Gaza has become a funeral home, 
but there are no seats, 
no mourners, no bodies. 
In the caskets are nothing but 
what remained of the dead’s clothes, 
and on the crumbling walls are clocks 
that have not moved for fourteen months.

On the plains and in the vales of Oklahoma,
     Grew a flower of the Tyrian hue,
The color that is loved by the Redman,
      That tells him light and life,
               And love are true.

Long ago it flamed in beauty on the prairies,
      Lighting reaching vistas with its glow;
Ere advent of the whiteman and his fences,
      Told the care-free, roving hunter
               He must go.

The throng, the herd, and greed have madly trampled
      Prairie, woodland, valley, and the height;
Crushed the feath’ry flower and rudely blighted
      Its pride and life and beauty,
              And its light.

Today ’tis found in silent glades and meadows
      Where by twos and threes it greets the May.
Like the scattered braves who loved its color,
      It has passed, been trodden out
               Along the way.

As the oriflamme it flaunted through past ages
      Went to gladden the fairness of the earth;
So the greatness of the Indian will linger
      In the land that loves them both
               And gave them birth.

My friends are dead who were

the arches    the pillars of my life 

the structural relief when

the world gave none.

My friends who knew me as I knew them

their bodies folded into the ground or burnt to ash.

If I got on my knees

might I lift my life as a turtle carries her home?  

Who if I cried out would hear me?

My friends—with whom I might have spoken of this—are gone.

^{Level II: Basic Assessment}

All my life I was a hammer:  
I struck at everything I touched. 

Then I commit a few Thursdays  
to trees. I am not gentle but I could be. 

Around one tree, I try my basic circling  
steps, tap the tree’s bark with my mallet  

and listen for the difference: alive?  
dead? alive? dead? alive? still alive?  

I muscle coils of clay and learn  
the same lesson again and again– 

could be clay trees family trees  
literal trees: I hear the precarious things.  

I go phone-my-forester asking  
about sounding trees, about my ears?  

How I want to save a few trees  
but don’t understand what I hear.  

All my life I swung the wrong things.  
I put down mallet and muscle,  

circle the tree’s girdling roots  
and ask, “Where does it hurt?”  

The forester returns my call.  
He’s glad he caught me this evening. 

He heard what I asked about trees  
and ears. “It’s subtle, takes practice.”

Until around sundown, the surviving
lilies in the yard stay wide open,
like the window of a car passing
on a hot day. No music from the flowers,
but they smell like somebody’s fragrant
soap unwrapped on a dish edged
with daisies. All those smells expressing
themselves haphazardly like a band
trying to tune up. Escape is what I’ve wanted
since I was little, cramped in summertime
Section 8: flowers everywhere,
my bird-legged brother a couple steps
back, my sister book-nosed somewhere
in the radius of us. Just a deciduous minute 
when the blossom of noises
was from my own AM radio & not my thin
stomach. No more backtalks, no more
slapbacks. Just a quick inhale before
I tiptoed out the front door. Unlatch, turn,
run away. Escape, as Indiana bats wheeled
up top, chirping sonorous somethings.
I ran under them & to the bus, past
those long-necked lilies, self-congratulatory
in their exploded colors. Their purples leaned
the way June does, their reds hot as the woman’s
attitude waiting at the bus stop while
the #17 scooted past without picking us up.

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers and tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.

No rays from the holy Heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently—
Gleams up the pinnacles far and free—
Up domes—up spires—up kingly halls—
Up fanes—up Babylon-like walls—
Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers—
Up many and many a marvellous shrine
Whose wreathed friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine.
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
So blend the turrets and shadows there
That all seem pendulous in air,
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.

There open fanes and gaping graves
Yawn level with the luminous waves;
But not the riches there that lie
In each idol’s diamond eye—
Not the gaily-jewelled dead
Tempt the waters from their bed;
For no ripples curl, alas!
Along that wilderness of glass—
No swellings tell that winds may be
Upon some far-off happier sea—
No heavings hint that winds have been
On seas less hideously serene.

But lo, a stir is in the air!
The wave—there is a movement there!
As if the towers had thrust aside,
In slightly sinking, the dull tide—
As if their tops had feebly given
A void within the filmy Heaven.
The waves have now a redder glow—
The hours are breathing faint and low—
And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence,
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,
Shall do it reverence.

We will live forever misaligning the changes
into further time stinted tricks
giving up post kickflip failures
scribbling prepared remarks to notebooks
unlocked over dry spells flooded with demand
salt crystals crushed, the past flashed
and I was a working writer, nursing the pools
in everyone’s hearts, disembarking
soothing the air around a final question
away in the country toweling off
my doing the most proper thing turned
somehow slick, of feminine wiles, a clap trap
case book, the dream at the end so delicate
and put out. Makes light so pained
two reclining long in the turn of the neck
in like stride, imparting poetic asides
(bored to tears in Taos) cross out words
and tunnel the line, the guts will sit atop
glistening, hand stamped valves really
toying with release, a lighted display
corresponding controls, to repave
an entire arcade in release of our well
whiskey texting back dimension
We are poor and not cheap, in love
with the same little song slashed booklet

The silence is broken: into the nature 

  My soul sails out, 

Carrying the song of life on his brow,

   To meet the flowers and birds.

When my heart returns in the solitude, 

   She is very sad,

Looking back on the dead passions

  Lying on Love’s ruin. 

I am like a leaf

   Hanging over hope and despair, 

Which trembles and joins 

  The world’s imagination and ghost. 

what the birds know is the way home

it begins with a door that cannot find its own name

the bird who stitches together the last sky must sing the name into existence

and the door opens into the burning of the world

through the door we find each other

and in the wholeness the birds

collective rupture into species being

the last sky world burn sings itself into our feet

soles imbued with prophecy of dirt

good lord last sky world burn there is something beyond you

the birds are taking us to find it

you are singing the door open for us

and through it streams the flood of the people

the feet of the flood of the people burn the world as they run

the last sky world burn is desperate to open the door for us

there are birds making treaties with the sky to facilitate its arrival

there are feet conspiring with the land to ensure the world burn is total

last sky will empty itself of airplanes and war jets to make room for our spirits

the last sky world burn is a sketch of a coming dream

it is our duty to believe in its inevitable birth

the last sky world burn asks a question

it is our responsibility to make the answer

It’s dusk on a Tuesday in June. A hot wind

       bears down and east. In my room, a stranger’s

hairclip lies like a gilded insect beside the sink.

       Hours later, it’s still dusk; it will be dusk all night.

Last month, I cut the masking tape from a box my mother left

       my sister and me. On the lid, she wrote, Life is hard, not

unbeatable. If I can do it, darlings, so can you. 2 am. A rosy dark

       dusting the window, the heat a ladder into sleep.