It hit me while running,
staring down at my feet without thinking,
how in much the same way
two overlapped squares, idly sketched,
resolve into a cube, or
a wine goblet will turn into faces,
this well-worn path in the grass
I believed I’d been sharing all of these years,
was only, in fact, the one I had beaten
into the ground by myself.

I tell my daughter winter killed the wasps
and throw a well-aimed stone, we both jump back

as the nest falls, as if it wasn’t true
and wait—for nothing. She wants to go,

but I say, “Look! It’s broken!” On the snow,
entombed, dead wasps, some plan has gone awry,
                                          
she won’t come near, she looks away,
she points out a new bird, but I still need

to make her wonder if the sleeping queen
survives, woven into the maze of her children.

We bring the broken nest back to the car,
it rustles in my hand, it’s only wind

inside the ruined walls, and I pretend,
like her, that I don’t notice.

On the north tip of Bahia Banderas
there is a point with long crescent beaches
called ***** de Mita, where villas loom
behind massed manzanillas, where
half-asleep guards with sleepy machine guns
slump on plastic chairs under hibiscus
beyond the driftwood that marks the high tide.

There, on a bed, in this cabana, where
I know the pelicans, the names of the waves
and the sound your feet make on the sand, when
it's too hot beneath fluttering canvas
to do more than stretch out, as if on the rack,
staked under the sun and slathered with honey,
eye-lids sewed open, awaiting the army
of fire-ants....
                     except your feet are too perfect
for me to be eaten by ants,
toe-nails too pink, crazy sand blooms
on your wet shoulder blades: O instead,
I'll sit up and stare at your nose.
I've seen it before on a totem pole
in Chapultepec Park: inscrutable Aztec,
cempazuchitl, I've been waiting for you
to devour my heart.

On your last solo,
you had six matches,
a tarp and a rope,
a bag of granola
on a tiny island,
afraid of the bears
on the mainland;

without any birch bark,
to kindle a fire,
you waited for dark
crawled into your tent
to sleep for the morning
that never comes,

once that full-moon is high
above the black lake,
and you hear them set out
over the water.

Deep in the Amazonas,
two bugs with long legs and horrible wings
bounced up and down, eating each other, I guess,
beneath this enormous leaf that you lifted
with the tip of your broken machete
in feigned curiosity.

This was after the worms you called serpents
squiggled in our ankle-deep mud,
after your so-called jaguar tracks, after that tumour was chopped off
of the tree trunk and the termites poured out,
even after the green-eyed poisonous frog,
but well before dusk when, Clarindo,
you told us to turn on the light.

Clarindo, Clarindo, you ******* artist,
those tracks were the village dog's
and it was our light that attracted the Cobra Grande,
who rose from the shadows and fell on my back,
pressing its fangs through my chest then listening to hear
if I breathed, while all you could do was bang
your machete on the great Ceiba tree,
which (as you knew) was provocation not remedy
in such a darkness, the one we now knew
overtook us.

-3-
Our rockets blast off. Binary stars rise. People are lonely in space. They try to make friends, they really do. Of course they tell stories, but it doesn't matter because in space everything else matters too much. Who would have guessed? You? Weightless too long, now you can barely lift a phaser to your temple.

-2-
Squeeze. Nothing happens. Stare in mild perplexity down the crystalline barrel, squeeze again and this time you incinerate your left ear and open the predictable hole in the hull of the vessel. Yes you—the last person on Earth to drink beer by engulfing the top of the bottle in your mouth, instead of pressing it gently onto your pursed and thirsty lips.

-1-
Remember when Colonel Alexis Leonov left the capsule and floated in space for ten minutes at the end of a light line? The general public was greatly impressed by the spectacular and emotional aspect of this sortie into the void. From the loudspeaker his voice crackled: "The vast cosmos is visible to me in all its indescribable beauty; in the black sky the sun shines brilliantly, and I feel its warmth on my face through my helmet window."

- Lift Off-
And so when we open the lower panel, preparing to leave the capsule, drawing ourselves slowly through the airlock and with a light push moving away from the spacecraft, notice how the small ****** given as we leave imparts a slight angular motion to the capsule; see the vehicle rotating slowly below us; see the heavy door in the open position.

-Nothing-
Reassured by the hiss of oxygen, I began bicycling my legs in the void, moving away.  When the stars came to an end I said, "Ha! No more stars!" and bicycled onward.

-Worse-
I should never have slipped on the suit, never stared wide-eyed as the polycarbonate fishbowl was lowered over my freshly shaved head, never listened to the titanium neck ring slide and click into place.

-Nothing Without No-
One of those angelic flies on the hollow wall of our nowhere reports that we appear disoriented. Hemingway, however, recalls one of those picador's horses, seen from the upper tiers of the bullring, dragging a plume of their own entrails through the fine yellow sand of the arena.

Yes. Ride up the Yukon in winter –
No one to stop you.

I can see your tracks threading northward
and, once you start, it won't take so long

to get there, to the end, if it matters.
They say starting’s the hard part,

to get ready, tighten the straps,
test all your gear, all the training.

The winters have come and gone,
but the frozen river waits for you

to pedal through the deep snow,
because you will, now that you've started;

covered in ice, squinting in the glare,
and it was enough to keep pumping the legs,

filling the lungs, singing a song, to follow
the river north in the winter. Happy

to be there, in that blinding light,
with feet too frozen to start for home.