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.

The Great Matriarch says: There is a dog who barks at his own shadow, which is not there, for in mid-day sun, there is no shadow.

Notice, if I give him a dumpling or a chew-toy, he stops barking, but he does not stop when he sees his shadowless shadow. He barks with warning, with alarm.

He barks louder and louder, snapping his jaws, swallowing sputum, on his haunches, ready to pounce.

He is afraid of what is not there. Like you, Mei Ling, when you wake up, gasping for breath, thinking you might die, that ICE agents will come with a choke-chain.

Poor dear, he wants to protect us from the unseen, the unexpected, the unknowable. This is very bad luck in the neighborhood, to constantly hear the harbinger of doom.

Should we, then, euthanize him, put him out of his misery? To prophesy destruction is to invite bad omens, to stare into the abyss.

Or should we calm him, caress him, give him shelter?

Let’s call him by his birth name and take away his power. Let’s shout, “Hashtag, No Collusion, Gunboat, Death Star, Apocalypse, Mara, Cerberus, Beelzebub!”

Let’s call him, “The one who understands vacuity.”

Let’s not fear him, but love him, offer the pink leash, for he is your dog and he is mine.

I put your leaves aside,
One by one:
The stiff, broad outer leaves;
The smaller ones,
Pleasant to touch, veined with purple;
The glazed inner leaves.
One by one
I parted you from your leaves,
Until you stood up like a white flower
Swaying slightly in the evening wind.

White flower,
Flower of wax, of jade, of unstreaked agate;
Flower with surfaces of ice,
With shadows faintly crimson.
Where in all the garden is there such a flower?
The stars crowd through the lilac leaves
To look at you.
The low moon brightens you with silver.

The bud is more than the calyx.
There is nothing to equal a white bud,
Of no colour, and of all,
Burnished by moonlight,
Thrust upon by a softly-swinging wind.

My neighbor keeps a box of baby pigs
all winter in her kitchen. They are

motherless, always sleeping, sleepy
creatures of blood & fog, a vapor

of them wraps my house
in gauze, and the windows mist up

with their warm breath, their moist snores. They
watch her peel potatoes, boil

water from the floor, wearing
a steamy gown. She must be like

Demeter to them, but, like this weather
to me, this box of pigs

is the cause of all my suffering. They smell
of invalids, lotioned. Death is over there. When I

look toward my neighbor’s house, I see
trouble looking back

at me. Horrible life! Horrible town! I start
to dream their dreams. I dream

my muzzle’s pressed
desperately into the whiskered

belly of my dead mother. No
milk there. I dream

I slumber in a cardboard box
in a human kitchen, wishing, while

a woman I don’t love
mushes corn for me in a dish. In

every kitchen in the Midwest
there are goddesses & pigs, the sacred

contagion of pity, of giving, of loss. You can’t
escape the soft

bellies of your neighbors’ calm, the fuzzy
lullabies that drift

in cloudy piglets across their lawns. I dream
my neighbor cuts

one of them open, and stars fall out, and roll
across the floor. It frightens me. I pray

to God to give me
the ability to write

better poems than the poems of those
whom I despise. But

before spring comes, my neighbor’s
pigs die in her kitchen

one by one, and I
catch a glimpse of my own face

in the empty collection plate, looking
up at me, hungrily, one

Sunday—pink, and smudged—and ask it
Isn’t that enough?

As a girl I made my calves into little drinking elephants,
I would stare at the wonder of their pumping muscles,
the sup of their leg-trunks. I resuscitated a bunny once
from my cat’s electric teeth. I was on neighborhood watch
to save animals, as many as I could. My damage was easy.
My plainspoken voice is a watercolor. I’m afraid of it
as I’m afraid of what the world will do to color. I don’t
think I’ve done much. A table leans against itself
to be a table. I hold nothing but this air. I give it off.
I want a literature that is not made from literature, says Bhanu.
Last night my legs ached a low-tone. I imagined the body
giving itself up for another system. Dandelions tickling
out of my knee. The meniscus a household of worms.
It is okay to bear. My apartment hums in a Rilke sense.
A pain blooms. I am told that it’s okay to forego details
of what happened. I am told it doesn’t matter now.
I want to write sentences for days. I want days to not
be a sentence. We put men in boxes and sail them away.
Justice gave me an amber necklace. I tried to swallow
as many as I could.

have retired now that the circus
has closed, to their watercolors
& bowling leagues, their tusk-dug
rose gardens, their record collections,
their calligraphy—
                             say one has
begun a letter to you, peacock feather
gripped in the beautiful gray coils
of its trunk, & she dips it in the inkwell
& begins
              darling, I have my dead &
I have let them go,

as the elephants walk thirty kilometers
to find the house of their keeper
who died last night, to keep a vigil,
an honor guard of fifteen-thousand-pound
bodies, they wait all night,

as she continues, the past is always
vanishing if we are good or careful,

as the elephants nurse their young,
wrap their trunks when they greet each other,
trumpet when they hear Miles’s Kind of Blue,

what is eternity but the shadows
of everyone who has ever fallen,

the languages of the dead are never more
than a breath away, darling,

as the elephants are drawn & painted
by da Vinci, by Max Ernst,
are reincarnated as Buddha,

our mouths are incapable,
white violets cover the earth,

remember the gates of Rome, linger
near pianos, near the bones & tusks of their own,

the greatest of the shadows are passing
from the earth, there was never a city brighter
than a burn pile of tusks.

^{Deployment Day 150}

Halfway through October and I have lost
hope of autumn, everything still the green
green green it was when you left. 
I wonder if this will be another year
of wind and banshee flame as I wait
for rain in the endless blue. I want to say
I can bear this, but I wear your absence
in my face, in the way my skin crawls off
in the night when you’re asleep in a cold
country, dreaming no doubt of something
warm. Here our cat stopped eating 
six days ago, her haunches peaked
and sharp on my lap, where she circles
herself to sleep. Each time I wonder
if she’ll wake. But she is as warm 
as this month, and soon she thrums
against my thigh. We are saying a sort
of goodbye each day, when she looks 
at me and I am all the heartbreak 
a body can hold. We say skin and bones
but nothing of how big the eyes become, 
how wonder and starvation are twin. 
I try to call you to say this. There is nothing 
but the trilling ring that calls out 
like a bird that forgot its season.