Not just a crack but a chasm in the floor
Not just a room but a helix of rooms
Not a hall to follow but a hallucination of halls
Nor a load-bearing wall but the Great Wall of China
Not one mountain between us but a range of mountains
Not one sea but generations of seas
Not just the harbor of Harbortown
but the Gulf of Aqaba
Not just bread to share but flour and salt
Not a cold mug but a mortuary of teacups
Not the abdominals but the whole washboard
of muscles or one limb but the weapons of all limbs
Not just a spear but a storeroom
of swords and mallets for your selection
Not one wound to lick but a ward of blisters and sores
Not this mouth to open but a horde of mouths
Not one hand to pray for but a braid of hands
Not just this body but this skin, these nerves
Not one joy but a cauldron of joys, a season
of grief, a year of crossed tides, years of seasons
Not one man but several men bonded in one suit,
a coal blue shirt, a pair of khakis, a complex look
Not one woman but a relief of women, profile
after profile in a continuous silhouette
Or one child, one dog or one song to praise
but a litany of music and children
Or one house, one chamber, one window, one box
Or one fence or pump or an apparition
in the attic, a face in the flames,
Or doubts or deliria or furies to heal,
Wire hangers, shoes lined up in the closet by size.
Not one heart but a riot of hearts.

Dogs fetch an unthrown ball
and children smash softly together.
Finches twitch in the upper branches,
antennas for the soul of winter.
I lie down rib by rib across the sled’s
hard slats and kick into the terror
of the hill. The horizon ridge
holds out an unstirred cup
of gray.

Words I’d nurtured surge
past me, faces, situations.
The glow beneath what’s spoken
ravishes like an orchid blossom
on a browning stalk. My body
disobeys me, turns brittle in
the hill’s cracks but the snow
conducts me through
its falling. I am a passenger
on its narrowing track.

The bottom drops away,
the meadow rises, the road
travels the other way.
A frozen pond stares me
toward it. I was a skater
once on its knuckled back.
In those spirals, my neck
and head angled back,
I never thought my face
would be as broken
as the figured bark of
a sugar maple tree.

That world was the ivory v, flush with the basketball
floor of the pinball machine—I could open a door.

The landscape was painted in that Bad Day at Black Rock
matinee poster style with counters ringing tens

of thousands of points with the same springing bell
sound the Esso gas pumps made all the way to L.A.

My father would have found a percentage in the way
half of the quark’s globe spins backward in time, back

just that touch into the twinkling past while the other half
spins with the rest of us into the future’s dark. Durango’s

not much given to the Who—got much more George
Jones and Dolly and Johnny Cash. But this one particle

made it through the mountains. I could push the lab’s door
and toddle in where the yellow pollen of the future pulsed

dull as gold dust on a poker table. The technician would bellow
and someone would come sweep me like a spill, flipper me out

the door again. Oh yes, they wanted to keep me far, far from the score.

The hayloft doors were wide as they’d go and the shining
snow on the ground outside crowded the barn ceiling
with projected light that rose into those inhabited rafters warm

against the slotted wind pouring frost like a hard mist
through chinks between the back wall’s warped planks. Shining I
entered—ladder, trapdoor—to bow and scrape among my old shivering

shadows: myself against the wall, self thrown careless across
many pale prone selves dead along the granary floor. Self
squared, baled, divided, reached, consumed by the beasts lounging

red and speckled in the dark down there. My father would have
loved this: the glare, the sheer Wallace Stevens “Projection
A,” “Projection B” Sheeler modernism of it, that math/

myth/mmm/mothlight something. But he never saw it. He
was wrapped up with his Key West crew and Jersey intelligentsia.
I got out of all that soonest and to stay. But don’t think I don’t still hear,

through the snow’s quiet, boom as of the breakers crashing, boom
breakthroughs long since, hear shades in ancient conversation
flicker war through our heavy air like sound motes. Fork

fodder down to the cows and wince at my too-bright dream of him. Work
myself out, myself loose, my—Ahem, ha! the dust! ha! That’s it, then! Hum.
We’re finished here for now, ladies. Coming down. Hack myself free of him.

You, a two-year-old with a Goldwater button on your nightstand,
better that the television isn’t color, better that you grab the pull string of your
duck on wheels and toddle to the playroom, dragging a rose-print Turkish towel
down the stairs and across the sculpted carpet, stop to study
the particular green-brown sludge of its color and manage an
alley-oop past the coffee table with the sharp edge that will have its
way with your baby brother’s lip in a couple of years. What are you
lookin’ at? You seem to sneer when Mother steps into the dining room
for a minute to check on her firstborn, the girl she named for a newspaper poem and
a spoiled little sister from a famous book for girls. For a moment it’s just you and her, since the
New One is sleeping upstairs, he’s always sleeping or laughing or eating, but when he cries—this
friend you’ll love like a brother, I swear—she runs, wiping her hands on her apron and scuffing the
linoleum with her rubber-tipped heel, to lift him up, hold him, hum into his neck.

“What will survive of us is love”
Philip Larkin

December, 1971. A light snow. The Taft Hotel.
Our room across the street, overlooked
the Winter Garden stage door. I was green
and this was to be my first taste of Broadway.
By the time the lights and trumpets

lifted on the “Loveland” number,
I was lost in years monogrammed
across silk sashes, wigs, and in the follies
of relationships — only a few going right.
Are we ever awake, or is all of this dream?

Not a tiny fleck of foreshadowing that,
given a handful of years and a little
more seasoning, this city would become
my home, the anvil of my art, the abode
of my glorious ghosts for over thirty years.

2011, primed with anticipation and an
entirely new gaggle of friends, I rustle
in my seat through “the revival;” –– cast,
lose, and reel, myself back in; once again
in the bars of “…spend sleepless nights….”

Rollerbladers cocooned
in earphones occupy the site.

A photographer busily shoots
a lanky, posing model

sporting a clear and extravagant
tattoo. I shoot them

from overhead; from the platform
where the Führer

and his industrious cronies stood
and spoke, were photographed.

A creative break from my own
taking in of the expansive scale.

Like miniature, the imagination
creates vastness. Millions

snapped their crisp salutes
like guillotines. The result

of the romantic
madness still hangs

profound and murderous
in the air: train cars, camps,

sequentialling tattoos, gas,
and reels of propaganda.

Swans glide and dip between
the dark silhouettes of trunks;

the sky and pond are
opalescent. Hardly concealed

systemic cruelty contains
the urban Turkish neighborhoods

not far away. Let the concrete edges
of this field continue to crumble.

We’re thirsty. Time to drive back
to the power station building—

Source of light, to make
transparent part of what it was

that was being ambitiously
designed, stoked, and rallied.

I will cajole someone to take
a series of photographs of me

posing outside the converted
plant. Me: sated, victorious

and mocking; a ridiculous,
cheesy pin-up model—

the latest to strut and plug
for the kingdom of fast food.

It wasn’t a marriage, you said on the phone, because we didn’t always live together.

A decade together, a decade ago. Now why should it matter?

Still I hadn’t fully understood the complexities of subtraction.

Take away Capri, where you convinced me they filmed blue Il Postino.

Forget that you asked me to go there to marry you. Cancel the grave Don Antonio

who consented, without all the documente, to join us in Santo Stefano,

the gold throne chairs at the altar, Umberto’s Marlboro box

on the railing, the soar of Ave Maria. Cross off

the knee-high nun who hugged my waist, saying auguri, auguri,

the arched doorway that rained candied almonds.

After we came home and made it legal,

a clerk came out from behind the bulletproof window.

Shred the card he extended, which gave the exact, atomic clock time of our union.

After I got off the phone, I dug out the album, flipped through the pictures

of nothing: the one in which you clutched me under the tower, the one of the famous ceramic

chapel floor of Adam and Even in the garden.

The one of impossible rocks in the background between us.

Elbow in elbow, treasure in deskwell,
object in perfect embrace of your subject,

Beloved. You fasten tumbled sheets, pell mell
with dailiness, ordering the old wrecked

destiny of hearts. The stubborn staple
bites with prongs; undressed corners join one fold

as if pretense alone can hold them stable. Your clasp stays firm, or slips off, as you’re told.

My paragon, remain. You may unbend
your shape, an L or V, to fish lost rings
from drains, pry out a crumb inbetween keys.
But stripes and gaudy colors make an end
of mere display–their hard enamel clings

like taint. Repeat pure elegance. Fix me.

The humid shadow of nightfall blankets the grass
as the stem of the daffodil bows
to the weight of the dark:

yellow as butter, its perfumed head
bends to the ground as in prayer,
as if to baptize its petals
in the slow-coming dawn,
as if the promise to stand anew
were not as vaporous as the dew.

(The Old Guitarist, 1903)

Why viejo, bow your head
to the morning of the century?
Your age? the Age? The sad
crush
of the hand-hewn past caught
in the racket rush of a new Now
proclaimed by the turn of a calendar’s
page?
Each stroke of the brush
colors your music with a hint of rose, yet
still your song plays more blue
than La vie, more
grim than any dream dulled
by absinthe
or the clutter of the scraps of Le jou…
(Even the brown of your guitar is a rosy-hued
blue.)
How seek
with that dark slit of eye?
Your dry lips apart in song
as if singing were the same as a sigh.
But strum you on without pick or fret—
what chord can be struck to
paint how you grew
Greco-long and bent? broke-
necked and torn,
legs folded as if to fit their length like
notes played low, en
coda and brought, oil-on-wood,
to rest.

In a parallel
universe, expanding not so very
fast, Robert Frost is petrified
of mowing his own

grass, owing
to certain seasonal allergies,
and the fidelity of blades

making a fragrance he longed
to know, and chew

on every
moment turning
ceaselessly

into the past.

“You’re interrupting
my radio,” she said,
as I fell into my easy
chair, turned on TV,
seeking respite
from noise in images.
Divorce: Ours
more like slow
tearing of limb
than surgical amputation,
more drifting
apart than cataclysm.
Was it ever
passionate attraction
that tightens chest,
magnetizes eyes? Rather,
more moving
together gradually
to soothe needs, as if
burying head under
comforter on blustery
dark December night
awaiting dawn’s
inevitability.

The nineteen-fifties number counters clacked
as I waited for my father in the Fairmont Co-op.
The heater blasted, and the man behind the counter
lifted his Mycogen hat to wipe a stubble of sweat.

Out of the window, I glanced at my father, wicking
streams of light off our windshield with a squeegee.
He glowed under the streetlights, his arm flashing
like a low flame straining to stay lit in the gusts.

Impatient, I kicked at the scuffed-up floorboards
and thought of farmers who’d meet to sell their crops,
the most productive strains the county would see
gathered here in the hands of the local farmers.

The antique sleighbells ducktaped on the door
jangled when he entered. As he opened his wallet,
his hands flushed a bitter red from the heater.
It helps us all to shop here, he would tell me years after.

And I remembered how late in the season grain trucks
would pull in, spilling bright slips of kernels
above the iron grate in the ground at the elevator—
then open a rushing, golden heat from their chests.

But if danger is inevitable, lets throw a hootenanny,
celebrating the agents of our own destruction.

Beyond the field. Beyond.

(“Upon Imagining the Field where Matthew Shephard was Murdered”)

Granted, he was stranger than the lot of us.
I walked his dizzy plank once in Manhattan.

Tell me now can I find peace here underneath
This crazy quilt of pipe and restful waste,
Not giving a tinker’s dam for a skyline view,
Designing my dream house one fever-night at a time?

You can tell by the curtain
how the play will end, this sill
dusted word for word
till your ear slides along
the feathers and you hear
a door open the way
between the passenger’s side
and just one wing
so there’s a spin in the works
though under the hood
an old campfire is fed
live songs laced together
with stories about ghosts
–their smoke covers you
–even the tires
glistening, half wood
half songs, surrounded
by miles no one remembers
and the invisible shadow
alongside your eyes when the door
opens on the driver’s side
divides the sky the way lightening
sees what’s coming and the curtain
makes a gesture –spread-eagle
then climbs slowly
to become your arms
–you don’t move
–from this height the sky
fills with some moon-lit constellation
still burning in the dark
–you can make out the beak
the claws clasping your lips
suddenly rock, lowered here
to watch over the dead
the falling birds
with not enough air to breathe.

Because his screech is melody and we are all in jeopardy
and all have golden toadsongs semaphoring in our throats.

Because the golden toad teaches us to flirt with day-Glo
explosive breeding excess and to only emerge between the dry and the wet—

though in the end all his flaxen chorusing could bring
no darker gravid female to climb, to clutch and hang upon

and his protective skin was also lung and kidney
a failed-canary early-warning for these coal mine days.

Because the true toad occurs on every continent except Australia
and Antarctica, and is toothless and sleek, deaf and mute

and all the scientists admit there was nothing like it anyone
had ever seen and nothing anyone will ever see again

we must memorize the numbers of decline: from three hundred or more
in each small pond, to twelve the next year, then one lone male in 1989.

and must not conjugate them into present tense
or in the understory and gnarled roots of the elfin forests.

Bring us back to the border of that April-May window and temporary pool,
to the small and bright gold enameled orange hue

that occasionally called out, perfectly patient, perfectly still,
before the end of that wild dangerous ride

like the second plague from Revelations in reverse
or the frog-in-the-moon eclipsing back into the oblivion of a black, human magic,

before the extremely dry El Nino year, the desiccation and larvae ungrown
before that fungus and blight as in a spell from Tubal and Jabal

could be ushered across oceans, on airplanes
in the dirt beneath our fingernails and the dust

lining the Vibram-soled hiking boots
of the new conquistadors.

I look at my life before the war,
chockablock with prayer requests, holy tomes
and communion with a higher power.
Then alightment on the field of battle
rifle-ready, rucksack-relaying
clad from helmet to combat boots
in digital camo and body armor.
From insurgent alleyways
through booby-trapped homes,
we skirted IEDs and spider holes.
Fortified behind Jersey barricades,
we waited for grenades to come.
I remember the barrage of artillery,
MK-77s
and bodies shrouded in white phosphorous haze.
Now I carry only shell-shocked faith
and an intractable belief
that God’s promise is subject to the evidence.

I wake up in my bedroom not knowing.
It’s unclear if you’re stargazing
outside the tent in that shitty park
in Tonganoxie, Kansas. Or if you’re naked,
fridge-side rummaging for milk and any
sliver of chocolate kindness.

It’s so unclear I get lost
in tracing the topography of the white ceiling.
Tiny roads, mountains loom.
I can’t tell if I’m above all of it, gazing down,
or if I’m beneath it somehow,
hugging inside the earth’s endoderm
where I suffocate above core and mantle,
eager to surface like bluebirds I saw hatch once.
Milky bodies, blind, dumb birds.

I don’t hear you.
Absence of kitchen door percussion
that cuts out sleep. And I don’t feel you
outside, your pose tilted as if you could
catch Orion raining on your forehead.
Only this white haze of mountain
and country road that fades out
as it reaches the corners.

like in every other New England town

a plaque at any place a founding father once slept
the marble fountain running steady on the green

Where four girls rolled down the windows of a red Geo Metro and drove it at the fastest
speed I could walk –

a boulder rolling downhill

knocking over piles of firewood
and plastic three-wheelers
crushing it all underneath

Two blocks away
a scattering of tobacco barns
a boarding school
crowded with sons and daughters
of Middle Eastern Royalty

+

I once wrote a letter to Barry Bonds:
“Do you ever get the sense
that your head will never stop growing?
Do you remember that long
fly ball at the 2002 All-Star Game,

the one Torii Hunter stopped
from being a homerun?
It was the first beautiful thing I had ever seen

Do you ever get the feeling
that nobody will ever like you?”

Seven years later, standing alone at the front of a cafeteria hugging the
Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt

as if in front of Mount Rushmore, I look up

waiting for the first
weekend in April
the first pitch

for Minnesota to drift East
and knock New England
off the map

+

Moving faster towards home

A boulder rolling downhill

They stuck their heads out of the open windows and made sure I knew what was wrong
with me

How do you learn what isn’t?

The sidewalk breaking in half
stones jumping up to hit my ankles

Fast, or
the places to hide

disappear

It’s not a science, this still-cooling story:
Nora was a woman who became a couch.
Tim, defeated, clipped the fringe from her ankles
and wore it as a laurel, artlessly
microfiber, though blessed with a middle-class
honesty. Why does anyone lose
who they are? The atmosphere,
it gets heavier until it congeals
into a voice, a face, a tremulous shake of will.
Call it a symptom of overcrowding.
She loved him or he loved her too much.
Too much is the way any story happens.
Too late she realized his magic. Too much
she loved a neighbor boy. Tim was already hard-
pressed to let her go, but she breached contract,
called a lawyer. Maybe she was too
beautiful; maybe he was shunned by his own kind.
Maybe he used to be the son of a god
who thought he could have anything.

In a forest of starlings
there is no sound.
This worries me.
Should there not
at least be a muttering?

…

I once read—
this was how you died,
in whispers that you did not hear—
but I only heard the last blood
returning from her fingertips.

…

Last night I spent
hours trying to acquaint myself
with my vestigial organs.
I feel as though
I am missing something.

…

 Most days I am nothing
more than a few
carefully constructed sentences
invented from shades of gray,
and the musicality of air in the lungs.

…

I have assembled my self
from cardboard
jigsaw-puzzle pieces, scattered,
then collected
from dusty corners
and curbside drains.

Naturally you can’t hear me

Over those boys
Who’ve hung a momentary eclipse

Above our blanket
With their soccer ball.

In lieu of conversation
We watch and shiver; they yell and grunt.

What carries all of us through?
A tremendous bounce

Toward the sun.
And just as fast, of course,

The fall.

into a hole
something      of the self

always
disappears

light    mother

tongue

into
mouths

and this morning

that
bunch
of hairs

peeled off
the drain

and dropped into the toilet

almost
as mournful       a gesture

as a wreath
laid

in the ocean

The bathroom carpet,
wall to wall, is blue,
the lightest blue,
to complement
the bowl and ceiling.

Apropos the moment:
I bend the waist
and heave the gristle
from last evening’s steak.

Tomorrow I shall row again
to see those ancient men
in caps and coveralls
stand like statues
while they talk
and tap gold embers
from clay pipes
forever glowing.

I’ll go there
at the dinner hour
and see them once again
fork potatoes,
whole and steaming,
from big kettles filled
at dawn by crones
forever kerchiefed
and forever bent.

At dawn you hear
these women
sing their hymns
like seraphim
a cappella
as they genuflect and dip
big black kettles
in the sometimes still
sometimes foaming sea.

Like divining rods that tremble
at the sensing of some hidden
wellspring

I stretch my tired arms, lay them
down, slowly, like a pilgrim

with a heavy wreath
of cross

on my chest

hoping to still
the undead fountainhead
of these

Tears.

There is a river deep
kept raging by the restless

unforgiven,

It keeps washing away
the frail spillways

of my resolve
towards

forgetting.

the flowers she tends
with backbreaking care

in the backyard
you’d never see her take
off

the ring
her gnarled finger
had outgrown;

about time, maybe,
someone taught her
how

to use search
engines
online

Today, you don’t make it past Livermore.
With a hundred miles to go,
you pull off the freeway.
You park.
You get out.
You watch traffic pass
at eighty,
heading northeast.
You wanted to see where she’d lived.
You imagine roads and barbed wire fences.
It was a long walk.
This is what you remember.
And big tin mailboxes
with their metal flags up.

There are people our eyes can’t ride. My grandmother
had an expression for it in Greek: Our eyes fall off them.

Who don’t you see? What do they make plain instead?
Have you thanked them? It’s probably relative. That is,

not a question of beauty or character but rather, where
you’re standing & when & how long. Today I said

hello to someone who didn’t answer. No telling
which of us wasn’t there. Perhaps we all get a turn.

Does light have a memory? Does it get used to us
the longer we’re here? I ask on behalf of the woman

you don’t see in an elevator until she gets out
and the whole car shakes. I’m asking for the boy

who runs into you at the mall, for the look he gives
not just you, but his own feet. I’m asking for all of us

who’ve ever disappeared from a family picture, one
we still feel ourselves holding for.

I put my hand on her stomach and feel
for the baby’s head. Earthquake season.
After a beat, it finds my palm, nuzzles.
I sense other movements, a fumbling
in the dark of this woman. The couple
downstairs are blind and clumsy. Their
daughter is ashamed of her sight and
pretends to stumble all day. The baby
kicks twice, like its foot is caught on
a rug. Yes, like that, I think and move
my hand. Long ago, animals gathered
here, for water, for shade. Somehow I
can tell I’m over the face, the baby’s
eyes are open, it’s speaking. I kneel
to listen. A laugh begins in the floor.

& Diz on one stage was a daydream
to rival his most carnal. When he heard

those escalating exchanges, the opposite
of gravity, it was like the first time

he rode an elevator: when Diz hit
floor three, Miles’ heart filled his shoes. As they climbed,

he imagined smashing through the ceiling
to cruise among stars beyond the Milky Way,

that spill of pearls below. The greatest feeling
I ever had in my life, he’d say,

then, with a smirk, with my clothes on, that is—
St. Louis, ’44: Bird and Diz.

2
Probably the first paint was animal blood. He asked for a razor. Born on a cold day, he took with him a heart always about to break. He was found, years later, wearing only one shoe. Some of his stories from that period are spattered with raindrops.

3
He picked cherries from the tree and threw them down to her. Everything yearned toward everything else. She was there no more than three or four minutes, her white dress dashed with blood as bright as the cherries she caught.

The 16 inch slash
from his left nipple

around to his backbone
wouldn’t cripple

his style, but
having his chest muscles cut,

his ribs pried apart
so surgeons could root

through artery & bone: that might.
Still, they collapsed

his lung, steered toward
the fist-sized tumor trapped

between his heart
& spine… Dis here

finado, he liked to say
that year,

though it wasn’t over,
not quite: his side

sewn up, his muscles
relearning how to bind

& flex… No stitch could hope
to withhold the manic

grind of Tempus Fugit,
the frantic

laddering of sixteenths,
but what can you say

when you hear those last
records: the way

every fluid & bottomless
run he blows

tests the seams
of those restrung sinews,

some notes amplified,
while others are muffled, caught

in the hole
between his spine & heart.

By what grace

can two men stand

in equal stillness

while each minute

settles like exhaust

when it rises

and drifts

to the edge

of the city.

There is the man

who musters

his snake limbs.

There are the stones

that he shakes

against his chest.

Then you, Raimund.

On what nerve

do you undress

for a crowd.

And with what

can you lie

while you wait

for Snake Limbs

to place his stones

along each ridge

of your spine

as though parting

his child’s hair.

An exchange

between skin

and stone.

Between city

and the minutes

that build it.

Distance

between man

and man

and how

without deed or bond

he measures his body

against the ground

where he lays it.

Sometimes I wonder whether I was robbed
of some rich diction, having grown up in
a landlocked place. The smells of sea don’t make
me sick for home, nor do the names of fish
or coastal birds. Or this: a sound. That means
one thing to me. But it haunts you, this land
formation made by flood or glacial carve.
The dark arm of an ocean reaching past
the salty shore in all her sulk. This world
is full of real life fishmongers, who heave
their flash of fish, bellow shanties easy
like breathing. Something in that skin of yours,
a Captain Ahab, shivers awake sometimes
and stares at me, my nose scrunched up at men
filleting: hacking heads and wracking bones
and tossing around all that red-silver, limp
and heavy, hand to hand. That man you are,
he knows I don’t belong here, as he wraps
his business expertly in paper, throws
it in his pack, and walks away, red skull
cap gleaming back at me: my only guide
from here, at once calling me to follow
and warning me to stay the hell away.

You are the first
person to see
the beauty
in a firefly
without jarring it

to watch it die.
I buried calico quilts
in the ground, for weeks
and months after you died
so you’d have something

warm and home to sleep in.
Can I still tell you the things
I am afraid of? Does it count-
when you are
gone and I am grown up so much

that I shouldn’t be afraid
of anything like a god
or a word or a book with those things in them?
Please jar me. Let me be jarred.

I want to be in a place with a lid
so I can stop breathing
and stop wishing
I had enough sense to know why.

All week I’ve been drinking in the morning
instead of reading the news.
Now a pretty shorthaired girl says

we’ll be bombing Libya by tomorrow—
but tonight there’s a rumor of fireworks,
and a burly blond’s chosen my waist

to wrap a bulging arm around.
He’s a tank of a man,
with thick, callused fingers

that could kill or cover, depending
on his mood or mission.
Soon we’re on to the other room,

to whiskey warm and neat
and another sloppy rock band from Nashville,
all of which makes me feel so

goddamn American.
Sipping something strong
from the cup he’s passed me,

I imagine what I can’t imagine:
he can’t die without having kissed me,
so I arch and swoon in his arms

like a girl in a black-and-white photograph.
His palm huge in the small of my back,
I kiss him goodbye all night.

Years later, I ride my bike past his house

and he’s washing his car in the driveway,
the garden hose coiled at his feet, suds running up his arms.

(Is his shirt off, or do I imagine that later,
in the shower?) I’m surprised at how handsome he is.

I’m eleven now, which must make him
twenty-one, old enough to buy a girl a drink when he wants,

which I imagine is often. When I’m twenty-one
I won’t remember the make of the car, the color, or how long

I pause my pedaling to watch him—only his
belt buckle, its silver tongue,

his hands. All ten of his fingers.

Now all is one highway. One combine, yellow, so long settled in dirt—crows make
a disco of it. One logging truck, the Merritt’s, one cropduster whose circular sweep
of blue smoke is the summer’s news.

Your moving truck cuts through cotton barbed to prick fingers that pluck it & flat pasture
where cows stand mucked up to their ankles in mudponds—ghostcows drawn with skeletal ribs & haunches.

Humidity here will swamp the average while windspeed sticks on still, large motorized
vehicle count: sixteen. This is no Memphis. Camelback houses, shotgun doubles, frontyard chickens, cockfight

Wednesday, Dixie Dandy Grocery sells catfish bloodbait, bright orange hats, gas, bullets.
I see you open parsonage cabinets already filled with dry goods from the pounding thrown for your family’s arrival:

sacks of flour, cream of tartar, grits—four cardboard shakers of Creole hot stuff. You’ve
never used newspaper for tablecloth, sucked the head & eaten the tail of crawfish, known 2 dollar wine tasted so pink.

*

One body—yours.

Is the hot new jack-off topic in every men’s bathroom. Which makes things multiply.
I see you in black jeans with two holes torn out the knees & a three-stringed
halter that shows what a scant

mile you believe you could walk on your smarts. What you don’t know: No one wants you
drunk to hear you recite the highschool mercy speech from Merchant of Venice & that dirt
road curved through one

pitch black mile of swampgrass will not lead you to the Julliard your aunt & mother put
money in your savings for—but to a shack small as a four walled-dock
& about as stable.

I would tell you not to go in. Or rope you like a calf & lock you in a trunk till dawn
if that’s what it took not to watch you down those Crown & Cokes—throw your
fivers in the air & laugh—

your paper money falling by the barstool. Your snowy egret breasts. Your limbs akimbo
across the pool table or in the back parking lot where you will go limp, deaf,
& dumb for six men

who will square you up under them casually as if laying down bricks or digging grave dirt.
After this, you will see their faces at night, you will piss your bed, you will
carry a steak knife

in your purse.

*

At sixteen, you kneel to touch letters on a plantation stone: Bill Chase/A Beloved And/
Faithful Slave. I have some questions for

Mr. Chase: What name did your birth
mother palm onto your crown & was
she then sold down the Mississippi? How
could I love the river if this were so—

river at sixteen, I think I know? Rich
black with delta sediment—river who
could carry a cypress three thousand miles
on its back & still not ache—who floods,

fathoms, & contains as weather designs.
Whose currents copper in the deep
draught of afternoon sun & who moves
the temporal shore. Bill Chase, I want to

know if you haunt the places that hurt you—
here in Newellton? Do you retrace fields
for one last look at your sons & daughters—
the boy you were at sixteen? Or do you go,

now, like the river goes—breaking through
levees as you see fit, calling up storms to
frighten Zeus, letting poor fishermen think it’s
luck—not you—who wash fish to their feet?

Maybe you are the patron saint of lost girls
caught in the wrong bar with their drawers
pulled to their ankles and you can avenge me.
You, who in life could have been tied to a stump

& hot tar poured on your balls then set aflame
for raising an eyebrow in the wrong direction?
Do you have enough lightning left in you to
brand the cheek of the barman whose face

was one bad freckle? Could you shackle the
one who said sorry to his wife’s bed frame? How
long would it take to scalp the third one if you
tied his mullet to a tractor & dredged him through

gravel? Could you nail horse shoes to the hands
& feet of the one with the rodeo buckle—
or maim, with a shovel, the one who knuckled me
in place? Maybe you could stick a meat hook

through the solar plexus of man number six
& lift his body to the trees till his blood drains
& he becomes the carrion special stripped by
birds to skeletal remains? Your marker must

get hot as brimstone out here with no shade.
Maybe it is just a stone & you are not a god—
but one dead human. Were you alone like me
in Newellton—wanting a plot of land to own

where no one would correct, with a whip, what
crop you planted in crooked rows? With someone
to trust your secrets to, who would not ask why?
but make a balm for you & say: I’m on your side.

I will neither call you Bill Chase, nor beloved,
nor slave. Neither will I call you ghost, river, rain—
these are not your name. I cannot fathom
either your source or end any better than I

could keep by own body from falling where
you lay—or keep my hands from touching
this stone. My shadow separates from me as if
she never belonged to me. Maybe our pluvial

shadows join—yours rising up from groundwater—

mine flung downward in dew.

*

At sixteen. I want to beg you: don’t leave your viola on the pile of dirty clothes at your
bedside where you will step through it’s delicate, tigerwood maple body—think
of music here as a splintered

gray dock where Grieg, Bach, & Rachmaninoff share the same tenuous plank & every
other board that keeps hold over Ox Bow Lake is named George Jones. Old
Possum has a fan club such

that if he’s too drunk to stand up for his concert one man tapes his ribs straight & the
other holds his microphone. But there is no repair shop for your instrument
in Newellton—when your plank

breaks you may well as hang a wreath upon the door for your awkward little concertos.
Hang a wreath upon the door for your ignorance, while you’re at it. I think if I
can start with getting you

to wash & fold your clothes I can save six men. Button back their jeans, starch & tuck
their shirts, set them back to playing darts in that odd doll house, cut their
liquor with water, keep

you on the porch, make you practice harder. Wild bird, wild would-be daughter—I think
if I can get you to put your viola in its crushed velvet case, proper, instead of being
so careless—I can save you.

That if I cannot go back & save you—
Music can.

Loud in my ear,
the boom of waves against
breakwater,
gusts
that finger
some storm-strung windharp
as you hold your phone’s
receiver
out the hotel window
to share
a gale blowing strong,
late at night,
off the North Sea of Aberdeen.

Wakened, wool-eyed,
from sleep,
I hear your voice: lost
along a highway
flocked
with gorse and furze-backed
mounds of
sheep.
From the refuge of
a phone box, you offer me
the snuffle and bleat of a crowd
of curious ewes.

At week’s end,
just off the River Wye, in Wales,
you stop to use a roadside
phone
to take me on a tour of
Tintern
Abbey: its plane-cut stone
ruins
keep their Great Silence.
Not even
the rustle of a pale
Cisternian robe, ghosting
down
the night-stairs
to prayer.

You will never
call
from wherever it is you
have been taken now.
I press my ear’s pink
shell
to a Conch’s flared lip,
hear a phantom
sea’s empty rise and fall–
the echo of my own blood’s
chambered
slough and sigh.