I begged for tongues the way that I was taught—:
hanala si ke andana—: whispered close.
Was this the Holy Spirit that I sought?—:
Bashful tongue drawing silence from my throat.
Trinity lesson, clicked behind my teeth,
Welling like memory I stood to receive
There at the altar. Blood that flowed beneath
Scripture an ocean gave me to believe.
Atlantic, how you sing to me my own!
Rhythm of roar and stillness, treasured still,
Hushed in my marrow ] shut up in my bones! [
Less like a fire than crash and salt of will
Preserving as the sunset breathes the sky,
Parsing the wave’s lip pressed into a sigh....

meaning that the moon will pass over the sun and blank it out.
in that moment the corona will appear to become brighter.
it “appears” because it does not actually become brighter; it “appears” to be so
in that moment grasses will whisper and the stars will turn red, blue, green
and maybe even speak—what will they say? SETI will pick up a message
from beyond newly discovered possibly planetary bodies.
there will be a low beeping and crunching sound that seems to emanate
from all over, but most likely from three blocks away where men are
directing a bulldozer to tear up the street and it sounds so omnipresent,
we were all talking about it this morning. it is small yet momentous,
how molecules jostle one another to carry the sound of their jostling
over often enormous distances.

                                                                    in that moment of eclipse
the phone rings, have you seen it, are you seeing it, I finally understand
what we’re doing, in this moment of glowing darkness I understand
what I put in the water I drink the water and if together
we are all getting hot we are making it hot and I must find
my way to the water from the bed through all the squares of darkness
and back again through treachery of light

“I would have gone back,” the voice
full of shells, gravel, liquid washing
stones, back meaning lost island

or calendar, a thing rigged
with bones unbending, unfolding past
the hard symmetry of clocks,

vertebrae of thought moving now
in real time, home a word hollow
as the bone of birds—tody, cling cling,

gaulin, euphonia—“That dream was over.”
Such oneiric geometry, “The Blue Room”
built by Miles, his horn a grail from which

you sup the saudade of marine might-have-been
never-will-be, embouchure unthought,
no better than Vidia for leaving.

So we leave, skein of shadows,
silent psalms for how our scourge
was beauty, home; brightboys fleeing

the estate for another on that other
island, jolted by the freight of shame.
Mas Hall, thanks for the company

on the volte-face voyage, stingy-brim
on which we sailed, migration of monarch butterflies.
Landfall at Port of Avonmouth in a scene

from Hardy, landfall at Tilbury Dock
to step off the caravel in white gloves,
stout ties, leave to remain vagrant.

Lonely Oxonians together,
oak hatch of the Bod we’d shade,
then off to All Souls to cram

for mods, toiling in Codrington
we leaf through Thistlewood.
And so we are marked. Is it Marx

or Douglass with that beard? Bound
to become Judas-Brutus, blood
diamonds paid us in arrears to try

the line of Hopkins, Auden, Eliot, Donne.
Evensong at New Chapel to ease
the medieval weight of failure in the refrain

of white robes, one brown seraph alone:
“O hear us when we cry to Thee
for those in peril on the sea.”

’Gainst the towers most colored I feel,
dear Stuart, in these duds, our hide,
sub fusc aeternum. You grasp browning leaflets

on the stump; O betraying beauty of brown:
bankra, Barbancourt, Venetian ducats, dhalpuri,
khaki, Gauguin. Remember the strange fog a night

on Broad St. as if below Friedrich’s Wanderer?
But, as you taught, who more Wanderer than we,
the evicted on the victor’s turf, playing the past,

loss a force centripetal? All praise
to your mind a sextant, darklit as Diwali.
You bless our kin severance. How I wish

to forget your sister strapped to the sugar mill,
charged with spoiling the color scheme:
sedition. Ah, compay, even leaves of the croton

sprout from our eyes. There is no going back.
Thinking translucence you say, “Bend the stick,”
different than Lenin or United Fruit. The rank of Bombay

mangoes exceeds all migrations. The lignum vitae
insists on itself. Navel string toughens to twine
with the rhizome, portal in the ground.

1932-2014

            —with Kara Springer’s “Repositioned Objects, I,” primer on wood.

Seems lak to me de stars don’t shine so bright,
Seems lak to me de sun done loss his light,
Seems lak to me der’s nothin’ goin’ right,
          Sence you went away.

Seems lak to me de sky ain’t half so blue,
Seems lak to me dat ev’ything wants you,
Seems lak to me I don’t know what to do,
          Sence you went away.

Seems lake to me dat ev’ything is wrong,
Seems lak to me de day’s jes twice es long,
Seems lak to me de bird’s forgot his song,
          Sence you went away.

Seems lak to me I jes can’t he’p but sigh,
Seems lak to me ma th’oat keeps gettin’ dry,
Seems lak to me a tear stays in ma eye,
          Sence you went away.

O God, my dream! I dreamed that you were dead;
Your mother hung above the couch and wept
Whereon you lay all white, and garlanded
With blooms of waxen whiteness. I had crept
Up to your chamber-door, which stood ajar,
And in the doorway watched you from afar,
Nor dared advance to kiss your lips and brow.
I had no part nor lot in you, as now;
Death had not broken between us the old bar;
Nor torn from out my heart the old, cold sense
Of your misprision and my impotence.

Green pincushion proteas grow
in my memory, swaying faintly
in today’s wind. Memory snags me
through the pink pincushions I bought this morning
from the auntie in the doek by the Kwikspar
who added a king protea to the bunch,
all spikes and pins in reds and maroons,
so regal that as a child I didn’t know
they were alive
and did not water them.
My mother’s remembering
remembers them into me.

Do you remember, she asks, and then I do,
green pincushion proteas this small?
She slowly makes her fingers turn and bloom
green flowers the size of large coins
that we found here among the rocks and grey sand
under tall trees unnameable in memory, reaching
their roots into the house’s foundations,
subtle threads stretching closer and closer.

All tangles and snaggings and swayings,
green pincushion proteas prick into my mind,
thicken themselves stitch by stitch
into a place that was not, but is again.
The grey sand of memory now fervent with colour,
green blooms clamber over the rockery
and we, who did not know their beginnings,
move them to another part of the garden,
and they withdraw, and then withdraw
from memory until now, a new species of green
blossoming and unmoved.
They died, she recalls.
They don’t like their roots to be moved.

Do you remember, she asks,
and the green coins bud into the first bush
long preceding us, and careless we wrench them
from their original rocks and they die
a little and then fully.
Why did we move them to another place,
we, who were removed to here?
Do you remember, she asks.

       3. (Jeong Seon’s Album of Mount Geumgang)

Jeong Seon began his career
        in the low-ranking position
                of adjunct professor
                                            of administrative      iconography.
                              Breaking with convention,
        he diligently studied the birth of a brushstroke
                                                                                  by gazing at
               the surviving itinerary      of an unrealistic river, at the
     rippling rapport of vegetation and rain.
He preferred to observe and preserve
                   the essential concerns of a superfluous calligraphy
and thus did not succeed
in his civil exams.
                                     When he was thirty-six years old,
       at the
                   northern border of poetry and astronomy,
    Jeong Seon
              repeatedly painted         a series of eccentric circles
                        and so gained access
to the crystal bridge
                                between ink and atmosphere.
His artist name became
                   Magistrate of Waterfalls, and
Jeong was said to have annotated
                                the nine-bend stream of time.

Analysis of Jeong’s preeminent painting,
   The Four Horsemen at Big Dipper Pavilion
reveals
                wished for figures    in revolutionary mansions—
a remembrance external to its style.
       Particularly noteworthy
                              is a spiked      and turquoise perspective
                  and a diagonal
dismemberment of silk.
                The painting was able to route
Jeong’s identity around
              a dominant focal point,     along wavy and uncertain patterns,
                               and finally
              through environmental conditions of blue.
                                              One can grasp
his aesthetics of juxtaposition
                        as long as one is covered in mist, or enriched
by hemp-fiber clouds, but
      not lost
         horizontally       in the heart of the sea.

In Transmitting the Vertical Immensity of Coniferous Light, characteristic
       of his more mature style,
Jeong’s command of     a
                   rhythmically surging semicircle
evokes the overwhelming
                                    articulation of
          how a higher philosophical plane could be
so astounded    by the mundane.

            Here, the twelve thousand pillars of basalt
do not overwhelm the composition;
      rather, they commemorate
              that sunrise is a landscape’s subsidiary entryway    into the     
           verdant flow of the visible.

           A yangban painter once
    wrote:
               “According to where he sits, Jeong Seon
           resembles a rugged jar-shaped diamond,
an arrangement    of Mi dots,
                           or a panoramic dichotomy in detail.
        Now at age seventy-two he is
         much more than an amplification         of the massiveness   of soil.”

  
    One especially
beautiful example of Jeong’s expansive style
            is today known as
                   A Documentary Record of Aristocratic Time Travel,
which illustrates
                                        the reinterpreted bodies
of     a great-great-grandfather
                  and his great-great-grandchild
         listening to the collision        of dark energy.
Jeong’s strong lines here
           impart a wide-angle awe
       that connects the flow of        inner color
                    to outer air,    a sense that even hawks could survive
in our world
                         of dissimilar forms.
Literati writing under a predated    nom de plume
       compiled ninety-six poems about the painting
             and published them in the Album of
Liquid Astonishment.
                   By the time the colophon was    written,
the appended poems
          had been vicariously     exaggerating
      their own images
                                 —as if they were looking
             through the zoom lens of a camera
                                at a human eye.

And then smelling it,
feeling it before
the sound even reaches
him, he kneels at
cliff’s edge and for the
first time, turns his
head toward the now
visible falls that
gush over a quarter-
mile of uplifted sheet-
granite across the valley
and he pauses,
lowering his eyes
for a moment, unable
to withstand the
tranquility—vast, unencumbered,
terrifying, and primal. That
naked river
enthroned upon
the massif altar,
bowed cypresses
congregating on both
sides of sun-gleaming rock, a rip
in the fabric of the ongoing
forest from which rises—
as he tries to stand, tottering, half-
paralyzed—a shifting
rainbow volatilized by
ceaseless explosion.

Pauline Opango Onosamba Lumumba 1937–2014

When it is finally ours...this beautiful
and terrible thing...
—“Frederick Douglass” by Robert Hayden

1.
we like to imagine that liberation comes in the natural order of things
carried on such fabled winds of change that
even in the heat of assassination
slaughter and awesome dying for right of millions, or
else some solitary
beautifully ordinary brother
cannot be missed or misconstrued

but there are so many added costs and taxes
as to trip us up quite easily
in all the clamor and bravura of this liberation business.
and then, of course,
the grief-stricken bared breasts of pauline lumumba—

no half-century long enough to bury
the blank and heavy forward-propelled pace
widow flanked on two sides by men
daring
aching to protect her and she
already worlds beyond—

who among us looks on those breasts
and is not bowed?

2.
beloved companion the letter begins
beloved companion

we are not alone
and history will one day have its say

how does one look into the frank, unstoried eyes of one’s child and say
we are not alone?

how does one address the letter that reads
whether i am free or in prison alive or already in death’s maw?
to what khakied and accursed postal worker falls the task of bearing
so hard and heavy final and unbearably dear a letter?

in what corner of
one’s dank and filthy cell is it written?
where do the flower petals of one’s springtime dress fall away to on receiving it?
and what is the weight of those hands, slim-fingered and otherwise empty
full now of driest air
coming slowly slowly
from neighboring forest and savanna?
when does the gnawing of marrow begin to tell
the ages-old story
of the death even of hope
when after everything
after all
we are not alone?

3.
month of the wolf
month of solemnities and annunciations
as good a beginning as any
january then surely was seasonable enough for death by torture by beating by
shooting by three adept and clearly necessary firing squads for three men already half-dead
fully bloodied from head to heels
orifices swollen to proud flesh ripe-red for the plucking
one at a time in a row from that tree
buried unburied dismembered doused with acid how
how many ways to kill
men whose ideals
clearly were that much more costly than
uranium?
uranium.
yes.

january
seasonable for mourning-time—
assassinating martyr-making widowmaking time of year

4.
they liked in those brief months
they liked to report on your loveliness, didn’t they?
european press couldn’t get enough of you—
your slight waist and native grace
the pretty way you held the pretty child
how you held to the arm of the young hero-husband
so clearly perfectly patently marked both for victory and for early death
eyes wide with all the world could then imagine of vicious and
reverberating grief
pretty young wife and mother become symbol become widow
to generation and to continents history and biographers—
nothing said of the shambled life from center to border
flight into egypt beyond and back again
death-startled children in tow.

what will they write in a single decade’s time of how
you yourself chose the warm tenth-month of
sacrifices and of minor feasts, lesser saints
fewer and requisite number of martyred virgins
told no one of your journey—
december and death in your own bed —
asleep
asleep alone as ever you were
leaving now fully alone continents grieving
worlds humbled
contemplating now and forever, again
bared grief-flattened breasts
as earth
as at the inevitable and deliberate coming
of end times
of hope.

On TV, someone is selling the idea of buying
by way of a happy family by way of a cleaning product. 
I want—, I say. Then your mouth
on my mouth. Your mouth on my belly. And then. 

I was never good at being a girl. All those hands
made dirty work. Once, my grandmother
scooped the Tennessee soil, put it in my mouth. 
It tasted true. I wanted more. In my steepled city 
steeped in song, I pitied that christian god 
his labor. He made marrow and astonishment 
of us. We made bludgeon of him, bland bread of his son. 

My neighbor used to be a missionary. Now he spends days 
painting a bird pecking at the eyeballs of a dead girl. 
In the painting, you can only see the bird. See how 
the artist probes the light so the feathers shimmer. Beautiful, 

the TV mother says to each guest as the house 
burns down. She sashays through the parlor, 
stopping to nibble on a stuffed mushroom, 
dab sweat from the brow of a dignitary. Everything 
is a metaphor until the body abuts it. Even then. 
Metaphor with blood. Metaphor with teeth. 

Metaphor with epinephrine. I name each blow 
desire. Look how your hand revises 
my form. Extraordinary ability. Prodigal child. You leave
and take your weather with you. I take your language
to polish my wound, but rarely do I dare
to mean anything at all. A poem is evidence

of nothing. You cannot prosecute with a poem.
I thought your violence made me good. I thought 
your desire made me beautiful though the signs
chirping wanted all had your face. Maybe you’ve named 
me innocent after living so long in my mouth. 
I, for one, always fall in love with the person holding
the pen. What will you bring me when I tell you
what I’ve done? Lobster, slant of light, doilied petition,
blond girl playing scales on the violin? 

Oh, I will reach right through her. I will extract her best music.

Hand trembling towards hand; the amazing lights
Of heart and eye. They stood on supreme heights.

Ah, the delirious weeks of honeymoon!
   Soon they returned, and, after strange adventures,
Settled at Balham by the end of June.
   Their money was in Can. Pacs. B. Debentures,
And in Antofagastas. Still he went
   Cityward daily; still she did abide
At home. And both were really quite content
   With work and social pleasures. Then they died.
They left three children (besides George, who drank):
   The eldest Jane, who married Mr. Bell,
William, the head-clerk in the County Bank,
   And Henry, a stock-broker, doing well.

If I had a million lives to live
  	and a million deaths to die
  	in a million humdrum worlds,
 
I’d like to change my name
  	and have a new house number to go by
  	each and every time I died
  	and started life all over again.
 
I wouldn’t want the same name every time
  	and the same old house number always,
  	dying a million deaths,
  	dying one by one a million times:
  	—would you?
  	                     or you?
  	                             or you?

^{para mi abuela en la isla}

A hurricane destroyed your sense of home
and all you wanted was to pack your bags
in dead of night, still waving mental flags,
forgetting the nation is a syndrome.
All that’s left of the sea in you is foam,
the coastline's broken voice and all its crags.
You hear the governor admit some snags
were hit, nada, mere blips in the biome,
nothing that private equity can’t fix
once speculators pour into San Juan
to harvest the bad seed of an idea.
She tells you Santa Clara in ’56
had nothing on the brutal San Ciprián,
and yes, your abuela’s named María.

Thoughts of Katrina and the Superdome,
el Caribe mapped with blood and sandbags,
displaced, diasporic, Spanglish hashtags,
a phantom tab you keep on Google Chrome,
days of hunger and dreams of honeycomb.
Are souls reborn or worn thin like old rags?
The locust tree still stands although it sags,
austere sharks sequence the island’s genome
and parrots squawk survival politics
whose only power grid is the damp dawn.
There is no other way, no panacea.
Throw stuff at empire’s walls and see what sticks
or tear down the walls you were standing on?
Why don’t you run that question by María?

Beyond the indigenous chromosome,
your gut genealogy’s in chains and gags,
paraded through the colonies’ main drags
and left to die. So when you write your tome
please note: each word must be a catacomb,
must be a sepulcher and must be a
cradle in some sort of aporía
where bodies draw on song as guns are drawn,
resilient, silent h in huracán.
Your ache-song booms ashore. Ashé, María.

(from Negro Mountain)

Wolves came up the driveway and through the side yard of the old house—this 

was in kindergarten time—and I stood still though I was frightened 

to be in their midst and they took note of me but did 

not bite or threaten me. The light was light I had known—by then—

having seen it in the hour before a thunderstorm: dull, bitter light, and everywhere though

without apparent source. The wolves had ragged gray pelts—bad fur, tufts

of it—and their hindquarters were skinny in comparison to their very big shoulders.

They’d come in apparently from the street, Liscum Drive, and onto the property (which 

was nearly an acre and had once been a farmstead), and they parted around where 

I was standing. It was almost literally a wave of them, those wolves, as 

though they’d come up the hill from West Third Street or somehow got through 

the chain-link fence of the V.A. cemetery that traced the hill 

on Liscum Drive.  

	       A white friend wrote to me, the human figure passes through the animal 

pack unharmed. And she said that she saw the dream as being not about 

the wolves as much as passing through adversity, this exchange 

decades after the dream itself, which had been a thing of moment—visual, 

tinctured with obvious anxiety—and current in my memory for that time before the year she 

and I met.

	   Make no mistake, dear and articulate friends, I knew it    

was an unstable moment. My thumbs  

were different, I’d seen, from one 

another. Beyond the driveway had been pear and walnut trees.  

One passes through a wood, or a track does.  

A dull feeling overtakes you in the field.  

There had been a gate at the driveway but only

the posts remained, grown through by the hedges that stopped on either side 

of the entrance from the street.  What do hills 

summarize? Origin stories? Right

and left separated long before this. Bait me, love

—I can pass until I speak.  

Our “I”s.
They are multiple.
We shuffle them
often as we like.
They can tag us.
We can untag ourselves.
We’ve got our
to-be-looked-at-ness
oh we have
got it.
We peer and cross.
Go lazy.
We’re all girly.
We’re pretty selfie.
We write our poems.
We write our manifestos.
While sitting in the photo booth.
While skipping down the street.
We think: if only my camera
could see me now.
There is a tranquil lyric
but we recollect emotion
with the speed of the feed.
We pose to show
the spontaneous overflow
of powerful feelings.
There are no more countrysides.
There are no more churchyards.
We smudge our vistas.
We flip the cam around.
What is burning in our little hearts?
Hashtags of interiority
licking like flames.
We had been reflective.
We have been reflected.

from an inherited notebook

(I) How many teeth does the 
snail have?
                   tens of thousands 
upon the tongue. thousands 
those who fell loose from 
within my home. a flesh  so 
soft  so full of bite. I molar– 
EXCEPTION––you 
the fangs.


   (II) How many words does 
English have?
              tens of thous- 
ands & tens of thousands 
obsolete.–––EXCEPTION 
FOR you I earned 	      –– 
a credential in what was 
said to break in the mo 
uth.

  (III) Who are the candidents 
ates for president of the USA?
contra. crisis. turning point: 
. نقطھ عطف on the contrary. ca 
da paso que das. civil. The ali 
en must establish–––.good 
ness. In good faith. in case 
you wonder. admissible. Marr 
red. marriage. EXCEPTION
––. I feel like––to:–– I’m in 
the mud to doing s. thing. an 
anniversary. flow. fire 
       fourth of july.


    (IV) What happened at the 
	  how do you
mean.–– all those days for 
mastery & yet money is–– 
EXCEPTION––. invisible & 
power. to make a living. for 
your teeth I ghost wrote a 
letter so that they would un 
derstand. every one fallen 
meant new ones that I would 
someday give to you. flow 
ship. restoration. what should 
i do if i want to continue.–– 
the future. what we take as 
return. precious common 
porcelain.


   (V) What color of the earth
	      from out of it 
home is the faint brown of 
a martyr’s soil. bend your 
head before it. salat.––sal 
t. it is possible that––it is– 
is both? alien. citizen snail. 
IN GENERAL––. if it is holy 
then one must bend before 
its purity. like our flesh so 
soft. so full. so much for 
repair.

Three days into his wake my father has not risen.

He remains encased in pine, hollowed-
out, his body unsealed, organs 
harvested, then zippered 
shut like a purse. 

How strange to see one’s face inside 
a coffin. The son at my most peaceful. 
The father at his most peaceful.  
Not even the loud chorus 
of wailing family members 
can rid us of our sleep.  

My mother sits front center.  
Regal in black, her eyes sharpened 
as Cleopatra’s. Her children, grown 
and groaning, quietly moan beside a white 
copse of trumpeting flowers.  

The church is forested 
with immigrants, spent after their long journey 
to another country 
to die. 

Before the casket 
is to be closed, we all rise 
to bid our final farewells.

My mother lowers herself, 
kisses the trinity of the forehead 
and cheeks, then motions her obedient 
children to follow. One by one my 
siblings hover, perch, and peck. 

I stand over my father 
as I had done on occasions 
of safe approach: in his sleep, or splayed 
like a crushed toad on the floor, drunk.

I study him, planetary, 
distant presence both bodily 
and otherworldly, a deceptive 
kind of knowledge.
His beauty has waned 
but not faded, face surface 
of a moon, not ours, I turn pale,
shivering, I place my hand 
on his, amphibious.  

While my mother places her hand warm on the cradle
of my back, where I bend to fit into my body.

Her burning eyes speak, Do it for me, they
urge, Kiss your father goodbye.  

I refuse.

The cataract whirling down the precipice,
  Elbows down rocks and, shouldering, thunders through.
Roars, howls, and stifled murmurs never cease;
  Hell and its agonies seem hid below.
Thick rolls the mist, that smokes and falls in dew;
  The trees and greenwood wear the deepest green.
Horrible mysteries in the gulph stare through,
  Roars of a million tongues, and none knows what they mean.

Who
would decry
instruments—
when grasses
ever so fragile,
provide strings
stout enough for
insect moods
to glide up and down
in glissandos
of toes along wires
or finger-tips on zithers—
   though
   the mere sounds
   be theirs, not ours—
   theirs, not ours,
   the first inspiration—
   discord 
   without resolution—
who 
would cry
being loved,
when even such tinkling
comes of the loving?

No tears No tips No meters No nips [well 
mayb] No Lyft No Uber No 1-8 
hundo But he do wanna kno How yu

            been? Where’d yu go? & yu kno yu best talk

harder 2 pin his desire Even 
tho we didn’t start the fire yu wait 
4 the punchlite The lines of blinker

            Yu ask of Mom & Dad & late nite D

sires—dimes o’ lite Till so close yu must 
b Southwest Delta American Air 
lines Here here is gud don’t worry So he

            pop the hood & yu roll in Left ‘em full

gud on the queerer questions of queer kin 
-ship What danger cost 2 much    patron saint 
of patrón? Pain 2 paper alchemy?

            Skycap’n of the pitiful sellin’ out

damn spot!? My politic ain’t got a pot 
dealer 2 piss off I’m peppery—I’m 
emphatic as an amphetamine Can’t

            cut myself out of me in2 the blank

holes of nite The whole pre-fires The whole 
—Okay okay I started the firelol 
boring in2 the air via port Bony-ass

            horizon I’m drug poor I pay my way

(the passports curled up) (it was so humid in our rented room)
            
            (travel to forget the criminal element) (in my bad blood)


(Nothing very significant at the cemetery)            (an unremarkable lunch salad)


                        (The thrift shop closed six months ago)


((We lit candles for a man who died) (rusted cellar grate)) (near to home)


            (I was afraid (and I made my friend afraid too))


                        (another woman altogether said they may be (murderers))


((I'm more worried about) being backed over by construction vehicles)


            (in other places)            (I do pray for my family's safety)


                                    (mother says it isn't working)

imagine your heart is just a ball you learned to dribble up
and down the length of your driveway back home. slow down

control it. plant your feet in the soft blue of your mat and release
it is hard but slowly you are unlearning the shallow pant

of your childhood. extend your body—do not reach
for someone but something fixed and fleshless and certain—

fold flatten then lift your head like a cobra sure of the sun
waiting and ready to caress the chill

from its scales. inhale—try not to remember how desperate
you’ve been for touch—yes ignore it—that hitch of your heart

you got from mornings you woke to find momma hysterical
or gone. try to give up the certainty she’d never return

recall only the return and not its coldness. imagine her arms
wide to receive you imagine you are not a thing that needs

escaping. it is hard and though at times you are sure
you will always be the abandoned girl trying to abandon herself

push up arch deep into your back exhale and remember—
when it is too late to pray the end of the flood

we pray instead to survive it.

Dichroic. Glass: half-empty, half-full. As in my paperwork glowered; my paperweight glowed. A hard drive. Backing up. By the hour. We cannot be bought. But, we flower.

Flour to coat the bottom of a pan. Sometimes a moment, I understand! A window. Light. Diachronic. Glass: mourning, This, too, shall pass.

But my loyalty
       points—my purchasing
       power. Nothing.

But my economies
       of scale, my digital
       compression :: companionship.

But my all-
       you-can-eat
       loneliness, my rail-
       rapid integration.

But my market-
       driven love
       handles, my accrued
       vacancy.

But my taste
       in artisanal
       bootstrapism.

But my choice
       of protein, of pit-baked
       avarice, of indulgences.
       [CHURCH collects
       as does CAESAR.]

But my supply
       side floods, my O’
       so buoyant home
       staked and sandbagged
       on striving’s pebbly shore.

But my internal
       combustion, my miles,
       my carcinogenic
       Kingdom Come. Nothing.

But my fast casual
       history—every morsel
       wrapped in a bank
       notes’ blood-sketched
       hagiography.

But my user-friendly
       righteousness, my Gross
       Domestic Amnesia.
       In place of the old wants …
       we finds new wants.

But my comfort,
       my tariffed aches,
       my engorged
       prerogatives. I made
       this money,
       you didn’t. Right, Ted?

But my ability to believe
       that what I’ve paid for,
       I have made. Nothing

       to lose, except ownership
       of this wallet-sized tomb—
       these six crisp walls.

Fearless riders of the gale,
In your bleak eyes is the memory
Of sinking ships:
Desire, unsatisfied,
Droops from your wings.

You lie at dusk
In the sea’s ebbing cradles,
Unresponsive to its mood;
Or hover and swoop,
Snatching your food and rising again,
Greedy,
Unthinking.

You veer and steer your callous course,
Unloved of other birds;
And in your soulless cry
Is the mocking echo
Of woman’s weeping in the night.

Under Mirabeau Bridge the river slips away
       And lovers
     Must I be reminded
Joy came always after pain

       The night is a clock chiming
       The days go by not I

We’re face to face and hand in hand 
       While under the bridges
     Of embrace expire
Eternal tired tidal eyes

       The night is a clock chiming
       The days go by not I

Love elapses like the river
       Love goes by
     Poor life is indolent
And expectation always violent

       The night is a clock chiming
       The days go by not I

The days and equally the weeks elapse 
       The past remains the past
     Love remains lost
Under Mirabeau Bridge the river slips away

       The night is a clock chiming
       The days go by not I

Shiitake, velvet foot, hen of the woods, wood 
ear, cloud ear, slippery jack, brown wreaths

of Polish borowik dried and hanging 
in the stalls of a Krakow market—all these

were years away from the room where I lay 
once, studying the contours of your sex

as if it were some subterranean species 
I’d never encounter again. Because I hadn’t

yet tasted oyster—not even portobello— 
when I thought mushroom, I meant the common white

or button, the ones my mother bought for salads 
or served in butter beside my father’s steak.

First taste of love, or toxic look-alike, 
there was your stalk and cap, the earth and dark,

our hunger, wonder, and need. Even now, 
I can’t identify exactly what

we were, or why, some twenty years later,
learning you lay dying—were in fact

already dead, suspended by machines if not
 belief—I thought first of your living flesh,

the size and shape of you. My amanita 
phalloides, that room was to exist forever,

as a field guide or mossy path, even 
if as we foraged, we did not once look back.

Did not but didn’t not or did not not did? Woke up 
a rando hour in that ol’ double-bind of suspicions of 
activity (didn’t not did, did not’d). No sich thang ez 
reppytishun. Didn’t not not’d no such thing as. Only 
insistence, amplification of. Rigor, please!—I’ve 
been in a steady residency studying doing sans 
getting done (-) in. When abroad for the 
conference RE: conspiratorial unsuspicious 
activity, I insisted our syncopated metrics tender 
on the International Measure Exchange. To the 
registration: “Our data tight AF, Boo-Boo; toot 
sweet with my tote bag,” my lanyard swang Jesus 
piecey as I crooked bootied to the keynote. I sat in 
the not doing of doing what I did not. By&by 
came Q&A, I Q’ed: “can self-disciplined inactivity 
be considered inactivity as the disciplining of the 
self is a praxis and—.” In come Security a rented 
roughshod, all There they are, misconjugating where 
I stood. I stayed to rephrase my Q. I believed this 
a discourse. Security fixed to quantize my “offed” 
conduct with they copse of batons. I was a present 
ruckus, recused for actively inactivating me by 
vice and versa. This collabo took the discipline to 
the next level!

Turns out lots of lines prove blurry I once thought sharp.
Some blur from further away, some from closer in.
Plant/animal, for instance. On which side, and why,
the sessile polyps, corals and sea anemones?
Same problem saying why my self must be internal.

Where do I see those finches glinting at the feeder?
To experience the is-ness of what is,
I’d need to locate the here-ness of what’s here.
Or be located by it. Or share location with it.
There’s a line I want to blur: between my senses

and my self. And another: between my senses
and the world. That anemone looks more like a lily
than an appaloosa. Looks, and acts. I feel that fizz
of finches sparkle on my tongue, the back of my throat.
I don’t say these words until I hear them. My voice

visits. Is visitation. I would choose the role
of visitor over visited, if I got to choose.
Those finches trill and warble in sequences of phrases. 
I can tell there’s pattern, but not what the pattern is.
I can say I hear them (I do hear them) in my sleep,

but I can’t say what that means. Their twitters and chirps
start early, before I wake. I can say they chatter all day
(they do), when I’m hearing them and when I’m not,
but I can’t say how I know that. The back of my hand
always feels as if it’s just been lightly touched.

Sometimes you don’t die

when you’re supposed to

& now I have a choice

repair a world or build

a new one inside my body

a white door opens

into a place queerly brimming

gold light so velvet-gold

it is like the world

hasn’t happened

when I call out

all my friends are there

everyone we love

is still alive gathered

at the lakeside

like constellations

my honeyed kin

honeyed light

beneath the sky

a garden blue stalks

white buds the moon’s

marble glow the fire

distant & flickering

the body whole bright-

winged brimming

with the hours

of the day beautiful

nameless planet. Oh

friends, my friends—

bloom how you must, wild

until we are free.

When the dead return
they will come to you in dream
and in waking, will be the bird
knocking, knocking against glass, seeking
a way in, will masquerade
as the wind, its voice made audible
by the tongues of leaves, greedily
lapping, as the waves’ self-made fugue
is a turning and returning, the dead
will not then nor ever again
desert you, their unrest
will be the coat cloaking you,
the farther you journey
from them the more
that distance will maw in you,
time and place gulching
when the dead return to demand
accounting, wanting
and wanting and wanting
everything you have to give and nothing
will quench or unhunger them
as they take all you make as offering.
Then tell you to begin again.