All the good sports
         go out for a run
                       into the ice storm.

They grimace and squint
           in the headlights of cars
                       on Riverside Drive.

And they run as if for their lives
            in this freezing rain
                        that sheathes and has broken

the leafless branches
            along snow-plowed bike paths;
                          ice-pellets ping off
        
their pricy goggles, their fluorescent shells,
              as they struggle north
                           to the pole where

they always turn back
              for the Christmas lights strung
                       over the porches
              
welcoming home
               those who might have been
                        men.

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.

Today was a day where walking
into the woods, over hardpack,
one foot went right through the path,
then the other, up to my knees.

Today was day in between
being stuck in the snow and the spring
I was ready for, seeds in my pocket,
a sunflower of sorts, for a chickadee;

and so it was, in a wink
you landed on my fingertip: uncertain,
bird, winter and I
vanished together.

On a nameless lake
north of Nipigon
I saw a creature

up in the crown
of a burnt-out jack pine
watching me wonder:

should I go on, into the opening
cleared by the fire, or return?
I stayed at the edge,

half in the open,
afraid of a windigo;
I must have turned back

and paddled in,
over spruce bogs,
across Black Sturgeon Lake;

I must have come in,
tell me you saw me
come in.

Not because she told me
you and all your work were just a tree-fort
and to get inside one had to trust
the flimsiest of whining rungs
(nailed, nailed, and re-nailed in the trunk),
how the floors were rotten plywood,
a lattice-work of soggy two by fours,
conspiring to keep you in there,
until another backup plan unfolded;
but because you were the only one
to stay up there overnight,
when everybody promised that they’d come.

And there was nothing, really, up there
except you in your tree fort, as if
a life depended on it,
as if life depended on a life depending on it
as it did.

Deadfall

My palm warm on the trunk
of a drowned out jack pine,
I squint into the glare
and feel how the wind rides
the dead crown,
then I push and I push
until the heartwood
that has held up the rot cracks,
until the great crash
into this black swamp
brings forth a shrill
irrevocable silence.

I saw the pigeon rise and dive,
a maintenance man was sweeping
the fledglings from the roof; in silence
(as I was watching from a distance)—death
was a perfectionist; he swept them off,
her little ones, the broken nest,
mixed with debris, all spinning down
behind a row of houses.

She rose and dived again, attacked
the bobbing baseball cap—
Go for the eyes!
but she was simply baffled
by the relentless sweeping;
and then it stopped.

He straightens up,
some other duty calls
the man, and so the bird,
who settles on a barren patch,
flutters a wing and pirouettes,
perhaps perplexed, though I can see
that she will start again.

Weaponized,
a Plymouth Fury
wallows up the off-ramp
oblivious to our toot-toot-*****,
dodging cars to disappear into
the onrush. Senile missiles,

our moms and dads
take aim through their confusion,
behind windshields, selfishly
they hog the right to their wrong-ways
and praying for decorum
cream the Firebirds.

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.

Back in '71, when I was pregnant with my first child, I went for a long desperate cross-country run through Prussian territory. Waving my arms like a folle, dodging the crottes of maudits corbeaux flustered from the heaps of corpses left over by Napoleon III’s second-last stand, trying to catch the eye of the franc-tireurs, searching for Zündnadelgewehr  in the grenade pits.

In ‘46, just before bringing forth what remains of my second child, I was sitting in a prototype grey Panzer taking *** shots at a couple of charred hibakujumoku (the ******* eternal gingko) when I felt her chewing at my innards. Needlessly and in spite of my best intentions, my strict upbringing and the “Manual”, which I'd almost learnt off by heart, I leapt up off the soiled wicker seat, banged my head on the ****** periscope handle and pulled the red ripcord.

Later, I imagined her breastfeeding on what was described as “the flesh of my withered gland”; I watched her little nails squeezing the calico pythons squirming in my camouflage maternity flack jacket and recited doggerel from the Shorter OED, the classic tales of mirth and fury.

My last, Cenozoic, carried in my matrix through the Sturm und Drang of the Quaternary glaciation, cougar-pelted and covered in flint chips, something like thalidomide finished it off (according to the magnetic resonance). God, how I loved to paint the trichinosis, the rhinitis, no, the rhinocerii (we were pre-literate, after all) on the cave walls. Augustus I called it, buried with blueberries, primitive to any distinctions.

Still, the albino alligators with the orange eyes escaped from the biosphere on the Rhine, the one right beside the nuclear reactor, twenty miles from the cave entrance. They were mutant twins. Reading Herzog's plump lips, they headed straight for the heavily guarded cave door. One paleontologist and one art historian patrolled the opening in alternating twelve-hour shifts. Dressed for duty in typical ice age fashion, long caribou ponchos draped over leopard skin undergarments, they were ready for anything: filmmakers, epistemologists and brutal English; with their laptop PCs, flip phones and clipboards, they were avant-garde obscurantists. They didn't stand a chance, standing there by the door hole, waiting for their cameos.

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.

Sky grabber,
Hide under thick trees;
Stay in places unlit by the sun, like shadows of buildings;
Maintain complete silence;
Use general confusion methods;
Spread pieces of reflective glass on the roof of your car or
Disembark and go in different directions.
(It is unable to get after everyone.)
Form fake gatherings using dolls and statues,
Place them outside fake ditches;
Burn tires for cover smoke;
Leave the microwave open;
Lift the ordinary water dynamo, carefully,
the one fitted with the 30-metre copper pole and
jam the waves and frequencies.
God willing, the operator should be a know-how.

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.

First, you unscrew
the faceplate and pry out
the broken door **** assembly,

then you remove
the smoothly machined,
cast iron latch bolt: ‘1914’

stamped on the tongue;
its torso forks
into bow legs.

Twist a paperclip
around its waist
to make it

a crutch
that will drag ends of thread across the floor,
until,

bolt-headed,
it senselessly stands
behind the door.

O my friend,
how long before
you hang?

1        I sat there, reading you a story.

1.1     Well, reading a story to myself, maybe even in my head, not sure.

1.12    I used a small light clipped onto the binder. I bought a fresh triple 'A' battery in the little pharmacy on the ground floor, beside the broken escalator.

1.13     I brought my binoculars too.

1.131   The windows in your room faced west over a helicopter landing pad and the parking lots of another hospital, an ok view at night, and I could look into the rooms of that hospital and sometimes see this kid looking back, unseeing.

1.2      You were usually half-asleep when I got there, but still willing to talk about the flocks of crows that streamed by your window at dusk.

1.21     The setting sun carved them into the sky. By the time I got there all that was left was the windsock on the roof of the hospital, twisting in the indefinite sunset.

2       The world is coming out, isn't it?

2.01   As if from a broken centrifuge, it is going to fly out and splatter on these walls.

2.012  Whatever energy I have left to write at all arises from the centripetal force gathered those nights, their gravity and implacable stillness.

2.1       I sat with my thermos of mint tea, my feet were on the nurse's stool, the night before us.

2.2       Can something forever conceal itself from, yet express itself in, the world?

2.21      This question in the letter I was reading when it started.

3       Blood everywhere.

3.01   There is still a spot on my wool sock.

3.1     All over the floor in the bathroom.

3.2      And in the sink.

3.21     And when I looked up in the bathroom mirror I saw your eyes. Your eyes!

3.3       And the small vessels in your sclerae were bleeding.

4       Breathe.

4.1       And each item can be the case or not the case while everything else remains the same.

5       And you cannot.

6       Death a midwife.

-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.

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.

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.

(com)Putaré.
Roman in spirit, I reckon:
pure, amputation,
standing, Greek-still,
numb, counting our infinite
orders. Ordaining but mainly
still, metastatic: a system,
a yes and a no.

More relation than thing,
pure burning forge, binary
burnt to instruction constructs a prosthetic,
so here:
clamour and rattle, flutter and struggle
requiem whistler, your Kyrié Eleison!
Strap up the tap shoe: Hop ! Step ! Brush ! Slip Off!
fall crawling, follow the echoing absence,
of world?

O, there are worlds for this:

Charles Simonyi sang in a soft tiny 'C',
reserved for himself, tautologically,
the in and the out of it:
[#defineNEARnear] and
[#defineVOIDvoid]  I
swear it is true
(parenthetically) to itself,
otherwise go
wherever
you get two.

Virtualis.
Rootless, I reckon:
(hu)Man, reflected (my pidgen) in
vir/us, nest fetid (putére)
Stinking like poison, our
pigeon Kingfisher, the bob and the strut,
picks at its nits, an ubiquitous flutter
inside our openings,
pigeon souls digging
deep pigeon holes.
Souls: Log On.
Infect space in between
system and structure. Logged or afloat
in the time-slice,
the churn smoothing bios (for us!),
to be construed:
Basic Input Output System or Breath,
(Soul, to you)
You know the drill,
down to the psukos, I reckon,
some zoon logon, so
pass a word over: Are we on?
We are off!

We the prosopopoetic (figure it out)—
Warm mask on the dead.
Dead? No. New (at long last),
some thing no older
than its own name:
(declare:
[NAME]
"remember this fire"
*the step was always downhill
(PROCLAIM:
“here we are again”
Here we are again
A£¶šÌ & oÊ°ÔìŨÙ;–
again and again
<…ÚYš„¦ú•¥Ûµ¸e=Â:
a mask on a masquerade.