are the open way of thinking

that use the patterns of the way

I motion with language

breathe like the way I amass

sometimes air

in my insides

carry heavy weight

like the having to good

ideas write

don’t like boy’s really

moving body of questions

that form tower of answers

eagerly want

to beat

the others

forge

toward

others

go

yonder

hang

impact

the wanting

words

jump from one

thought

to the next

kettle

like

fish

lavish like talking

people if they doctor

the words

master

language

openly

navigate

words toward

meaning

operate the machine

landing the thoughts amazing

that they don’t fall apart

pave

the wanting

road

question

wanting

really ask

more

questions

slant

with peeving

typing

tire to something

that rolls

with the road

use

people

to answer

vortex the void

and assembles

gathering words

water

thoughts

like rain

exit the door of cold

raying water

other is the way

yesses

the yonder  

zoning the word and

uses the idea

to language everything

& 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. 

Vain to fish 
with unbaited hook, 
the proverb says. I fished that way,

at 9, after Sunday School at Trinity Presbyterian, as God said 
(my schizophrenic, periodically 
catatonic uncle and preacher said) 
thou shalt not kill, so I would kill 
neither lake bass nor earthworm, thought the Lord 
was watching that rowboat and testing 
me, like Job or Abraham, to see if I’d break 
some covenant we’d made 
I couldn’t remember making,

dreaded that like Joan of Arc I’d be summoned 
someday in my backyard, under the pecan tree’s 
velvet greenfuzzed litter, to leave 
Alexander III 3rd grade to go 
and raise an Army 
to end the napalm flamethrow jungleburn 
Walter Cronkite told me about

so for hours in the rowboat with my father 
who’d left his own war without ever going to combat 
to Travel Mental Troop to psychiatric 
discharge after six months and told his family 
he’d been the sole survivor 
of a kamikaze-bombed carrier,

my unbaited hook would twitch along the lake bottom’s 
algae slime, my earthworm snuck back into bucket-writhe. 
He couldn’t know I was deceiving him for the Lord, 
humiliated on my behalf 
that hour after hour I got 
not even a line-tug. It 
humiliated me to disappoint that Pacific hero. 
And this is how we did it, outings 
of Father and Son; fishing 
for each other, with unbaited hooks.

I know why I fell hard for Hecuba—

shins skinned and lips split to blooming lupine

on her throat’s rough coat, hurled down the whole length

of disaster—I’m sure I’d grown to know

by then to slacken as a sail against

the current and squall of a woman’s woe.

What could I do but chorus my ruddered

howl to hers? When you’re a brown girl raised up

near the river, there’s always a woman

bereft and bank-wrecked, bloodied and bleating

her insistent lament. Ay Llorona—

every crossing is a tomb and a tune,

a wolf-wail and the moon that turns me to

scratch at the tracks of every mud-dirged girl.

<sup>I'd like to be under the sea

In an octopus' garden in the shade.

            —Ringo Starr</sup>

The article called it “a spectacle.” More like a garden than a nursery: 

hundreds of purple octopuses protecting clusters of eggs 

while clinging to lava rocks off the Costa Rican coast. 

I study the watery images: thousands of lavender tentacles 

wrapped around their broods. Did you know there’s a female octopus 

on record as guarding her clutch for 53 months? That’s four-and-a-half years 

of sitting, waiting, dreaming of the day her babies hatch and float away. 

I want to tell my son this. He sits on the couch next to me clutching his phone, 

setting up a hangout with friends. The teenage shell is hard to crack. 

Today, my heart sits with the brooding octomoms: not eating, always on call, 

always defensive, living in stasis in waters too warm to sustain them. 

No guarantees they will live beyond the hatching. Not a spectacle 

but a miracle any of us survive.

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. 

We drank coffee and got ready,

listened to 93.3 during our commute

to take our mind off how

every day we die on tv. Every day

down the block, kids in surgical masks

spraypaint Magneto was Right on street signs

and new storefronts waiting to redeem

spa resort passes and avocado toast dreams

until they, too, are forced out of business.

Or not. People can surprise you

like beating cancer or criminal charges,

the 2016 election, the high cost

of middle shelf liquor with a decent view.

If you want to succeed, let them see you

coming, our mothers once said before asking

if we wanted the switch or the belt.

But a whooping beats sitting

at the rooftop bar looking over the steepled skyline

and feeling the pang of worlds we’d rather be,

with two empty seats right beside us

that stay empty for the next two hours

surrounded by people drinking & eating

standing up—the wind threatening

to blow their hats off their sunburned heads.

Somewhere right now

there are two people looking for those seats.

We keep hoping they’ll find them—

find us. Let’s have another drink,

watch the muted news above

a row of decent bourbon,

  

wait to hear, to see

if they make it to us or turn up on tv.

Probably you’ll solve gravity, flesh 

out our microbiomics, split our God 

particles into their constituent bits 

of christs and antichrists probably, 

probably you’ll find life as we know it 

knitted into nooks of the chattering 

cosmos, quaint and bountiful as kismet 

and gunfights in the movies probably, 

probably, probably you have no patience

for the movies there in your eventual 

arrondissement where you have more

credible holography, more inspiring

actual events, your ghazals composed 

of crow racket, retrorockets, glaciers 

breaking, your discotheques wailing

probably, probably, probably, probably 

too late a sentient taxi airlifts you 

home over a refurbished riverbank, 

above the rebuilt cathedral, your head 

dozing easy in the crook of your arm,

emptied of any memory of these weeks 

we haven’t slept you’ve been erupting 

into that hereafter like a hydrant on fire, 

like your mother is an air raid, and I am 

an air raid, and you’re a born siren 

chasing us out of your airspace probably

we’ve caught 46 daybreaks in 39 days, 

little emissary arrived to instruct us,

we wake now you shriek us awake,

we sleep now you leave us to sleep.

                                         for Jim McKean

Before we struggled to hold light 

along this line of the Jacob Fork,

we tied on the nearly invisible

tippet to nymph pools, glimpse

broken halos. Rainbows held low

in their lanes. Sometimes they rose

to brighten the surface, our breath

tightening on the take. The rest

of the morning, we worked a section 

below the bridge, wanting only 

to return shadows into the river.

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.

When I told them it must be like dropping your kid            

off at school their first day, all my parent friends

nodded and smiled uncomfortably, meaning              

what would I know. I won’t be taking solace                 

in the many firsts ahead. Here among the gray,

spotted and brown heads of the seniors,

their soft flesh and angles, their obedience as they

sit as uprightly as they are able at white, parallel

tables, nobody cries, and very few speak.                 

When I seat dad beside her, one senior tells me

she’s ninety-four, presenting one hand, four

fingers in the air, just as she might have ninety

years ago with a stranger like me, now long gone.



                       Dad never liked me to talk:

Lower your voice, he’d say. If I was louder:

Put on your boxing gloves. Or: You’ll catch

more flies with honey than vinegar, as if some day

I’d need the flies. I stopped talking, started writing

instead. I work full-time and dad wants to die,

so I dropped him at the Champion Avenue

Low-income Senior & Child Care Services Center,

a newish building, municipal and nondescript,

in a neighborhood that’s been razed and rebuilt so often

it’s got no discernible character left. There was bingo,

men playing poker in a corner. Red sauce and cheese

on white bread pizza for lunch. Dad, a big talker,

was an instant hit, but refused to return. What

is the name of that animal, someone asked me.

Where is Philip, asked someone else, over and over.

As if firsts and lasts were one and the same.

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?

after Tina Takemoto

I will paint us together

in lemon and burnt shoyu.

I will squeeze us out of

flour, water, yeast

while you dress

behind the thin curtain

while you flatten

lapel, collar, slacks

in our tightly ironed

tar paper life.

Your tie clip, carved from

ancient wood and not

the real topaz you deserve.

Outside, we shuffle in dust

flap powder

from between our feathers.

I used to be a swamp.

In this government aviary

dust storms can’t be predicted

unlike the government

which splits atoms

the way it did your chest.

Spilled you

on the ancient sea bed.

The mountains blow

their alien breath in you

while sleek muscle men

cactus across my humid eyes.

They don’t stop

to light my cigarette

or palm a slice of

fresh, warm bread.

Now bluebirds trill

from my cuffs

and it’s time to clock out.

Beyond the perfect

frame of this prison city

desert peaks buzz

the rich, rich song

of my hunger.

That slick monster sat down with us all.

A man wants to know mouth-first

           what my face does looking at him,

           if my eyes are cogitating wells

of sweet soup. He imagines me forward

then bent as in over. The idea is I’ll say yes, 

          go to the car for unbuttoning

          but a wife flashed back in the way.

So I don’t visit the details of convention.

When I say I like a man who knows

           what he wants, there’s nothing more

           about him to like. Nowhere else to be,

I stand under the snow face-

first, the mouth my summoning shrine.

                                   Give up      the brain 

        Offer down its clumsy

meditations      its blurred face

                      of fury      its hellbound 

      policies bugged into my throat

        Cough out

that sickled attitude      the ragged shelves

                    downing my ankles      every 

            era of hibernation

It’s all in the performance      the butcher 

      operating on slabs

of my identity      the bereaved dissecting

                      memories of an octopus

                        Lift out      far from of it 

      Careen the elbows      out of murk

                        with wine       taken by

                              the midsummer full 

                              moon

Constantly stoneward

                        hunting toward heartstill

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.

begins with its subject,

          which is the sentence.

Track the sentence

          to find out what happens

or how it will act. It is

          the subject, after all. To track,

meaning keep an eye on,

          which is synecdoche,

part representing the whole

          of a thing. One

may track a package if he pleases.

          One may track a person,

though you’d probably want

          the whole of him, not only

an eye, or perhaps

          only an eye. Look how

the sentence is so capable

          of embracing contraction.

A him may function

          as a subject, but that depends

upon the sentence, i.e., A man

          is subject to his sentence.

You understand.

          Such syntax renders it like

a package showing evidence

          of having been tampered with—

Lord, let my ears go secret agent, each

a microphone so hot it picks up things

silent, reverbing even the hum of stone

close to its eager, silver grill. Let my ears forget

years trained to human chatter

wired into every room, even those empty

except of me, each broadcast and jingle

tricking me into being less

lonely than I am. Let my ears forget

the clack and rumble, our tambourining and fireworking

distractions, our roar of applause. Let my hands quit

their clapping and rest in a new kind of prayer, one

that doesn’t ask but listens, palms up in my lap.

Like an owl, let me triangulate icy shuffling under snow as

vole, let me not just name the name

when I spot a soundtrack of birdsong

but understand the notes through each syrinx

as a singular missive—begging, flirting, fussing, each

companion call and alarm as sharp with desire and fear

as my own. Prick my ears, Lord. Make them hungry

satellites, have your way with their tiny bones,

teach the drum within that dark to drum

again. Because within the hammering of woodpecker

is a long tongue unwinding like a tape measure from inside

his pileated head, darting dinner from the pine’s soft bark.

And somewhere I know is a spider who births

a filament of silk and flies it to the next branch; somewhere,

a fiddlehead unstrings its violin into the miracle of

fern. And somewhere, a mink not made into a coat

cracks open a mussel’s shell, and with her mouth full

of that gray meat, yawns. Those are your sounds, are they not?

Do not deny it, Lord, do not deny

me. I do not know those songs. Nor do I know the hush

a dandelion’s face makes when it closes, surrenders, then goes

to seed. No, I only know the sound my own breath makes

as I wish and blow that perfect globe away;

I only know the small, satisfactory

popping of roots when I call it weed and yank it

from the yard. There is a language of all

you’ve created. Hear me, please. I just want to be

still enough to hear. Right here, Lord:

I want to be. 

More than anything, I need this boy

so close to my ears, his questions

electric as honeybees in an acreage

of goldenrod and aster. And time where

we are, slow sugar in the veins

of white pine, rubbery mushrooms

cloistered at their feet. His tawny

listening at the water’s edge, shy

antlers in pooling green light, while

we consider fox prints etched in clay.

I need little black boys to be able to be

little black boys, whole salt water galaxies

in cotton and loudness—not fixed

in stunned suspension, episodes on hot

asphalt, waiting in the dazzling absence

of apology. I need this kid to stay mighty

and coltish, thundering alongside

other black kids, their wrestle and whoop,

the brightness of it—I need for the world

to bear it. And until it will, may the trees

kneel closer, while we sit in mineral hush,

together. May the boy whose dark eyes

are an echo of my father’s dark eyes,

and his father’s dark eyes, reach

with cupped hands into the braided

current. The boy, restless and lanky, the boy

for whom each moment endlessly opens,

for the attention he invests in the beetle’s

lacquered armor, each furrowed seed

or heartbeat, the boy who once told me

the world gives you second chances, the boy

tugging my arm, saying look, saying now.

                                     for Yehuda Amichai

You threw off your exile
by clothing yourself in praise,
Yehuda, saying, my nation
is alive, Amichai, in me,

inhabiting your own body, 
your mother-beloved skin.
I’m hairy like you, and afraid,
like you, I’m half-animal

and half-angel, uncertain 
where my tenderness ends
and cruelty begins. We
did what we had to do,

you wrote, which in translation
reads:                                    .
Yehuda, I want your clarity—
to love you, not close the gates

of my heart like a nation
trying to make itself a home
but winding up with a state. 
Psalmist, you spoke so tenderly

of peace, but the war persists. 
All I have for you is this poem:
a man photographs the sudden
undulating hills. Behind him, 

a woman he loves now dreams
that their bed’s legs grow roots
beneath, overnight, and spreads
a canopy of branches that shoot

pink blooms open and open,
now green with shushing leaves 
that shelter and shadow the rucked
bedsheets, the branches burdened

with red apples, apples like eyes
ready to be praised
                                      and plucked.  

Then came the soft animals, the snake

and octopus, slinking along. You’ve seen

the octopus as escape artist, sneaking out

of cracks and holes, hiding in a tea pot,

plotting the big adventure. Now she moves

through chemical reaction, the first soft

robot, taking to the sea. Remember

that the real thing once disassembled

her own aquarium, waiting, bemused,

in the remaining puddle, for her custodian

to come. They say it was simply curiosity.

Now imagine her robot double dismantling

at will. That which we have tried to contain,

swimming off into the deep, re-emerging



like the snake that slithers into your garden;

its trapezoidal kirigami cuts in plastic skin

keep it crawling through bursts of air.

An innocuous slinky in colorful garb,

this robot can sidewind anywhere.

Now ask why everything now harbors

a weapon in your mind—do you dread

the snake under your own bed?

Is it the real tooth and venom you fear,

or this programmed body double here?

We’re told of a fall, a fault built on flesh—

the flesh of a fruit, the flesh of a woman—

now this manmade flesh, a reptilian test

of applied knowledge. Industrial sin



co-starring the latest sensation: a running

cockroach robot, sliding through cracks

to get to you, away from you, through

your walls. Extinction now eradicated,

bought: replacements on order. Enter

“Robotanica”—the world of the wild robot—

woodpecker, dragonfly, kangaroo, child—

unborn, they can all do the job. Two by two,

battery-powered to keep the world moving,

replacing their organic prototypes. Centipedes,

spiders, ants, termites, and robobees, these

are just the beginning of the evolving nation,

as if someone has decided to revise, start over.

This time using human labor, invention.

In a world of loss

     gratitude is what 

          I demand for keeping 

     precious catch

within my reach.

     No one despises 

          the shepherd for

     collecting his flock. 

No one accuses 

     the watchman of 

          making a captive 

     of his charge.

I’m like a holster, 

     or sheath, all function 

          and no fury. Don’t 

     you worry as I 

swallow you whole. Those 

     ulcers in my gut 

          are only windows,

     the stoma punched 

in my throat is just 

     a keyhole. Don’t be shy.

          Hand me the rattle 

     of your aching heart

 and I’ll cradle you, 

     bird with broken wing. 

          Let me love you. I

     will hold your brittle 

bones together. I’ll 

     unclasp your beak

         so you can sing.

     It’s a world of always 

leaving but here

     you can always stay.

Spring in Hell and everything’s blooming.

I dreamt the worst was over but it wasn’t.

Suppose my punishment was fields of lilies sharper than razors, cutting up fields of lies.

Suppose my punishment was purity, mined and blanched.

They shunned me only because I knew I was stunning.

Then the white plague came, and their pleas were like a river.

Summer was orgiastic healing, snails snaking around wrists.

In heat, garbage festooned the sidewalks.

Old men leered at bodies they couldn’t touch

until they did. I shouldn’t have laughed but I laughed

at their flesh dozing into their spines, their bones crunching like snow.

Once I was swollen and snowblind with grief, left for dead

at the castle door. Then I robbed the castle and kissed my captor,

my sadness, learned she was not a villain. To wake up in this verdant field,

to watch the lilies flay the lambs. To enter paradise,

a woman drinks a vial of amnesia. Found in only the palest

flowers, the ones that smell like rotten meat. To summon the stinky

flower and access its truest aroma, you have to let its stigma show.

You have to let the pollen sting your eyes until you close them.