Someone will        love you     many will      love

you         many will brother you   some of these

loves will        bother you   some   will      leave you

one might        haunt   you      hunt you in your

sleep        make you       weep the tearless kind of

weep the         kind of weep   that drowns your

organs     slowly    there are little oars  in your body      

little boats   grab onto them and row and        row

someone will tell you      no       but you won’t   know

he is    right until you have   already        wrung your  

own heart dry    your hands dripping knives    until

you have    already   reached your hands into       his       

body and put them through his        heart     love is

the only thing that       is not    an       argument

Then a woman said, Speak to us of Joy and Sorrow.
And he answered:
Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and others say, “Nay, sorrow is the greater.”
But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.

Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy.
Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced.
When the treasure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver, needs must your joy or your sorrow rise or fall.

Spawn of fantasies
Sitting the appraisable
Pig Cupid            his rosy snout
Rooting erotic garbage
“Once upon a time”
Pulls a weed        white star-topped
Among wild oats sown in mucous membrane
I would             an eye in a Bengal light
Eternity in a sky-rocket
Constellations in an ocean
Whose rivers run no fresher
Than a trickle of saliva


There are suspect places


I must live in my lantern
Trimming subliminal flicker
Virginal             to the bellows
Of experience
                               Colored glass.

after a bottle of chianti
              Don’t mistake me, I’ve pondered this before.
              But tonight I’m serious.
              One bottle and the end is certain.
              Tomorrow: Lawyer. Boxes. Road map. More wine.

while walking the dog
              Paris won’t even notice.
              I’ll feed the pup, pack a quick bag,
              take out the trash, and slip away into the night.
              Home to Sparta. Or Santa Monica.
              An island off the southernmost tip of Peru.
              Disappear. Like fog from a mirror.

while paying the bills
              Guess I’ll have to give up that whole new career plan.
              Academic dreams. House-and-yard dreams.
              Stay on like this a few more years. Or forever.
              Face the bottomless nights in solitude.
              Wither. Drink. Write poems about dead ends.
              Drink more. Work. Pay rent.
              End.

when Paris comes home drunk
              Call Clytemnestra. Make a plan.
              Move a few things into Clym’s spare room,
              storage for the rest. Set up arbitration.
              File what needs to be filed.
              Head to Athens. Or back to Crown Heights.
              Maybe find a roommate in Fort Greene.
              All I know is out out out.
              Sure, I can blame the past or the scotch
              or my own smartmouth or my worst rage,
              but blame is a word. I need a weapon.

when Menelaus writes a letter
              As if.

from the ocean floor
              Bathtub. Ocean. Whichever. All this water.
              Yes, Paris pulled me from the ruby tub.
              Menelaus fed me to the river a year before that.
              Metaphorical, and not at all.
              O, a girl and her water. Such romance.
              Gaudy. And gauche.
              How do I leave what cared enough to keep me?
              What of those goddamn ships?
              That ridiculous horse? All those men?
              Now, wretched little me. All this dizzy sadness.
              How many kings to tame one woman? Silence her?
              How many to put her under?

is what my sons call the flowers—
purple, white, electric blue—
 
pom-pomming bushes all along
the beach town streets.
 
I can’t correct them into
hydrangeas, or I won’t.
 
Bees ricochet in and out
of the clustered petals,
 
and my sons panic and dash
and I tell them about good
 
insects, pollination, but the truth is
I want their fear-box full of bees.
 
This morning the radio
said tender age shelters.
 
This morning the glaciers
are retreating. How long now
 
until the space-print backpack
becomes district-policy clear?
 
We’re almost to the beach,
and High dangerous! my sons
 
yell again, their joy in having
spotted something beautiful,
 
and called it what it is.

And on the first day
god made
something up.
Then everything came along:

seconds, sex and
beasts and breaths and rabies;
hunger, healing,
lust and lust’s rejections;
swarming things that swarm
inside the dirt;
girth and grind
and grit and shit and all shit’s functions;
rings inside the treetrunk
and branches broken by the snow;
pigs’ hearts and stars,
mystery, suspense and stingrays;
insects, blood
and interests and death;
eventually, us,
with all our viruses, laments and curiosities;
all our songs and made-up stories;
and our songs about the stories we’ve forgotten;
and all that we’ve forgotten we’ve forgotten;

and to hold it all together god made time
and those rhyming seasons
that display decay.

Upon the mountain’s distant head,
   With trackless snows for ever white,
Where all is still, and cold, and dead,
   Late shines the day’s departing light.

But far below those icy rocks,
   The vales, in summer bloom arrayed,
Woods full of birds, and fields of flocks,
   Are dim with mist and dark with shade.

’Tis thus, from warm and kindly hearts,
   And eyes where generous meanings burn,
Earliest the light of life departs,
   But lingers with the cold and stern.

The hurt returns as it always intended—it is tender
as the inside of my thighs, it is as blue, too. O windless,

            wingless sky, show me your empire of loneliness,
let me spring from the jaws of what tried to kill me.

Let me look at your face and see a heaven worth having, all
                         your sorry angels falling off a piano bench, laughing.

Do you burn because you remember darkness? Outside
the joy is clamoring. It is almost like the worst day of your life

                                      is ordinary for everyone else.

Moons on the upper visual
field. I replay many springs

                                      for their ripening
                                      heat. Five limb in

                                                                           me: Ornate, Greased,
                                                                           Codling, Luna, 
                                                                                Death’s-head.

                                                  Two supernatural, three
                                                  balance need. I feed on fat

                                                                                      apples, pears: 
                                                                                           Tunnel
                                                                                      toward center, a 
                                                                                           heaven

                                                            in the core. Instinct
                                                            attempts to correct

                                       with a turn
                                       toward light.

                        My dress
                        a brief

                                     darkness. Flits
                                     there. Another set

                                                                         of wings to tear.
                                                                         Spiral me in the silk

                                                                                     of my tongue. 
                                                                                          Farm
                                                                                     what is 
                                                                                          economical

                                                             in me: Blood for blood,
                                                             heart for snare.

                                                                          Scent, sweet
                                                                          air: My cedar,

                                                hung juniper, lavender
                                                cross: What holds the body

                         keeps the body blesses the body’s
                         lack.

                                                Is that not a blessing?
                                                What blooms in me:

                                   Trouble. Trouble.
                                   Trouble.

            So I consume. So I feed
            what festers.

When navigating artificial
light, the angle changes

                         noticeably. Angle strict, beloved:
                         My head a mess of moon.

The Junior Minister waved a hand
                       toward the courtyard where, he said,

                                    Goering’s private lion used to live.

                       With him we climbed Parliament’s steps,

walls pockmarked still with bullet holes.
                       In the conference room the Social Democrats

                                    passed trays of petit fours and coffee.

                       We were perhaps insufficient, he said.

His voice, uninflected: they shipped
                       my father to Stalingrad. Forty days

                                    and dead. In the room,

                       the transcriptionist, the translator,

and security stationed against
                       the wall. Some time passed.

                                    In East Germany, he said, at least

                       it was always terrible. Bad luck, he said,

to be on that side of the wall. Even
                       the apples were poison. We were

                                    to understand this was a little joke.

                       He brought the teacup to his mouth,

but did not drink. His fingernails
                       were tapered and very clean.

                                    When you are the victim, he said,

it doesn’t matter who is killing you.

     My neighbor to the left had a stroke a couple years ago. It didn’t look 
     like he was going to make it, and then he made it. I’m watching him 
     now from my window as he makes his slow way across his yard 
     with some tree branches that fell in last night’s storm. Three steps.  
     Wait. Three steps. It’s a hard slog. Watching, I want to pitch in.  
     And we do, at such times, wanting to help. But on the other hand, 
     it’s good to be as physical as possible in recovery. Maybe this is part 
     of his rehab. Maybe this is doctor’s orders: DO YARDWORK.  
     And here comes his wife across the yard anyway, to give a hand 
     with a large branch. She’s able to quickly overtake him, and she folds 
     into the process smoothly, no words between them that I can make out.  
     It’s another part of what makes us human, weighing the theory of mind, 
     watching each other struggle or perform, anticipating each other’s 
     thoughts, as the abject hovers uncannily in the background, threatening 
     to break through the fragile borders of the self. “What’s it like to be 
     a bat?” we ask. The bats don’t respond. How usually, our lives 
     unfold at the periphery of catastrophes happening to others. I’m 
     reading, while my neighbor struggles, that the squirrel population 
     in New England is in the midst of an unprecedented boom. A recent 
     abundance of acorns is the reason for this surge in squirrel populations, 
     most particularly in New Hampshire. They’re everywhere, being 
     squirrely, squirreling acorns away. We call it “Squirrelnado” because 
     it’s all around us, circling, and dangerous, and kind of funny. Language 
     springs from the land, and through our imagination we become 
     human. They’re back in the house now. We name the things we see, 
     or they name themselves into our experience, whichever, and then 
     we use those names for things we don’t understand, what we can’t 
     express. Wind becomes spirit becomes ghost. Mountain becomes 
     god. The land springs up before us. It shakes us and pushes us over.  

i.           

I’ve pulled from my throat birdsong like tin-
sheeted lullaby [its vicious cold        its hoax of wings]
the rest of us forest folk       dark angels chafing rabbits-
foot for luck     thrum-necked     wear the face of
nothing       we’ve changed       the Zodiac & I
have refused a little planet little sum for struggle & sailed
ourselves summerlong & arbitrary as a moon grave
across a vastness        [we’ve left the child-
ren]      Named the place penni-
less motherhood      Named the place country
of mothers      Named the place anywhere but death by self-

ii.           

infliction is a god of many faces      many nothings     
I’m afraid I’ll never be whole     I’m afraid
the rope from the hardware store [screws for nails]
will teach itself to knot      I’ve looked up noose I’ve
learned to twine but these babies now
halfway pruned through the clean bathwater of childhood
I promised a god I would take to the ledge
& show the pinstripes the pinkening strobe-
lights maybe angels chiseled at creation
into the rock [around my neck] the rock in the river
I would never let them see        I would never let them

iii.

break & spend a whole life backing away from that slip—
Let us fly & believe [in the wreck] their perfect hope-
sealed bodies the only parachutes we need

A young man learns to shoot
& dies in the mud
an ocean away from home,
a rifle in his fingers
& the sky dripping
from his heart. Next to him
a friend watches
his final breath slip
ragged into the ditch,
a thing the friend will carry
back to America—
wound, souvenir,
backstory. He’ll teach 
literature to young people
for 40 years. He’ll coach
his daughters’ softball teams. 
Root for Red Wings
& Lions & Tigers. Dance
well. Love generously. 
He’ll be quick with a joke
& firm with handshakes.
He’ll rarely talk
about the war. If asked
he’ll tell you instead
his favorite story:
Odysseus escaping
from the Cyclops
with a bad pun & good wine
& a sharp stick.
It’s about buying time
& making do, he’ll say. 
It’s about doing what it takes 
to get home, & you see 
he has been talking 
about the war all along.
We all want the same thing
from this world:
Call me nobody. Let me live.

We walk through clouds
wrapped in ancient symbols

We descend the hill
wearing water 

Maybe we are dead 
and don’t know it

Maybe we are violet flowers
and those we long for 

love only 
our unmade hearts

On attend, on attend

Wait for Duras and Eminescu 
to tell us in French then Romanian

light has wounds
slow down—
memory is misgivings 

Wait until the nails
get rusty 
in the houses of our past.

Isn't it funny

when suddenly after all these decades

you notice a new part of your body.

 

Maybe the hamstrings—

entirely unused when lifting weights,

back used instead

which then pains for years.

 

Maybe the slight shoulder raise

that tightens those muscles

maybe for good.

 

I notice my body

slide through time.

It is odd and peculiar,

genius of no one,

a perfect clock

making clocks

look simple.

 

Newness comes naturally.

Resisting it causes the past

to present memories on yellow

platters.

 

My age is a number.

Bones getting ready to play poker.

I will remain a small book

hidden away deep

in the library.

 

I love my body and this world!

Such a declaration

five years ago

would've driven me insane.

 

But now an appreciation arrives

with a fine taste of sulfur

and anywhere I look is born

a rose.

Breathe
. As in what if
the shadow is gold
en? Breathe. As in
hale assuming
exhale. Imagine
that.      As in first
person singular. Homonym
:. As in subject. As
in centeroftheworld as in
mundane. The opposite of spectacle
spectacular. This is just us
breathing. Imagine
normalized respite
gold in shadows
. You have the
right to breathe and remain
. Imagine
that
.

What if I tell you they didn’t evacuate

the high school after he brought in the

clock? What if he and clock waited in the

principal’s office

until the police came? You look at me

as though I pulled the fire alarm,

yelled into a crowded theatre. You

think I can erase the weapon out

of the hands of that young man in

Kevlar pointing his assault rifle at me?

Would your pain lessen? Would you

sleep tomorrow? What if I expunge the

hoodie? Outlaw convenience

stores? Institute curfew for all adult males

after 8 p.m.? Did you know that kid

loved horses, ate Skittles, went to

aviation camp? What if

I rub out midnight of the blue, blue

world? Take the jaywalk from the boy

trying to catch a city

bus? Which blue should it be? First or

second? The last thing you hear on the radio

before mashing

another button? What if there were no loosies

to smoke, steal, hawk? What if Sandy used her signal?

I say her name, I canonize the thought all

black lives matter. What if I raise my

voice? What if I don’t stop speaking?

What if I stop talking back?

Then will you miss me?

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—

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.

The river is high. I'd love to smoke pot 

with the river. I'd love it if rain 

sat at my table and told me what it's like 

to lick Edith Piaf's grave. I go along thinking 

I'm separate from trash day 

and the weird hairdo my cat wakes up with 

but I am of the avalanche 

as much as I am its tambourine. 

The river is crashing against my sleep 

like it took applause apart and put it back together 

as a riot of wet mouths 

adoring my ears, is over my head

when it explains string theory 

and affection to me, 

when it tells me to be the code breaker, 

not the code. What does that mean? 

Why does lyric poetry exist?

When will water open its mouth 

and tell us how to be clouds, how to rise

and morph and die and flourish and be reborn

all at the same time, all without caring

if we have food in our teeth or teeth in our eyes

or hair in our soup or a piano in our pockets,

just play the damned tune. The river is bipolar 

but has flushed its meds, I'm dead 

but someone has to finish all the cheese 

in the fridge, we're a failed species

if suction cups are important, if intelligence

isn't graded on a curve, 

but if desperation counts, if thunderstorms 

are the noise in our heads given a hall pass 

and rivers swell because orchestras 

aren't always there when we need them, well then, 

I still don't know a thing.

     1.   I ate eggs from a chafing dish while the baker reminded us: the only thing that will hurt you out here are your own bad decisions

     2.   I felt fettered then un-

     3.   I listened to the rain

     4.   I listened to the rain hitting the Carrier compressor, the gravel walk

     5.   I listened to the rain flattening the clover, I listened to the rain letting up and then it was ozone and drip

     6.   On the bench under the overhang in the rain I let myself pretend I was younger and childless, like the first time I arrived here

     7.   The first time I arrived here, I never thought I am small and luminous

     8.   The body, burdened and miraculous

     9.   The body as thin-nest boundary

     10.   I climbed into your body like a cave

     11.   I was frightened to walk in the dark

     12.   Late at night even my own movements became unknowable, magnified and rustling

     13.   The night cut by the moon, punctured by the whistle of the cargo train

     14.   There was only a hole, there was only forward and more forward

     15.   The inevitability of a scarred life, your pulse, stitches, this palace of breath

     16.   go on, go on / again, again / return, return

My old lover was Catholic and lied to me about the smallest things. Now he's dying and I'm trying to forgive everyone standing in line ahead of me at the grocery store. I keep painting objects intuitively. I keep saying I've never been in love. It's not quite true but I keep describing the same things differently, as sailboats through the locks of reversed rivers or as streaks of red across the sky, visible only in one eye. The sensation of decision-making won't stay put. I forget who I am and wake up exhausted. I had a teacher once who died, it was as if she removed herself into the forest. I scatter leaves to read them like pages as if she's speaking. She was in love. I don't know if I'm worried I will or won't ever give up my fictional autonomy. I'm choosing between two trees with two hollows. One begins breaking as I step inside, as I try to sleep. The other is already inhabited by a rooster. I pluck a feather and run to the pawn shop. How much is this worth? Can I buy it back for my Sunday best, for the suit I never wear? Maybe if I go to the church I don't believe in I'll meet a man I can. I'll wear my Jewish star and pray for his belief to convince me that I too want someone to hold my stare.

Then came Oscar, the time of the guns, 

And there was no land for a man, no land for a country,

      Unless guns sprang up

      And spoke their language.

The how of running the world was all in guns.

The law of a God keeping sea and land apart,

The law of a child sucking milk,

The law of stars held together,

      They slept and worked in the heads of men

      Making twenty-mile guns, sixty-mile guns,

      Speaking their language

      Of no land for a man, no land for a country

      Unless… guns… unless… guns.

There was a child wanted the moon shot off the sky,

      asking a long gun to get the moon,

      to conquer the insults of the moon,

      to conquer something, anything,

      to put it over and run up the flag,

To show them the running of the world was all in guns.

There was a child wanted the moon shot off the day.

They dreamed… in the time of the guns… of guns.

                                         for Jim McKean

Before we struggled to hold light 

along this line of the Jacob Fork,

we tied on the nearly invisible

tippet to nymph pools, glimpse

broken halos. Rainbows held low

in their lanes. Sometimes they rose

to brighten the surface, our breath

tightening on the take. The rest

of the morning, we worked a section 

below the bridge, wanting only 

to return shadows into the river.

Probably you’ll solve gravity, flesh 

out our microbiomics, split our God 

particles into their constituent bits 

of christs and antichrists probably, 

probably you’ll find life as we know it 

knitted into nooks of the chattering 

cosmos, quaint and bountiful as kismet 

and gunfights in the movies probably, 

probably, probably you have no patience

for the movies there in your eventual 

arrondissement where you have more

credible holography, more inspiring

actual events, your ghazals composed 

of crow racket, retrorockets, glaciers 

breaking, your discotheques wailing

probably, probably, probably, probably 

too late a sentient taxi airlifts you 

home over a refurbished riverbank, 

above the rebuilt cathedral, your head 

dozing easy in the crook of your arm,

emptied of any memory of these weeks 

we haven’t slept you’ve been erupting 

into that hereafter like a hydrant on fire, 

like your mother is an air raid, and I am 

an air raid, and you’re a born siren 

chasing us out of your airspace probably

we’ve caught 46 daybreaks in 39 days, 

little emissary arrived to instruct us,

we wake now you shriek us awake,

we sleep now you leave us to sleep.