirror? A shadow of birds
in trees outside the park pulls me
up to the window, & then a voice
saying, “Do not go to the park.”
Those birds tell all of us to look,

& then I feel as if they are woes
disfiguring the sunset, or lovers
of those gone into Kenyan bush.
My face here on a windowpane,
seeing them as part of myself.
They make the trees smaller,
divined by a lifetime of pleads.

A silhouette of them in the trees
moves with me toward the park,
but before I enter a voice says,
“If your driver had not waved
the wand beneath that sedan
maybe you would not be here.
You know, timing is everything.”

I stood again at the window
as if only waiting for someone
to stir up that cloud of wings
waiting for the world to end.
All at once, I wanted to hug
someone, or to just hold her
against me, breathing as one.

Their skullcaps of pale feathers
became too much to believe in.
Such a ragged hour of half-dead
dreams & deep longing. Maybe
if not the park, I’ll go to the bar
on the corner. I stop at the door,
turn, & walk back to the hotel.

A week later, a grenade is tossed.
Three Aussies die in the Jericho,
& I try to say what turned me
around at the door but I can’t.
Their gaze on me, & half-dark
wings writhing into specters
or deep eyes of prophecy.

     I’m no philosopher, but some days I think
we were put on this pale blue dot to have long ass debates
     over ways to make coffee & levels of sugar
in tea &, most importantly, the correct placement of semi-colons
     in the soul. Ah nitpicking, quibbles,

     The world contains
crab fried rice & is thus beautiful.
     Or: crab fried rice
is more beautiful than the world.
     Which is true?

     They keep drifting in,
these yellow petals, through the kitchen window—
     look how our dog
paws at them, sniffs, as though they are soft
     scraps of his lost

                                    after 鲁迅

For all the places I kneel on bruised
knees: a sheet of snow, scarred streets,
the crusted carpet on my sand-scratched
floor. How new boots leave marks on my bare
ankles. How a spring snaps in my mattress—
I wake up to all the sparrows dead
on my windowsill. Winding kinesiology tape
around my ribs until all the air flees.
Google says it’s normal. This shortness of breath.
This bruising. This inflamed voice box.
Silence. The fear of disturbing the sleeping,
of their knuckles against the back of my throat.

                    after Halyna Kruk

Good sons have found me crying
in local park ditches, where I’ve been
called chink & faggot all the times

before & after. Still, I return. I keep
trying, like a good son, though not quite
as good. I’m more bird than human,

rolling in the mud I’ve made. Above me,
forefathers looking down from pavements,
carrying guns like bodies, kissing guns

like bodies. I let them repeat history.
The flowering branches in my way—snapped.
The cicadas that warned—sorry, sung—too loudly,

they squashed for me. I’m in good hands,
wrapped in good guns. When released,
there are bullets in the trees chirping

about standards, phone calls flying
in between trees, the trees moving
toward me with legs. I don’t remember

why I was crying, but there were guns
all around the clearing. Big beautiful guns
shoved into my mouth & don’t kill.

Smoke your smell sell your smoke
smell your tell your sugar sweet smoky the smoke smell
smoky clothes made war the scent the smell
tales of home my tell smell the smell
ashes sang pit against pit against queen smiling
smell smoke smooth the smoky spicy smell we sell we smoke
sunday on blazoned screens on smoke brought home
unwell rest smell the smoke hell to-go and choke
grandma worked days stiff smoky
family the fire we smoked and toasted burnt
me: welcome to smoke just here is home
try one our smoke sell smoke smell

You have to understand: there was no noon, no down. Time passed. Day turned to night. I woke and slept. I drank, I ate a bit, I slept. There were few nouns. They wouldn’t connect. I didn’t know fan. I kept kicking off the blankets and pulling off my clothes. The people came and went. I didn’t know now, I couldn’t find the latches, and every few hours I found myself at baseline, staccato, returned to tonic. The light moved through its stations: soft white, blur-white, buzz-white, white-white, cream-white, cream, tan, black. My dreams were flickers, my days were smears. I slept in a mechanical bed, three feet in the air. Time and more time. The questions were confusing. I answered in song lyrics and scraps of poetry. Twenty-nine dollars and an alligator purse. It would have been funny except for the yelling. And the fear—the mind that didn’t work, the leg that wouldn’t move, the people who should have arrived but didn’t. I pitched fits; cried jags, hair-triggered—it was neurological, endless. Finally they knocked me out. They clocked me. Soft white, blur-white, buzz-white, white-white, cream-white, cream, tan, black.

from no one. When I put to my lips the distempered

plums that have divorced the branch I realize

A standard piece of paper can be folded only seven times.

The seventh fold marks the city limits of the physical

I am jet fuel and six miles long. I am bad business. I make the rooms grow smaller. Underneath my shirt is another shirt and under that the cloudbanks clang their worksong. They pitch their weight in droves. This is a cold shelf, Sport. A struck bell. I gloat when I say this. I shine in the frost. You are a ham tied up in string. You are pineapples and cherries and ham on a plate at dinnertime. Fate eats you up. We rub against the facts now. My face is a glass jar. My heart is applesauce and a cold spoon. I clear the decks and spend my leverage. The rest is dazzle. You are an obstacle course and I am a pair of dice. You hop, like a rabbit, cabbage to cabbage. I win by a landslide. I smear the mirror and distort your face. You are the flipped coin and I am the outcome. I don’t decide, I collect; thumbed scale or not. You hit the ground, or so you say. You can’t unknow the facts so you run faster. You, the boy from bruised tomorrow, under the eaves where everything gets put down. I am a lamp, you are a gun. You spend your bullets on a hat, I burn when touched.

So much fiction happens in our rooms,

now that the Viennese artbooks rot away, barefaced,

Originally written for the inauguration of Claudine Gay as president of Harvard University

                              –after Toni Morrison

Come with me
                              to the gardens, and we’ll find ourselves an arbor

Let us begin, first, with the heart–a monster

of a thing. An elephant’s is the size

will you join us


here on the floor

under the tablecloth I

am sorry about before of

“Consider if Jesus had had a bit of chrome up on that hill – what was it,
Calvary, Calgary, the hill they hung ‘im from? Shit’d be a lot different right
now. We’d be better. World’d be burning less. Burning much less. A gun is
less dangerous than your watch. Some cost about the same. Sometimes, the
watch is more expensive. Jesus didn’t have a timepiece neither. Imagine that,
Jesus with a gun or a watch? Fanged of both violence and métron
simultaneously? Consider it. Really a blessing. Think how it changes things.
What would He have used the gun for, up there? Huh? What use for He the
watch?”

                                    blunting

my own blade I have dulled,

skulled, and sullied the sun’s

shade. in the perfume of oils

To my Leon acetate burned through your temple in a blue curl I could see it visible as the flash and glitz you used to love isn’t that ironic you would have thought so you would have raa raa’d and judged in that deep rumbling bubbling of yours I remember bumbling grasping it distilled in feeling through your polyester tanks black enough to sink with the Alcantara seats ribbed tickling my skin ear frame after your wayfaring as you put it making building and all the ruminants of the stars will be ours one day your humid intimacy beguiles me we never had much well you had nothing noticeably noting even on remember that day you said you were a maneuver of words I word agree this will never be read a deliverance can’t make it through flames so yes I write to

It was the wrong time to negotiate

singularity in the back of the clown car.

Every room I am asked to enter leaves me

an eel & a conger like u very much

or each other

they like each other very much

how ur DNA may be 99.9% similar but u absolutely don’t care

for your birthday I organised a fatal shark attack. the first one in 60 years.
the great white was longer than our bodies put together and the
swimmer is in half. I wish the people hadn’t posted the video. disturbance
of the mind like this makes me forget you are 32. how selfish. we hold so
much blood in our bodies. he was 6'5" so he held even more. it mixed with the
salt like a watercolour. I am going to remember the painting forever,
the stroke of a dark fin, the return of foam white belly, the gnashing pink
flail to the tune of happy birthday. an eerie ice cream aesthetic. I wonder
if you even know what’s happened. more likely you are celebrating your
whole life, oblivious. you like to make things about you, which is why I’ve
appropriated this tragedy in your name. meanwhile the shark is turning
50 and is really bored of your bullshit. off she goes down to the ocean
floor to rest, confused by all the shouting. she doesn’t like people in her
house and she’s tired of no-one respecting that. blow out the candles.
leave her alone.

It’s the night before your wedding.

In utero, I listen to anxiety crack

open your breastbone, persistent lightning as Pa

love had me reeling since the lake, the headlong plunge into barren landscape, where ranks of rolling hills are guarded by black cypress that slant toward bishops. staggering about no man’s land as my rival puzzles over her next move, she bites a fat purple fig then drops it to snowmelt. I stalk like a rook with dark plumes, perfumed, and molting each style like a sable fur coat. my empress preens in expensive taste. I clip on her unwashed braid and feel like a Clydesdale galloping into my 30s; the annihilating, brute whiff of what it means to “have it all—” baby books and dissertations, boss bitch and stinking bibs. consolation? she asks, offering her remedies, her nightshades. I peel my cuticles like eggshells, like archaic wallpaper. who mothered who? dressed me in footie pajamas and laid me down upon the forest floor? was this Plath’s gambit? the unseen latticework of hyphae: overnight, very whitely, discreetly, very quietly our toes, our noses take hold on the loam, acquire the air. we lodge ourselves as truffles, as dreams, adjourned. as wet season spawn with soft fists breaking into Egyptian cotton, the dormant generation becomes sinewy from crumbs, sweeps tidy tercets into the dustbin, heaves through dried leaves, unexcused, not needing light, though a little is nice. we rise like gilled pillars matsutake, hen-of-the-woods—slightly restored, but colossal. as grandmaster of the undergrowth, we inherit stately oak rooms; patient for the poem to swell in the night, up, up toward full-throated spring

They wake me. Like car alarms bleating along an empty
block. How many beloveds in me whom now I survive?

Even Forough must have run her loving hands to water.
My lips move like a merchant’s hoping to sell survive.

Can you use it in a sentence? Swinging their pendulum
heads, they foretell how few survive.

Sour as berries died on the vine. My fingers stay
in the mouth of astonishment. Can such a shell survive?

Like the owl of Sunday morning cartoons, I want one big
chomp! To see what, on the tongue of a cracked bell, survives.

I reach time. I step in front of a honking car—jump
back. I outlive myself. Can’t help but survive.

A citizen of my catch-all drawer. A keep-sake of the stayed-
behind. A one-way ticket, that will to survive.

To worry is a law of nature. Is it enough? To be
inscribed in lighter hue: she is well-survived.

Veiled mother flickers bodily in the lamp-light
of you. Steps, unsteps in the melt that survives.

I want to love so well, that I spell a name with each
foot-fall in dirt. I reach palms down the wet well. Survive.

They say my mother’s was more than a death. Must mine be more
than a life? How to make my name undone? How to spell survive?

Father was a chair. I was tired but did not sit down. Father was a chair. I moved him to
the other room. When we watched TV, I could feel his chair-like energy growing more
and more anxious. Father was a chair. I went to school. Father was Father was a chair
pooling in the light. I could not tell if he wanted to be more than a chair. In the car, father
is a different kind of chair. Plush. Father drove me to a new school, stone, rich, white.
There was a woman I admired. There were many women. Beautiful warm sensual well-
dressed intellectual women. When they discovered I was not their daughter, they shook
their hair in shock. They had to move on. They were lively women who would never
survive in a pen. Father was a chair. I took a last look and closed the door.

Look. The deer is dead because I killed it.
Because I saw a hunk of flesh
and couldn’t remember
brakes existed. Because I was crying
and driving. Because it was winter
and things fall apart. Because
I kept going. Because I like to drive.
Because I know
these roads. Because the road
coming home is dark.
Because I go fast, faster when I’m sad.
Because I saw a pair of eyes
and closed mine.

and she picks me a tooth from her pile of tools, carved
in half-moon curves along its front edge. The other
edge covered in two-sided jags, falling, marked
by my inability to find it again. Behind her, columnar
light from the moon and a street lamp blazing. Cried
into her arms, she says, it’s alright to fall. Did you care
for bad teeth? I seized the morning on a fogged
up roof. I was stuck in Japan. Now it’s late September
and the dream house wakes me up. While I punch
at the clouds for air, for respite, and find pigeon dust,
she passes me the crumbs. It’s a fine bread crunched
into pieces. In any other city, you make a fuss
about the dream house, its engineers and bandits perched
on the deck with their rules, infinitudes, thin lust.

After the party when you’ve collapsed on the couch, leaving the mess for the morning and he gets up as if it were the most natural thing and fills one sink with soapy water and starts moving the sponge along each plate and cup until the dishwasher is full, nothing sexier than his hands dripping soap suds, his love handles peeping out from his shirt as he moves his fingers up and down, around and over, nudging the crud from the tines of the forks, emptying the sink, nothing hotter than the tendons of his arms as he swabs the counter and when he’s done your fatigue has disappeared and you can’t get to him fast enough and even the longest schlong in Cincinnati can’t compete with that.

I have, may it please the court, a few words to say.

In the first place
I deny everything
but water
have all along
I quilted my designs
on a map, all stars
freed slaves
we upended
serpentry. Oh!

to have made
such lean patties
of fat masters
they froze last winter
we shook them down
with the trappings
of a jinn

Boats to either side
MOVE
slow
defend—we said No!
too rough
this country

Hands? Left them in Canada
Eyes? Divined to do the same

They never didn’t
intend murder
art
treason
order
corruption of progeny
or to excite
or incite
the enslaved to rebellion

We freed a mother tongue
abject in their ice and
it is unjust that ICE should sulfur
our ancestral dreams

Had I so interred fear in the path of the rich
the powerful
the intelligent
the so-called “patriot”
on behalf of any of their friends—
father, mother, sister, wife, children, or any of that class—
and suffered
and sacrificed what I have
for this interred fear
it would have been
purest flight

End every man in this court
either hand
punish
vent

rat rabbit
mary martha
bathed in honeyed
milk sick
silk grenadine
cherry syrup
angel face
Nardostachys grandiflora
stored in alabaster
boxes marian
memorabilia
halo of aluminum
foil stars
fortune smiles
upon our bed when you
take me home on
saint valentine’s day
canopy beaming
christ’s radiant light
virgin wife
feet and hair and
love and service
have your cake and
eat it, too
candy hearts
prayer and worship
blessed is she,
amongst all the women
i was always giving myself
laundry to do

They hold chalices above their mouths
and the eggnog
never tickles their lips. It’s

stuck at the pommel.
The false-teeth manufacturer millionaire
nods. Aren’t those transitions between our

two coasts strange? One’s
bailiwick in this

case, is the dank snow falling
at the philtrum. Backward in a lovely
smoky hovel.

The girl smeared chocolate mesquite
at piano. And we all poured ourselves
into bed.

Hard rain hurts the neck, which is that soft. A part

to cut. Not to be so grim

and guillotine-gullible, but I have been; safe-

I’m right

on the steps of a

hall. Hubris.

It helped the

heaving of having

been there in some

lizard-like stealth
slow and easy

catch that fly!

with that nimble
tongue of yours

everything's a winner you know when you
die. and then there's that giraffe
yip yip         yip yip!
now THAT's finally done let's get back
to christmas why not? it is a public affair
hobnob you. porcupines in heaven what
will they think of you who knows? own it you
idiot gopher haha. sorry. i'll give your present
away this summer. it is a hell of a summer
sandwich and all haha oh. not a joke. deny it
you crumb bum you must love me you
do it often enough. and who doesn't want to
touch me too who doesn't? end. go and buy a
sandwich store you are. haha now THAT's funny.
okay meant for giraffes. which i disdain
as much as you do.
                                      reasons i will not disclose
i'm old now.

On the eighth day, coquelicot,
wearing my Armageddon earring,

my faggotry jumped to its death
from the foam spire of its death.

on Monday evening, bleeding between
bricks & concrete, indecisive direction,
improper & traversing. weight
lurching, we force forwards. when a prophet
makes a mistake, I am not equipped
to forgive. even if he asks. sweating, knees
buckling, bobbing. we plead. jolted over
curbs & branches, I recite the Lord’s prayer
for the first time in ten years. somewhere,

See, that’s the thing you’re not getting, the part

about the gods, or whatever you want

My left hand digging in my pocket. Three days ago a
Chevy parked outside the garage, waiting for the stars to
bleed into the ready ground. The clouds never rise: they
film the skies white. My hand scooping the wind, shoveling
light to make way. Then the mechanic, the shaking leg, the
loving familiar pain. The truck coughs final. Every arm
snapped—even young—heals slow. But we salvaged scrap.
The heavy hand, the girl. Today, the new sky. The first seen
cloud, the sun going quick. My pockets shrank fast. My
father buried far, my tiny hands big. Sun’s coming, sore
eyes. Don’t look yet.

Brief reprieve, then Junetime. The fledgling wins, just as
it does every year. It rushes back rotten. When the last of
the frost puddles, the bake-skinned child emerges, dumb
again. The echo in my drums again. Elena, Elena.
The once-remit light. I still answer to the name like a
dog. Pluck the petals, bald seeds, worry leaves thin. Each
blinding summer, the re-christening among the spindly paint-
brushes. I, running behind the barn. The dried wheat thins,
the frivolous blooming fields, a round-bellied robin giving
chase. I’m tired of regrowth, the youth, the perpetual
youth, the weeds and the boy with the shade hat. Lying
peacefully atop my dull body, bugs landing heavy on their
feet. I once held out my thumb, one brown eye closed, to blot
out the sun. Just my little hand. Now the light tastes sour. The
barn has grown empty and wet. The mold spread there for
years, I’m told. When they were new, the pricks were clean,
the sweet pear and cacti were shining and sweet. I place it all
again as the light leaked this morning: every frenetic bone,
every tooth-lodged seed, the sun in my skin. Landing any-
where, light refracts broken onto me. Well, I opened my rickety
fridge, the sudden cold relief, the wrinkles wrong. I ate every
cherry, let them bleed in my mouth, putrid, forcing the swallow.

One of the horses was dead and it made for a
start to the day. Warm for the month for the year
so far. The kind that comes with sun and rain and
rain with lightning. That kills horses. Apparently.
I didn’t see the horse. I saw your face cave and
saw it come back. There’s no good antonym for
caving. Some things take work and time. You
narrow your eyes when you look far ahead. Your
pupils contract in the sunlight. Then you smile.
The future is mostly a whole lot of physiological
change. And expectation. And then some. When
I think about death my stomach hurts. When I
think about horses I am usually wrong. I thought
horses stood while they slept, but they can sleep
lying down. Bodies at rest become bodies at
work. Even decay can be no easy feat. Requires
work and time. Are we like or unlike horses. We
are not like this horse. This horse is different.
This horse is dead. But the field looks greener
than it looked before. The water pools where our
feet have moved the earth. It pools on the road. It
doubles us. I want to know if there is ever
enough symmetry. At Trader Joes the answer to
symmetry is lots. Pastels, gold lettering. I want to
buy an orchid. $12.99 in a ceramic, purple vase.
It feels like they’re reading my mind. When my
card is declined the staff is kind. They say it
happens to all of us but it’s happening to me. I
feel like I’m watching myself watch the horse.
But the grass is very green.

Hand over hand, fishermen hauled cod, haddock,
flattened slippery silver against drying walls.

you stopped to take a leak
he stopped to take a peak
and then what, you got married?
how boring

I’ll be the first to admit it.
As another swaying casualty,
I do admire your suspension
technique. Your feast and famine.
Your field and fasten. Yes,
how you slung up that wasp.
How like a construction-
paper crown reality now appears.
The rhomboid jewels losing
what little span scissors
and tints lent them. Like sage
leaves giving way to their grey floss.
I still don’t know your name.
Or maybe you told me and I
404 Error. My index of memories
obsolesced. The heraldry
shrunk to point. Classification codes
dropped their prefixes. Wait,
maybe I do now remember.
Your given name. Isn’t it
404 Error. My mom’s name.
Brother’s too. The name I cry out
in the direction of my shoe
in the rust bluing of morning.
When I try to make something,
anything, move. “First things first,”
404 Error. Who’s or what’s to blame.
Having used up so much silk
and hunger, the wasp twists
in its terminal cocoon.
It’s not actually requesting
an apology. No. That’s a salute.

“Joint fluid,” said the physician, spilled
                              from a sprung seal in the ultimate knuckle
of my left index finger, just shy of the nail,
                              and gathering there to a “mixoid cyst,”
a substance also called “digital mucus.”
                              Once a woman with beautiful hands
said to me, “There are very few physical pleasures
                              without a little mucus.”
But when this doctor with an expensive
                              lancet lanced it, there oozed from my mixoid cyst
a viscid substance vastly more limpid than semen
                              or vaginal secretions. It was like a tear
wept by a fly-sized golden butterfly—
                              and when I touched the tiny glistening orb of it
with the pad of my opposite index finger, it clung
                              to the print’s whorls, and when I swirled it
against the pad of my thumb I understood
                              my body will never repay me
for the satisfactions I give it every day by moving.
                              O itty-bitty pure lubricious gobbet,
O most licentious and merest whit betwixt the pads
                              of index finger and thumb
slid together so lusciously the joints between my carpal
                              and metacarpal bones thrummed a hum
through every atom of my corpus
                              from this side of corpsehood all the way back
to the slither and divot of my conception,
                              which the doctor, seeing the look on my face,
closed his eyes before the lust and rapture of.

honeydew, hold me—
haggle over my seeds
with your
own— flower

over hovering
above hinging
upon you—
I like you in

We stayed inside
and drew red trains

we ate burritos
like it was the end

the air was sweeter
for a good long while

(For Sarah)

The last poem I will ever write
will be like the first dream I ever

wrote down, when I was green like a lawn
that did not know it was not the world,

I don’t exactly think I will.
I don’t exactly wish I don’t.
The science is inexact, and don’t
Think it won’t splice you
As you swish by
On your two-stroke motor
Scooter with your bright visor
Held aloft for all to topple.
Your orbit is unseeming.
It takes you in, like a market
Spilling futures
On the livestock you are
On the soybeans you aspire to
And the husks and straws
Baking your energy
Into meticulous kitty litter crypto
Currency in the metabolic
Cycle you were born for:
Come and see yourself
By and by, baby-naked and
Time-begrimed
In your coin-op space scope.
Its azimuth is lacking
Its optics are exacting
And can smother
Grainy eggs of the tiniest
Horned reptile
Secreted in the stream bed
You once took to.
It might feel like something
To feel something capturing you
In milled mirroring lenses
As you are and would be
But that self-love is
Nostalgia.

I made a playlist of songs I’d heard in Heaven
mostly to procrastinate the letters of rec due soon
the notes to thank Saeed and Deborah an intro
to a talk the announcement of the talk and a talk
itself though not the talk I’m talking about a
different talk. Homeless is the heart, I’d call it.
The talk I’ve yet to write and yet to talk.
Uncertain is the mind. I remember a time I had
no desk to clutter, no meals and no regular address.
Just the crushed can car I slept in. A town so small
a wind had nothing to scatter when it blew through.
I parked myself on the farthest side of the levee,
away from homes and watched the river riffle
slowly over cowbelly silt. Listened for scaups
or cops on patrol. The music of Heaven so far
away. The sounds of earth are hard to find and
harder still to catalog. A hard field amplifies each
hornet. A woman I knew not well but well enough
she considered me a last resort, someone to escort
her to a movie down in Sac. I had no cents even.
Scraped the last of it out of the glovebox to buy
cigarettes. So I declined. And every whisper being
overheard, in turn another woman asked how come
I’d turned the first one down. Then gave me a ten.
Oh, but I can’t, I said, I can’t pay this back, I have
no job and don’t know when…but don’t you under
stand, she said, when someone just wants to give.
She gave me such a look. And a stick of gum.
This is the thank you note I haven’t written.
This is the talk I have yet to give some future
me, a scattered kid. I’ll name it after a song by Diz.

Uncomprehending, overwhelming, combative
Regressive, regretful, insincere
Engulfed, disgraced, contrary, forgotten
Misbegotten, misshapen, miscellaneous mister.
Unscrupulous, overweening comrade-in-arms.
Regicidal regimental insectivore.
Englishman dispatched convivially forth,
Misty missiles misfiring mischievously.
Underwater ova combing
Regal regions inland.
Engines disbursing countrified fucks
Mislead meshugana Miss Mishkin.
Missing-the-mark, misery mistakes miso
For continental dish engendering
Insubordinate regurgitas—pregnancy—
Combustible overcoats—until
Dingdong: Helmeted wombats
Caress egrets, sinkholes.
Fried rice condoms go
Begging apes for cellophane terraria.
U owe community
Wreathes, rental-income, inch-long
Engravings your racist coot forges.
Miss us, miscreant? Miss missing?
Apprehensive, well-meaning, we’ve
Aggressively retched in sync,
Unfed, effaced, eerily gotten,
Gotten by happenstance, skeletally, Sir.

The service must have just ended,
because the boys in their dark suits

and the girls in their skirts and dresses
were spilling through the open doors

Last week, scientists found a new moon:
a second one, peculiar and small.

The poets will be excited. Maybe now
they can write about the moon without consequence

since it will be new, and free of tropes.
Perhaps they will hang on it like honey.

There’s a part of me that thinks if we can get a new moon
then maybe anything could happen. Like maybe I could hand you

outside, two children pull the
wind back under their t-shirts

smoulder & smoke
into two fat fists of need

after Mickalene Thomas

When I look back over my life
on how everything played out
it was I who licked the salt from your pillar
neck. Some days I chose to self-sabotage,
some hours I resembled Orpheus, afraid
we would never walk right up to the sun,
hand-in-hand, my fingers stuck beneath your skirt.
I looked to the hills from whence cometh my help.
I lived in the history of the future where
some of us would not die. When asked to keep on
the straight and narrow, when presented
with the lineup of Tom, Dick, and Harry,
I ducked to enter a pink hole.
When I forgot to mind my head,
God looked over his shoulder.

God gave me a man
Who I, in turn, bodied.
Had he lived, I would
Take myself more seriously.
Come what may I will
Get myself together,
I will whip myself into
The shape of a man
Who has put away
Childish things. I will
Take a woman as my toy
And pretend, in doing so,
I’m highly favored.

We fill duffle bags with ripe fruit,

tearing off leaves that feel like human ears.

We put flowers in our mouths,

the two of us whose bodies have no thickness.

We undress in the pink room,

where the blinds are still closed.

Summer is disintegrating, the heat unravels

in the wind. I feel the skeleton inside my chest.

Outside, emaciated dogs bark in German.

The flowers fade like paintings.

Parasites chew the still water

we held our breath under.

Breeze tears through the fibers

of our bathing suits drying on the back of a chair.

Little sister listens,
solemn, to my tap
of egg on silver-lipped bowl.
It cracks the way ice does,
lined as the palm of my hand.
Just beneath the shards of white:
filmy membrane, milk-colored.
Stretches and tears
like a mother
to release the golden yolk.
Never knew it was there,
slick as frogskin.
Never knew how easy
it is to cut into something:
in the grade school science lab,
scalpel and blue
rubber gloves.
Organs like glass beads
glowing in a veil of formaldehyde.
I’m baking lemon cake for my mother.
She loves the tingle
on her tongue, sharp smell
of furniture polish.
Glassy wood of her first bedroom set,
and I, nestled haploid within
like so many white orbs
in pink styrofoam.
The whites drip over my fingers
like spit or tears or breaking water.
I can feel their aching,
as I ached each month
at thirteen, my body so empty
it poured itself out.
My sister holds the bowl
in her bugbitten arms
as I scrape batter into the pan
with its grease-glow.
She, yolk-gold, sun-gold,
our small bright thing. Strawberry
freckle on her nose.
The year my mother birthed her
was the year I learned
of the eggs inside me.
Little halves of would-be daughters,
girls before they’re touched.
Mama taught me their genesis,
growing like grapes within me
while I was within her.
How baby sister,
small enough to shatter,
carries them, too,
already,
in her soft pink abdomen:
womb within womb, echo of blood.

for Allison

All lovers feel like they’re inventing
something. How else would we work
out the kinks? I am in awe of your
pussy. You said it appears like I am
doing an inspection. True. True.
I lift the hood. I study your anatomy
of flowers and fruit. Mixing food with
sex disgusts you. You hate cantaloupe
and the texture of cherries. Once, you
had a nightmare about being force-fed
grapes. Your eyes change colors when
you laugh. There goes the secret life of
green, witch hazel spells of black magic.
You encourage me to keep climbing as I,
a heathen hymn, teach you the taxonomy
of touch. You, a table of plenty, show me
how to paint by numbers. One is never
enough. Two: my lips at your neck. Another
two: the sound of my name—twin flame
of your own. Four: your hands around my
ankles. I present you with pansies and lilac.
This poem is a form of praise and worship.
In years lived, you’re on page twenty-eight,
and I on page thirty-two. I hope that you
survive me, I do not ever want to go without.

We are contemporaries, born in
the worst plague year for our kind.
It is May, locust shells in the screen doors.
The surf is thick with ash. An unnamed man
roams the beach, looking for a place
deep inside himself, like a room lined in silk.
You are a piece of shit, like me.
Between us, three ceramic teeth
glued to our jaws. I leave my hair curly
for seven months. I love you because you can’t be destroyed by love;
we are immune
to one another: my perfect Tennyson, your fingers
tearing the metal strings of a guitar. We stop
wearing underwear, spring lays its dust over everything,
flies climb our naked shoulders.

My grandfather burned fires when we were kids

down by the lake in a structure he made

from stacked stones, the ash

so soft and powdery, almost white.

There were burnt shards of birch

cracked and black as pieces

of a sarcophagus. You can’t witness your own death,

I remember someone saying in a seminar

while we were discussing a Celan poem

in which the speaker is digging

through the ash. It was a Thursday,

I drank a bottle of mineral water with Ronald,

sun on Holbeinstraße, sun on Morgensternstraße.

It’s a Friday in New York
and fifty years from ’69.
Though since we’ve yet to meet
or have, and are still looking,
what we’ve said to each other
in photos and films, bars
and basements, returns
with enough echo
to remind us of ourselves.
Those of us who resisted heroes
and sentiment. Those of us
who waited and found neither—
not the promised liberation
in marriage, or the salvation
of laws. How some asked
to carry America’s guns
and did. How others knew
equality was a rumor,
elusive as freedom or sex.
Do you think about dying
every time you have sex?
I still think about dying.
I do think about death.
Or a day in childhood when I saw
the only place I could live
was here. Inside.
So whoever wanted me
had to come through the body.
Which has rarely been beautiful
to me. Too soft and unconvincing.
Too small. I hope the future
is free of god and memory.
I hope the future is
all body, all blood.
And since to be queer
is a way to forgive life,
I’ll take as long as I want
finishing my cigarette on Seventh,
walking up Christopher
and thinking of everyone
who’s yet to get here—
somewhere in a bedroom maybe,
young and bored across
the country, not impressed
by our parades or idols,
all the sponsorship we bought.
I’m late for a drink but wander,
handsome and aimless,
looking for a sign
before nodding to the dead
who always need a light.

The mirror’s clubfooted,
not me. Afro’s gone Medusa again.

Every coil’s its own Hydra.
I’m adventuring with a comb.

The sink’s full of myths...
The myths are growing...

Everyday I find myself
smaller with effort,

my life’s light
with every person who

spoke of me. Last night,
Achebe tried again

and I nearly heard him.
Ngũgĩ refuses these tones, says,

this music has the worst sort
of oceans beneath it.

Besides, his ears
are busy with real myths…

Being alive must be nice,
says the sink-basin, filling

further with myths…
I say, abandon narrative,

latch on to landlocked
home— forget ships,

take planes! land with
passport on to place

with shore— forget ships,
take planes! land with

passport back to place
without shore— forget ships

for a day sometime on
winter break, during summer—

our only seasons here.
My body’s a clubfooted boat,

not me. One time I went
blonde, that’s a different

prow. One time I went
with suit-jacket, that’s a different

sail. One time I go
and touch the exact difference,

pretty, sailing, she says, I love you.
I say, whose boat.

This time, I want it to be simple: say you are
a fresh, cool lemon. Your rind is dotted with wet.

Say I have a tongue and lick away the wetness,
have hands and excavate the seeds.

I pull you out of yourself. I raise newness.
Everything tastes yellow and the sea-line is a line

down my throat. The lemon is a line across
the sky and that too is what you are: everything

mistaken for something else, the citrus getting larger, blooming.
Are you blooming? Are you in bloom? Tell me how you feel.

You don’t have to be a lemon if you don’t want to.
The rind could slip from my hand, if you asked for it.

I only want to speak to you. I’ve known lemons before:
tendrils of fruit clutching to the white, hand unhooked,

every cold, flowered thing giving way to water. Things change
when I speak and fruits flower, open slowly, without knowing it.

Try this: the dig of your finger under stem, stopping
crooked between flesh and peel. So what if when I dream

I dream citrus? I can taste even the farthest slick of air,
unlace semblance from skin. I can feed in pieces.

When I call out your name, it is your name
before it is anything else.

Later, I can ask you about the rest.



Title is taken from Archibald MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica."

in the kingdom of purity i obeyed my husband
i walked behind him my breasts covered

by a camera                 in his arms was a mirror held aloft
i faced myself & myself blurred in slightest motion

light fleeing the shutter                 & in the castle of purity
i closed the lights & faced my husband & my husband

called me by my glottal name                 my mouth
a depression in clay                 my mouth a mirror in the arms

of my husband                 my minaret a nipple in the direction
of my husband & five times a day i hesitate                 & five

times a day i chip a tooth & study sepia photographs
to learn names for my mothers                 to learn arrangements

for my photographed parts                 my captured parts
i tighten the frame                 i close my legs

when i say girlhood i say prison
i clean myself up & repent

Whatever it was that was supposed to
hold on my face,
steady the astrolabe,
reserve the seats and tether the baboon,
whatever those pills are supposed to do,
those hooks, rings, documents,
whatever I meant by delphiniums,
what she wore by the lake and said,
they say every other Rembrandt
although, as will blood, the fake
is often the most convincing.
Some contaminants make liquids clearer
but put enough black paint on anything
it becomes a door.
It’s dark out.
The most elegant woman in the world
watches me throw up in a trash can.
When you hold something on fire,
shouldn’t it weigh less and less?
Does everything have to become ash
to ascend? It’s not that there aren’t comforts.
An inmate in Iowa sends chocolates.
My mother comes back from the dead.
A call from a friend stuck in an elevator.
A postcard of a child riding a pig.
I went where we used to live
to dump the last teaspoons of dog ash
into the culvert. Someone was signaling.
Someone was being carried out.
5 trips. In pieces. Like a harp.

In all likelihood, they were the ugliest pants I had
ever seen. Something with the soft brush of velvet
but none of the right lay, huge hem with full break.

Repeating from somewhere once, I said “corduroy”
comes from cord du roi, cloth of kings. Obviously, B.S.—
I mean, who the hell ever saw Louis XVI in wools?
I picture him now in the pillory, in Levi’s, with his head
all spent, tumbled pale in the basket like an unripe berry.

I get pale-dry like that when I sleep funny. Those days
always seem so muffled, like a watch wrapped in cotton,
and viscous time contracts like a vein. Just like that, a day
can fold itself into three hours, skim milk in coffee.
The way it falls in on itself, then disperses. Now look,

I’ll be the first to admit: it’s been years since
I truly wanted something. A pair of fuzzy socks
with individual toes, the texture and color of moldy grapes.
So it’s not that I want you, this oil-slicked time, these pants.

More so, I want the feel of it, tight bands of corduroy,
packed like bamboo, Styrofoam-peanut seconds
pressed just-so to the minute, the easy sweep of skin

on skin. The feeling of everything suspended
at once, like how the light seems to honey
in Nan Goldin’s pictures, a looming sense
of awareness coming into a frail body,

like the husband walking in on his wife with the plumber
while John Lennon intones the “Day Tripper” chorus.
It’s such a steamy coincidence that I whip pan to the husband
as the words come down like hail: It took me so long to find out,
and I found out.

In the end, I don’t buy the pants, and nobody bothers
to fix the sink, which is a flood hazard. Which is to say,
nothing happened, and no one cared about it one bit.

After Magritte (1935) and Leone (1966)

Doctors promise it is not so, but I swear I am
going deaf in my left ear. Unequivocally, this is
more humiliating for them than it is for me.

After all, I have done the tests, snapped my fingers
on left and right, heard the difference in pitch
like the small slaps of waves under the hull.

Once, in a floating hotel, I was given no pillow,
told the sound of the river would be my cushion.

Still, I couldn’t fall out of time there, couldn’t still
the thrum of my pulse: something about sweeping
and ticking, the dull shush of the sand.

It’s like that sometimes on dim afternoons,
a slow wade into late lunch and oyster crackers,
when the real sense of small apocalypse creeps in.

It rolls by, the tumbleweed a minute before high noon,
the shrill, smoking, wild-west beat like boiling water.

The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, each passing like a hiccup
because the throat makes no such distinctions when parched.
It simply cries out, then sleeps.

In the Western, the cowboy hero. Drygulched
when he least expects it. Bandits rustle his steer. Revolvers pop
like whips. Again and again, owl eyes stare with apathy.

There is much in this world that is unspeakable,
and so much silence worlded by its thingness.

Like the leeward side of a mountain, which is deserted
by the rain, lying in its shadow. The silent rock as it stands.
There is only one thing in the universe that is like an ocean.

Somehow, it all spins like a quarter on the sticky bar counter,
the illusion of fullness, a silver berry, for a second. Then the drop.
Something about sweeping and ticking.

…when he saw a child drinking water from her hands
           he threw his cup away…

…when a mouse ate the crumbs from his poor man’s bread
           he rethought his philosophy…

…lit his lantern in daylight to see if he could see
           anything or anyone truly…

                                   green fruit in noonlight
                                        the olive breeze
                                   bright like fish eyes dart
                                        away
                                   the tree is made of light
                                        the patient wind
                                   decides to stay

…thought in all things moved a soul
           the lodestone draws into a metal rose the iron filings…

                                   roof of mouth is
                                        roof of heavens
                                   the word is the same
                                        starry fog
                                   a thought thought
                                        behind the teeth

…he who discovered what water is discovered the soul is
           eternally self-moving…

                                   a corpse that breathes
                                        buried in thought
                                   counts the olives one
                                        by one the aster is
                                   a purple flower the sun is
                                        a yellow button on
                                   the traffic of the stars

…the threads gave birth to themselves and wove a world
           together, a god is the never-beginning-never-ending one…

…the whole tree is a single leaf he thought the letter g
           unfurled on the stem of the deciduous throat…

…the soul a dry heat he thought the sun would pull
           the moisture from his body leaving him sane and whole…

—for Patrick Pethybridge

, the no-tongue bell
, the urn-mouth against the earth
, dream in which I would not sing
, though many asked me to sing
, slept warm in the stable straw
, with my head on a lamb breathing
, a full-grown lamb
, the bell around the cow’s neck
, did not ring
, the bell was sleeping
, dreaming that it would not ring
, goat mouth asleep in the hay
, the dream of eating hay