Put down that bag of potato chips, that white bread, that bottle of pop.

Turn off that cellphone, computer, and remote control.

Open the door, then close it behind you.

Take a breath offered by friendly winds. They travel the earth gathering essences of plants to clean.

Give it back with gratitude.

If you sing it will give your spirit lift to fly to the stars’ ears and back.

Acknowledge this earth who has cared for you since you were a dream planting itself precisely within your parents’ desire.

Let your moccasin feet take you to the encampment of the guardians who have known you before time, who will be there after time. They sit before the fire that has been there without time.

Let the earth stabilize your postcolonial insecure jitters.

Be respectful of the small insects, birds and animal people who accompany you.

Ask their forgiveness for the harm we humans have brought down upon them.

Don’t worry.

The heart knows the way though there may be high-rises, interstates, checkpoints, armed soldiers, massacres, wars, and those who will despise you because they despise themselves.

The journey might take you a few hours, a day, a year, a few years, a hundred, a thousand or even more.

Watch your mind. Without training it might run away and leave your heart for the immense human feast set by the thieves of time.

Do not hold regrets.

When you find your way to the circle, to the fire kept burning by the keepers of your soul, you will be welcomed.

You must clean yourself with cedar, sage, or other healing plant.

Cut the ties you have to failure and shame.

Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders, your heart, all the way to your feet. Let go the pain of your ancestors to make way for those who are heading in our direction.

Ask for forgiveness.

Call upon the help of those who love you. These helpers take many forms: animal, element, bird, angel, saint, stone, or ancestor.

Call your spirit back. It may be caught in corners and creases of shame, judgment, and human abuse.

You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return.

Speak to it as you would to a beloved child.

Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It may return in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be happy to be found after being lost for so long.

Your spirit will need to sleep awhile after it is bathed and given clean clothes.

Now you can have a party. Invite everyone you know who loves and supports you. Keep room for those who have no place else to go.

Make a giveaway, and remember, keep the speeches short.

Then, you must do this: help the next person find their way through the dark. 

There is no known root for how the word cum
came to mean what it does. But imagine
if you could stitch a lineage back to the Latin
cum meaning to step. Hence: movement.
Hence: a destination. The body moving,
perhaps dancing, toward a kind of end.
Vanishing point of flesh—trembling tongue
-fucked apocalyptic. Apocalypsis. A veil
shifted & what awaits beneath. A rose
by any other given name could still
draw blood if it wanted. But shit, turns out
there’s no emoji for a rubber dick
sat heavy on the tongue. Go figure. I can
still feel it twitch. Hold you in my mouth
spit slick apocrypha. Sweet faggot magic
the way we speak organs out of their
Christian names—lick cock to clit, bruise
breast to flattened chest, bury knuckles inside
a redrafted anatomy. Sucked finger shudder. Lust
-hot alchemy. Holy, how even the air becomes
wind when moving. Holy, how you fuck me
by my one unburied name. & when I tell you
how beautiful you are, you riot-laughter,
kiss me & call me a dyke. Your smile arrives,
day-bright, unburdens the slur of all its blood.

Two full cypress trees in the clearing
intertwine in a way that almost makes

them seem like one. Until at a certain angle
from the blue blow-up pool I bought

this summer to save my life, I see it
is not one tree, but two, and they are

kissing. They are kissing so tenderly
it feels rude to watch, one hand

on the other’s shoulder, another
in the other’s branches, like hair.

When did kissing become so
dangerous? Or was it always so?

That illicit kiss in the bathroom
of the Four-Faced Liar, a bar

named after a clock, what was her
name? Or the first one with you

on the corner of Metropolitan
Avenue, before you came home

with me forever. I watch those green
trees now and it feels libidinous.

I want them to go on kissing, without
fear. I want to watch them and not

feel so abandoned by hands. Come
home. Everything is begging you.

Easy light storms in through the window, soft
            edges of the world, smudged by mist, a squirrel’s 

            nest rigged high in the maple. I’ve got a bone 
to pick with whomever is in charge. All year, 

I’ve said, You know what’s funny? and then,
            Nothing, nothing is funny. Which makes me laugh

            in an oblivion-is-coming sort of way. A friend
writes the word lover in a note and I am strangely

excited for the word lover to come back. Come back
            lover, come back to the five and dime. I could 

            squeal with the idea of blissful release, oh lover,
what a word, what a world, this gray waiting. In me,

a need to nestle deep into the safe-keeping of sky.
            I am too used to nostalgia now, a sweet escape

            of age. Centuries of pleasure before us and after
us, still right now, a softness like the worn fabric of a nightshirt

and what I do not say is, I trust the world to come back.
            Return like a word, long forgotten and maligned 

            for all its gross tenderness, a joke told in a sun beam,
the world walking in, ready to be ravaged, open for business.

                                I

Just as my fingers on these keys 
Make music, so the self-same sounds 
On my spirit make a music, too.

Music is feeling, then, not sound;
And thus it is that what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring you,

Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music. It is like the strain 
Waked in the elders by Susanna;

Of a green evening, clear and warm,
She bathed in her still garden, while 
The red-eyed elders, watching, felt

The basses of their beings throb 
In witching chords, and their thin blood 
Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna.
 

                                II

In the green water, clear and warm, 
Susanna lay.
She searched 
The touch of springs,
And found 
Concealed imaginings.
She sighed,
For so much melody.

Upon the bank, she stood 
In the cool 
Of spent emotions.
She felt, among the leaves,
The dew
Of old devotions.

She walked upon the grass,
Still quavering.
The winds were like her maids, 
On timid feet,
Fetching her woven scarves,
Yet wavering.

A breath upon her hand 
Muted the night.
She turned—
A cymbal crashed,
And roaring horns.
 

                                III

Soon, with a noise like tambourines, 
Came her attendant Byzantines.

They wondered why Susanna cried 
Against the elders by her side;

And as they whispered, the refrain 
Was like a willow swept by rain.

Anon, their lamps’ uplifted flame 
Revealed Susanna and her shame.

And then, the simpering Byzantines 
Fled, with a noise like tambourines.
 

                                IV

Beauty is momentary in the mind—
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.

The body dies; the body’s beauty lives.
So evenings die, in their green going,
A wave, interminably flowing.
So gardens die, their meek breath scenting 
The cowl of winter, done repenting.
So maidens die, to the auroral 
Celebration of a maiden’s choral.

Susanna’s music touched the bawdy strings 
Of those white elders; but, escaping,
Left only Death’s ironic scraping.
Now, in its immortality, it plays 
On the clear viol of her memory,
And makes a constant sacrament of praise.

This evening, I sat by an open window
and read till the light was gone and the book
was no more than a part of the darkness. 
I could easily have switched on a lamp, 
but I wanted to ride this day down into night,
to sit alone and smooth the unreadable page 
with the pale gray ghost of my hand.

^{translated from the French by Youmna Chamieh}

We will no longer be able to think (breathe, words like silence)
Of the too great complication of what it is to live.
The poem will be, more and more blind, nothing but words:
No one will be able to truly hear them.
Something else will come within ruins of time and friendship,
It won’t even be worth saying that we must die,
We will die.

Un jour écrire deviendra trop difficile.

On ne pourra plus penser (respirer, les mots comme du silence)
À la trop grande complication de ce que c’est vivre.
Le poème sera, de plus en plus aveugle, plus rien que des mots :
Personne qui pourra les entendre pour de vrai.
Quelque chose d’autre viendra dans des ruines de temps et d’amitié,
Ce sera même pas la peine de dire qu’il faut mourir,
On mourra.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

Translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker

The outflow of your drifting—
up until now you’ve slid along the road

I would like
in a faraway language
to tell you what I don’t
understand 

**
Nothing pulls you back from doubt any longer
from obsession 
from seeding 
your body is amnesia   plural   futile   limpid
a disappearance
stands in for space
stands in for an emptiness
to circle round 

**
Not visible   the sense
slumbers teeters on the edge
you expect nothing of the hours
not the days returned 
not daybreak
you expect 

**
There had been no
days without sand 
and you thought the sun
inexhaustible
you had not seen:
the lantern is cold 

**
Leaving you
clamber up your confusion
on the cord
of forgetting 
Leaving is 
all of life still
behind you 

**
What remains
to begin each morning 
at the same hour 
like 
starting from zero
to answer time’s memory loss
and the drift of ages
your mother, trembling
the genealogy of the worst
the disaster of the gods

to finish counting the remaining hours

**
You can’t bring yourself
to let go of the sky’s edge

at nine o’clock
this morning 
you hold the sailboat’s breath
head for the narrowest path
to redraw the mirage 

**
You ask yourself what is 
a place of your own 
if you must fade yourself out
unweight yourself of promises
yesterday you wanted to know if
and now you no longer know why
 
you should have dived in with no expectations 

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.

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.
At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.