That streetlight looks like the slicked backbone

            of a dead tree in the rain, its green lamp blazing

like the first neon fig glowing in the first garden

            on a continent that split away from Africa

from which floated away Brazil. Why are we not

            more amazed by the constellations, all those flung

stars held together by the thinnest filaments

            of our evolved, image making brains. For instance,

here we are in the middle of another Autumn,

            plummeting through a universe that made us

from its shattering and dust, stooping

            now to pluck an orange leaf from the sidewalk,

a small veined hand we hold in an open palm

            as we walk through the park on a weekend we

invented so we would have time to spare. Time,

            another idea we devised so the days would have

an epilogue, precise, unwavering, a pendulum

            strung above our heads.  When was the sun

enough? The moon with its diminishing face?

            The sea with its nets of fish? The meadow’s

yellow baskets of grain? If I was in charge

            I’d say leave them there on their backs

in the grass, wondering, eating berries

            and rolling toward each other’s naked bodies

for warmth, for something we’ve yet to name,

            when the leaves were turning colors in their dying

and we didn’t know why, or that they would return,

            bud and green. One of a billion

small miracles. This planet will again be stone.

My mother and I and the dog were floating
Weightless in the kitchen. Silverware
Hovered above the table. Napkins drifted
Just below the ceiling. The dead who had been crushed
By gravity were free to move about the room,
To take their place at supper, lift a fork, knife, spoon—
A spoon, knife, fork that, outside this moment’s weightlessness,
Would have been immovable as mountains.

My mother and I and the dog were orbiting
In the void that follows after happiness
Of an intimate gesture: her hand stroking the dog’s head
And the dog looking up, expectant, into her eyes:
The beast gaze so direct and alienly concerned
To have its stare returned; the human gaze
That forgets, for a moment, that it sees
What it’s seeing and simply, fervently, sees…

But only for a moment. Only for a moment were my mother
And the dog looking at each other not mother
Or dog but that look—I couldn’t help but think,
If only I were a dog, or Mother was,
Then that intimate gesture, this happiness passing
Could last forever…such a hopeful, hopeless wish
I was wishing; I knew it and didn’t know it
Just as my mother knew she was my mother

And didn’t…and as for the dog, her large black pupils,
Fixed on my mother’s faintly smiling face,
Seemed to contain a drop of the void
We were all suspended in; though only a dog
Who chews a ragged rawhide chew toy shaped
Into a bone, femur or cannonbone
Of the heavy body that we no longer labored
To lift against the miles-deep air pressing

Us to our chairs. The dog pricked her ears,
Sensing a dead one approaching. Crossing the kitchen,
My father was moving with the clumsy gestures
Of a man in a spacesuit—the strangeness of death
Moving among the living—though he world
Was floating with a lightness that made us
Feel we were phantoms: I don’t know 
If my mother saw him—he didn’t look at her

When he too put his hand on the dog’s head
And the dog turned its eyes from her stare to his…
And then the moment on its axis reversed,
The kitchen spun us the other way round
And pressed heavy hands down on our shoulders
So that my father sank into the carpet,
My mother rested her chin on her hand
And let her other hand slide off the dog’s head,

Her knuckles bent in a kind of torment
Of moonscape erosion, ridging up into 
Peaks giving way to seamed plains
With names like The Sea of Tranquility
—Though nothing but a metaphor for how
I saw her hand, her empty, still strong hand
Dangling all alone in the infinite space
Between the carpet and the neon-lit ceiling. 

like some 14 year old girl waiting for her crush to glance back i 

keep waiting for capitalism to end

but it won’t end

my adult life lover states

on what will end:

Libraries 

Birds 

Retirement 

Recess

Sprinting during recess 

Hispid Hares

Starfish shaped like stars 

Inconvenience

Wrinkles 

Sunken cheeks 

Living corals 

Protests

Anti-Nuclear Proliferation 

Non-Aggression Pacts 

Dragonflies

Mangosteen 

DMZs

Trade Embargos 

Leopards, all kinds 

Sawfins

Rewilding

Infiltration Plot/Dreams 

Oak, Trees.

Partulina Variabilis 

Partulina Splendida

(-------) Violence Prevention Programs

News. News:

Might a few jellyfish survive—

counting till revelations becomes part of—

I climbed a mountain and the air constricted breathing—

the terrain of the free spirit, that creature

so dedicated to surmounting that the mountain,

its hanging glacier, its granite slabs cut through

by the trail, its heaps of rocks blocking reasonable

access to the turquoise lake beneath, its wildflowers

with their fraying lackadaisical paintbrushes,

went by in my eyes so quickly I never truly left

the not-yet-turning aspens, carved by local lovers

who loved themselves so much they stayed right

there with their knives until they finished their names.

apricots & brown teeth in browner mouths nashing dates & a clementine’s underflesh under yellow nail & dates like auntie heads & the first time someone dried mango there was god & grandma’s Sunday only song & how the plums are better as plums dammit & i was wrong & a June’s worth of moons & the kiss stain of the berries & lord the prunes & the miracle of other people’s lives & none of my business & our hands sticky and a good empty & please please pass the bowl around again & the question of dried or ripe & the sex of grapes & too many dates & us us us us us & varied are the feast but so same the sound of love gorged & the women in the Y hijab a lily in the water & all of us who come from people who signed with x’s & yesterday made delicacy in the wrinkle of the fruit & at the end of my name begins the lot of us

—For Leia and Graham

Before he is sick, he surfs the Pacific.
After he is sick, his faint body is pulled
from the water just in time to know
something is expanding. Leia goes over.
Just as friends, she says.
She sleeps in his bed, makes coffee,
tackles the wild zinnias of the Santa Barbara
hills, bends the flora to her spells.
The brain controls everything
except his nearly lifeless foot
moving to a Steely Dan cover.

All his orchids are crooked in the greenhouse
and the cats are missing. Too many coyotes,
he once said. When he was well,
everything survived. The orchids grew
erect, the coyotes were spineless, and Leia
stitched things together on her porch
exactly half a mile from the ocean.
Does anyone ever die in California,
I wonder. Leia enshrines him with eucalyptus
and Neruda, calls us, sleeps fetal now in LA.
You want to hear a love story, someone says.
Meaning them. Meaning this thing,
not quite knowable to us, her hand
on his laughing foot, the only part still alive,
it seems, the contract of their intimacy
that is not quite love, not quite
anything we’ve seen or can name.

In some other life, I can hear you

breathing: a pale sound like running

fingers through tangled hair. I dreamt

again of swimming in the quarry

& surfaced here when you called for me

in a voice only my sleeping self could

know. Now the dapple of the aspen

respires on the wall & the shades cut

its song a staff of light. Leave me—

that me—in bed with the woman

who said all the sounds for pleasure

were made with vowels I couldn’t

hear. Keep me instead with this small sun

that sips at the sky blue hem of our sheets

then dips & reappears: a drowsy penny

in the belt of Venus, your aureole nodding

slow & copper as it bobs against cotton

in cornflower or clay. What a waste

the groan of the mattress must be

when you backstroke into me & pull

the night up over our heads. Your eyes

are two moons I float beneath & my lungs

fill with a wet hum your hips return.

It’s Sunday—or so you say with both hands

on my chest—& hot breath is the only hymn

whose refrain we can recall. And then you

reach for me like I could’ve been another

man. You make me sing without a sound.

Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star’s stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother’s, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe.
Remember you are all people and all people
are you.
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.

Little bastards of vine.
Little demons by the pint.
Red eggs that never hatch,
just collapse and rot. When

my mom told me to gather
their grubby bodies
into my skirt, I'd cry. You 
and your father, she'd chide—

the way, each time I kicked 
and wailed against sailing, 
my dad shook his head, said
You and your mother. 

Now, a city girl, I ease one 
loose from its siblings,
from its clear plastic coffin,
place it on my tongue.

Just to try. The smooth
surface resists, resists,
and erupts in my mouth: 
seeds, juice, acid, blood

of a perfect household.
The way, when I finally 
went sailing, my stomach 
was rocked from inside

out. Little boat, big sea.
Handful of skinned sunsets.

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.

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

In Seattle, in 1982, my mother beholds this man
boarding the bus, the one she’s already

turning into my father. His style (if you can
call it that): disarming disregard—a loud

Hawaiian-print shirt and knee-high tube socks
that reach up the deep tone of his legs,

toward the dizzying orange of running shorts.
Outside, the gray city blocks lurch

past wet windows, as he starts his shy sway
down the aisle. Months will pass

before he shatters his ankle during a Navy drill,
the service discharging him back into the everyday

teeth of the world. Two of four kids will arrive
before he meets the friend who teaches him

the art of roofing and, soon after, the crack pipe—
the attention it takes to manage either

without destroying the hands. The air brakes gasp
as he approaches my mother’s row,

each failed rehab and jail sentence still
decades off in the distance. So much waits

in the fabulous folds of tomorrow.
And my mother, who will take twenty years

to burn out her love for him, hesitates a moment
before making room beside her—the striking

brown face, poised above her head, smiling.
My mother will blame all that happens,

both good and bad, on this smile, which glows now,
ready to consume half of everything it gives.