This is my pastoral: that used-car lot
where someone read Song of Myself over the loudspeaker

all afternoon, to customers who walked among the cars
mostly absent to what they heard,

except for the one or two who looked up
into the air, as though they recognized the reckless phrases

hovering there with the colored streamers,
their faces suddenly loose with a dreamy attention.

This is also my pastoral: once a week,
in the apartment above, the prayer group that would chant

for a sustained hour. I never saw them,
I didn’t know the words they sang, but I could feel

my breath running heavy or light
as the hour’s abstract narrative unfolded, rising and falling

like cicadas, sometimes changing in abrupt
turns of speed, as though a new cantor had taken the lead.

And this, too, is my pastoral: reading in my car
in the supermarket parking lot, reading the Spicer poem

where he wants to write a poem as long
as California. It was cold in the car, then it was too dark.

Why had I been so forlorn, when there was so much
just beyond, leaning into life? Even the cart

humped on a concrete island, the left-behind grapefruit
in the basket like a lost green sun.

And this is my pastoral: reading again and again
the paragraph in the novel by DeLillo where the family eats

the takeout fried chicken in their car,
not talking, trading the parts of the meal among themselves

in a primal choreography, a softly single consciousness,
while outside, everything stumbled apart,

the grim world pastoralizing their heavy coats,
the car’s windows, their breath and hands, the grease.

If, by pastoral, we mean a kind of peace,
this is my pastoral: walking up Grand Avenue, down Sixth

Avenue, up Charing Cross Road, down Canal,
then up Valencia, all the way back to Agua Dulce Street,

the street of my childhood, terrifying with roaring trucks
and stray dogs, but whose cold sweetness

flowed night and day from the artesian well at the corner,
where the poor got their water. And this is

also my pastoral: in 1502, when Albrecht Dürer painted
the young hare, he painted into its eye

the window of his studio. The hare is the color
of a winter meadow, brown and gold, each strand of fur

like a slip of grass holding an exact amount
of the season’s voltage. And the window within the eye,

which you don’t see until you see, is white as a winter sky,
though you know it is joy that is held there.

I’ve got two hands and an urge
to yank out your teeth,

my lover said, dropping the dress
she made from my shirt

to the floor, to see the landscape
a mouth of holes might look like.

Maybe jagged potholes on a rainslick
street, she said, climbing over

the bed. Maybe, she winked, a prairie
dog town in West Texas after a flood.

—Ciudad Juárez

You bob & spit & bite
     at my breast. You are my private
colony of sharp stones. I burn
     your umbilical cord to ash.
Come, meet the spirits. Before
     your birth I thought you an eyeball
bruised purple. I have no crib
     to leave you in, but a maizena cardboard box
& a blanket of my thick dark hair.
     I have done many things to feed your body—
open-legged, dark-thumbed
     things. Things for the price of what I
can endure in thirty minutes before
     breaking. I know I can’t keep you,
but even stillborn I used the blood
     I gave you to wash my legs clean.

Your look makes me want to jump off the roof
of the modern art museum. How am I supposed
to tell you about my life? Yesterday I saw a turtle
eat a dandelion flower up close. I cannot say what
this might mean to you. It was on my phone,
which is where I’ve been living lately. I can’t expect
you to understand. I cry openly and you stare at me
with big wet cow-eyes. I tell you what the abyss is like.
I heard breathing. It was my own. I wasn’t terrified.
Loneliness binds me to myself but I use my phone
as a wedge, use it to keep myself from touching who
I am. Nobody wants to grow up, not even children.
They just want to be taller because they hate being
looked down upon. What is it we see when we turn
and look back? Salt? Pepper? I’ll take both. No more
questions. All I want is to sit in this field with you,
little cow, this field I built in my mind. I pet you, make
little noises. You try to move away but I hold on to you,
I throw my arms around your neck. You drop
your dark head, continue chewing what you chew.

my parents used the term from money         it meant a lineage
but I envisioned a woman emerging naked and fully formed

from sierras of unmarked bills            there was no derision
in the term but an understanding that she was not like us

she had not worked a day in her life          she had never worn mittens
with holes in them            her house had central heat instead of a wood stove

she knew how to shuck an oyster           always knew which fork
was appropriate            there was a lot we knew that she could not

but it was understood that these were Pandora kinds of knowledge
I asked if it was better to not have money           then have it but they said

it was more elegant to come from money            the nouveau riche
they said suffered from the one great affliction        a lack of manners

I said it doesn’t seem like the bad kind of suffering         they said
you’re too young to know what shame is            but you know I said

they argued behind the closed bedroom door once about a prostitute
I envisioned the prostitute             naked on sheets

of crisp hundred dollar bills             I understood even then that money
and sex were cousins            though the order of the transaction confused me

the art of the deal              how to get what you want
withhold whatever has value             my father kept secret

that he was starting another family              we could have
with a little detective work sleuthed it out               rule number one

follow the money              people will do terrible things to get it
my half brother was born               no—           he was practically minted

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?