^{Aging. Being in pain. Finishing. Rotting.
              —Emmanuel Fournier}

We feel we’ve contracted into very dim, very old white dwarf stars, not yet black holes. Wrinkled, but not quite withered. Dropped out of summer like a stone, we watch time fall. With the leaves. Into a deeper color. Wavelengths missing in the reflected light.
 

The road toward rotting has been so long. We forget where we are going. Like a child, I look amazed at a thistle. Or drink cheap wine and hug my knees. To shorten the shadow? To ward off letting go?
 

So much body now, to be cared for. What with the arrow, lost cartilage, skeleton within. Memory no longer holds up. A bridge to theory and dreams. Impervious to vertigo. Days are long and too spacious.
 

Though the sun is a mere eight light-minutes away elderly dust hangs. Over the long sentences I wrote in the last century. Now thoughts in purpose tremor, in lament, in search of. Not being too soon? Going to be? Unconformities separating strata of decay?
 

You say aimlessness has its virtues. Just as not fully understanding may be required for harmony. And blow your nose. You sing fast falls the eventide, damp on the skin, with bitter wind. And here it is again, the craving for happiness that night induces. Or the day of marriage.
 

The difference of our bodies makes for different velocities. But gravity is always attracting, and my higher speed. Cannot outrun the inner fright we seem made of. Though I gesticulate broadly. As in a silent movie. Running after the train, waving goodbye.
 

Distant galaxies are moving away from us. Friends, lovers, family. Even the sky shifts toward red. Where every clearness is only. A more welcoming slope of the night. And I don't remember why I opened the door.
 

Mouth full of moans, you believe the natural state. Is a body at rest. And close your eyes to the threat of your face disappearing. Without thought or emotion. Into its condition. And I thought I knew you.
 

Are the complications thinning to a final simplicity? The nearest thing to a straight path in curved space? Clouds of gas slowly collapsing? With only one possible outcome? But unlike a black hole I keep my hair on. As I move toward the unquestionable dark.
 

This dark, Mrs. Ramsay thinks, is perhaps the core of every self. The deep note of existence the ear finds, but cannot hold on to. Across the vicissities of the symphony. Or else this dark could be our shelter in the time of long dominion. And though we are not well suited to the perspectives it opens it is an awesome thing to see. Once you can see it.

Lots of accidents
 
stabilizing this tau-
             crossed room
of adobe
shade, spaced
 
out with crumpled cars
Upon the concrete seal
 
float squares of light
sun-thaw, snow unsealed

Ask me again how the story should go. How much the underbelly of my garden held to bring forth spring, how much hunger I had to devour to get the sweetness I wanted from it. Did this devouring frighten you? I frightened myself in how much I promised to tell you if you asked me again about the water the water the water. What errors I made calculating the downward trajectory of memory rattling loose in the inhale, sharp in the shoulder blades exhaling like wings or whales or swizzles of light. Ask me again what I offered as a sacrifice to the rooster crowing his betrayal of morning. Forgiveness, what a sharp blade I press my body hard against.

I am wasted on thought-so’s and photo-ops

 
so-so’s and S-O-S cries and the lit flare

 
I burn I intuit I follow your light

 

look at the way you go into the tall grass
 
into it                         you light

 
               you moth

 
look at your shirtless body behind the tall grass

 
look at me on my knees

 
a poem is a lot like a grass stain

 
I want to do what a grass stain does

^{a love letter to traci akemi kato-kiriyama}

does a voice have to be auditory to be a voice?

where in the body does hearing take place?

which are the questions that cannot be addressed in language?

which are the questions where promises lodge?

how do we hear what is outside our earshot?

when does distance look like closeness, feel like velvet sunrise cheek to cheek?

what are the objects, ideas, or experiences we drop beneath the more evident surfaces of our lives to the air or water or ground beneath? do we drop them purposefully? are they forgotten?

what word makes the body?

what body defies the word?

which figures, shapes, presences, haunts, methods, media, modes, ephemera, gestures, abandonments, models, anti-models, breaths, harmonics? which soil? which fields?

what does beginning sound like? what body does continuing form? what note does perseverance hum?

is a word a body?

which apertures? which hinges?

where does a body stand without settling?

through which holes does history break into our day?

where in the past does the future excavate?

where in the future does the past propel?

what are the distinctions between proximity and simultaneity?

where does a body resist without refusal?

can borders be exceeded? can borders be disintegrated?

where in the body does hearing take place?

where in the body does loving take place?

how do we make family with someone we do not know?

what do we carry with us and where in the body do we carry it?

might we be permitted a we this evening?

may I hold your hand? to feel your hand as its actual shape, clothed in its papery useful unequivocal skin, bones stacked like tiny branches, the balancing act of a bird, joints unlocking, span from thumb to pinky octaving out toward unfamiliar harmonics?

what space does the body occupy despite everything?

what does despitesound like? what does withsound like?

where does attake place? where does respite take place?

             for Aja Sherrard at 20

The portent may itself be memory.
—Wallace Stevens

How hard to carry scores of adults on your back, 
not look at them as carrions of need, the distress 
of what loyalty requires. This pain is human, 
formed from plunges and positions,
misjudged from various heights.
 
For your love is of a practicalist tucked 
under purple quilts, sad conundrums, 
under the dearth of too much identity 
mixed with middle-class signifiers.
And then some from all other signifiers
like two magicians in someone else’s window.
 
How ceremony
for you was linked to desire, and not to a lie.
 
What you had is that writing came
from the same plumed pen as your father’s. 

And when you were writing we took note.

For so long the diary contained a seal depicting a wayward sense, 
descriptions for the sake of describing:
 
for what? for whom?
Now you’re growing—writing is skyward, a future tense.
 
There is a mountainous place. 
It’s where my crusty poetry lives,
and where my impulses reach across 
the divide to a charted, snowy place.
 
There is still bewilderment set between our conversations. 

Because we wanted you to mature.

Because you see it as our permanent discontent.

Nonetheless, we are close to the stitches 
where perfect boundaries darken us to you.
 
We hope willfully that we are close to the expiration of 
seemingly endless agitation.
 
Or we are in for years and years of 
its wild growth.
 
How encumbered-now memories existed
before the truth of a portent, which I have 
always taken to mean a warning.

New moon in midheaven, in Libra. The hermit wields two swords. Temptation overcomes the star. The chariot travails with weakend strength. Death rises to meet every face you meet. Ten wands whittled from prickly ash. Fall in love with a teacher. Build a home on the moon. Grow twinberry and gentian. The chart culminates in a stellium of ginger coins and wild yam discs.

Had I been raised by doves
wouldn’t I have learned
to fly
 
By wolves
to hunt in packs
 
Had I been raised by gods
wouldn’t I too
be godlike
 
In the movies the orphan
is the killer
not loved enough
unwanted
 
But wasn’t I
most
wanted
 
My mother
fish goddess
dove into the sea
for the sin of loving
a mortal man
 
I love a mortal man too
 
At night I coax him
from sleep
rousing him
with my mouth
 
By day
we build high brick walls
around us
        	  our Babylon
 
Had my mother lived
to see me rise from this boundless
deep
        	would she recognize me
as I have grown large
and my arms have become
the long arms of the sea
reaching over
        	         and over
                                	     	    for the shore

I’m the matron-king of hell
In yoga pants and a disused bra for a laurel
& shatter the scene inside your simmering year
 
Like a ransom scene filmed through shattered transom
I smear in my glamour
I make as if
to justify the ways of God to man
That’s my ticket in
That’s why God lets me speak here
Crystostoma’d
on his couch
Even though I’m derived from Hell
Hellish Helenish Hellenic
 
I’m the hanged man
in this version
pegged up
in mine pegged jeans
by mine ancles, an inversion
mine manacles are monocoles
I spit out the key
and squinny through the keyhole
back at the unquittable world
 
In my rainment
of gummy sunglasses
and crows wings for epaulets
I delicately squawk from the edges of things
balance unsteadily on the bust of the goddess
 
squawk:
Aeschelus Euphorion Aeschelus Euphorion
 
&:
I’m going to tell you something so bad that when you hear it you’re gonna know it’s true.
 
Like all the worst stories
It comes from the heart
& it goes there too.
 
Back here in St. Joseph County
a struck duck flies crown first into the asphalt and is stuck there
with its brains for adhesive
like someone licked the pavement and sealed it
a postalette
with its cartoon feet in the air and its Jeff Koon wings
that’s roadkill for you: realer than real
and the cars mill by with their wheels in reverse
heavy as chariots
in a dealership commercial
and I am walking my dog by the river
a matron from hell
 
look on me and despise
I am like the river:
thick as beer and with a sudsy crown
there polyethylene bags drape the banks like herons
and a plastic jug rides a current with something like the determination
that creases mine own brow
as I attempt to burn my lunch off
the determination of garbage
riding for its drain
hey-nonny it’s spring
and everything wears a crown
as it rides its thick doom to its noplace
 
gently brushed
by pollen
by the wings of hymenoptera
like a helicoptera
performing its opera
all above Indiana
bearing the babes away
from their births to their berths
in the NICU in Indie-un-apple-us
Unapple us, moron God,
You’ve turned me Deophobic
the greasy tracks you leave all over the internet
the slicey DNA
in the scramblechondria
the torn jeans
panicked like space invaders
in an arcane video game
oh spittle-pink blossom
the tree don’t need nomore
shook down to slick the pavement like a payslip
you disused killer app
 
each thought strikes my brain
like the spirals in a ham
pink pink for easter
sliced by something machinic
each thought zeros in
flies hapless and demented
festooned like a lawn dart
finds its bit of eye
spills its champagne
split of pain
 
then we come to our senses
suddenly alone
in the endzone

Through predictive analytics I understood the inevitability of the caged-up babies
 
They keep coffins at the border for when the refugees get too far from home
 
How many thousands of bodies can we fit in a tent or a swimming pool
 
We can live without the unknown in front of us if we keep enough babies in cages
 
The cardboard box sleeps one kid comfortably
 
Two is snug   efficient   recommended in times of austerity

Relational values change in relation to market sentiments

This is the danger of having too much access to illegal bodies
 
Let’s pretend the illegal bodies are bankers
 
Let’s stick all the bankers in cages
 
Let’s shove shit in their mouths
 
Let’s pretend they are eating cryptocurrency
 
Let’s create a crisis let’s induce inflation
 
Let’s undervalue the cost of their bodies

I dream of an economy where one arrested immigrant is replaced with one dead banker
 
I am not responsible for my dreams rather I am responsible for what I do with my dreams
 
When the sleep medication wears off I am alone with the machines that watch me	
 
The global economy brightens my room with the surveillance of my rotten assets

1
 
Muddled stillness 
All summer
Sun 
 
Punched the yellow jacket nest
 
Cavernous paper
Valved like a parched heart
 
Over and over
I let it
 
Beat outside
My body
 
No dark to cradle
The living part 
 
 
2
 
The glare sears seeing  
              	        Something moves out of the corner
                                          	                      Often it is more      	nothing  
 
Tumbling
From its silk sack.             	
 
This stillness
 
              	         Shifts. Streak  
 
Of tiny particulars
Pained in relation: the experience still
 
So still
It is invisible?
 
It will settle, I will tell you
Where the edges belong
 
 
3
 
 
River
That bare aspiring edge
That killing arrow
      	      Feathered from its
Own wing
 
Then the third
River forms
 
When pain’s lit
 
Taper
Drips
 
 
Soft lip
Of my vision
 
Effacing, radiates
A late, silty light
My life
 
Slowly bottoming
Into thought  

Everything in the beginning is the same.
Clouds let us look at the sun.

Words let us watch a man about to be killed.
The eye-hollows of his skull see home.

When they stone him,
he knows what a stone is—each word, a stone:

The hole of his nose
as dark as the door I pass through.

I wander the halls numerously.
He’s no longer my grandfather in weight.

Among old bodies piled high, they aim.
Living can tranquilize you.

                           —or rhubarb?
 
 
Scant difference between some flowers
and the heads of cauliflowers the fingers get
herbaceous rubbing against. If I could get
ecstatic I would by the low soft
weeds, the hard oracular orifices of tree bark.
Some landscapes under duress
predict this atonal sky.
 
 
Scant difference between flowers.
The canned cool metal slightly
curves, of trash receptacles,
meadow interregna, strange
fanciful flights, toward toward.
 
 
Where the rhubarb field is not so bright
red as you would think, not so precise
or fulminating, too much green sticks
out, stems and leaves like a fuzz
of voices, watery incarnadine,

 
here where the sounds so simplify
the milieu into that wetness there,
 
 
here I stumble
to approximate the durations of others, to appear
of the same time as though of space,
I worry terribly, I hesitate, I lose my measure, a juice
trickles down my side,
 
 
रस ರಸ.
 
 
Like
I get I’m out of tune.

it ends my sleep to want my story about
my skin melting in the sun that day of
summer and a doctor who tells me i am dying,
that thing i hide under my nails like dirt
scratched from summer skin.

so i pick up a pencil and begin to erase myself.

erasure is sometimes editing.
immigration is always editing.

*

my father with the heart that chokes
him in his sleep, in his shorter and shorter
walks around concrete and glass sculptures,
around mother who keeps leaning one
way then the other at the precipice of fall

as he yells promises at her to keep her alive.

in this journey that began with his misstep
across waters and languages and his
hands on my face teaching me to long

how did he mean to rewrite me—

*

what will i say to the sky and the soil
neither foreign or home when they are
all gone leaving me to hold our name up
alone when i am neither tree nor

fire.

*

in the mirror i look for my head that
has begun to shake, the weight of how
much i am afraid, how it makes me look
like mother when i was a boy—seeing
it for the first time in her, demanding

she make it stop—

*

this fear of sleep has kept me up for years
did you know? because in dreams there is always
a point when your mother dies while
you are traveling through space searching
for your lost child and other such

possibilities.

*

i spent the day moving my body, guided
by a stranger’s voice and somewhere
on the floor my bones recognized pain
told me that in this too / (that is my body)

there are borders to cross
there are borders not meant to cross

*

interstitial—it’s a new word i learned
something about the space between
things, but it is obvious like my body that
wants to break, that space is the thing not
the between, the mass that cannot be occupied

a space between spaces that tell me

i am a child of none

*

i capture my hand grasping at the sky outside
the window of another plane in mid-flight.

it was orange. it wasn’t anything.

and the hand belonged to no one.

there was only the reaching.

There is one atop each of the Girls’ heads. Clearly they have been playing this game for a while. There is only one girl whose turkey is still full of air, and that girl is Girl D. The game is called Duck, Duck, Turkey. They go through the motions of having an “it,” and having that “it” walk around the outside of the circle of sitting girls, tapping them on their turkey heads while saying, “duck, duck, duck, duck...” until they say “turkey!” while hitting the turkey on the head of a girl and then running around the circle, trying to sit down in the open spot in the circle before getting tagged. The general stance over here is based on the unshakeable belief that playing this game is going to lead to a better, more just society for all, once everybody’s turkey is equally deflated. And although most of the turkeys are, indeed, mostly deflated, none of the girls can keep themselves from glancing furtively at the head of Girl D, her hair positively radiant in the light bouncing off of the almost fully inflated rubber turkey on her head. How can this be? What is wrong with everyone else’s turkey? Did Girl D get a refill? Or more air than others to begin with? Is that really a turkey? Maybe Girl D’s turkey is not made out of rubber like the rest. What if the rubber turkey of Girl D was filled with turkey? 

From the island
he saw the castle
 
and from the castle
he saw the island.
 
Some people live
this way—wife/
 
mistress/wife/mistress.
But this story isn’t
 
the one I’m telling.
From the island
 
he saw the castle
and that made him
 
distant from power
and from the castle
 
he saw the island
and that made him distant
 
from imagining
what power can do.
 
The story I’m telling is
the war coming.
 
How can you go from
island to castle to island
 
to castle and not give
birth to a war? No.
 
I still can’t explain it.

The human brain wants to complete—

The poem too easy? Bored. The poem too hard?
Angry. What’s this one about? Around the block
the easy summer weather, the picture-puff clouds
adrift in the blue sky that’s no paint-by-numbers.

In the corner garden, the cabbage butterfly
bothers the big leafy heads, trying to complete
its life cycle by hatching a horned monster to
chew holes in the green cloth manufactured so
laboriously by seed germ from air, water,
light, dirt. There’s no end to this, yes, no end.

Even when we want to stop, stop, stop! Even
when someone else calls us monster. Even when
we fear and hope that we will not have the final
word.

Why don’t more animals pass through here? Dale asked
There were none
But sounds
shifting in thick oil
behind the cement wall
that kept precisely those animals out

the moon was rising
a bruise was rakish on the moon’s right brain
A coyote to the southwest on the roof of the hotel
birds, nightbirds   a dog

Why didn’t more animals pass through
The strangulation of the self
to alert the family   by way of torched skin
and a thin buoy of breathing
to one’s individuality
as a service
to extinction   personal in-fruition

Is Jupiter red? One star was the question
meeting itself in the atom-sphere

Animals were parading eating the mustards
and ants   fallen fruits

a grapefruit? I asked.
a pear, Dale said.

We were in the sly suburbs, sitting by a swimming pool
The lack of animals was the consequence
of enforcement   the prospectus of looking
at oneself   and seeing an end the end
when the ark has been sent off
depleted in the mirage of heat
curling the horizon
to the contemplation of the human
on the shore

the contemplation is impatient
Why stammer   animals are on the roof
in the trees   the wall that starts at the ground
fences, applications,
hedgerows, motion lights
gates, kitchen windows,

animals are abundant
Why don’t more humans pass through here?

The larval aura makes summer
sense to me who’s alone with
my aftermath and the teeth
have been torn out of the mask
that represents mimicry
nobody wants to tell me
with summer-breaths
where it hurts or who was injured
when I broke into a toxic garble
with a hissing snake for a heart
when I was sweaty and tired
I learned to kiss in the underworld
with my mother tongue
and my hymn to inflation
already sung
in a dazzling killer language
I learned to speak
in the most toxic state
with my father tongue
while the war was at war
with a war and a mother
war took place between summer
and my virgin arms
I know the emergency state
of being alive
has little to do with my tongue
it has to do with the lies
I tell my children
with my father tongue
I’m interviewing them
for roles in lilac antigone
it’s beautiful but it’s also a joke
I have a dead child
in summer I have trashed
summer eyes with a million
nightingales because
I’m reading the plays
of Eva Kristina Olsson 

The crown of it was fire: 
a stolen wish, this city
of bridges valving the heart,
ancient and scarred, tongues
of stone, this haughty sister,
matronly and jeweled, who
straightened her skirts,
looked me down in the eye.
Girl, are you sure 
you’re ready to rise?
Question mark of candles,
waiting for breath.
 
This vision, a pistil
of wavery bloom, a man
before me, the first refused:
a bite off our plates,
an outdoor café, the
privilege to witness
him, fierce and poor,
thrust forth his heart,
douse his body with oil,
purse his lips and blow out
tongues of flame. Utterance
of desire and gasoline,
a presage of future, some of it
mine. In the distance,
iron stippled with light. 

So torn by my tides, I do not know I can read them.

Hour book, our book. “H” in Italian is a tool, not a sound. My mother slips the “h” in only where it doesn’t belong. Our book, our book. How events just accumulate in time. Who will we lose in the duration of this writing. The promise of future children named for our beloved dead. Whispered at caskets. An hour dead. How many hours.

In our village the streets empty at appointed times. If life were a time-lapse video, lingering would be more visible than slipping away. Invisible motions the more pronounced. Once I stood akimbo, 8PM mid-street, waiting for everyone to go. I am astonished, in memory, by the boldness of it. Did everyone go?

                      How many ours.