We may not deserve it
        but we were given sight and blood
        and soft organs that we know to protect

We may not grasp it
        but we were given faith and song
        and the urge to dance because we tremble

We could not measure it
        but we were given miles for our feet
        and a horizon orienting us headlong

So on this night of
        hemlocks alive with cicada
        moons engulfed in hot orange
        hands seeking each other
        and bite marks
        and hip bones
        breath
        stubble
        and time escaping in astronomical units

Who are we to ask its meaning
with the very words we could
never fully know?

Have you asked the tightrope walker
where he is going?

over there.

he suggests.


At the airport, I ask you
why you must travel?

to see the world.

you rehearse.


But when you return, you say you will tell me if I am yours.


We gratefully watch the walker’s feet
petals on a necklace

like these words that I
lace around your ears
keeping me alive
high above the ground

Over there.  Eventually, it is true.

There are nights when I dream.

It’s my father,
and I’m an adult.
And he’s in my kitchen.
So I know I’m dreaming.

And with his fists knotted in his jacket,
he offers a smirk.
“I know what you’ve been up to.”

And he does.

You’ve been saying “heh” a lot.
You’ve been thinking you’re clever.
You’ve been hoping silence equals shrewdness.
(You’re quite taken by the theater of your own anger.)
You keep getting taken by the mechanic.
You’ve been giving the desperate glances of a subway ******.
You’ve been pretending to be a man.
You’ve been hoping someone else will put out the fire.

Now we’re holding a couple of beers by a truck, overlooking a lake.
Inexplicably, we’re going hunting.
“It’s ok.  This is how it is.”
He deliberately checks the sight.

And with the certainty of a father, he tells me he knows.

But I remember it’s a dream,
because he doesn’t.

There was the day that the stroke --just a stroke--
freed her from that dreaming,
lightning freeing the pine
from its impossible salt air climb,
cleaving it to the gravity.

Do we dream of puncturing the salt air, or
do we dream of
the strike, the stroke
the fragrant humus that waits within
to passively, piously
become salt,
electric?

echoes in our spinal cords
drip bile
sulphur
electricity
a brooding, remembering snake

your voice recalls
kisses, chin on neck, yours, later
the back of your knee
the crush of skin on carpet
a betrayal of fingers, yours or not

warm spite
a violence delicately buried under so many ancestors, drowned in tea
the squawk of puberty
ancient fists, in scabbards
these echoes are all mine

but the way nets hold water,
is the way we hold ours,
serpentine
believing we are the soundmakers, the moaning cello
when we have no hands and no tongues and so many hollows

The fuselage must gleam
in a pink Pacific sunset
at 29000 feet
inside, I am brought puffed cellophane pouches of tamarind by attendant ladies and men
and a sanitary case wraps my pillow.

Bangkok’s taxis are driven by a man with bones for a neck on cracked
roads that vanish into blind ways.
Later a child – spying left – pulls me through a curtained door into an ante-room to
sell me cling-wrapped copies of Japanese slasher movies. “Cheap!”
Flies circle a mound of meat spiked to a vending cart -- “special for you.”
A sea of mopeds rumble up the road and chase me between parked cars
Tattered hunks of plastic bag blow past off the beach.

At night gut rot infects the air, and I walk in brown puddled streets.

The tar sky smothers above the neon and the barkers and the *** for $10.  This last part was in the guidebook.

A woman sits, cloaked in a shawl, selling women’s apparel, all arranged on pale and chalky mannequins, angled at attention.
They wear the rouge of the truth-telling jester.
Their mouths are gaping, smiling, lurid, laughing, howling.  Eyes wide, piercing and empty, excited.
They look like me. And I look away.
The woman’s throat moves.  Or does she chuckle?
“For you.”

She wanted to tell you a dream
but you wouldn’t let her.
“We can marry when you’re 80.
Then there’ll be nothing to lose.”
Geese do not marry, though
and she wondered if the moon over
the Nile would really be the same
moon as here, tonight.
8 hours, after all, is not 80 years.

It’s not so easy to admit that you’ve been here all along
Like my gnawed fingertips
Like my absence of dreaming
You with your breath and your stars

And your dead brother
Who I missed by a week

Is he the one who showed you how to make an exit?

As if spoken to you through the back
of your skull,
from below snowpack,
through the bell of time.

A haunting has no language,
though.
A life leaves no heat.
A kiss, no bruise.
So when it walks these halls
during the inverted night
greet it as a guest
who has come to dance.
Do not be so rude as to lead.