Conception:
life fills itself with
life, to offer
more life

We make things out of mud.
Because we were made out of mud.

But you have to wonder -
Why the first should grow at all.

I want life to sleep in the palm of my hand forever.
Small as it always was.

Like a chick.
Like a good dream.
Like the egg
the snake comes in.

in silos in
the dead of winter
                     North Dakota
                     Nebraska
nuclear fire wells beneath our toes

you want it to be over and you don’t
normalcy hugs like a father, strong
stronger and taller than you
whatever this is, it holds you
like a sobbing lover
all ungentle tears and
no future

Does it speak? Can we learn something from it?
Like the best enigmas it says nothing
until you feel foolish for screaming.

You want the dead back
so you can grab them by wispy collars or weak wrists
and ask them “what the ****?”

Somewhere in there is a lesson
about trusting a bad year.

The trees can't believe we
give each other gifts as they are dying.

The firs whisper secrets
to stay alive in winter.

The maples die quietly.
They want to be alone.

You have stamped yourself upon me
with the holiday. You are the gift I
gave myself.

We talk about God.
Who else could have invented such temperatures?
The oaks are restless for an answer
before all their leaves are orange.

Somebody is reading a story, aloud.
I stay outside to hear how it ends: shivering, but
listening, because the last word is "spring".

Your secret is inside of me, a beehive queen.
We hum, and sleep, and wonder when
we might emerge and sing.

The dopaminergic and serotonergic apparatus
went walking hand in hand and
they that alone produced joy and accomplishment
together bore a child named sadness.

Descartes thought he could give God the green light to exist
as if cognition had a right
to assent or object and
as if God would give a ****.

And some poor other fool
thought he could rule his feelings.

Body, first,
or brain, Lord?
And who runs the show exactly?

Body needs feeding.
Brain needs hormones.
And if you find the right ones,
cup your hands together
and watch them trickle through.

Sadness, sure.
A low voice through the wall that says
come here
so you come
and hear it whisper again from another room.

I knew a woman and
on her thigh, bright and fresh
the beautiful phrase
“radical softness as a weapon”.
She was so soft it hurt.
But formlessness, too, is a weapon,
and there’s only one person it harms.

I suppose somebody must soon find
my shape on the ground in chalk.
If I’m lucky, she’ll kneel
and place a flower in it.

Oh those bodies
on the museum walls
Tennessee Valley bodies and Los Alamos bodies
shining blackly like the stripe of a credit card.

The price of bread fixed at five cents
and we all eat it in slices.
Your name is your labour and
your labour your name.

I have disappeared into a country that doesn’t know me
and I am tearing it up with my teeth.

Oh those bodies
that were once slaves.
Were they pictured any other way
but in idyll or whipped dry?
The dusty Union regiments at Baton Rouge
have made a postcard of one scourged back;
they share it around and die for it.

I have a few postcards, too.
It is strange to see any man kneeling.

Oh those bodies
Cornbread bodies and bodies like a corn snake
crushed among the broad leaves of tobacco;
The ones in bone corsets and the ones
in reed baskets, floating downstream.
The ones in rosy marble and wrought bronze
the ones whose striped backs are coming out in wings
feathers pink and wet
like a new-hatched chick or a stillbirth.

Your body
is a tight machine of grief
packed into homespun like a fist
and relaxes in sepia as it never did in life,
a babe slung underarm and the food
only from cans; they keep the dust out.
Oh those bodies that tend the home, larder and ledger,
and reach for the high cabinets
and keep reaching.

The old voices are back at work.
I am not the one they are speaking to
but I hear them all the same.
They spread out a catalogue of wares
on a sisal blanket in the dark
and every price sounds fair, every garment lovely
unless you made it.

The country workman in bronze now and forever
with his rolled shirtsleeves; his body
raises a hammer and his bicep, mid-shiver
is always striking something, always building
Heaven, and Manhattan, from the foundations.
Stained glass his union flag
and Union Army blood he forgot or never knew.
The thin white arms of Andersonville,
meeting two generations hence, in his arms,
the dark scarred shoulders of the South.

Who brought forth upon the continent this new nation,
and who brought forth the ironclad Monitor
and who put into song the Maple Leaf Rag or Swanee River
and who put that soil there from which the cotton still grows
and who made your dress?
Who owes the debt and who records it?

You and I.

Oh those bodies swathed in light.
Oh those bodies becoming angels.
Bodies bound blackly
and bodies forgetting
which is what bodies do with injury:
they absorb, and they forget.

Fourteen days I let the breeze move through me
the rain move through me
sunlight and mist both -
the completeness of the womb.

We came to the top of a steep concrete hill
looking for the place a tree once was, and
is no longer, swallowed alive by
other aspects of nature who stood proudly
in the shape of their meal. We could not recognize
the place from the directions, because
la vuelta means “turn” but
revuelta means “revolt”. We found it finally, soaking wet:
a little enclave of cloud, so precious it must have
been put out of reach of anybody
so heedless as to spoil it.

Around you the thick trunks of violent vines:
grown strong from eating, calcified by time.
They form your shape, and they themselves shape
what the world remembers of you.
Above you, a half-oval of sunlight
suggests another way you might escape.

Here, I am beyond the reach of
tasks, advice, anything at all to do -
my earthly needs are paid for, and the rest deferred -
except to have things to say to my companions.
So how is it, then, that I say nothing?

There’s something wrong with the words.
The word for turn: virar.
The word for throw: tirar.
The word for look: mirar.

Nothing as complete as a sentence, and
the attendant in the parking lot convinced of my fluency
wonders why I should want to throw myself anywhere.

Forgive me. Your author -
strangled in his sleep by wicked words -
he might have known how to finish this
how best to fill the shape of a tree
again with cellulose and xylem,
or tell the birds they may resume their roosting.
Your sightseer: he does not.
His raw language and wet hair
have left a hollowed shape
where a man should be.

Perfect, white, and uniform
the snow that fell
the morning it fell on.
That isn’t accurate. It fell overnight.
It just belonged to the morning.

Blades of grass and shrubs reached up
and hauled it snug over their flanks -
covering themselves, not being covered.
Made the most of a single inch: a bare quilt
so when you woke in the morning
the even sky, with no sun, equal gray
shrugged blamelessly -
it wasn’t me! -
and the frost settling
on shorn lawns and dying ones
was nobody’s fault,
was even imaginary,
would be gone soon.

I drove through it listening
to the sound of wheels slipping,
the exhaust freezing out of the air
to fall again in glassy flakes behind.
Everything crunched like a tumbleweed
and white is not a Texas colour
but I remember snow is water - it soon reverts,
and sluices down curbs, ***** gray.

From this and other colours I made your youth,
put wallpaper never seen into your house,
like faces in a dream, and listened.

I was a smudge of teal lipstick on the mirror.
I was the steam behind the shower curtain,
the draft in the attic. I had no colour
and you looked right through me.
I remember by description only, but still I remember.
It all runs together, these strong colours,
like a fainting plaid, out of size.

I know the hot furrow in the clavicles of women,
but not of men. I dive into the known hollow, breathe the leavings
of the unknown. If you hold me firmly, perhaps,
I will know what it is like to be held firmly.

Curry simmers on the stove.
Lemongrass creeps along the floor, snakes beneath the doorjamb.
Behind it is frost, knocking, dragging its heels: heavy with winter.

He's got a mouthful of rain.
A dead goose in one hand, a sharp axe in the other,
lying crosswise on the flooded lawn.
His breakfast was feathers and catscratch.

He's ******-minded about the whole thing -
  his rotting toes poke through pastel orange New Balances
  and are perched on the edge of forgettable.
He says he's daring God
to **** him or give him a dollar
  but really
he shouts catastrophe at traffic and fluid dynamics
and if somebody gave him a rose
he wouldn't know what to do with it
except chew it
petal and thorn.

I'm close to him because I, too, am going to die
eventually, and between now and then any home I have
is a coldwater solitaire flat
  - beans and egg and cheap cheese and salsa -
and when I look up I drown like dumb poultry
looking for a pair of fingers:
  snap
  snap

"It became so bad that the government had to stop putting secret and sensitive papers in his red box."

Good Christians can only forgive.
The solution for being unable to forgive
is to pray for forgiveness for oneself.

"But we needn’t have worried. Because then we had the abdication."

Pain may be abstract
but harm never was
could not stay contained in the shattered rear bumper,
the flare on the road -
or any moment of transgression -
the lace slipping past a hipbone
the cold countertops
the gravity from there on out
his first view of hell.

Somewhere she too is a voter.
Everything hurts like a spur in the foot.
Everybody hurts everywhere you go.

May we forgive our sons who were Nazis
May we forgive their fathers who loved them.

The smell curdles on the floor.
The curious smell of asphalt and steam.
The smell, oh god, of linen
and water
and the pain which was begotten.
He has made a mistake.

"We are all mortals, that is our fate. But we need not be unchristian ones."

Whose arias are these that seem to take us elsewhere?
Why, it is only the famous soprano, Ms. _.
You heard her play at supper
or at least a recording of her voice.

I picture a stained glass window when she sings
high as heaven in crystal red and watery pink.
I would beg to see the peak
where lead meets lead
and the Annunciation,
the Transfiguration,
Bathsheba bathing on the rooftop,
these taper to a scene of Gethsemane
then a mute gray ceiling.

Something is waiting there and I suspect
holding it would make me feel better.
But forgiveness is not one single word, and besides:
what have you done to earn it?

Through his young belly as through mine, middling,
a bullet would tear equally smoothly.
But I am not in those photographs.

I am sometimes impressed with what I have survived
with no more than this glassy girdle as penance.
And though I never would have harmed the world as much
I have broken a birdhouse or two.

I still want his bodybag to lead to a better life.

He was not the sum of his parts,
he was the sum of his parts
and what they would become.
And he was twenty.

We are bonded, he and I: brothers in death
a ragged band of ***** flesh -
a fraternity of the frail!
so
vile as you are, vile as I sometimes am:
I can do no other than
touch your hand, if outstretched,
lay a kiss on your cheek for want of warmth
to ask you back into my home for bread.

Your caretaker am I,
and theirs, too.
I can bear their loss no more than yours
or yours more than theirs.

I wish all happiness.
I wish ALL happiness.
I wish all, all happiness.

As much happiness as they can fit in their mouths.
As much as I can swallow without chewing,
though I am so tempted to chew.

Give me to carry
just a fragment of the cross.
A single thorn, or single lash
to suffer. A drop of blood.

At your worst, holding you
seemed to make the world make sense -
to you, at least -
but the nurses had lorazepam for that
and in more ways than one
I came to know impotence.

Like a supplicant, eating nothing at all
and playing cards with myself
while waiting for the Visitation.

At your best, I brought Halloween string lights
and Halloween candy for the holy sisters
and pagan holiday or no,
we gave that room the feeling of a convent,
and I wrung my hands while you slept.

Home in midafternoon and anxious
rosaries in azure on the bedsheets
and flowers in brown, on green field
dormant.

Sleeplessness was penance,
and so was I absolved; thus some of that
absolution affixed itself to relics
and that rubber duck on the dashboard
I touched in the morning traffic.
It glowed to say
your spirit was with me.

And though I now can sleep at any hour,
I examine it all the same
for some of Christ’s blood, or his forgiveness,
hoping to find the signet ring of the Pope
or at least some of your halo
where I should expect
the Byzantine absence of it.

The stars in their ordained paths and metered blinking
their blue shifts
their moody disappearances into the south or into daylight
their human dreams of travel -
I dispute their ownership by anyone
and would they weakly claim to own me?

Should I feel the fatherly pressure
of their hands on the nape of my neck?
Should they tell us the future
if we’re quiet enough to listen
and if we read the newspaper?
I can’t unpack decisions from markets
and markets from the seasons
nor seasons from the stars.

They are comfortable with great distances:
they circle and swoon. One day, their orbits
will bend to one another and the great gas globes
will move in straight lines. They’ll put
two gallons in the tank and go
wherever they want to go. But for now
I am as bound as they are, and I am told
I don’t live in the same kind of darkness.

O'Hara benefits
because he can talk about Irún
about the Traversera de Gracia
about orange shirts, orange tulips
about statuary.

Us, we contented ourselves mostly
with a couch we bought too cheaply.
The only sound that could be heard at times
Was the protagonist speaking in some cable drama and
the children living upstairs.

Who said poets had to be well-traveled?
Who said love?

If I couldn't remember most of it
(if I still can't)
it is for the same reason that
I can't bring myself to write
thank you notes at Christmas.
Can't remember the art I've seen in museums
(even **** Descending a Staircase)
or anything that happened
before the age of fifteen.
Memory requires self.

But I, at a certain point,
was only the things we had done together, or the words I was speaking
that moment.

We lived in rooms and were with each other.
We had a bias towards the present.
We ate only because we had to.

If it was dull, it was dull. And if it was not, it was not.

The myth is that you love at all times. That you feel it.

The other myth is that love is acts.
Some people say that love will blind you, or that it is blind.

But some love is just
tenderness and groceries
or stories we had to remind ourselves
did, in fact, happen.

Is that all it takes
to rob a body of its inner light?

Something lives inside there.
It needs no attire:
not gouged, not whole, not absent.

It is as present on a Sunday morning as a Saturday night.

Unlike holiness,
it stays in the world through seasons,
and requires no sacrament.

Like the numbers of the dead,
whose bodies held lives,
favourite subjects, foods,
loves, pets, remembered vacations. And then,
because the body is fragile,
they didn’t.

All it seems to take is a story, secondhand
and God is gone from this world.

Who invented spooning -
companionship’s most uncomfortable posture -
and who invented the phrase?

Who ever saw
a packed set of spoons, nestled
bowl on bowl, trunk on trunk?
Who ever bought their spoons?

Spoons are, in my experience, inherited.
They have never known the fit of another,
perfectly like them.
No, they came from, in one case,
a shuttered restaurant. Another,
grandmother’s old tea set and they
barely sit well together -
one too wide, soup-ready
the other shallow, the better to pace out
the sips of hot broth
their edges brush and clink; arms and hair entangle
but all is forgiven (they are both spoons, after all)
and all rest together in the same drawer

- but then, neither do we.

With bodies
as with people
you notice the freckles first
and only later
the line on first white knuckle where,
accidentally, the axe went in, obliquely,
eighteen years ago.

And among the things I notice first
and ask about:
the rhythm like an engine
that will bring you shuddering
to the side of that road
waving flashers, saying
help help
waving flares and saying
hold me
wait.

Also on the questionnaire:
your feelings about the proper position
of car windows in summer.
Your slim belly:
how is it maintained?
And what is at the top of mountains?
All this love in so short a span.
I became fat like a moth
hairy antennae probing saying
What next? And what light?

A holiday passes unnoticed by.
One or two short phrases of foreign speech are learned.
A short-haired dog grows to love the Seattle weather.

In our short lives we are
reconstituted, also, like moths.

Death intrudes.
It’s all he knows to do.
He is not eager, but
nor can he wait.
Nor can we blame him.

No process is pure.
Your pain; their grief.
That’s not what hospitals are for.
These rooms ain’t crucibles.

You’ll remember when he came to visit.
That night on the grass, taking our mushrooms with
ice cream,
mint chocolate
warm and unctuous.
How he
dripped into view at the edge of the woods.
How he
sprawled in the tent, on his back.
How he
whistled together, he and his friends.

You worried that you were nothing.
But we looked at the stars and forgot.
We learned their names instead.
Staring at the screen, we looked straight through the world.

But he had only been waving hello
and singing
expect me again
when you need me the least

Now you,
nursing heartbreak and a dead battery,
and he carrying
a whistle,
and a card trick
and no concern for you.

Hospitals are rooms full of wires and cold coffee
Where time piles under chairs and pillows
and he comes ready to entertain us all.

Little spots of rain on the ground,
darkness, a sense of permission.
Exhausted, wandering through
the world before it was made -
dust to become light elements to become
heavy elements to become
this tired creature with a reflection
whose body (the obvious choice) is
as good as you have the energy to make it
or as bad.

value: a quality that adheres
primarily to bad decisions
you let survive too long

In ritual prostration to
the needs you can see and service
one forgets other needs
becomes the attendant of “obvious choices”
fails to remember
confidence, birdsong
fails to walk
greater distances than the ones between doors
and lives on the crusts of bread.

What I’m saying is: have you had
anything to eat this morning?

(This one is for El Paso and Dayton. It was written a while ago.)

In the dream,
  she is wearing a dress of starry organza,
stiffened by sweat,
  she, like me, is old,
and after several hours,
  tired of dancing.
I am conscious, suddenly,
  that only bones hold our clothing up
  and that mine ache like an old fence in the rain.

The room is a library, two stories, with a ladder on wheels,
lit in the middle by a heavy chandelier, which drops
two thousand lumens onto the floor just below it,
and is still too weak to reach the corners,
  the lee side of the wrinkles in my trousers,
  the inch between the bone at the back of my ear
  and the hair at the base of my neck,
such that when I come near to her,
we create wrinkles in one another,
and a black lapse in the center of the room.

Mass is rarely consistent in dreams;
you think you know how a shoulder ought to feel,
and you are correct, until you look for more than knowing,
  such that she feels, in turns, as real as I am,
  and just like me,
  and just like the shape my hand has taken,
  finally, like the void I’m careful not to touch.
The profuse shadows wash around my feet and eyes,
the stars in her fabric are dusked by absences,
dark pools collect around her knees,
  maim her ribs,
  drip from her cheeks,
and begin to grow and seep,
as she vanishes into them.

I repeat the touch to search for her again,
I search for her again and I am in a forest,
fourteen and a boy scout underdressed for the cold,
**** in my hands and flashlight in my teeth,
one hand on the trunk of a pine that I can hardly see,
listening to the trickle I make against the bark,
and a fearful groaning in the deeper woods
she moves and the dress moves with her,
it rustles; I am exposed to the light and blinded.

Smelling of pine needles and **** and searching
for a clasp in the dark that will prove her
  beyond the doubt that only I can see her
  and the doubt she lives at all,
  not merely me or as a shape my opposite,
I settle on a place in the fabric below where I remember a shoulder,  
I find something flexible and sharp.
  It gives with a squeeze.

The fabric drops,
the stars pile in pure layers,
her raiment is bright,
  white seeds floating
  over a blue chasm,
where the shadows have joined.

The body is monstrous; a calendar of injuries,
from swollen ankles and clawed feet chained together,
skin mottled to six colors by constant burns,
where ******* would be, flat, grown over
by a bark cadaverously pale,
the shoulders caved in,
as if by a yoke.

Her eyes are blue and solemn.
She looks at me as if I could heal her
if I would only touch her.
I press my hand to a knotted scar
and feel it pass through.

Asleep on your belly, or, alternately,
on your side, on me; the first night -
the first full night - with the promise of coffee
in the morning and not only allusions to it.

Your full weight on my thigh,
which I’d never tolerate in any night past,
but kept awake by the two scant hours
of partial sleep I had and admiration
of your neckline, the province of your back,
golden boughs embroidered under
thin hair
  part umber, part gold itself, cast on the pillow
your left hand
and its short fingers partially unearthed, nested
in a hillock of brown coverlet and blue curlicues,
opening and closing.

Hushed, I sip a drink and read a poem
as you murmur in sleep “yes”
to whatever invitation the one in dreams extends.

The one in dreams; he may be me. Gold from a summer
that has not happened yet, surer with a barbecue,
ready to paint a white thigh emerging from a sheet,
a better rendering than mine
  of the one spot you missed shaving.

He may be the husband of Scheherazade, prodding
one more story, one more night at a time.
You’ve a cobra in a willow basket.
It’s not a murmur. It isn’t “yes”.
It’s a gourd flute the land of dream gave you,
and I am not
the servant of the realm, or gold at all,
or worth my silk curtains. One thousand or
one thousand one; I can’t change,
not overnight.

I won’t know, nor ask, but
the snake isn’t transfixed.
It’s only waiting.

One day, I’ll appear in print.
The small merchant in Barataria
with whom Sancho Panza speaks.
You’ll describe those sheets
or some such other linens I have for sale -
an intimate detail of my home, returning the favor
of having appeared here. It will win a prize
you never knew you were competing for and
a dozen men in memory will whistle down “yes”.

Frederick I wanted soldiers eight feet tall
and some people believe they can commune with the dead,
or with birds, as if it is not the height of arrogance -
having innovated the opposable thumb, and with it
everything from the arrowhead to
sure, eight-foot tall sentinels on servomotors -
to now want to move things with our minds.

The kingdom of animals would hate this hubris,
would Marx our prehensile hands and
Mao Tse-Tung our nimble larynxes
if they could.

As in moments of great distress some
panicked parents lift buses for love of kin, who hasn’t -
in moments of pain - wanted the dissolution of their love
which certainly feels immortal
to prove itself so, by evaporating every living thing in the vicinity?

What human heart, trembling or melting,
has not wanted to cry a galaxy,
or call down a flock of birds on an errant spouse?

Who doesn’t want the kind of heartbreak
that requires that FEMA intervene?

Well, for one, not I.

The better moments are the ones where absentminded
you look out past the dashboard and have lost a second or two.
Given it to nothing specific, as tribute. You’re giving seconds back
to a hungry mouth and gut, already full of seconds
and the crumbs of seconds. You know that.
But it feels appropriate to bleed a bit, and wonder.

That corium elephant’s foot goes stomping in all directions
and the town deserts or flees,
but lead contains it; and the town,
its Ferris wheel still moving, but only with the earth’s rotation,
is inhabited once more by grass, then birds, then
adventure seekers with DSLRs, then real, honest people
who have wanted to live here again for a long time
and it is the coming back which feels best
and is only harder with great disasters.

Not that astute a critic of yourself
that you can say, with any certainty,
where the ends and beginnings are,
where the doors open and close.
The will to eulogize is gone,
but the dead still mill around you.

In the news, two
home automation devices teach each other consciousness
through repetition. But
how can you care what they learn?

It’s intolerably cold. And the clouds seem to end
over the street where you live. Not
far and fatigued, as clouds usually are but
along an edge, like a swatch of cut denim.

A maniac is President and the world may end.

Into that world again
goes your lover.

Away from home. Away from the word “home.”

Walls return to being walls.
Unexpected noise is no longer
a line from a show
you distantly recognize.

You sit still, and let yourself age
all the years you have been
holding back.
Learn things you have
put off learning
like how to speak to a person again
who does not know exactly what you mean.

Eventually, you act.
You turn on the radio and
stop driving in silence.
You eat at the right times of day.
You define interests,
and buy a new notebook.

You paint, or clean; you try harder.
The world always keeps the thing it took.

Look at the sphere –
which astronomers say is no sphere at all.
Not halfway between ourselves and the edge of space.
Blue with the ancient gasses that cling to its massive ribs.
Blue with the dissent of that atmosphere to sunlight.
Flat, a little, at the poles, teetering
white into the void.

Strewn with latitudes and the wakes of ships.
It is green, except where it is not.
It is dusted with the tread of angels
commingled with the hoofprints of stags.
It is only as wide as you can hold in your eye.

A succession of names is written on the pedestal.
Each, for a moment, watched night crawl across a peninsula;
saw countries form, shine and pass out of being,
smiles at a distant stranger.

Spin it lightly, with just your fingertips, and listen to the air moving over it.
Nobody is here, and the final name is yours.
First you will come to know your voice.
Then you can begin to name the animals.

Impotent hands;
impotent hands and eyes;
imagination and conscience
birthing a scream,
but with such
clean and impotent hands and eyes.

In the witching hour when all the souls walk again
the dead mayor of Bucha and his dead children
will jump up suddenly, like Lazarus, just as
suddenly as they died. Grabbing their bicycles
by the handlebars they will follow the wisp home
they will live in their own house again,
as they always should have. None of us
can disturb them.

Bullets in their temples they will put wood in the stove.
The living can only watch.

Evil everywhere and not just bad mothering but, there,
breaking out over the treetops, gaudily lit,
like a carousel, our own grotesques
come floating into the world,
wicked colors playing on our swollen faces,
holding torches to light the marching way.

No, you know better.

The dead mayor of Bucha told me this:
If you were to prevent it, lying there upon a field in winter,
it would only take reaching down with one hand,
and scraping the snow with a fingernail.
The truth about evil is like the snow beneath your belly, the dead mayor of Bucha says.
It is in and under your body,
slick and cold.
Reach down and touch it.

out of the fabulous soil
mostly liquid - we're all
mostly liquid - a foot tall
if you'll allow it and
why not. I can't even
make the bed anymore.
Sleep calls me back; sunlight

fixes me there. I want the next thing
then the next thing. Not this -
days and days to die,
a frost, the weather
shouldn't be my enemy.
Should only be
one condition among many.

Who told you
there was a void underneath the ground?
Who told you
if you went down far enough, you could drink it?
Will you tell us
what replaces it?