In the bronze skin of your rain-mottled angel of immigration
who looks forward 
                          with a faux diamond clasp 
               of upward mobility on her watery clavicle, 
                                       inner rain called mizzle is shining— 
a frayed chrome-polishing 
                                        rag on a bicycle while the fig tree 
loses its foliage due to a blight called rust. Dear millennium, 
                           destined to be a girl, 
an artist not engineer, 
you’ve never fallen in love. (Do you even believe?) Centuries, 
                                                 this peace offering— 
a non-fruiting olive 
                                  transplanted 
                                       after your lavender died of root-rot 
                            on a winter afternoon in the north. 
(Day after a sea storm, holy 
and granular— 
             bayside hailing clean off the rim, napthlalene 
                                         stored in mothless boxes of air, 
of agelessness, hybrid tea-roses, and rocket fuel.) 
                           Ear-shaped, honey-combed morels 
flourish by the rosemary, edible yet uneaten— 
                                       dearly so, as evidence 
of a battered dictionary you once loved, too. (Light-drenched sea, 
             all its charismatic splendor, is a room 
                                                          of meticulous self-reform, 
                                       noxious blue-eyed madness 
of the dead.) For this reason, your ancestors 
                         wished to sail on a ship around a landform 
              to its southernmost point (Dear millennium, what we loved 
                          is written tenderly in the dregs of the earth.) 
Dear millennium, see how immigrants 
                         yearn for departure not extravagance, 
freedom with a notion of rootedness 
                                       or nesting. 
In doing so, this generational reimagining, dear millennium— 
you are cured of nothing 
                                       yet everything at once.

Staring at the stars,
I imagine you
vanished and dispersed
in that unreachable
clarity of light.
They glisten, sharp and cold,
vast distances apart
yet coming to their marks
the same time every night
of their season.

The seasons slowly move,
carrying their forms—
I recognize so few:
Orion with his belt
dominating winter,
a wobbly W,
the dipper’s angled box
and handle, each bright dot
individually
jeweled there.

Nothing there is fixed,
not even that clear star
that seems always to point
just one way as it speeds
farther and farther off.
All of them are whirling
on their separate paths,
circles and ellipses,
poles of radiance
that spread the dark.

What can be made of that?
If you are nothing now
but memory, the stars
seem a proper home.
Long after the sun
swells to disperse the earth,
they’ll change as you have,
light vanishing with time,
light beyond the reach
of light itself.

Staring at the light
an explosion sent
from some place nowhere now,
I know it will outlast
whatever I become.
Imagining its end,
I see it moving still
when nothing can be seen
and we are both nothing
everywhere.

They came like emissaries
from a fairy tale. In twilight, framed

by wisteria vines that burdened
the backyard’s powerlines, they dozed

like cats all summer. Awake,
they tussled up and down the honeysuckle,

still kits, all muzzle, light feet.
This was years after your friend

froze to death on the concrete staircase
outside his Florida apartment.

Years after you loaded your last
bomb. Years of desert deployments.

And now this house, its kind porch
and open rooms, the foxes we inherited.

Though eventually they too left,
and the sickness that follows us took root.

Wherever we go, these black blossoms.

Late evening, metals bolstering our
houses finish acting like anything
but themselves. Bauxite, copper, rods

we bored into under aegis of trees:
forgetting injected fluid, cracks in
unwitting steel. Years later, a landmine

excavates us—crack-seal veins
bubbling up, flaring out—formations
pressurized from inside. Silica lingers

in brushed air. Silos empty to wind,
grainy clouds we hardly see. Is breath
our only hopeful model? Is exhaling

our exit strategy? Sand has lied to us.
Irritants take our guts over. We weep
frost. Our children scoop sky.

We recite our wedding, their births,
this fire. Soon we’re snowed under:
silt umbrella shields us from visible rain.

Our play circles, losing rhythm.
One child rings rosies, shakes her shovel
in chemicals too cautious for palms. All

the world’s time and money. Every
gold coin tail-flipped. Nothing to save.

When I smell the dirt on the oiled leather
I fear that I am leaving everyone to become
A field of wind and sunlight.
I climb a stone wall to look at the ocean
With a bird call stuck in my mind.
The frog, my spirit animal, cocks
Its bulging eyeball at me and its throat
Enlarges as if to laugh, to engulf
All the air since neither of us wishes to live
In a gloomy house of fish scales
And neither of us can perform basic manual tasks
Like re-greasing the axle, repotting the hydrangea
Or knitting a new sweater maybe
Because I dropped the knife on my toes
When I was 8—I was trying to hack
A pumpkin from its vine but the mouse
Darting through the garden startled me
And some spec or mote dove into
The abyss of my insides where I am
The night watchman at the perfume factory
Where the machines never quit humming
Where the stench is overwhelming
Where I have to wear a mask or I’ll black out
I’ll float down the river, get stuck in the reeds
Or torn to shreds in the sudden eddies.
Blood gushed from my big toe but the knife
Didn’t make a clean cut. Something else was wounded
So I put on my gold star badge. I, sheriff
Of the cosmos, must cordon off the attic.
The mold has made it unstable and besides
No one can breathe, even with the oxygen pump
That the doctor left dangling in the branches
Of the oak that shades the eastern side of the yard.
The cabbages look neon in the maturing sun—
There’s time for one last cup of coffee before
The raindrops dive straight at the old glove
And bucket of balls. When the sky clouds over
It’s like Dad’s staring at me again.
I’m not even sleeping. It’s the middle of the day
And he lives 200 miles away—
He just buried his dog in a black mound near the pond
He just opened a box of love letters
He just ran his finger over the lumpy dough
Remembering when we stopped by the big lake
On our way to the museum—the sun had just come up
And I felt like I was holding a hammer
That would break the glossy water into little pieces
That would spin around the lookout station—
I was 10 or 11. I had just discovered hairspray—
I was trying to make my head a hammer
But this is not a memoir—this is not a personal account
Of each burning nanosecond of wakefulness.
I picked up the old mitt just to smell the leather.

Animals come down through stars
to reach the valley. A coyote with
its nose pressed in a rabbit hole.
Two Sandhill cranes as tall as rain,
and listening north. And when a cougar
screams its human scream, I’m suddenly
a child again, awake, the parched air
raked by drumfire blasts, window panes
all gleam and vast, animals angling
through ripe alfalfa fields. My grandmother
holding me to the thunder-headed sky
as if I were an offering. Saying, There,
see how meager we are made. How our
bones ring with fury and light.

He speaks like a slow evening,
Some deep warm and nowhere-to-be.
She is memorizing his words—
    threshold, cairn, conduit, kiln—his lilt.
After the storm, the woodpile is wet,
And they break apart a rotting ladder
From beneath a stairwell to burn.
Horns of the drowsy steer downhill
Glint like a pistol tucked into a stranger's belt.
Faults in the drywall, in the bannister, black mold
Along the foundation in the farmhouse. A myth
The workers whispers: how beneath
The house someone's shovel once found
An apothecary bottle, a woman's glove, a shoe.

Little poem, you are too young to remember
the smoking gun, the con man on TV
who looked like a supervillain, or the hominid
skeleton dug up in Africa and given the name
of your childhood dog. You never heard a word
about the IRA bombings, nor did The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre terrorize your sleep. Having no use
for money, you do not understand the concept
of stagflation, nor did you marvel at the satellite
images of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. How much
you have missed in the span of half a century!
I want to swaddle you in yesterday’s headlines
and send you back down the river, no wiser
than the day you came blaring into the world.

To pick a tulip from the garden, the red one. To put it on the desk
In the small blue vase, here. No,
Here.

To incline toward it then, as if the flower could teach me something
Of its art.        Of my own art.
When did we forget we were knit by waves,

Not mind? Fomented in dirt, brazenly
We rose from all fours and, from the wrenching losses of dusk,
Conjugated our lullabies.

To hear the red of the tulip searing air. And understand color,
Then, as a way to parse
The shy boson. The corals, dying. The man with burning eyes

Who came up to me on the street today, asking for change. Anything,
Miss, he said, then leaned in, conspiratorial.
Just to get through.

       Ese Louie…
       Chale, call me “Diamonds,” man!
	       —José Montoya

He shined shoes
as a boy for movie money,
& I imagined how

a shinebox might fit
under the theater’s seat
the way it fit decades

later when I saw it
in that dark beneath
my grandparent’s old,

sunken spring-bed.
Later bulldozed,
the Phoenix theater

must have looked
like those pre-war
cinemas mostly lost

now but documented
in the photographs
of Hiroshi Sugimoto

—for which the artist
placed his large-
format camera

in the last rows
of spring-shut seats
below ornate

wall-carvings
& baroque sconces
where he then

left the camera’s
aperture open
for a full feature.

It is what we see
of stars—all endings
& untouchable

beginnings: images,
characters, & plot
gone & only white light

left. The cedar box
housing brushes,
rags, & tins of polish

had its hinged latch
& the handle that
also cradled a shoe.

My foot’s never
touched it, but I wonder
which brush inside

might brush back,
against the grain,
one of those photos

to extend the wet
finger of projection
over a boy, who looks

up toward the screen
like he looked
up from a shine.

Or is the figure
to borrow from that
other invention?

Could I carve open
a pinhole in the shinebox
for its storehouse

of inverted images?
—as if revolutions were that
simple an apparatus

of optics to have
the shiner ascend there
to what shines.

Old Schmidt clacks
two sticks to tell
his sheep it’s time for bed
he smells like a barn

Mother says blue overalls
always muddy always
something filthy
in his hands a hoe or rake

a snake a dead bird
a wiry dog trots alongside
dirty as he is
tin bell around its neck

so weird familiar music
comes drifting back
bark jingle mutter clack
and fades away

they were a little family
it’s true it’s time
he calls time to go back
over the hill into the barn

where he did sometimes
drowse beside them
where he was happiest
there in the dry hay

the sagging gray barn
they locked up they
burned down one night
all the sheep inside.

Everything is made of shapes
made of loops and lines
Mother said and
my life began to unravel

the string of the world
running out of my pencil
she taught me to hold on
fingers’ pressure

against wood could blur
lead to shadow show
the slow darkening
a candle’s flicker making

strange angles of her face
she said it all fades
is lost to the horizon
she snuffed the flame and

I was falling I tried to
slide inside my letters
p’s open window
the low doorway of an h

but how could I know
words wouldn’t hold me
how could I know
they close so tight?

I climbed a mountain and the air constricted breathing—
the terrain of the free spirit, that creature
so dedicated to surmounting that the mountain,
its hanging glacier, its granite slabs cut through
by the trail, its heaps of rocks blocking reasonable
access to the turquoise lake beneath, its wildflowers
with their fraying lackadaisical paintbrushes,
went by in my eyes so quickly I never truly left
the not-yet-turning aspens, carved by local lovers
who loved themselves so much they stayed right
there with their knives until they finished their names.

/1/

What forest is there to run to,
other than the one within another’s heart?

What appears to be deeply rooted 
is half dead         drowning
            and sucking at the sun.

/2/

I hate to say this 
but what is stable
can be easily disrupted,
and what is easily disrupted
can cloud       even        the clearest of days.

This is what I have come to know 
after being turned on,
             turned over,
                             and turned round.
/3/

I want to spark the heat of this body with the heart, with 
the heart of the heart, with the heart of the heart of this 
body, with the whole body of the heart, and then I want to 
slow it down and tinker with it. I want to slow it all the way 
downdowndown to a gentle timber,
                                                                            or fall.

/4/

To pioneer is to take part in the beginnings of something.

Come, Pioneer.
I am tired of shepherding this heart. Help 
me to believe. Come.
I am near willing to give it up and over. Come,
before I bury it all under.

                —too many waltzes have ended . . .
                   – Wallace Stevens

It’s only when the stars
are lined above a burning
cathedral, charnel house

or theater, when the air
is filled with riffling ashes
that hallow a space where tragedy

& comedy are indistinguishable
that these seeds, too small to see,
take to the wind—

& when they find a soil
rich with the bones of dictators
& clowns, they root, & thrive

if fed the vowels of gallows
confessions: soon you’ll see
buttons mushroom like tiny

nipples on one side, black
& white keys start to show
like chicken bones on the other,

& the bellows concertina
as they breathe. And if you
were born beneath a bad sign,

or boast a lineage of hucksters
& carnival barkers, if no one
you know has been touched

by luck or grace, if you’ve drifted
through your life for years
an accordion may choose you

to bear it, & if you pick it up
after much has come to naught
a music of motion & full

of shadows will begin, a music
for when the president’s statue
is pulled down by a rope,

for when the people waltz
though the town square, or when
the cinema catches fire,

& film strips blizzard the air,
alive with the faces of the dead,
everyone catching beautiful faces

on their tongues, at last
you have an heirloom to pass
to your kids, who will ignore it

until your wake, which will
have lots of parking, & all
the music in the world.

     —You are she who is not.

Some month that summer there became a beach ball in the garden.
Wedged, it were

between the teeth of the fence and the trunk
of an elder sunflower, it repeated

the season, a melon of seeds, the
failing flowering

hydrangea. It

was a thing. And the thing was
not feeling, but the boding

of a body
of an inkling      (O

all my little 
                                                    pen marks)

Before wanted posters were hung    her name & face    at gas stations
& the Magic Mart      Before she testified    to the House Subcommittee 
on Energy and Mineral Resources    made congressmen look

at her slides     orange creeks    scummy tap water    a nude girl bathing  
in mine waste     Before capitol police    detained    interrogated her
for an hour     Before she told reporters    I’m a hillbilly    a Cherokee

a fierce mother     Before the ridge behind her house     was blasted
& her children got nosebleeds from the dust    had to play inside
Before strangers gave her children the finger     taunted them     Before

coal trucks swerved    tried to run her off the road     Before the sand
in her gas tank    & knifed tires      There was the night the rain came 
moaning down    had nowhere to go       valleys near her house

had been filled with debris     everywhere the soil pressed down
a great grinding flood      Big Branch Creek       took her access bridge  
her sidewalk     She led her son and daughter    out of their house

tried to climb the hill     tried for higher ground    They couldn’t push 
through liquid mud     the hill washing down on them    their feet sunken 
slipping in mud    the earth sliding away