When the doctor suggested surgery
and a brace for all my youngest years,
my parents scrambled to take me
to massage therapy, deep tissue work,
osteopathy, and soon my crooked spine
unspooled a bit, I could breathe again,
and move more in a body unclouded
by pain. My mom would tell me to sing
songs to her the whole forty-five minute
drive to Middle Two Rock Road and forty-
five minutes back from physical therapy.
She’d say, even my voice sounded unfettered
by my spine afterward. So I sang and sang,
because I thought she liked it. I never
asked her what she gave up to drive me,
or how her day was before this chore. Today,
at her age, I was driving myself home from yet
another spine appointment, singing along
to some maudlin but solid song on the radio,
and I saw a mom take her raincoat off
and give it to her young daughter when
a storm took over the afternoon. My god,
I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her
raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel
that I never got wet.

Little soul lost, little shining ghost, prepare yourself to descend
into the small chambers that flicker like fireflies. Prepare cattle
& rapid fire which should be the pallor, tenderness of patient flowers.

I want to tell you about my childhood, ten times the nerve, which is
stitching darkness, which is mine alone tattooed, black as the black
craters in an isthmus, worse than the worst mind during the war
deranged, always the strange order of smoke, always in praise
of the elder tongue, which I’d like to think, is afraid of the dark forest
of trees. But never mind all that, how it mocks what is & what is not.

All the while I didn’t know when I claimed you my apostrophe
I meant an adagio with ink, meant dead ringer in the wind, but worst.

What remains is this deer at the edge of the woods, my dappled antlers
my toiled meaning & no meaning making music like a heretic. After all
what is a soul crawling out of the black dirt if it has no teeth or nails.

A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.

No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.

This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo
but he’s not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.

His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy’s dream
deep inside him.

We’re not going to be able
to live in this world
if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing
with one another.

The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.

I took a chair outside and watched the sun.

In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money

in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)

lived happily during the war.