after Jacqueline Rose / after Chen Chen

she fed me 

clothed me

kept me

safe albeit

in excess

five layers

in spite of 

subtropical 

winter heat

so much to

eat I needed

digestive pills

to ward off

the stomach’s 

sharp protest

how not to

utter the un- 

grateful thing: 

that I am 

irrevocably

her object

that the

poet who 

wrote this

saved my life: 

Sometimes, 

parents &

children

become

the most

common of 

strangers 

Eventually,

a street 

appears

where they 

can meet 

again

How I

wished

that street

would appear

I kept trying

to make her 

proud of my 

acumen for 

language

these words

have not

been for

nothing

I wrote

to find

the street 

where we

might meet

again & now

there is relief

guilt or blame

but they are 

nearly always 

misplaced

you are born 

into the slip-

stream of

your mother’s 

unconscious

if someone

had told her

that the last 

thing a young 

mother needs

is false decency

courage & cheer 

she might not 

have hurt us

both but what

to do with 

remorse &

love that comes 

unbidden like a 

generous rain

how to accept

her care after

the storm is there

a point at which

the mother is 

redeemed the

child forgiven

can the origin

story be re-told

transfigured into

the version where

the garden is always 

paradise & no one 

need ever fall

out of grace

          After Jen Bervin / After Quan Barry

River spidering across the wall, sailing 

through the air. River flashing with silver 

sequins fastened to sunbeams. River always 

in pieces, a torn ribbon streaming everywhere.

River carving out a canyon through the years, 

seen from a sudden grassy overlook, 

an old bridge, a new shoreline, endlessly

crossing and recrossing our lives. River 

this winter with sixteen eagles alert 

and searching. River unfrozen and pooling 

around the ankles of trees in springtime, 

daring us closer. River asleep inside 

the black night like a spent lover, 

dreaming of being a chandelier of rain, 

first velvet wet drops on bare skin. Go, 

go on. Conveyor belt of clouds, destroyer 

and preserver of towns, longest breath 

of the earth, tell us what floating means 

to you. Some trees are weeping, river. 

Speak of all you carry and carry off

in river song and river silence. Be horse, 

be ferry, carry us from now to next to. 

River, I’m done with fading shadows. 

Give me daylight broken and scattered

across your fluid transparent face, 

come meet me with the moon and the stars 

running and tumbling along your sides. 

River swinging open like a gate to the sea,

time’s no calendar of months, you say,

but water in the aftermath of light.  

Your drifting cargo tells us everything 

arrives from far away and long ago 

and ends in the body, boat of heartache 

and ecstasy we pilot, in quest of passage also. 

River we call Mississippi or Mekong, 

sing us forth to nowhere but here, 

with your perfect memory be our flood.

I ask the new migrant if he regrets leaving Russia.

We have dispensed already with my ancestry.

He says no. For a time, he was depressed. He found

with every return he missed what he left behind.

A constant state of this. Better to love by far

where you are. He taps the steering wheel of his car,

the hum of the engine an imperceptible tremble

in us. When he isn’t driving, he works tending

to new trees. I’ve seen these saplings popping

up all over the suburbs, tickling the bellies

of bridges, the new rooted darlings of the State.

The council spent a quarter mil on them &

someone, he—Lilian—must ensure the dirt

holds. Gentrification is climate-friendly now.

I laugh and he laughs, and we eat the distance

between histories. He checks on his buds daily.

Are they okay? They are okay. They do not need

him, but he speaks, and they listen or at least

shake a leaf. What a world where you can live off

land by loving it. If only we cared for each other

this way. The council cares for their investment.

The late greenery, that is, not Lilian, who shares

his ride on the side. I wonder what it would cost 

to have men be tender to me regularly, 

to be folded into his burly, to be left on the side

of the road as he drove away, exhausted. Even

my dreams of tenderness involve being used

& I’m not sure who to blame: colonialism,

capitalism, patriarchy, queerness or poetry?

Sorry, this is a commercial for the Kia Sportage

now. This is a commercial for Lilian’s thighs.

He didn’t ask for this and neither did I—how

language drapes us together, how stories tongue

each other in the back seat and the sky blurs

out of frame. There are too many agonies

to discuss here, and I am nearly returned.

He has taken me all the way back, around

the future flowering, back to where I am not,

to the homes I keep investing in as harms.

I should fill them with trees. Let the boughs

cover the remembered boy, cowering

under a mother, her raised weapon

not the cane but the shattering within,

let the green tear through the wall

paper, let life replace memory. Lilian, I left

you that day, and in the leaving, a love

followed. Isn’t that a wonder and a wound?

Tell me which it is, I confess I mistake the two.

I walk up the stairs to my old brick apartment

where the peach tree reaches for the railing,

a few blushing fruits poking through the bars,

eager to brush my leg, to say linger, halt.

I want to stop, to hold it for real, just once

but I must wait until I am safe.

The wound on her lip goes white

before returning red.

The virus erupts the lines between chin and

lip, between lip and philtrum.

A sore across two continents of skin, a

bridge of lava.

She will feel healed when the flesh

color returns. The variation

is the aberration. Blood courses to

deliver a clot. Vessels

bouquet under the scalp or in the

womb, in places where we

heal fastest. Cells scramble

a lean-to scab, a mortar of new skin.

The body wants to draw its

seams together.

But Jesus hangs before the

convert eternally

wounded, eternally weeping

from his gashes.

How to open hers without nails or

thorns? How to measure

heartbeats without seeing blood

heave out its rhythms?

A gush slows under pressure

even as the pulse

goes on. Our lesions take air, our

infections seek sunlight. How to

resist our unwilled mechanisms to

staunch?

We push through the same tear in the

world and leave it sore.

When we come, we come open.

Pick a wound slow to bleed and 

slower to seal. We cream

the scar to fade our atlas of living—what

itched its way to a silver road,

what shadow constellation of pox. The

convert counts Jesus’ wounds.

If you count both hands and both feet, all

lashes and piercings

and the forsaken cry, the number is

higher and lower than anyone’s.

My grandmother is only one day

into her infirmity and doped up

on Morphine. Her shoulder is immobile

beneath layers of plaster.

Her eighty-five-year-old frame droops

from the weight of it.

My mother confesses:

she cannot take care of her mother.

I am not she says a nursemaid.

My mother is angry. Angry

at my sister who didn’t give enough

support, angry at my grandmother

for shuffling her feet, angry even

at the dog that was tucked beneath

my grandmother’s arm

as they all three tried to squeeze

into the door of the vet’s office.

She calls me from the emergency room

to say that grandmother fractured her shoulder

in three places. She’s become an invalid

overnight, she says. My sister calls her cruel

for refusing to run the bathwater, refusing

to wash my grandmother’s naked body, for

not even considering renting

a wheelchair for her to move from place

to place. When grandmother whispers

that she is afraid to walk, my mother

tells her that there’s nothing wrong with

her legs, tells her she’ll have to go to a

nursing home if she won’t walk

to the bathroom: one piss in the bed is

understandable, two is teetering too

close to in-home care.

My sister does not understand that there

is too much to overcome between them—

always the memory of the black dress

grandmother refused to wear

on the day of her husband’s funeral—

the way she turned to my mother and said,

I am not in mourning.

three girls ago

bloodroot: it was Eid

Al-Adha: a man

I loved shoved

my face into

German reeds

I can still feel his sweat

when I unsleep: the cleave

of his breath-lice

warming chains

of my necklace

I was without people

oh so summerful

I invented my girlhood

I languaged myself

a knife-body

yet all uncles said

I’m badly woven: bad

muslin: say forgiveness

comes easy say freckledirt

buried the faces

of my sisters: lakewarm

& plentiful—

we kiss we touch

we Magdalene each

other it’s true

during the adhan I pulled

down my tights

nylon black like the chador

of my mother

I licked from my yesterlove

the salt licked

real good—to pluck it again

I must whorl ad nauseam

for the addendum

of flesh the soft

sumac, cottonwood hard

as the nipples

he circled

we are singing

it’s spring and God to my song

is unlistening, unlistening

o Maryam o Miriam

o Mary we are undying

we are not gone

are not slayed we are

unslaying—our hand

wields this life

and I ply myself

out come here

between my legs     

come in          all are welcome        who believe

Shame             forces                        what we denied         into luminosity.

In dream       my father     tells me               my mother’s grieving      

prevents          momentum.



He’s projecting thoughts to a screen          for me to read.      

I’m at his private film      of captivity.



He’s watching us.    We’re hunched over          heaving the sorrow vomit.



Father stands before me

time without fear    suspended    and apart

unafraid of anything   one way or another.



“When did they cut it?”                                                       he wants to know 

pushing the thought into space                   between my eyes.

Raising his pant leg    where the mortician



smoothed and stretched the salvage skin     Father used    for padding 

his below-knee amputation                         

hovering   inches above the ground                                   glints in his eyes.

He doesn’t remember the amputation                                     

in the bending.



Father shows me his whole leg.                    Scars



mended and smooth.

He is an uncut body again.  Like before the bending place.

Only the graft scars on his thighs remain.



He projects: “I feel my leg here Margo  my foot still itches here” Father

points: “in this empty space”     he twirls his fingers       a    slow    spiral.



I nod to him:               “I see.  I’ll remember this for you.”

^{for Daniel; after Pablo}

It was five o’clock when paper handkerchiefs descended

over the ocean’s surge—

              one ocean varnished by oil in the morning, fish under the surge’s blades.

My country, you whimpered under fog. I awoke to the tender

sound of seashells on the radio.

I knelt by myself and listened. Your flat skeleton, large skeleton,

would group at your back.

Come, you murmured over canned goods. Come. I will tell you

everything—

clay seeps onto roots, roots drawn by salt, roots crowned

by trees. The cords unravel from the flesh of trees, unravel

by the storm shutters. Come.

See the roads brim with red poppy, roads tracked

by green serpents

                                                                       ((a la víbora, víbora / de la mar, de la mar)) 

I tendered nine eggs before the ignorant lion 

of exile, who nodded.

At five in the morning, everything seemed to be made of lime—

one torso shrouded by magnolia, one torso under vulgar peal 

of grey morgues, and the fish.

Barely-morning pink curtains

drape an open window. Roaches scatter,

the letter t vibrating in cottonwoods.

His hair horsetail and snakeweed.

I siphon doubt from his throat

for the buffalograss.

Seep willow antler press against

the memory of the first man I saw naked.

His tongue a mosquito whispering

its name a hymn on mesquite,

my cheek. The things we see the other do

collapse words into yucca bone.

The Navajo word for eye

hardens into the word for war.

light that day | bright | & the air hot | & meeting bones

of those I would never know en the panteón

speaking Sinaloan Spanish | which has always

been the accent I’ve understood most

despite hearing it least in my life

sígueme he sd | follow me

we must walk | roads unpaved lined

with stones & dust | so much dust

| polvo | of airborne bones &

saguaro ancestors watching us

their shadows trailing us |

as sr Nalo led us past a dried

creek & just over a small hill

& there | a house with no doors

& there attached to this home

the walls of another | walls covered

in hot black plastic | secured with rope

there | the walls of Francisco’s home

what was left of Francisco’s home

now a storage space for another family’s home

aquí el vivió | sr Nalo sd | he lived here |

Rosario after decades of waiting | left this home

& lived with her children | Francisco’s children

from his first family | closer to the center

of el rancho Tetaroba | how los Alvarez

of Arizona dwindled to less people

over one hundred years &

how los Alvarez of Tetaroba

increased & lived in all parts of Mexico

touch these walls | de color colorado

they were the same yr grandfather felt

you feel the heat | they breathe hot

touch these walls | paredes en la frente y la mente

they were the same yr grandfather felt

you feel the heat | they breathe hot

I pocketed a piece of this wall

& later when drunk | way drunk after

getting to know mis primos better

over chelas | I stumbled into the hotel

hot tears in my eyes | dad I sd |

I kept this for you | for all of us

but always for you to keep him

& to remember | always remember

what he did |

| climbing down the drainage of red

rock | sweet minted plants |

Robert | my father | father of five

all born in Arizona | Robert

stops to catch his breath then rips

bamboo from root | clouded

red dust clumps dropping |

this is where he was born

& now we know why | now

we know why & now we can see why

 I

small victories                                  small wars

a famous person

played chess in the woods

whatever repeats                  whatever

input we have          a disappearing

that knows how to proceed                                    

local realities            made up

exclusively                 of their own grammar         

but only if their grammar

is voluntary               

victorious feelings                 without victory         

sam calls                     our teams are playing         

we are getting older             can only hope           

for a beautiful result

II

                                            activity

is a truth that conveys

no information                              a local

threat                                               a distant                    

possibility                                       autoplay                    

tabs on tabs on tabs

I buy the hat              that my bitmoji had

in a threat of forests             a savant

of anger                      a savant of nothing

to be angry about

a hierarchy                of satisfactions

the next activity                   

the best distraction              

it’s never too late                  to stay the same  

III

                           very few things

are not

                           warnings

                           cultural

                                      touchstones             

                                      parlor

tricks

the body reacts

                           to what reacts

                           to it

a sort of           

            leverage

             a kind

                       of loyalty

Every turn I took in the city

pressed me deeper into the warren

of what I hadn’t said, the words

thickening, constricting like a throat

as I moved through the streets,

oblivious to traffic and high walls,

the rain gutters’ crooked mouths

staining the pavement, human faces

mooning past me, indifferent,

eclipsing my silence

with their phones, their apparitions

floating—where?—and everyone,

everyone talking to the air.

Until around a new corner

on a narrow street I’d never seen

a piano began to play from above

a window-muffled music

at odds with itself, the rush of notes

splintering like glass across a floor

then picked back up, piece

by piece—first one hand sorting

along the keys, then the other

joining, out of step, irreconcilable,

unpunctuated by frustration,

or shame, but stung with the urgency

to make what couldn’t yet

be made. How could anyone learn

their way out of such blunder,

how could any song be gathered

from those shards grating

like something lodged in a shoe.                

My ear cocked into the air,

I thought of floating up, balloon-like,

to look. I felt cartoonish,

a marvel of the last century’s

animation already out of date.

I could have gone on like that,

listening, loosening into the song,

but then the piano stopped.

My ears filled with waiting—

car horns and chatter, the wheeze

of a stopping bus, the city going

about its filthy exclamations,

its abandon. The window

darkened as the player shut

the light over the sheet music,

and it reflected another window

across the street that in turn

reflected a bit of sky, a plane’s

bright sideways thought

trolling across the pane 

music once broke through—

delirious and awful and unabashed,

and so unlike what I’d wanted to say

swollen now, a contrail

coming extravagantly undone,       

or a balloon full of glass.

I have that precious and irreplaceable luxury of failure, of risk, of surrender

                —Jeff Buckley

If something happens to me, then you’ll be free!

And I want you to be free: how does that Presley

Song go? I want to be free, free, free, yeah

Free—I want to be free… like a bird in a tree.

And here by the river alone, by the Mississippi,

There’s one last song I’m gonna wade into. See,

I was raised to sing wherever I was in a house

And now, it seems, I have no house. How does

That Tom Waits song go? Wherever I lay my

Head, that’s where I call home. I say

I have no house, but that’s really a big lie.

I’m renting down here. I can sing in this place,

So maybe I’ll buy. That is, if I don’t die

First. Why so grim, you ask? There’s joy,

I suppose, in my voice somewhere. So they say.

I don’t hear it, myself. And that’s because

I get myself all hung up in the blue, or weigh

Myself down in the freighted churn, heavy currents

That I hope to God will carry me to our unchained redeemer,              

            Jesus.

My last thought is... that I had no last thought.

I’m just singing along. Whole lotta love! But… But… 

The Hallelujah is what you can’t put into a poem.

Now I have no house but the waves (the river has waves).

I’ve left no notes: only some sketches for an album

Of tunes that was, I guess, intended to save

Me from going down, or out, or into the hurling rain—

From the pain that I worked so hard to earn.

Where it came from, where I come from, doesn’t concern

You, but please listen to these wild thoughts I’ve hung

On staves, that are fit to garland the graves

Nobody thinks to visit, in places I confess I never

Went to except in a nightmare, and in the posthumous release

            Of this song.

^{with gratitude to Wanda Coleman & Terrance Hayes}

We have the same ankles, hips, nipples, knees—
our bodies bore the forks/tenedors
we use to eat. What do we eat? Darkness
from cathedral floors,

the heart’s woe in abundance. Please let us
go through the world touching what we want,
knock things over. Slap & kick & punch
until we get something right. ¿Verdad?

Isn’t it true, my father always asks.
Your father is the ghost of mine & vice
versa. & when did our pasts
stop recognizing themselves? It was always like

us to first person: yo. To disrupt a hurricane’s
path with our own inwardness.
C’mon huracán, you watery migraine,
prove us wrong for once. This sadness

lasts/esta tristeza perdura. Say it both ways
so language doesn’t bite back, but stays.

                                          ^{for Kristen}

Breakfast rained on again,

and I’m lifted up the stairs

on the breath of what

the dark of the day

might promise in its

perfect silence. The light

in my daughter’s room

has been on all night

like every night,

but the sun shifting

changes the shape

of the space from

a square into an unfolding

universe. I had always

imagined a different type

of fatherhood before

fatherhood found me, but if you

asked me to describe it now,

I don’t think I could

find the words. Try to find

a way to describe living

a few different ways at once.

For a while I imagined

there would be more attempts

at trying out what I’m still

trying to see in the room

that’s gone power out,

but the weeds in the yard

grow too quickly to be left

alone for long. I had forgotten

the strangeness of a humid

February. I had forgotten

all that makes up the memories

that need me to exist. It was

easier to carve out a place

before I had words to describe

it. Now looking back feels

like looking forward. I am 

drawing a self-portrait

and trying to remove the self.

The day feels as thin

as the letters fading from

half a can of spray paint

a decade ago on the brick wall

of the closed down

Suder Feed Supply where we used

to skateboard and think

of all the crimes the police

could punish us with

for being poor, and teenagers,

for wearing skin-tight jeans

and growing our hair

like a girl’s, for almost anything—

at least it felt like it then.

I can’t imagine home

without thinking of the past

and the faintest stir

of indignation. It’s beside the point.

Today, I’m revisiting Miłosz

with a pen pressed to the pages

making notes in the margins.

In 1987, in Berkeley,

he is doing the same, and thinking

back on the end of his countries, their

“posthumous existence.” Like him

I know a place

I can’t return to, and without

much imagination can picture

everything coming apart, one way

or another. When I imagine

how it might go, it is

just like this: I am memorizing

bird calls and wild

plants which become a blur

at the far edge of my yard,

their Latin names tangled

in my mouth. Didn’t I

already show you this?

The country at twilight

and a far-off darkness

of pines, a deep red sky

imagined for this page. What I left out

wasn’t meant to be remarkable—

a bruise faded from the surface,

the wounds buried

like overwintered wasps

plotting assassinations

beneath the snow. So let’s see

if I can draw it into focus,

like the truant daydreaming in class

suddenly with something to say—

the one end I know complete.

Once, I thanked my father

for the gift of this life,

something he didn’t hear.

It was two years before he died

and he was high

on the translucent painkillers

the hospital ordered to keep him

comfortable after surgery.

It was as real as anything

I ever told him. I stood

over him in the hospital bed

and traced the outline of his body

under the gown, the collar and hip bones,

his stomach, his penis, and balls,

numbered the black stars

printed on the cotton and listened

to him breathe, mouth

open, just so, a way

into the hive growing in his chest.

He didn’t hear, and then, he couldn’t.

In those years, I barely spoke to him

and now not an hour can pass

I don’t hear him, now that

what he has to say is always

final, always a last word. And

Miłosz is buried in Kraków

and my father has entered

eternity as ash, and I am

certain what doesn’t last

lasts—Hydrangea quercifolia,

Hypericum densiflorum,

Solidago rugosa

You end me

like a period

ends a sentence,

ends a line.

Wouldbelove, do not think of me as a whetstone

until you hear the whole story:

In it, I’m not the hero, but I’m not the villain either

so let’s say, in the story, I was human

and made of human-things: fear

and hands, underbelly and blade. Let me

say it plain: I loved someone

and I failed at it. Let me say it

another way: I like to call myself wound

but I will answer to knife. Sometimes

I think we have the same name, Notquitelove. I want

to be soft, to say here is my underbelly and I want you

to hold the knife, but I don’t know what I want you to do:

plunge or mercy. I deserve both. I want to hold and be held.  

Let me say it again, Possiblelove: I’m not sure

you should. The truth is: If you don’t, I won’t

die of want or lonely, just time. And not now, not even

soon. But that’s how every story ends eventually.

Here is how one might start: Before. The truth?

I’m not a liar but I close my eyes a lot, Couldbelove.

Before, I let a blade slide itself sharp against me. Look

at where I once bloomed red and pulsing. A keloid

history. I have not forgotten the knife or that I loved

it or what it was like before: my unscarred body

visits me in dreams and photographs. Maybelove,

I barely recognize it without the armor of its scars.

I am trying to tell the truth: the dreams are how

I haunt myself. Maybe I’m not telling the whole story:

I loved someone and now I don’t. I can’t promise

to leave you unscarred. The truth: I am a map

of every blade I ever held. This is not a dream.

Look at us now: all grit and density. What, Wouldbelove

do you know of knives? Do you think you are a soft thing?

I don’t. Maybe the truth is: Both. Blade and guard.

My truth is: blade. My hands

on the blade; my hands, the blade; my hands

carving and re-carving every overzealous fibrous

memory. The truth is: I want to hold your hands

because they are like mine. Holding a knife

by the blade and sharpening it. In your dreams, how much invitation

to pierce are you? Perhapslove, the truth is: I am afraid

we are both knives, both stones, both scarred. Or we will be.

The truth is: I have made fire

before: stone against stone. Mightbelove, I have sharpened

this knife before: blade against blade. I have hurt and hungered

before: flesh

against flesh. I won’t make a dull promise.

One for tree, two for woods,        

                                                            I-Goo wrote the characters           

                               

                                               out for me. Dehiscent & reminiscent:

what wood made

                                               Ng Ng’s hope-chest

that she immigrated with

                                                                     —cargo from Guangzho

to Phoenix? In Spanish, Nana tells me

                                                           hope & waiting are one word.

                                        _____

In her own hand, she keeps

                                         a list of dichos—for your poems, she says.

Estan mas cerca los dientes

                      que los parentes, she recites her mother

& mother’s mother. It rhymes, she says.

                                                         

                                   Dee-say—the verb with its sound turned

down looks like dice

                                              to throw & dice, to cut. Shift after shift,

she inspected the die of integrated circuits

                                       beneath an assembly line of microscopes—            

the connections over time

                                                        getting smaller & smaller.

                                          _____

                                                                        

                                                To enter words in order to see

                                                                             —Cecilia Vicuña

In the classroom, we learn iambic words

                                          that leaf on the board with diacritics—

about, aloft, aggrieved. What over years

          accrues within one’s words? What immanent

                                                                        sprung with what rhythm?

Agave—a lie in the lion, the maenad made mad

by Dionysus awoke to find her son

                                    dead by her hand. The figure is gaslit

even if anachronistic. Data & river banks—

           memory’s figure is often riparian.  I hear Llorona’s agony

echo in the succulent. What’s the circuit in cerca to short

          or rewire the far & close—to map

                                                   Ng Ng & I-Goo to Nana’s carpool?

                                         ______

I read a sprig of evergreen, a symbol

                                               of everlasting, is sometimes packed

with a new bride’s trousseau. It was thirteen years

                                             

before Yeh Yeh could bring

                                                Ng Ng & I-Goo over. Evergreen

                     

& Empire were names of corner-stores

                                             

where they first worked—

                                             stores on corners of Nana’s barrio.

Chinito, Chinito! Toca la malaca—

                                                             she might have sung in ’49

after hearing Don Tosti’s  

                                    recording—an l where the r would be

in the Spanish rattle filled with beans or seed or as

                                                                         the song suggests

change in the laundryman’s till.

                                         ______

I have read diviners

                       use stems of yarrow when consulting

                                                                                    the I-Ching.

What happens to the woods in a maiden name?

Two hyphens make a dash—

                                                the long signal in the binary code.

                                             

Attentive antennae: a monocot

—seed to single leaf—the agave store years

                                             for the stalk. My two grandmothers:

                                                         

one’s name keeps a pasture,

                       the other a forest. If they spoke to one another,

                     

it was with short, forced words

                                    like first strokes when sawing—

                                             

                                              trying to set the teeth into the grain.

Diagonal paths quadrisect a square acre

white as the page in February.

From the soil of this basic geometry

ash, elm, and maple flourish like understandings

whose bare logics are visible,

understandings the theorem has allowed.

Between roam bodies of the sensible world:

people, dogs, all those lovers

of the material and immaterial

illumined, as under working hypotheses,

by sodium bulbs whose costly inefficiencies

Los Angeles and Philadelphia have apparently

moved on from.

The trees are grand hotels closed for the season.

But belowground, social life is taking place.

As when snow lay on the fields

and people descended to rec rooms, secret bars

like the Snake Pit in the basement of the curling rink

in Golden Prairie. Our big Ford nosing the siding,

we waited for our parents with the engine running,

under grave instruction

as radio sent our autonomy bounding toward us,

chilling scenarios inspired by the trucking forecast

and news items from Great Falls or Bismarck

freely imagined, songs that gave us bad ideas

and the seeds of a mythology. Ten minutes,

then one hour, two,

pop and chips and the gift of the periphery.

I've never understood what “starlit” means.

Even on a clear night in their millions

they cast no discernible light

into the dark expanse where a farmhouse gestured weakly

and grid roads and bullshit caragana disappeared,

where the animals’ lives played out,

smells travelling slowly, low to the ground.

In Riverdale Park the diagonal walks like diagrams

may be said to describe themselves,

which is a relief.

Now snow is blowing through the theorem

that the understandings broadly accommodate

and sensible bodies adjust their collars to,

and even bare spots left by departed cars evidence

how the outlines of loss might gradually alter

as experience is filled in by its representation,

even if not made peace with.

You are never mentioned on Ararat

or elsewhere, but I know a woman’s hand

in salvation when I see it. Lately,

I’m torn between despair and ignorance.

I’m not a vegetarian, shop plastic,

use an air conditioner. Is this what happens

before it all goes fluvial? Do the selfish

grow self-conscious by the withering

begonias? Lately, I worry every black dress

will have to be worn to a funeral.

New York a bouillon, eroded filigree.

Anything but illness, I beg the plagues,

but shiny crows or nuclear rain.

Not a drop in London May through June.

I bask in the wilt by golden hour light.

Lately, only lately, it is late. Tucking

our families into the safeties of the past.

My children, will they exist by the time

it’s irreversible? Will they live

astonished at the thought of ice

not pulled from the mouth of a machine?

Which parent will be the one to break

the myth; the Arctic wasn’t Sisyphus’s

snowy hill. Noah’s wife, I am wringing

my hands not knowing how to know

and move forward. Was it you

who gathered flowers once the earth

had dried? How did you explain the light

to all the animals?