^{“Because the grief knot is known to slip apart ‘with astonishing ease,’
it is considered one of the most insecure of knots.”
—Wikipedia, “Grief Knot”}

I not-see houses at the not-edge of the trees. Nothing gnaws through brush:
no football deflated, no crumpled seltzer cans. Possums emerge and are 
not-run over. This yard is a certified wildlife habitat. These yards Make America
Laugh Again. Go Blue. From the top of a parking garage, I face the endless
not-anything. It is almost-green as I know it not-here. A golf course is not a rash,
not a sore, not a scab. It’s not so bad. A not-lover tells me these are Midwest Clouds 
after we drive under the same frothy white for hours. There is not-not-ocean
on the other side of the road. Listen. I came from not-here. I know better than 
to fault the land. ‘Āina has not-not-synonyms. There is no water I can look at 
or not-look at and not-think of poison. Ground plumes. Oil spills. The not-
government not-warns of PFAs. Not-alarms at white foam. I am not-embering
with my not-anger. In this corner of not-Michigan, There is no public access 
to tracts of forest, wetlands, shorelines. These are not unprecedented times. 
What not-new not-apologies will we hear in one hundred years? Who will not 
make them? I am not-not-exhausted afterwalking twelve miles in not-woods 
open to not-scientists like me. There are no switchbacks. With every step, I not-
remember no mountains. No hemlocks. No cedars. No spruces. No dwarf rose. 
No roses. No roses. Nō. My mother taught me to shake branches like hands, 
to know pines by their follicles. Without her, I not-name plants with not-names 
for other plants. How much to not-remember! Mother not-not-is a metonym. 
When I not-sleep, I not-hear the train not-wailing. I am not too far from her.

^{(Inventory, 1950–present)}

We were the dream of convenience, the permanent press. 
We were the yogurt cup you spooned empty at dawn, 
the blister-pack popped for a single white pill, 
the slick, sterile innards of the IV that saved you.

We were the unbreakable toy in the 1962 sandbox, 
the fleece that wicked your first marathon sweat, 
the photo-bright banner that welcomed you home from a war 
you only understood through our lens.

We are the hangover of that dream. 
We are the lint in your deepest lung pocket, 
the bright shard in the albatross’s gullet, 
the glint in your daughter’s first meconium.

We are the polymer of your placenta’s print, 
the slow, milky bead in your grandfather’s cataract lens 
through which he sees a world softening at the edges.

We do not arrive as invasion. 
We are issued at conception, 
like a social-security number, 
like a name you cannot change.

We perform the trophic math: 
krill eats colorful flake, 
salmon eats krill, 
you eat salmon, 
we pay compound dividends in your marrow fat.

Our half-life is a new form of forever. 
Every birthday candle is a small, bright flare 
against the petrochemical balance sheet 
you carry inside your own body.

We are the derivative that never degrades, 
the toxic asset sliced thinner than sunlight, 
securitized and repackaged 
until the valuation is your own vasculature.

Your 1950-cutoff is a fairy tale. 
We were waiting in the womb’s warm lobby to disprove.

We are the call coming from inside the house.

We are the house.

We are the mortar in its very cells, 
the silent, synthetic hinge 
on which your own heart swings.

We are the heirloom you did not ask for, 
the inheritance that cannot be refused, 
the future fossil of your present, 
already here.

I was looking for an old knowledge  
I could make new.

    Dehorn your cattle when the sign’s in the legs. 
    Kill a barn swallow, get blood in your milk. 
    Dig by the moon’s dark, prune by its light. 

I read all afternoon in my office on the third floor. 

A passage on shovels reminded me  
of crossing that one green pasture with my mother

before we buried her mother again, closer 
to our dead kin, the dairy bootleggers.

The dead can’t sleep if you’re always making noise, 
but I have never known a soul with my blood 
who wants to sleep, once dead, more than four days.

The women, especially, are always wanting 
to wake up, shiver in the grasses, sigh.

The worst pain of my life, I was far from the South, 
holding my belly, screaming in silence,  
and one came to me, ravenous, her eyes widening.

Taking my pain in and in. Like a lover

after a too-long, anguished absence  
drinking, as much as they can at one time, 

the expressions,  
freckles,  
eyes of the desired. 

I don’t know who she was, but she belonged to me. 

Her grave had been left open overnight 
leaving her to grasp after our awful music forever.

I felt myself all the way down 
to be full of sons, sons I would die with  
tucked inside, 

so when I found out I might be rounding with a daughter—
I had to walk many miles

when the sign was high in the knees 
and the knees were bent in snow

and sap, freezing in the trees, split  
loud slits up their middles,

lines a child pried open to enter

dug, but not yet cut by me. 

Speckled omens leave their fingerprints on their ghostly faces. The fleeting patter of rain slicks the asphalt beneath them. This is how history gets rewritten: in the gaps between their bodies, against the backdrop of early spring. Somewhere in the long middle of the end. He, in military attire, an oak tree with galaxies smeared inside him. She, a forest in a barren world. By now, I know how this story goes. The war will architect their undoing, decades and petty arguments stacked up against a god of futile things. Illness will harvest their lifespans. He will gasp for eight years, bargaining with fate. Her heart will break again and again until it gives out. Between them, a daughter. One day, a mother whose face will mark mine. In that moment, flanked by her parents, she stands infinite as the trees behind her. Hair draping shoulders. Body barely pubescent. Hand over heart. You can tell she still believes the world loves her. Head tilted upwards, she dreams herself in-flight, hedging her bets on the vastness of a borderless sky.

An act can be many things at once. 
We can be deliverers or takers both.

Was he saying thank you to the airbags, 
thank you to the chassis for its metal

promise to stop the impact short of 
breath and body and the bureaucracy

of the outside world. Praising all of it 
today. Praising the collision recalculated

that it could have been worse. Where 
is poetry if it is not at the base of

the wreck. Rich said it clearly. So clear 
we could see the ocean’s bottom

as if the glass had been emptied out 
from one last sip. My son and then

my other son and then the one 
who knows what I’m talking about. 

What if I say I want this poem to bless 
you, the reader. Will you take it? Will

you trust that it, line by line, truly 
means to protest harm, means well?

We were living in a blue room, somewhere near  
the coast. The trees were tall and green as sleeping men,  
bent against the wind. There were blackberries,  
apple farms, roaring waves of storms. Long December  
foghorn nights, the distant tinny ringing of a bell.  
We watched the ships go by, the seagulls flock  
and spread. We stayed up late and read Neruda 
in the dark, returning every nerve. So close it seemed  
the other person’s body was our own. Eyes for eyes,  
hands for hands, waiting for the other one to come.  
It wasn’t beauty but a lack of time. We saw the stars  
dissolve, the shifting range of blues against the peaks.  
Mountains in the distance. Black hills. Moon. There was  
a time, a period of days and nights before the end.  
We were living in a blue room, and we were happy.

^{translated from the German by Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky}

My springtime, a sobbing hunger, 
   my summer, a hot struggle— 
                      what 
          will my autumn be?

          A tardy golden sheaf?

              a lake of mist?

Full-on, no bullshit, no irony, yes Taco Bell 
where I can almost always pull together the 
cash to get dinner, at my brokest 
scrounging up enough change  
for the pillowy warmth of a bean burrito,  
extra red sauce, meant to be eaten  
behind the steering wheel in a parking lot 
or while driving, the wrapper crumpled up  
and thrown on the passenger side floor, 
leftover napkins stashed in the glovebox.  
In high school we’d ditch seventh period  
and drive 10 miles down I-5 to the closest town  
big enough to have a Taco Bell,  
where we’d house as much food as we could 
pay for, lounging in the pinkpurplegreen vinyl  
or the metal swivel chairs we’d knock knees under,  
giving each other dares around fire sauce,  
hoarding packets of mild sauce to douse everything.  
And forever, my love to the Taco Bell employees,  
who took my order when I was drunk or high or crying,  
who listened and fed me without too much judgment  
through high school and college and my thirties,  
and a special love for the two who pushed my car  
through the drive-thru, once, when it broke down  
mid-order. I couldn’t afford a tow until payday.  
They let me leave it in the lot. 
This is how I know labor is entitled to all it creates,  
and that given a chance most of us are helpers, 
we want to help people and to be helped  
by people, amidst the absolute and delicious  
loveliness of ordinary things. 

Palestine gave birth
her pavements smiled with groves of olives and roses
her children were shepherds, farmers, jewelers
she became pregnant with hope
          It would be enough for me to die, here, on her soil, 
                    Be buried deep in the earth of my country,
          Only to sprout forth again as a bright bloom, 
          Waved gently by a child who calls this land home.
          It would be enough for me to remain home, 
          Alive, 
          existing as a trace in her fabric … 
So, they targeted her womb
And Death greeted every child she had. 

I cup my ear to your chest and 
wait for a wind chime, 
but man does it sound oily in there. 
So it is. Deep-fried, a clucking shame. 
Poor Randall Butterbean: a bird between lucks. 
But isn’t this fine? Isn’t it swell? 
Wouldn’t you rather be kettle-cooked than smeared under a 
rain boot? 
Sidewalk paté, some years later, with no pension to speak of? 
Don’t worry, my chicken— 
for the vigil, I’ve hired the best 
one-man-cockroach-band money can buy! 
              (So the talent is thin, so what? 
You know how cars pile up in the desert.) 
Anyway.         Cockroach maestro, 
won’t you sing our sweet boy downstream? 
Do you think he quivered/ 
Do you think he bled/ 
Wings pinned down/ 
To a hospital bed/ 
Did Jesus pass him/ 
In a white Ferrari/ 
Or did his heart just go              POP!

I can tell you that some things vanish
without ceremony—a town can lose its name
and keep the post office, or keep the name

and lose the rest. There still marks a point
on the map where it began, but the work’s long done;
the road grown over with bleeding hearts and alder.

You can walk there. The gravel crunches 
under the phantom buzz of chainsaws, and fog
licks at the gridded hillside like an old debt.

Each stump is a headstone,
a biography in every ring. You think you see
a form in the mist—a thrashing elk, or a bobcat

or the shape of work that once
held the valley upright. Every road here
leads to another road that stops

at a locked gate, a washout,
a view of nothing but cloud.
Acceptance lives somewhere past that.

They say the forest heals, some say faster
than the heart—Scotch broom,
thistle, the thin gray line of runoff

that feeds the river in winter.
If there’s holiness in this, it’s in the rot,
the glacial comeback of what was taken.

Once I dreamed the salmon spoke
in a tongue I almost understood—
a language of loss, but also return.

They swam upstream through
clear-cuts and culverts, their bodies bright
as stripped wire, and I woke thinking

maybe the land dreams us too,
and stirs awake each time we leave
another scar across its ribs.

Docks rust and rot beside the river,
the paper mill sighing its white smoke
like a ghost rehearsing its final exit.

On the coast: blown glass, fish smells
and salt wind—the gulls screaming
for everything we drop.

Sometimes I go there just to see
where the road gives out at the jetty,
where the land admits defeat. Or victory.

No revelation, only the dull
thought that everything moves
toward water, then into it.

I’m somewhere inland still,
standing in the rain, or threat of it,
watching a fern push through the asphalt.

The sky        as always         undecided 
gray, opening, closing—
slack mouth of forgiveness, of apology.

What if I told you he wasn’t that bad? 
That you couldn’t smell it on his breath 
after all, & that he wasn’t one of the loud ones 
the way he is in all my poems? Not at all 
like the viral headlines made him seem? What if 
I told you he smiled in PTA meetings & never spoke first? 
That he sat on the sidelines at little league games 
& laughed with other parents? That he loves to sink 
his soft hands into soil & clip the crisped 
edges of dog-tongue rhododendron leaves because 
they make him feel small? What if I told you 
he sits in church basements with other white-whiskered 
men to talk about how proud they all are of their 
gay sons? & the whirling manic I cartoon him to be 
in line at the rehab hospital, or barking through 
car windows with an open Sauv Blanc bottle 
cinched between his khakis—what if I said 
that was all mostly for me?

Nowhere did they charge: Guilty of ____. Me? I’m pacing the living room, full-throated and the men on screen are men. I will not compare a man to a soft-feathered bird, but have you read Eli Cranor’s Broiler? If we can agree that caging a flock without room to stretch their wings is inhumane, are we not obligated to pluck a senator’s phone number from the annals of the internet? I don’t know these men. I don’t know these men, but spittle flies from my lower teeth as I pace and shout. Maybe the beaded black eyes of birds is nothing to no one. Maybe that’s a double negative for a reason. Maybe subject and verb disagree for a reason. Where was I when no one offered due process? Brooding, probably. About money or the broken left-front burner on the stovetop. The worn-through soles of my Chuck Taylors. Nowhere did they chant USA as they bent the men in half. Imagine: being one of these half-bent men. Nowhere did they say, explicitly, run little birds, run. I’m making sense of why, when Kilmar Jr. looks in the mirror, he sees white tube socks scurrying a cement floor. A boy’s hand. Fingers weaving between bars. A whisper: Fly little flightless bird. When they plucked these men, did I—no-one’s mother—wretch? Nowhere is a person free when men cage other men. Nowhere is America. Nowhere. Maybe a gap between a boy’s baby teeth. Maybe a legion of milkless mothers. A lit match. An unbolted cage.

^{Trees have always been the most penetrating preachers.
—Herman Hesse}

When the railroad first came to the edge of the mountain, 
men in buckskin breeches called it the “gravity road.” 
They pounded on solid rock from dawn to dusk, dangled 
off cliff faces in woven reed baskets to drive steel spikes 
into stone with a primal, accentual, hand-hammered beat. 

When the railroad first arrived at the sedge edge of prairie, 
bison were picked off from their herds, sometimes to cure 
into hams, skin for coats, or cull for bones to ship east 
and market as fertilizer, glue, plates or umbrellas handles; 
other times, they were shot just to rot where they dropped. 

When the railroad first built a station on the city outskirts, 
families gathered on hillsides to watch black smoke plume, 
hitched horses and abandoned stagecoaches to whisper 
about “Pullman Palace Cars” with velvet seats, brass rails, 
gas lights, knuckle couplers, air brakes: five stars for a fee. 

When the railroad first threatened the forest’s tree line, 
shackled men with skin dark as bark and forced to work 
in quarries and mines began to hack at stumps in hummus 
with shovels. They left their lives in leaf fall and the roots 
regenerated. Unlike us, forests grow slow, in no time zone. 

When the railroad first swam into the camera’s viewfinder, 
no train had used its timber ties for a span only the rings 
of a tree might tell (but won’t). Listen closely to the trunk:  
when our hurtling headlong is blocked, we need to change 
not just direction but dimension. Decelerate. Look up.

^{c.a. 2021 (modern century)}

Along the butcher paper you’re spread. Licking your fingers. Cracking spines  
(dainty little things). Still, you know to shuck all their meat. Be as Southern  
and slack as he saw fit. And you kept spreading. Your smiles. Your rumor.  
Your circles of darlings, looped & braided your hair. Late skin atmosphere.  
Wet from the heat. New timbres and eves. You loved the hilly tongues of Carolinas.  
The ooze of Baton Rouge. You told jokes in shotgun kitchens. Basked in the Garden  
District. Cocktails under Columns. Humming yourself drunk: like a Louisiana fairytale.  
You debuted so well. Sent boys chirping. City bright & blushing. Blue ghosts circling 
your show and tell cottage. There you hung dead flowers. Fanned and soaked for hours.  
Bronzed legs, the perfect sundress. Oh Nayika! you even served Creole for his guests.  
Bottles and biscuits, king cake and juleps. But darling, what of it? You spread yourself rich.  
Held every court of his. Heard of hidden women. Swore you were different. Roaring feline 
laughter. You’ll plead with him after. For now, set down the flute. Panting to the Bayou,  
pride staggered, dress lifted. Face in the river. You’ll listen under pressure:  
God dammit! God eager! Takes lightning strikes to please. His wanton demands. 
Forget the title Nayika, chosen means damned. Undo the coronet braids, rein back 
what you can. All you’ve mistaken: Territory for home, throat for song, throws for jewels. 
Your type is the wretched. You won’t be defeated. You’ll reap what you choose.   
Faustian bargain. Spiders in your garden. Pulling your ribbons tighter. You say prized  
trumps beloved. So long as you’re coveted. You’ll weather the storm and all that good brew:  
The spines that crack. The bolts that bruise. Rumors coming back to you.

            on Gustav Klimt’s painting, 1907-1908

Do you really think if you bend

me, I will love you? You

crack my chin up, your hands

brown pigeons scheming reunion

at my cheek and temple, your jaw

cragged at the end of your thick neck

of longing. I claw onto you

as the only tree here, your

swing. I’m mad for gravity though

I’m bound, diagonally, to

you. Let me. Push from your trunk towards

the edge and my freedom. Leave me

to wither while moss weeps

in the corners, our halo liquid

as yolk, waving from our bodies’ heat,

our divinity melting. My dress

blossoms loudly. You are still

wrestling me closer. If only I could

release to you my mouth just this

once and you would leave me,

but the shadows of your robe are

so haphazard. I know you will try

to smother me again. The poppies scratch. My feet

reach beyond spring.