Piece of Sugar or Drôle Parole

The impatient waiter simply waits. She is the one who has time without wanting it.

I must calypsountil the sugar melts, wait to drink my cup of sweetened water.

Aperitif, orsurmount this chasm.Patience. Scat; paying attentionto the turmoil of my waking days.Days when I watch seagulls,All the time,What I endured. Chiming dings ofEnduring bells.Clock towers,And ghosts in them. Peering out deLa cathedrale.

La Fenestre. Pointing atSpires. I can hear horror.Hear ringing.

Dazing or dazzling I cannot tellWhile I watch the geese nowGrazingOver my head. That (rememberRemember?)

Time of year.Certain slant of light. Tea Leaves.Fall.

Nude like summer waves.My heart was lifteddespite the wait’s apocalypse.

Under the late summer sunlight.I only now rememberthat viscous substance that creptout of my eyes called tears. Then I laughed deliberately.

Je connais, connaissance

I’m going to be coming back down to reality here in a little bit.I’ve finally unpacked from Houston.All of these giant blue bags that say New York.

I’m going to be coming back down to reality here in a little bit.The Holidays are finally over; but the divorce. La divorce.I have gifts to get ready. Everything depends

Upon beauty, penciling, what I really need.In the beginning,and a phallus for the business.

I pain a lasting month.Never this far in space.

I was listening to some CD’s upstairs;In the middle of the name of the streetIn the middle of some of the money.In the middle of ménage, word not in dictionary,arranging the household, preparing every room.

Never this displaced.In space.In a little bit.

Elitist Exile

What happens if existencereally is an illusion?Am I on repeat? Snap my fingers,to know how to do this jazz. I keepfive fingers down.In the future will I keepmy fingers down?Hostileat the checkout counter,another frown.No exit. Anapestic claps:bring me bananas, milk, yieldingcloser to this chance occurrence. I had a job already, then surpassedby barracudas, too many barracudas, delays, editorial:All connected: no money:day 2 day. I ken the stars already were cut (birds). From my new birth,and now this, Each cloud-complaint,nothing great Changes. Already open, wide trees,sun-shadows on the road.

What happens if I did exist… What happens if I do…What happens if I do disappear

on a country road… Elite exile.I should consider this existence.Again. I go home. Contendwith the illusory. I keep(the British Museum in my pocket),for now. My thumbs oppose.

Every sentence is a certain surrender, a white flag on the face of the incomplete Everything has a flag. I was forced to get up.I had hoped to see a lynching from bed, but was forced to get up. I had wanted to be entertained.Underneath me, crisp nadir ice and antlers of ancient antelopes.Predelictions, Annihalations: I had certain hopes. Such as , , ,The Roman Colesseum, in that Italian way, pretendethThat my civilization doth not cometh, in that Italian wayConjures something from nothing., , , I had hoped to see a lynching from bed, but was made to riseby a barracuda. I had wanted to be entertained;but was forced up by the men in tartan plaid,who were ready for a lynching. Their bagpipes, also plaid, later held the music of their loss. I had built my hopes for entertainment, for a jovial year! When every SENTENCE, has itscertain length,which is sayWhich is QUA je ne sais…

How do you say?Say surrender.Say quoi?

Work/Not-Work Your repose, like the languid wayin which I eschew the compromise of ____ ,is familiarin quality, but relatedto an utter-ly differentcircumstance. As origins of all things prevail only when the intended-historianwrites the script, I may circleYes or No. To what avail? You know you’re AWE-some,ness better,and have the tenacity vs. composureto trill its every warbling vertigo.As origins of all things prevail by the rhythm of historical syntax.Just at it should . . . I ran a circle around______ or ______.

Either/Or? Let it not be by chance, I throwI Ching to find the answer.

Oh My Ellipses

Keep the dilation steady, elasticas the syringe held upCelebrate before the cantilevered clouds, curvature the nanosecondthis sound inserts insouciance,Inveterate sound, I slicemy hand into it.Let me illustrate.A pair of dice, thrownway back . . . Insertion of an elision, in certain languagesstrikes me dumbfound.

These occasional crises (theatricalsearching for pronouns)awakens in me, derisionsawakens my impulse for creativity, or spirituality, whichever onelistens. (whichever oneisn’t gone).

Keep the dilation steady, as this isEndgame, before the nanosecondof the dumb show. What did the I-Ching say? I asked in crisiswhat I should do

Through turnstiles. Through occasional crises

in certain cities; the feet that are supposed to stay grounded,upright, above the nadir-ice, through which I peer

(redundant) at the antelopes. They loosen their roots.

Have you ever seen a downed tree? What am I doing here on a frozen crick, another country,without my ice-skates,,nowhere to be.

The Wood Veneer

Reflectd through highballs:Routine equivalents. Bar-hoppers in the mix.Barn-swallows. Minxes.

I do not root-salvage. Nor compromise.I wish he were someone else. (Surrender)Correspond with a letter. I went

someplace else. He(a)rd the antelopes. Pulled themwith a sleigh. Or let the sleighbe pulled by them. Sled down icy

slopes, eating treacle. As all-white canvasslit diagonal with box-cutters. Remember who we were

when all literate? Could I learn to spellagain. Remember what once made me(babble like this).

Rowing and row-ing. Large gray elephant. Frozen over.Antelopes drown in a lake.

Extinctby winter. Good night,we wish ourselves past loves

paradigm.Cardboard love pantomimedin paintings, ominous characters under lake glass.

Peer through

to the animals under your feet, findcardboard love on the telephone line:O cord, cord,

Did mine not find a counterpart?

I don’t know pellets of snow, Can see,

split the road’s fast jetties, Someone dies.

Each eye puts on a newshoe. Open. Closed. Theatrical. A combination

we can’t see anymore,we wax on,corpuscles splitting through roads

then arch--sideways mélange.The roads deepen in their retreat, fast jetties

of winsome. Ah carburetor. did you need a soul for that? These forecastsMay hurt you some.

Snow Itself Artillery

When I want youto really listen I will say,I will say, just likethose pigeons athwartthe fire escape of your firstpalace. The bluest, bluest recordersent shivers down my back.All the spines added up to rapture. I couldn’t stir the cauldron anymore—To hell with apples.

I.

And the jettisonof flutes—a rumbling and then the click.As the brigade turned onmy paradox.The fleet fled.Ants marched in the cleft.

Where I kept perfumed there.Where a pair of red mittens filled me with joy’s avalanche.

Midas passes through AWE.During his premonition and after.Mix in the platelets.Every now and then,erupts the signal.A static spark.

I got hot and sweatybehind the podium, rose from defense,into practiced artifice.

II.

He had a blue screen.I had an implant imbedded in my inner ear.Do his prompts, his projections, ever goon the fritz? Does he have nightmares like this?

Garages of the universe.Cars park in them.People sit in the cars.

There’s a machine in the people,And chips in the machine.And it works inside the holler,And they act like substances.

III.

The pen sounds fricative againstthe neoprene.I am amazed again.Many futures from now.Backing the car outIs now an option.Backing outat any speed is now an option.1.2.3 I clear my voice.Tap at the microphone pedal.Hear the bad signal scratch back throughstatic into a cleaner air. Every now and then, I worrythe substance will bugout, but soundscome back as English, Americandialect. By the skinof my teeth.

III. (Immigration)

The shelf life of this psychologybarely recedes. The calico schoolhouseis in the distance where there really was a prairie. I turned the television on when I came to America. At three years oldI kept my balance, after the divorce, by watchingthe tv families. It was a good rehearsal for how

mere messagespantomime the real, until the realis pantomimed. Perfect circles.Garages of the universe.Indexed.Cars parked.People. Inside the people,IMAGES of these garages.

Universes inside garages.See dusty spark plug on rusty shelf.Creek sneakers and a bicycle.

IV.

Look forward to space success, the voice tells the bicycle.The bicycle meets the voice at the end of the universe.

V.

Moving forward, the rickety soundof air through spokes.Over to the creek. The dam and fishermen and egrets.An old house on the otherbank side , set up high. Windows to look at,not through. A giant heap of mowed grass.And crawfish there and worms.Flat rocks like platelets. Cantilevering upwardsarcing away fromby proper method of throw.

1,2,3,4,5 dips1,2,3 dips1,2 dips1,2,3,4,5 dips1,2,3 dips the rocks carved craters1 dip little planets on the water surfacerings winnowing out of each one

Dip and glug, an infinite recurrence of the same. The heart will work for me, too.

How like an island the bicycle becomes. Henry James said that.

Betareader

Turn the doorknob to get into the downstairs room.Is the first memory of a contemplative thought.The first time I ever was meta.Turned the doorknob and the thought stuck to me, stitched together by what silkthrough what wormhole, that I should discern that there is weirdness here?Life is weird. Turn the doorknob all the way(after the Stop and the thought passes).Go to the door. Hand on the knob.Begin turning. Then, the thought.Weird. Then finish and go inside. Stop.Go back. Turn the knob. Go inside.No. First Stop. Then touch the knob. No. First the knob,then stop. Weird. Go inside. Go back. Does the time beforedoors refute this? Go back. Remove the house.

I’m standing on some piece of landin the Cumberland Valley. Still weird? Even moresowithout the accoutrements, the hallways and houses.What will happen to me when it gets too cold? Unluckilyit’s winter in Pennsylvania. The creek is frozen.But I’m not naked. I’m not willing to benaked in this scenario. Not in the middleof this not-neighborhood, in a not-countrywithout any hallways or doors. I am wearing:my plaid flannel Woolrich lumberjack coat.A fuzzy pair of purple ear muffs. It’s not worth freezingto conjure up the bison and antelopes. The wild catsor polar bear. Or Indians. Though, teepees have doors enough. Best practiceswould recommend the weirdnesspersist, despite my resistance to nakedness.

This Carrousel

I forgot the here-to-fore, the unsettling of tinnitus, where the earplugs removedthe braying of the seahorsesin concert with the land horses and airballoons. Let me back intothose estuaries, phantom canals of the blackhoney my leaden legs worked so hardto get through, to make it again,somewhere to sit. Let me imagine the darkest parts of our bodies.The words come out like moon-doves:Honey. Honeybees,work rings around the constellations,move in revolutions like this carrousel.Coordinates breakmy heart. Everything they weren’t everything once,telling you the longitude and latitude.I could scream through a sound-proof room,the kitchen’s black dishwater, Manitoba’s moonlight or a paper boat. And you’d hear me,in concert with the land horsesand the hot air balloons.

The Plane Taking Off

I put my heart right in it, flat and orderedas it was bound to become, corpuscles,even as the horse moved up and down, even as it turned around a pinpoint.as soon as I decided to work for you, youwould approximately find me, buried beneath the giant, cartoon parasolthat keeps my seahorse hiddenfrom the sun. I pressed the button and the engine whirredthe lights blinked on, so you would thinkeveryday was carnival.

Even in outer space, in a timecapsule, words to move us with\move with us, becomethe math we understand. It was\approximately,a way to let you knowwhere I’d be riding the horse:around the carrousel, here and thenthere, centered on its pinions.

Dallas

Further now from any fortress without any unraveling, unmade by what made me.

Farther from any boundary, without travelling, understanding a game of chess, as no morethan abiding, a form of conflict.

Infinity, has no face like this.

I see nothing in the opossum’s eyes.

I see nothing.

Let the stars collide, fade, but do not bombard, the present scenery, the cityscape.

I escape from nothing, into nothing: pinpoints of light, unseen through the hazy atmosphere, of these buildings rising up.

In other cities, Dallas, these walls flank, a sea or maybe rivers, where trees, may have never been. We were always born somewhere, even cities.

Rich in Mercy

Tangential promises laid out like primrosesand other arrangements of flowersset on the alter, atop a pile of full bloomsthreaded together. No sound of harpsichord,no waltz or organ-pipes resoundingunder this canopy of marble, marble everywhere. The floor so cool you leave the stench outside. Nothing festers in God’s house. My many ribbons fall to the floor when I bow down low, as lowas a girl can without falling into the well.My misericordia, my tartan-plaid, my eavesdropper—for this tranquilizing dose of mercy, all silenced. Here mercy, here mercy, come out of the idol’s plaster, set your kind palm on my crown and free me, from the wonder of hide-and-seek. I will gasp. I will sleep.

Tinnitus

Drinking scorched coffee, avoiding pills.Last night, not cancer, just asleep on the couch, a worldof buzzing I can’t access. Leave the mute on tv duringads dulls tremors like razor blades.Imploding captions of artist’s lives.

Germelshausen

Bronze exegesis: stolen landscapeof my summer.I brought my wind sails, my bluepeonies, sun-kissed and speckledwith dewdrops.Into this Scottish vale where my comfortkept cool under parasols.I reach for the splinterin your heel, take the prick out and hover.One more gilded hurricane takes up the furious mess.Relief again from heat.

Zealot

Kingdom for camel carts.Shoes replaced by animal hooves.Panic in the bazaar.The airplane engines so weirdfor the gypsy ladies vending okra,they train their ears to hearKrishna’s whispers, whatever formhe takes. Let him be machine, or Moroccan tourist, a gooseof Jaipur plaid. How many rupees affront the Rajah’s intended? She is not for sale when her ankle bellsSpin to the rhythm of a desert flute.Her golden blood drips from her wristsAs centrifugal force carries away her fingertips.Rajahs of ancient times went mad for goomer.

Living Book

I had been trying to write, but I couldn’t stop reading.Galleys once housed prisoners and other beasts. When the river opened, their limbs and guts fell outof heaven and into hell. I had to stop to write it down.Except for the smell up here, there’s not much different on the rooftop, where the pharaoh’s daughter bathes in sea salts and lavender.The last page (I couldn’t wait) says she’ll waitagainst time and myth. She is patient and knowsa ship is drifting on the river Styx. I pause in the book to read the sentence twice, once inside:The ship is drifting on the river Styx.And then outside: He is strapped to a cross on a wooden ship, sailing far away from the pharaoh’s land.When I wrote these things, they happened, vowels and consonants came out of the mouth, too unripe to echo yet when I wrote them, the ship that was carrying the lovers,the one fueled by the oars and oarlocks of slaves,began to drift, horizon bleeding like an inkblot.The copper sky brushed its hair along the sea,and the luck grew into something amorous,when I was reading I wrote this as it happened.A long spell of silence precedes a sip of poison.

Mr. Eliot, I Presume

Your body became just another barnacle.My freedom became just another grievance.Pretending your return voyage was like conjuringa spiteful dog who barked his way to my doorbut shirked my arm away when I held my hand out to rub his fur.My stone, my dog—they both shrink from me, roll away. As it happens, I’m grieved by the sea.In whose surface I seemed to see a second love.Perhaps because I’m landlocked,a desert child, without a drop to drink.Perhaps it’s mother I missmore than the sea breeze,more than sand, more than your lip’s kiss:your body’s lost treasure, lost somewhere in the zenith beyond the sea. My boat was just another boat, an ordinary boat, setting out to sea. Guided by explorers’ infamy,my quest became another comet’s trail of sand.

This is not a boat

In the morning, the sun was not the sun. All a human needed: a boat to sail down any river in town, or sail up, northerly, when snow sent a summoning. It was black. It was red. I trained myself to be brutal. Inhuman. I had to wish away rivers and wish the stars to dim. Tell myself, “You have no cause to claim this darkened room you see as real, than to trust in rivers anymore or stars.” On Reading House of Leaves, I learned: there were the old ways and then the new ways. The video camera captures a house on a shady street, a dog, and tree-swing. This is where in the backyard children would play tag or ring-around-the-rosy. But did you notice—even after the Romans fell, after the Salem superstitions, before or after time itself—did you notice how the yard stayed the same size?—

While the space inside the house expanded as large as the great mead hall where Beaowulf raises Cain. Cold and still, those kind of spaces must be like black holes, or snuffed-out stars. The house’s façade did nothing, nothing to hint what happened within: “Explorers don’t come back after entering the labyrinth,” read the caption in the robot’s imagination-chip. Some (some) theorists speculate the Minotaur is responsible for the scraping sounds one hears inside the cave. And for the deaths. Raskolnikovs and Minotaurs and poor birds that hurl themselves against window are just like the rest of us. Jesus wants us to believe that the rest of us are equal to one’s self. Leading me to believe in only this: this was not a boat. It couldn’t possibly be a boat, nor a river. As if the water could move like a cool breeze in this neighborhood, not Kansas anymore. It had cut a meandering line in the earth, and so here it was a boat in a waterless valley. A solo skiff stranded in the sand. What had made me human was my ability to call the sun a sun. Someone wishes for a boat, and a boat appears, magically, as though a boat were all that was needed. Voila. In the evening, when the sun went down, I wasn’t human anymore, moving closer to God.

Miscarriage

Fifteen bodies seen floating on the river;an unheard-of epidemic absorbs scientists.

I board the metal hull and enter the research lab as if hurrying into a myth, my footsteps patterning themselves after no reportable heroes. I listen to how stillness presideswhen rains turn dumb from rioting. I look above through the laboratory’s glass dome,and am dappled by rough-hewn shadows of April sunlight. Breaking coverage interrupts regular programs to announce the symptoms: possible reverbs in the memory; the crisis recurs as a celluloid-loop inside the mind;tumescent bodies surface on water;bulletins of a syndrome erupt from radios;storms lapse into silence at science stations; and the sun resurges, restores the climate to how it was this morning before the strange fifteen were noticed.The researchers panic, fiddle with test tubes and chemicals for an antidote to memory loss, dementia, blindness.I take a gulp of air, attempt not to falter and am dappled, surrounded by patches of sunlight. I guardthe mind-ship, ride it to a landscape of clover-fields, yellow-green, about to be scatteredwith a hundred fallen leaves. I have my armor on and my ears are covered.Feeling safe in the metallic corridor that will lead meto the scientists, I begin to skip my way to historicalrelevance, but can’t ignorehow these hundred oddfootsteps towards the river have harmed my feet and mudall over my church clothes is splatteredlike a fever, and I stop, feeling something unborn in me shrink away. When I reach the riverbank, I see smoke clouds risingfrom the fires they ignited to burn the dead. I’m cradling

my test tube, searching the crowdsfor someone of my kind.

Baby Broke into a Thousand Pieces

We tried to open it with three different blunt knives:the wine bottle with the cork still in it, the spiral of the wine key stuck.We gave upafter the tip of one knife broke off.

Then General Mercury talked about us being true fascistsand going into the nightto smash the bottle, somewhere responsible, so people floating off in spacedidn’t cut their soles.

Then there was a hurdleto overcome about where to break the bottle.

There were no roofs, no junkyards.No gravity.

I thought of what my blood might do.The General wandered into his scream, a thousandbloody broken shards, splashing out of asphalt puddles, redstars knifing in from above.

There is No Problem, Officer

I returned to the incident, the cold alley wherethe police almost caught us bacchanals.I walked into the cold, coldinto the starless, starless; my shadowcomforts a true form mirrored in a puddle. I bolstered this form, let it rise out away from me and fall inside the puddle, dark and empty, in that alley where you beatthe rhetoric with my head against a layerof plastic tarp, a cover for the starless, cold cement. My reprieve? Its time wascoming. The police asserting another answer, would have mucked things up, just then, you and I, in the starless alley, were busy with policy decisions. I was saying virtue, virtue, you were calling the cold in, to anoint me. The fence around that fascist future, a prize, I was forcing into the ground to hold us. But it wasn’t going to lock us in,the roots of my hair clutched in your hands,that was proof enough, the good was working.

By night, we're Christians.

We hover the moonbeamsuntil our car gets stoppedby the sound of mobsand the billy bats and pine conesare illuminatedby the harsh glareof police lights,spinning loudly like the whinny of horses as they prance around the carrousel.When the cops knock their sticksagainst the carrousel glass,i am trying to hide my flaskof whiskey. You're screaming at meto sit as the glass rollsopen to engage the face of our . "God?"you ask the scrim.When the world becomes real, we go. A burst of heatpuffs out into the cold.

On Being Rescued by the St. Anne Shelter for Homeless Women

These good people find me freezing in the cold, force me back indoors. In my culture existence is illusion. I knew a man once inside this illusion. A blue film over his eyestranscribed the text: every word of speech scrolling on his lens,and the instant silence became a sound, his screenunlocked the code.

I know he’s real. When my fingers probed,they poked at flesh not air. When I said I’m mad, he saw the script: I’m mad I’m mad I’m mad.

The radiator here clangs all night. Always adjusting, its metal coils begin to warm only when it’s cold enough. We ladies shiver-laugh, our faces eased by steam rising up from foam cups. We laugh because we’re freezing. I tell the story about my friend’s blue screenand how it lies. I tell another about a banshee in the pipes, whose grief clogs the heat, whose moans keep warmth from circulating—even if we laugh enough, she’ll be here.

A Taxi to New York

The plane from Atlanta has stopped,the passengers are still buckled in their seats.The lines of a room, bar stools,the chrome of tires, spin-styleinto the world of impressionvia Hollywood. The plane goesnowhere else. A scratchy voice blared from loudspeakers directs passengers. We exit single-file towards the subway,and on through the turnstile. Fluorescencecovers faces and bodies with a new blueskin. From a central towerin Times Square an omniscient voicedelivers new instructions:Planet, Earth; Canyon, Grand;Dance, Hula; God, God;Wax, Honey. Beeps pulsate,lights of every shade, dot a panorama of blue and pink, blink red and green like Christmases. Into this street-scene, your hand flags down a yellow cab. Nosing throughnight traffic, you mistakethe plunge of lower level roadsfor water, mistake your thirst for desire.

The Applause Was Fake

The applause was a fixed-conceitconcocted to keep me firing-upthe gas stove and popcorn kettle.Is this rust or am I plastic? Where is the turn when spring, all cosmopolitan, comes back to my arms like island-making lava, like green fuzz on lemons? I pray to the Great Bicycle in the sky, entreat minor mitochondria, for a dose of the pity Henry despised. Little by little the basement bats pick apart my sleeves, fly off with torn swatches. God loves a cruel joke. Besides the horsesI need other angels to clean out my hippocampus. When the applause came I was bombastic, thwarted by nothing short of escape.

As a Child

They could not keep me from doorsand turning knobs to slam the world closed.

I knew the violence of a hinge,its rusted metal creaking in the revolve—

how the hinge’s spine could catch a hair,and as it caught, yank the skullwhen I tried to tear away a strand.

Hunger Was Coming

I was here before mathematicswhen the challenge was the match-stickflicked against the slate-stonesparkling into fire. It was a choir’s voice I heardrising from the belly of Corpus Christion the valley-mist.

Syntax strains over a bridge, over a chasm before the other endcomes near—nearly, nearly there.I was watchingand lay down on the cliffan hour ago, before Christ, before years beforethe cacti were smalland birds were dots, before the birdswere dots and in their flight changed to birdswith wing-length and body-length.

When It Is Artificial

Marketplace hawkers squawk like emergency sirensfrom a fallout shelter.They cohabit the square and fix their gazeson strange couriers from abroad.Silent termites gnaw postsof a merchant’s stand, chewsplinters until the pulp topplescrashing on an old woman’s ears.Her face contorts and her eyesbulge, popped like glazed peppermints. Pigeons swoop at the corpse to peck the collapsed shopkeeper’s debris, her hair and skin. This itinerant madam of an ersatz village wrinkles under the sun, her soul ascends onward into the futurebut not before gyrating her spirit-life in a gullybetween peddlers and buyers. Children sweep through her transparent ether.Corpulent errand boysclatter tea-trays on her once-wise brow. Grumbles, sighs, and chuckles whiz by her approach to one more would-be incarnation, impervious to worldly clamor.

Collapsed Math

It was time to take over; the food was in the gulch.Little primroses and the cantilevered cloudsperplexed no oneanymore. The antelopes had disappeared again in the tall yellow green stalks of the beech grass. My head was in those prairies somewhere in crisis. God knows it was always supposed to have been this way. It was time to grapple with the algorithm. Restore the climate to what it had been before the hurricane.Before the drought.Before the torrents.Before the desert crept into the shallow river beds.Before I had goneback into the formation of the v,the disappearing of the form until formlessness reigned,wobbling outwards, slowly diaphanous, then completely gone.

Out here the stardust tends to scream into the remotestpuddle of an asphalt alleyway.Out here in the third eye after a game of chess.I shake the archer’s hand.He draws a bicycle in the sand.

Scholar of Feelings  ~for Pessoa Oh my little somnambulist,architect of doubt and peonies.Your igneous sediment unearthedfor the pleasure of my still heart.Alleged self of quietness,mask-wearer, a little-toy to spinlike a swirling top on my darker days.I love it when you hasten  to extinguish the lamplight beside the bed,thumbprints on the water glass.Ruminating in and out ofrest and unrest, your pipercomes down the hillsidewith song, with his backpack slung across him filled with those samebooks and dreamstangled in your flannel sheets. His whistlesout of your lips stinging when you press them closed and wordspipe themselves inside your eyelids.  Blackholes and galaxies of opposing wings filled with snuffed-out stars and space debrisswirl behind the sentences.

Sir Walter Raleigh

My soul will be a-dry before; But, after, it will thirst no more.

Wherever the ship would carry him, awkward into the pavement.Comet clouds shining from wet macadam.The interstellar lights thenbrighter than now in the new cities he made.Into whatever sea, as the skiffstook on the golden glow of chariots.Into each turning of the wheelHe asserts the law of Empire.

He would remember the poems he’d made from poems.The unmolded slab of clay. How he’d mottled and whittledwords, rattling out of his open mouthin the captain’s room. When the night reigned on the ocean and the ship was only the notionof an Empire. The slab of clay incarnates,re-enacts the stars. The stars that were flecked on the pavement.The same stars on the ship’s prow.

He had worn a hat thenand listened to the papers.What grieved him, into waste. In the manner of undoing a mistake, the portrait painter stoodscraping the canvas. The stars he alludes to, as if the wordshad been a lovesong carved in full, on the body of the ship. (Divorced fromcascades, caresses, things that fall.)When he’d reached the new world, the memorycrashed into the sand. New laws began composing newrequiems. His song stayed there on her breath where he laid it.

The season she had wept through now smelled like dead animals.(series of hieroglyphs flickering on the cave wall, a new world, even then)

We put the stain marks on macadamand listless, listed the passing of bicyclesor a Canadian goose in the backyard away from its flock.

We repaired here, creekside, our arms supportingour bodies, legs laid out in front so shoelaces became the commonplacepoint of arrival in our arguments

You wanted to stay in the countryI wanted the city. Until the moonmouthed the right words on our behalf, we staked the gamut

until then, when life becameeverything happening after, there was still that goose to remember.

Quick medium hounds behind the bicycle

You could chase or follow the sound.Never without a compass.

We called the dog off the gringo.A voice to look after you.

Look forward to space success, the voice says.You meet the voice, frightened, at the end of the pier.

Skipping Rocks, Dream of Fishing

Little belly-up. My macabre. My cadre.Caught wit at the Excelsior, did you? Cured you, but couldn’t cutold losses. Wrong this likeness, (between fish and foe), like an engine,quick medium, for the hounds that bore me.You voted with the police, right. Yes,and always walked down the pier to see the late June Magnolias, pulled form from the moonlight. Manitoba might keep us pale as possum’s eyes. Maybe Midaswill touch us somehow, doubt, and we’llcatch them someday, thosecertain maelstroms, lying on the perimeter.My fish were frightened, swam away, as that evening light along the pier receded.

No more upheavals in this atmosphere, arboreal, the sun undappling. Egrets again,walking with stilt legs, plodding overthe beach-silt, snort sucking sounds. Cries come from over yonder, but, then, you aremy little belly-up, I cannot bearthe crisis, dancing in southern shade,another misty lullaby goes on.Each one hand-holding.I cannot gut this fish.

Literary Debacles

With the closing-in of horse sensethe rains come. We catch other noiseswhinnying in the General’s pasture. Can not calibratethe right groans for our appendix.We are trying to record bug sounds for our next feature in Animal Planet.We’re held to impossible standards and nature seldom cooperates with dead-lines. Imagine what it feels liketo get to the mountain, with gusto,and the dewdrops from the mistwork into the equipment. Reducing us tostatic in the speakers. All day to my partner, I’m screamingthrough the radio if he can hear me. I get two hello’s, and one parenthetical.I caught it in the microphone: him cursingat the Maenads converging on his eardrums.We’re listening for crickets. I demand crickets.And he must do something about it, in this rut of civilization, I’m demandingour control of nature. We’re going to pressin a matter of days. I chant my MBA mantrasuntil our machines recover. We are going to ride down this mountain topand straddle our horses, take these sound clipsto the general’s house. We can mock-upwhat we’re missing with some .wav files from the archives. My laptop’s flipped open,cicada screensaver,waiting for input.

Re:

I can’t do anythingexcept swivel in my chairgo up and down stairs.You tell me to restin oblivion—my expertisenot measured by lickity-split.I break when the doorshuts, and when the hallway lightglows around the door stillI would give up my eyesightfor a semblance of ______.I come closer to actionwhen the firefox brigadeclogs the ambition I practiceon google. Gold in my trousseauand yet I wax onwith variegated wings. Peacockfeathers alive in the cornersof my living room.I keep a water jug by my bedside.Sip the coolness off the rim, add attachment, hit send.

Fw:

I process thisas disaster. Tell your friends:Drinking is now the Taoof the neighborhood.Gossip is going aroundthat the door closedaround midnight. We fact-checked, but won’t—because we can’t—reveal our sources. Shh.

For three days he spent the food money on birds of every kind. The terrace was now alive with birds.Anais Nin

There was the spotlightand the summit. I would wait therefor the plump birds, purple in theirpaint color. Piebald sky, where the dark emptiedand where light came through, everywhere elsea scatter of birds. Just to remind mewhat I’d forgotten (where had I hid the money?) They hardly asked meto spell my name; in the coat closet I was tongue-tied. It was the words that made me—my vocabulary. Each bit of stardustmint garden. Each animal, squirrel.I was called to. I was made to come hereby this call. They kept erectingsome other promises, some projectionsI never saw myself inside. Stood false witnessalong the way and affirmed I would be,yes, the president, yes, a paw print in your garden,the patriot of two nations, more now as they’ve scattered.Not one bird but two, then it’s uncountable.Inside each new form was a bird.Birds, black birds, white eyes,little beaks, each a little v-lineconstrained by sky, each bleetingdistinct. And by these songs I kept entertained. That the money didn’t make me.I was born of something else.And then made soft by

Peering into Abstractions

I have madea hobby out of myselfthat has no plot, and therefore no end.

I disappear when the light goes off,reappear when the cell phone clockalarms me with the reappearanceof myself. No little discord is this,no small breaking of the umbilical, but whyso daily, repetitive? Ask the husk, in the process of unhusking. Ask the bicycle.

The Angle of the Curve

It’s the stagnant, longestspell of silence onmy sender/receiver device.Office closed/now open. Operationsof little flowers ruminate in the greenhouseof the Queen’s science school.All of a sudden it’s May.My eyes float and like melittle mice horde copper penniesand like me they cuddlein the pink corners of the floor.Lovely was my euphonyrisen in the streets. My buttress,fable, enduring clavicle. Fire gobbling up all the white animals, and my dry-pressed rose. Particles of ashinside mistrust. But then the terra cotta pot was planted with something greenand the terra cotta pot was given art deco curves, I accentuate the curve to hoist it up, adding a counter-point for a shelf of afterlives.

Creation Myth

These days the starlight fades awayinto morning’s gobbledy-gook.I fall under the disciple’s spell,wear hexagonal symbols on t-shirtsmonogrammed with the likenessof Tennyson. America, and whispersecrets to my cellmate. Princess Dianadied, and the mourners came. I was one. My auntie wore whiteand moved back to Indian desertswhere the wells are drying up.Every government elects a king!Big Fat Elephant astride the eastern horizon,the moonlight shining on Peter O’Toole’s face.Mr. Blue Eyes keeps me wanting more. Keeps me guessing behind prison bars.O Gunter Grass. O Gunter Grass.

On Returning to Paradise

I can see it when stardust falls from my handand am in aweof this godI’ve become, without knowing if it’s the power or intention I hate most, the confusionpermits mefrom telling the ghostsin this room to go back. Why do they ask me what to do?

Pray as You Go Podcast

Sometimes you put your hand on my back and push sometimes you just diea little more than yesterday.Manitoba’s Moonlight Paleas Possum’s EyesI tell the truth, and thenI don’t. I train myselfto paint it all hurried over.Here, chickadee.Here, here chickadee.

Little Man

He says the highway dust is over all --Robert Frost I dig peace, simply homunculus, hold out thisoven-bird: space-warped, continually flattening.“My stars,” auntie said at Sunday brunches.“Buchenwald,” the professor quoteth it,when I was less than dead.I dig peace: the oven-bird’s house.Hold a feather out, homunculus, eyelashes in the tea cup;mystic dust into which germinate the Pol Pots andAugust Strindberg listening to the train tracks.Down low in Florida they loosen pearl clasps.I get the leaches off my skin in wintertime.Those black stars, remember them? The charcoal eyesof the Frosties we built In childhood my color was gayand rainbow-bright or sapphireInto sarcophagus, my birth ritetaken by the empire: Now I lay nose to nosewith my beloved Papiol. He is hardlybreathing anymore.

Homonculus

Him, my wit. He, who starts fights.My papiol, the jongleur who sings for me.I wind him up to do my pantomime.I am the modern man’s delight in gossip.The courtly lady, dressing the fool in yellow socks,watching the brow sweat, the heel to toe dance.There is no ritual unbound,someone’s fist sucked closed.Out in the Milky Way,inside our cells, there’s no actiontaking place. Here though is the egoand how we vaunt it. A blushing girl, a mythos,faces her suitor, under moonlight,the unbuttoning of her dress.Someone sticks a flag in.The cells dividing or the stars, riot and confusion--We must be macabre, insert a human knife in that cratered heart.

What Density

They’ve dispatched (another/a different terror)a telegram (come) (to call) me back from the underworld.I am not the same pearl or rose I wasin the middle ages, when the Westwas cloaked in a darkness, that boogey-man’s restbefore Hesperus turned me on to alchemy.After the sleep, the golden age rose and thenthe engine and the carbines of the trainbegan to rotate and chug along. All industryin a microchip, a catalyst for one more final race to find the end of the universe, displace the soul againwith some mere matter: space debrisout of the eardrum of my listening ages from now.

Mayday, Mayday, Abort Existential Leap

My name is the end of the in between, where we meetmiddle-wise, dumb from the last lessons of our fathers’ past.

Fault-kissed, listed, followed, dumbwaiter parade.My name is the crack wide as altimeter measurementswide as sunrise, horizon-lugging, twenty stories . . . more.

Mirror-horrified, caught, rendered, capillary tongue.My name threads through like blood, where we meetin paradise, finally alone again, a family reunion, humanity.

A rope around my body, your lips across the cliff, a planeof clear water rising in between reflects us in this peril.

Words ,words. I hear your call. Getting deeper by the second.My echoes are nothing. Can you hear me shouting for help?Last lassoed, hallowed, Now just a century’s song.

Sand-over was his name

If I want to travel to Turtle Oceanthat’s alright . . . I’ll have to find a way to manage it. And, for God’s sake, No Poaching!

Henry James

Back again to the cold breakers.Never the sand in toes again.Feels like snow’s coming.Gone already? Let me turn the newspaper page,and see for myself.

And yesterday was Turtles. Today it isglass in my soup. Catch, catch, thebauble falling. Begin to stir the soup.

Back then there was an old sagewith big black eyeglasses.We called him by his name:

Sand-over Sand-over

Back into deeper ocean, the linear crest churned into her remotest self where horizonseemed to greet the plane he stood on.

Yesterday was Turtles and tomorrow isa Seahorse and even my own name has gone back home to fetch a mask.