Fools, fools, fools,

Your blood is hot to-day.

       It cools

When you are clay.

It joins the very clod

Wherein you look at God,

Wherein at last you see

       The living God

       The loving God,

Which was your enemy.

They come home with our daughter

because there’s no one at school

to feed them on the weekends.

They are mates, and like all true

companions they are devoted

and they bite. We set their cage

on the kitchen table and wait

for the weekend to end, for our girl

to fall asleep so we can talk

about god while the rats lick

the silver ball that delivers

the water one drop at a time.

There are so many points on which

you and I disagree: the value

of a clean counter, the purpose

of parent-teacher conferences,

what warrants a good cry or calling

you a name so cruel I make myself

whisper it through my teeth. God

is the least of it. When I think

I’m so angry I could hit you

in the face, you turn yours to me

with a look of disbelief. The rats,

meanwhile, have turned up the volume.

Tick, tick, says the silver ball

as their teeth click against it, thirsty

as ever, thirstier still at night

when the darkness wakes them.

And during the day, when they’re curled

together in their flannel hammock,

head to tail, two furry apostrophes

possessing nothing but each other,

paws pressed together as if in prayer—

to what gods do they prostrate

themselves then? God of fidelity? God

of forgiveness? I lied when I said

I didn’t believe. Who—even me,

the coldest of heart—could turn away

from a sea parted, bread that multiplies

to answer need, water transformed

to the sweetest wine, the kind

that tastes better for each year

it’s been left in the barrel?

If you often find yourself at a loss for words

or don’t know what to say to those you love,

just extract poetry out of poverty, this dystopia

                            of civilization rendered fragrant,

             blossoming onto star-blue fields of loosestrife,

heady spools of spike lavender, of edible clover

                            beckoning to say without bruising

a jot of dog’s tooth violet, a nib of larkspur notes,

                        or the day’s perfumed reports of indigo

                                in the gloaming—

              what to say to those

                           whom you love in this world?

Use floriography, or as the flower-sellers put it,

Say it with flowers.

—Indigo, larkspur, star-blue, my dear.

To be able to see every side of every question;

To be on every side, to be everything, to be nothing long;

To pervert truth, to ride it for a purpose,

To use great feelings and passions of the human family

For base designs, for cunning ends,

To wear a mask like the Greek actors—

Your eight-page paper—behind which you huddle,

Bawling through the megaphone of big type:

“This is I, the giant.” 

Thereby also living the life of a sneak-thief,

Poisoned with the anonymous words

Of your clandestine soul.

To scratch dirt over scandal for money,

And exhume it to the winds for revenge,

Or to sell papers,

Crushing reputations, or bodies, if need be,

To win at any cost, save your own life.

To glory in demoniac power, ditching civilization,

As a paranoiac boy puts a log on the track

And derails the express train.

To be an editor, as I was.

Then to lie here close by the river over the place

Where the sewage flows from the village,

And the empty cans and garbage are dumped,

And abortions are hidden.

xxxix

The hard edge of historical light, it waits up for us

all night. Here’s one brutal but apparently

necessary historical bargain: I said that the energy

between you and the person next

to you is truer than it is real. This is not a randomly

existing fact. It’s a collectively and intelligently and menacingly

cultivated feature of our lives. Fugitive fact.

This puts you both—puts

us all—in peril, yes, but protects that energy between us.

If it were the other way, if that living thing between

us had become more—even as—real as it is

true we’d be more protected than we are

but that thing, that sacred being

-between would be endangered. The intelligence

of collective action knows, somehow, that that

kind of security is far more dangerous—the kind of danger

people become to themselves, then to each other,

the kind they become to each other, then to themselves—

than the peril in which we stand now. That’s a hard

historical edge to stand near, real talk, that’s the broken

back of a mother—black—skipped across a wit-quick crack in the sidewalk. 

& there’s no taking it back now.

What comes next? Charcoal underbone, 

darkroom for soliloquy & irises wide

at home. Some underside party popping

off & ending with me counting resignations

on a couch made from my last pennies—

copper profiles cushion deep, dull 

with emancipation & worth almost me.

Button nicks instead of eyes. Green

patina instead of skin over presidential 

profiles. How to separate these awkward

exhales from the marinating revivals?

The song in the park across the street

dials up something endless about love

& big sunflowers, but I can’t split

this primal reflection from its primary 

leather. Sneakers & skeletons arrhythmic

in their leaving & squeaking: twisting

in somebody else’s garden in the middle

of a cracked city near a river so thick

with its own beat-up history, it’s already

eye level to the flocking blackbirds. 

People always tell me, “Don’t put the cart

before the horse,” which is curious

because I don’t have a horse.

Is this some new advancement in public shaming—

repeatedly drawing one’s attention

to that which one is currently not, and never

has been, in possession of?

If ever, I happen to obtain a Clydesdale,

then I’ll align, absolutely, it to its proper position

in relation to the cart, but I can’t

do that because all I have is the cart. 

One solitary cart—a little grief wagon that goes

precisely nowhere—along with, apparently, one

invisible horse, which does not pull,

does not haul, does not in any fashion

budge, impel or tow my disaster buggy

up the hill or down the road.

I’m not asking for much.  A more tender world

with less hatred strutting the streets.

Perhaps a downtick in state-sanctioned violence

against civilians.  Wind through the trees.

Water under the bridge. Kindness.

LOL, says the world. These things take time, says

the Office of Disappointment. Change cannot

be rushed, says the roundtable of my smartest friends.

Then, together, they say, The cart!

They say, The horse!

They say, Haven’t we told you already?

So my invisible horse remains

standing where it previously stood:

between hotdog stands and hallelujahs,

between the Nasdaq and the moon’s adumbral visage,

between the status quo and The Great Filter,

and I can see that it’s not his fault—being

invisible and not existing—

how he’s the product of both my imagination

and society’s failure of imagination.

Watch how I press my hand against his translucent flank.

How I hold two sugar cubes to his hypothetical mouth.

How I say I want to believe in him,

speaking softly into his missing ear.