The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

A little while spring will claim its own,
In all the land around for mile on mile
Tender grass will hide the rugged stone.
My still heart will sing a little while.

And men will never think this wilderness
Was barren once when grass is over all,
Hearing laughter they may never guess
My heart has known its winter and carried gall.

Fluid curse
Cut loose from the face
Aeolian window
Singing my costume
The rain too wrongly falling to run in
When asked in an interview
Do I want the position
By night I do
No by day
And mute life plays, rising to the skin
To dream this concrete
Shape we’re in

I can never remake the thing I have destroyed;
   I brushed the golden dust from the moth’s bright wing,
I called down wind to shatter the cherry-blossoms,
   I did a terrible thing.

I feared that the cup might fall, so I flung it from me;
   I feared that the bird might fly, so I set it free;
I feared that the dam might break, so I loosed the river:
   May its waters cover me.

            and i return to the field
that i never leave          other boys 
are here too          stamping the bruise-dark grass
one of us stands alone     between posts
and waits for the rest       to rifle
a ball through the dark      and toward the net
he defends               security lights
from the school     on the embankment 
above us     cast angles and shadows      that cut 
through our bodies
and abstract them          all i have learned
up till now     is fear 
                                     of opaque windows 
in houses outside the fence          of headlights
to lone cars that pass     leaving a wake
of deeper dark          of the neighbor nightwalking
his brindled, snarl-jawed dog          of other boys     
laughing and taunting     before their volleys     
bullet     toward and beyond the boy guarding the net          
of myself    how i understand no choice
but to join them
                             then     i am called     
to stand between the posts    
and what else can I do
                                      when i am there     
other boys strike     the one ball
shared between us     and it sidewinds      
out of the dark     hurtling above or around or 
sometimes straight at me     
                                           and what else 
can i do     crouched in my place 
and ready to throw my body     
after the ball      as it rips out of the night
but raise my own laughter    against them
the boys     arrayed 20 yards away     and aiming 
for my failure     but ring out with a taunting 
glee of my own     
                          until i call another boy 
to his turn     and walk back to the edge 
of the group     and wait to stand over the ball
and hope     to make the new boy     
lay down his body    for our game     as i 
have laid down mine          
                                    and      at the end of it     
what else can i do     but return the shoves 
of other boys     as we send each other 
away     in a gesture we refuse to name      as love
and slip through      the fence gap 
where we first snuck in      and leave 
the field i can never leave     and     all my fear intact     
be gone

I

Living is no laughing matter:
	you must live with great seriousness
		like a squirrel, for example—
   I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
		I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
	you must take it seriously,
	so much so and to such a degree
   that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
                                            your back to the wall,
   or else in a laboratory
	in your white coat and safety glasses,
	you can die for people—
   even for people whose faces you’ve never seen,
   even though you know living
	is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
   that even at seventy, for example, you’ll plant olive trees—
   and not for your children, either,
   but because although you fear death you don’t believe it,
   because living, I mean, weighs heavier.

II

Let’s say we’re seriously ill, need surgery—
which is to say we might not get up
			from the white table.
Even though it’s impossible not to feel sad
			about going a little too soon,
we’ll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we’ll look out the window to see if it’s raining,
or still wait anxiously
		for the latest newscast . . . 
Let’s say we’re at the front—
	for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
	we might fall on our face, dead.
We’ll know this with a curious anger,
        but we’ll still worry ourselves to death
        about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let’s say we’re in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say,
                        before the iron doors will open.
We’ll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind—
                                I  mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
        we must live as if we will never die.

III

This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
               and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet—
	  I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even 
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
	  in pitch-black space . . . 
You must grieve for this right now
—you have to feel this sorrow now—
for the world must be loved this much
                               if you’re going to say “I lived” . . .

Lying, thinking
Last night
How to find my soul a home
Where water is not thirsty
And bread loaf is not stone
I came up with one thing
And I don’t believe I’m wrong
That nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

There are some millionaires
With money they can’t use
Their wives run round like banshees
Their children sing the blues
They’ve got expensive doctors
To cure their hearts of stone.
But nobody
No, nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Now if you listen closely
I’ll tell you what I know
Storm clouds are gathering
The wind is gonna blow
The race of man is suffering
And I can hear the moan,
’Cause nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

^{—after Freda Epum}

the day could do without
me. The ice outside glitters around
my car’s tires like a pageant
dress. Only digital utterances between
myself and the world for at least
a week. The last time he visited, my friend
noted the lack of natural light
in my downstairs apartment, 
the posthumous-grey bleeding into
the mood. Aught of light
in the bedroom due to the blackout
curtains. But sometimes,
the day heckles, with its high-
bitch sun and melting snow. Some
days, I lay in the morgue
of darkness, hyper-alone,
and the sunlight, so audacious, paints
the color back onto my cheeks. 

The sun goes down, and over all
    These barren reaches by the tide
Such unelusive glories fall,
    I almost dream they yet will bide
    Until the coming of the tide.

And yet I know that not for us,
    By any ecstasy of dream,
He lingers to keep luminous
    A little while the grievous stream,
    Which frets, uncomforted of dream—

A grievous stream, that to and fro
    Athrough the fields of Acadie
Goes wandering, as if to know
    Why one beloved face should be
    So long from home and Acadie.

Was it a year or lives ago
    We took the grasses in our hands,
And caught the summer flying low
    Over the waving meadow lands,
    And held it there between our hands?

The while the river at our feet—
    A drowsy inland meadow stream—
At set of sun the after-heat
    Made running gold, and in the gleam
    We freed our birch upon the stream.

There down along the elms at dusk
    We lifted dripping blade to drift,
Through twilight scented fine like musk,
    Where night and gloom awhile uplift,
    Nor sunder soul and soul adrift.

And that we took into our hands
    Spirit of life or subtler thing—
Breathed on us there, and loosed the bands
    Of death, and taught us, whispering,
    The secrets of some wonder-thing.

Then all your face grew light, and seemed
    To hold the shadow of the sun;
The evening faltered, and I deemed
    That time was ripe, and years had done
    Their wheeling underneath the sun.

So all desire and all regret,
    And fear and memory, were naught;
One to remember or forget
    The keen delight our hands had caught;
    Morrow and yesterday were naught.

The night has fallen, and the tide . . .
    Now and again comes drifting home,
Across these aching barrens wide,
    A sigh like driven wind or foam:
    In grief the flood is bursting home.

^{for Sean Ferguson}

The mother laid her boy to sleep
in a laundry hamper. Its weave curved 
around his head just as the glow 
of a dying planet had curved 
around Kal-El, another boy ejected 
into space. Buckled into 
the seat of her stationwagon, 
the hamper traveled north, as far 
from the panhandle as Ephrata, Washington, 
no father for miles. For her boy 
his mother packed the stroller, 
a painting, and all the towels 
in the damp rowhouse near the airforce base. 
For her boy she drove eleven days. 
Now the boy is forty, he lives 
in LA, he’s learned to love 
without caution. She lives alone, 
she attends church twice a week. 
The minister argues that hers 
is a heroism of the natural order 
overthrown: the patriarch gone mad, 
the son preserved to replace him. 
Yet the mother sees the little stories 
curtained by the great. She is certain 
that, during those eleven days of driving, 
she was mythic. They were mythic. 
Mary and Christ. Jessica and Paul. 
Heroine and hero, together in flight. 

Sand-gray desert siren, a roadrunner  
             froze between creosote, confused 

                          not by prickly pear or pencil cactus,  
                                       but by fumes choking the road’s throat.

A toddler nearby tensed at each  
             tire’s shriek, his hand crushed inside

                          his mother’s as the roadrunner  
                                       swiveled its head as if looking for his

before darting west, then north,  
             then west again, this time    

                          toward a canyon whose creek,   
                                       after a meagre snowmelt, 

was ringed by thin reeds, skeeters  
             careening between them. Don’t, 

                          my mother had warned when I crawled 
                                       from beneath mesquite, 

lizard’s tail dangling from my fist.  
             When she tried to stop    
            
                          bulldozers from collapsing bighorn  
                                       habitat, I ignored her, grabbing

whiptails, dung beetles, centipedes.  
             Now the toddler,

                          eyeing flecks of fool’s gold glowing  
                                       in a chunk of sandstone          

slips free of his mother’s hand 
             to flop in the dirt beside the highway. 

                          Can he feel dunes breathing  
                                       beneath his feet, aquifer dwindling

but still rich as his own blood running?—  
             Or does he hear only the groans

                          of a desert emptying, ravens massed  
                                       in the valley to scavenge. 

is up The Met’s stone steps,
so many that I have trouble collecting 
my girthy tourist’s breaths

and my palms, all sweaty, 
smeared with ink 
from his crinkled face,

wrinkled in the brochure, and
to think I’m too underdressed 
for a pocket square,

so up goes the tee’s hem
to blot my forehead dry
enough, when, of course,

there goes my furry gut’s apron
for everyone to see 
it unfurling like the carpet

Claudia Schiffer stomped
toward that one Lagerfeld photoshoot:
her mean mien

of a pouty puss made up 
to an almost-
black face, blond braided back

under a theoretical afro, 
an aphrodisiac, you know, 
what men want, a diasporic taste

in their ladies: hot 
enough to boil a stew pot, thin 
as ladle handles, good cooks

in the bedroom—yet 
still Lagerfeld wanted
supremacy’s payload, to not see

that which was too colored 
for his pleathered hands to hold 
not but to plunder, and so here we are

staring up at his sketched waifs,
craning our necks
to take in the niched wall,

each gown an upturned urn
shelved in its own alcove, 
dressed in nothing

but archive’s bleached light, 
the mannequins’ clean faces 
looking down on us—

crowded together 
like the staggered heads 
of snaggleteeth 
in his stitched mouth.