The morning is clouded and the birds are hunched,

More cold than hungry, more numb than loud,

This crisp, Arizona shore, where desert meets

The coming edge of the winter world.

It is a cold news in stark announcement,

The myriad stars making bright the black,

As if the sky itself had been snowed upon.

But the stars—all those stars,

Where does the sure noise of their hard work go?

These plugs sparking the motor of an otherwise quiet sky,

Their flickering work everywhere in a white vastness:

We should hear the stars as a great roar

Gathered from the moving of their billion parts, this great

Hot rod skid of the Milky Way across the asphalt night,

The assembled, moving glints and far-floating embers

Risen from the hearth-fires of so many other worlds.

Where does the noise of it all go

If not into the ears, then hearts of the birds all around us,

Their hearts beating so fast and their equally fast

Wings and high songs,

And the bees, too, with their lumbering hum,

And the wasps and moths, the bats, and the dragonflies—

None of them sure if any of this is going to work,

This universe—we humans oblivious,

Drinking coffee, not quite awake, calm and moving

Into the slippers of our Monday mornings,

Shivering because, we think,

It’s a little cold out there.

in each hand a disparate dream: in all dreams

                                                                           another far

            too quiet: delirium

                                     of the mask and God behind it: paradise

had no winter like

                          this: this

            is the one where the infant sleeps in the dirt

                                                                                the sleep

of a dreamless mind so far from home

                                                           he no longer resembles anyone:

            his mother, thrown

                                        down, hunted, sick 

with fear, sleeps next to him among the filth of animals: his father

              watches (the imperative

                                                       that love

—not solace—

                      demands), for there is no room for another

              sleeper: the desert will keep

                                                         bringing its mirage,

no doubt:

             the child will walk in his shimmering garden, says

   

the wilderness, if you just get across:

                                                          motes in the light rise and rest:

             sole face left (remember you are dust)

                                                                       of our first lost image:

The world’s largest Confederate monument

was too big to perceive on my earliest trips to the park.

Unlike my parents, I was not an immigrant

but learned, in speech and writing, to represent.

Picnicking at the foot and sometimes peak

of the world’s largest Confederate monument,

we raised our Cokes to the first Georgian president.

His daughter was nine like me, but Jimmy Carter,

unlike my father, was not an immigrant.

Teachers and tour guides stressed the achievement

of turning three vertical granite acres into art.

Since no one called it a Confederate monument,

it remained invisible, like outdated wallpaper meant

long ago to be stripped. Nothing at Stone Mountain Park

echoed my ancestry, but it’s normal for immigrants

not to see themselves in landmarks. On summer nights,

fireworks and laser shows obscured, with sparks,

the world’s largest Confederate monument.

Our story began when my parents arrived as immigrants. 

What have I

To say in my wrong tongue

Of what is gone   To know something is

Lost but what   You have forgotten what

You long forgot   If I am 

What survives   I am here but I am not

Much of anything at all   To be what’s left 

And all the rest scooped out 

And dropped into the sea   My flesh

Forming a knot on itself is a habit

Learned from whom   A mind reaching back

Into the dark a body releasing itself

Backward into space a faith

I have no prayer in which to keep

Am I home or merely caught

Between two unmarked graves

I’m saying where we live

 It’s a mistake   A compromise 

I’m made to make   

I’m told come willingly 

Halfway across a bridge to where

I’m halfway human   Or else 

A door bricked over 

Behind which all I am   

To be shadow cast by shadows cast

By no one’s hand   And now

Whose fault am I   It’s said 

I stand against the grain

Of natural law   A being in chaos

In argument with itself   What would it be

To be simply   I am here but what of me 

That’s gone stays gone

<sup>By which a strip of land became a hole in time

            —Durs Grünbein</sup>

Grandfather I cannot find,

flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone,

what country do you belong to:

where is your body buried,

where did your soul go

when the road led nowhere?

Grandfather I’ll never know,

the moment father last saw you

rips open a wormhole

that has no end: the hours

became years, the years

forever: and on the other side

lies a memory of a memory

or a dream of a dream of a dream

of another life, where what happened

never happened, what cannot come true

comes true: and neither erases

the other, or the other others,

world after world, to infinity—

If only I could cross the border

and find you there,

find you anywhere,

as if you could tell me who he is, or was, 

or might have become: 

no bloodshot eyes, or broken

bottles, or praying with cracked lips

because the past is past and was is not is—

Grandfather, stranger,

give me back my father—

or not back, not back, give me the father

I might have had:                                 

there, in the country that no longer exists,

on the other side of the war—

During the war, women hid messages

   inside white flowers

tucked in their hair. They crossed

   enemy lines, slipped the blossoms

into soldiers’ fists. What might

   have been a child’s crown

for her communion, an offering

   at a grave, might win the war.

The ovule, the style, the stigma—

   what seemed to unfurl overnight

took weeks, even years.

   Dream your hand plucks the bloom,

its widest petals like porcelain,

   and a halo of bees skims your arms.

Upon waking, walk to the docks,

   the bloom heavy behind your ear,

and breathe in its sweet persistence,

   its scent of sea salt and gutted fish.

I’m wondering about you, chevra kadisha,

the “holy society,” who will prepare my body,

once I’m no longer in it, for the earth.

Will you know me already, or see me for the first time

as you wash and shroud me, as my father was washed

and dressed in simple white tachrichim, for those

about to stand before God. Perhaps by then I’ll know

if I believe in God. I like the democratic

nature of the shroud, an equalizing garment. You

may see a body that surprises you. You may not have seen

a man’s body like this one before you, which I hope is very old,

wrinkled, and (since I’m wishing) fit, muscled

as much as an old man can be. You’ll see scars.

Ragged dog bit forearm, elbow my father picked gravel

from over the sink, then flushed with foaming iodine,

and the long double horizons on my chest, which trunked my body

like a tree. If I am unexpected, let me not seem

grotesque to you, as I have to many people, perhaps

even my own parents, and others whose highest

kindness was to say nothing. Please let me return to dust

in peace, as the others did, and recite those beautiful psalms,

remembering, as you go about your holy ritual,

how frightening it is to be naked before another,

at the mercy of a stranger’s eyes, without even any breath.

Weed-wrack and wild grape

                                                       hanging from the dusty trees

that touch above the narrow road.

                                                       I’m driving my way back

—rough passage over gravel—

                                                       back the slow miles over

the creek, the lapsed meadow

                                                       we walked for arrow points

until the road narrows to path.

                                                       I park the car.  I pick my step          

past rusty barbed wire through

                                                       a clearing to the house.

Back the house. Back the years.

                                                      Back with him now with me

over broken floorboards,     

                                                      stone footers, the pot stove— 



a whippoorwill, years distant

                                                      through the paneless frames.

Half a staircase leading up

                                                      over the century of beams. 



Back now again the old road

                                                      disappearing through white woods,

where he lay down and breathed

                                                      no more.

I cannot consider scent without you, I cannot

think that color so gay, so Japanese, so vernal 

without you; not assassination or any death in any spring. I think of you

and I am man-and-woman, flawed as a Lincoln,

welcoming as a window-box, and so tenderly alliterative as to draw one near—

at times, perhaps, to withdraw from all—yes,

without you I am without pulse in that dooryard, that blooming unfurling

so tell me finally, is last as in the last time or to make something last

—to hold, to hold you, to memorize fast—

She, being the midwife

and your mother’s

longtime friend, said

I see a heart; can you

see it? And on the grey

display of the ultrasound

there you were as you were,

our nugget, in that moment

becoming a shrimp

or a comma punctuating

the whole of my life, separating

its parts—before and after—,

a shrimp in the sea

of your mother, and I couldn’t

help but see the fast

beating of your heart

translated on that screen

and think and say to her,

to the room, to your mother,

to myself It looks like

a twinkling star.

I imagine I’m not

the first to say that either.

Unlike the first moments

of my every day,

the new of seeing you was the first

—deserving of the definite article—

moment I saw a star

at once so small and so

big, so close and getting closer

every day, I pray.

He said I must pay special attention in cars. He wasn’t, he assured me, saying that I’d be in an accident but that for two weeks some particular caution was in order, &, he said, all I really needed to do was throw the white light of Alma around any car I entered & then I’d be fine. & when I asked about Alma, he said, Oh, come on, you know Alma well. You two were together first in Egypt & then at Stonehenge, & I nodded though I’ve never been— in this life at least—to Stonehenge; then I said, Shouldn’t I always throw the white light of Alma around a car? & when he said, Well, it wouldn’t hurt, I said, What about around planes, houses? What if I throw the white light of Alma around anyone who might need protection from the reckless speed of driving or the reckless swerve & skid of the world? & the psychic opened his hands & shrugged up his shoulders. So despite your doubt or mine as to why I’d gone there, to a psychic, in—I kid you not—a town of psychics—in the first place, right now, as you read this, let me throw the white light of Alma around you & everyone you pass close to today, beloved or stranger, the grocer, the bus driver, the boy on his longboard, the lady you stand silent beside in the elevator, & also I am throwing it around anyone they care about anywhere in the spin of the world, because, we can agree that these days, everywhere, particular caution is in order &, even if unverifiable, the light of my dear sister Alma, couldn’t hurt.

or. The deer, nearly

Color blind, see blue

Better than we do, more

Blue than we know, a blue

I am not consoled

Lives beyond me. Imagine

Their sky, saturated, how

Do they bear it, and

The alpine lake where

They drink in summer, glacier-

Fed, reflecting back it all back

Plus. Consider

The glacier, blue at heart deep-

Frozen for millennia, blue

Its core and vanishing

In your lifetime. A rush,

A trickle, this is how

It goes? Around the lake,

Boulders harden themselves. 

Green firs. And there, a perfect

Center, the lake’s clear,

Unreadable eye.

The raven stood in a baby carriage and croaked to passersby. Her voice was a purple softness, really not much.

Something about a dingy bird is a question—where shall we work and live—or how did it come to this, a thing called “in public” standing near the ocean among balloons and pies?

Where did the baby vanish to?



A breeze rides in with its assignment. A woman laughs because she thinks she’s partly immortal.

So concludes an essay on “Fern Hill,” in which the student seems

somewhere between jazzed up & pissed off that green might mean

so many things from one stanza to the next: here, a blooming

Eden proxy; here, rot made by the grip of time. For starters. Or

that sun-slaked field, not far from our classroom, as lush-green

as any Welsh farmyard, greyed overnight with frost. Emerald

beer bottle hurled from a car. The slack-jawed lime-green

goblin face spanning a front porch post-Halloween

for so many weeks it looks like it’s here to stay. The long-ago

brown-green of Cleveland, where it rained always & without pity

upon a past I crave despite myself & our team lost always 14—2.

Every time we waited in the bleachers for the game to resume,

my father would look down upon the outfield’s diagonal lines

& proclaim Still a lot of green out there, meaning anything

can happen & will. Have you ever heard in a crowd the saddest part

of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” where everyone lies & pretends

we don’t care if we ever get back & makes the last word echo

twice more? We always want to get back, whether or not

we’re hailing childhood green. Like the student in her essay,

I too could keep rattling off images of spring & decay—June

sunset horizon flash, summer hair stained olive from churning

over-chlorinated pools, green shadow of a hand somewhere

that makes it feel as if owls were bearing everything away—

instead of looking again at the image online I glimpsed before

returning to the still-ungraded hay-high stack of student work. 

Maybe you saw it too? Maybe you also had the spellbound luck

of wandering to other tasks instead of asking what it means to know

anything can happen in a wholly different way, instead of looking 

once more at the slash of police tape that is the only horizon

that matters just now for the two men in the photograph who sit

together on the curb, faces glowing blue-red in the lights, both of them

bleary-eyed but alive, swaddled in aftermath & a blanket that is green,

a detail that couldn’t matter less, given how the numbers of the dead

still rise. Here we are again, as inevitable as the clock’s tick, looking in

at a place that now will never be young. Is there a way to say it—

There’s been a shooting—that will allow it to be heard, remembered

& heard without the easy glide of our past tense? That will stop us

from wanting to turn to anything under the wide starry sky that is not

the green fire burning in the minds of those men or the green

of a blanket America provides & provides without change? 

Only today did I notice the abyss

in abysmal and only because my mind

was generating rhymes for dismal,

and it made of the two a pair,

to which much later it joined

baptismal, as—I think—a joke.

I decided to do nothing with

the rhymes, treating them as one does

the unfortunately frequent appearance

of the “crafts” adults require children

to fashion from pipe cleaners

and plastic beads. One is not permitted

to simply throw them away,

but can designate a drawer

that serves as a kind of trash can

never emptied. I suppose one day

it will be full, and then I will know

it is time to set my child free.

The difficulty is my mind leaks

and so it will never fill, despite

the clumps of language I drop in,

and this means my mind can never

be abandoned in the woods

with a kiss and a wave

and a little red kerchief

tied under its chin.

A knock at the door: it’s the boundary technician—

Dr. Transducer glides out of the blue

and into your pulse, come



to recalibrate your peaks and valleys.

Gloved in hiss, he unfolds the bolts

of your voltage, fiddles



your knobs and bones, bones

your spectral entrails—and deduces your output’s

plagued with fits of hysteretic



backlash. Whatever you utter

is noise shaped, a dizzy signal. The doctor’s

got the fix, and it’s a doozy:



he cleaves you to a graven

waveform erasure. He tunes you to a frequency

that lacks you out



then blows. The door swings

and bangs you shut, clouds pressed to the roof

of your mouth.

The world baffles with sounds,

the worst of which is a human voice.

You would think that with a judgment like that

I would hate crowds, but better a pub’s intermingled dozens

than the sound of one fool speaking his mind.

The dozens drum and buzz and hum.

Against the dozens I could ring a wet glass

and sing C above high C,

could settle a bet with bold harmonics,

could stun down the bark of a barracks of dogs.

But against one idiot all another idiot can do is shout.

Imagine a life in which shouting was the precondition

for every action, if you had to shout to step, shout to sit,

shout loudly to effect any outcome.

What when you did speak would you say?

What wouldn’t sound old to you, 

about what could you not say I’ve heard this before?

What a relief it would be to scream yourself hoarse,

to be forced into silence,

the one note you know you can always hold.

In a strait, some things are useful.

Others, true, she turns to ash. 

Thrust, thus—

her head thick with arrogance, 

infection and futility.

It could be how a young wife went,

strewn with net-veined willow 

and mountain aven— 

trespass, and wreckage. 

She could write about the year 

she turned to heat and haze, 

to laze: immurmurat-, 

imauraaqtuŋa. Of cannula

and silver nitrate. Of petiolus 

and achene, about to begin again. 

Of greens as they green. Of a man 

aged, eskered. Of a confined gleam— 

to hereby dissolve and hold for naught

the soil / gravel / silt groaning 

as the tools of our penultimate glacier,

 

a glacier I might pronounce like grief. 

One does wish for words to thaw 

in the mouth, but find instead a tongue,

welt. Erosional or depositional, raised 

& visible, rift into language & grit—  

They were calm because it had never happened before,

because they thought it had, it must have, when designed, 

a tunnel to fit the child but not the adult. Then how 

if a child crawled there and curled and closed her mouth, 

how to get the child out? Send another in. Send in 

someone small. They were calm because everyone 

finds reasons to be calm when there is wind or sun or 

this coat at the base of the slide, it must be the child’s,

Come out. It’s fine. Come on, now. Come out. 

They were wrong. All of them were wrong. Some thought:

a saw! Some thought: calm down! They were getting 

somewhere with their thoughts. Part of the crowd grew 

angry with the other part for making a crowd,

so one crawled up into the tube until his chest stopped 

like his breath and he saw something wrong: 

the sun made blue in the tube. Something about the sun 

and black streaks from shoes. The crowd saw the half of him

left out kick then kick wild, so they pulled the other 

half out. They sat him up and someone groaned, 

someone said Enough, now, come on. Sweetheart, enough. 

Come out. Then another crawled inside, left her coat 

by the slide, passed the streaks, saw the blue, smelled the plastic

in her mouth that comes from plastic having caught

the sun at noon, the burning soon night-cooled,

a thousand black-streak tallies to mark the cycle of shoes then 

wider shoes of older children pressed inside by two 

to touch and make the space between them small—

this one heard a sound. Someone’s calling me she thought.

I’m found. So she crawled back. Remembered all. 

Moved aside. Another tried. Lost. Another tried. 

You’ve just died in my arms,

But suddenly it seems we’re eternal



Cali boys, Afro-haired cohorts in crime,

Racing through intricate lattices



Of quince and lemon tree shadows,

Corridors of Queen Anne’s lace—



On the skip-church Sunday you dubbed me

“Sir Serious” instead of Cyrus—



Then, swift as a deer’s leap, we’re devotees

Of goatees and showy Guatemalan shirts,



Intoxicated lovers for a month

On the northwest coast of Spain—



Praising the irrepressible sounds

Of a crusty Galician bagpiper



On La Coruña’s gripping finisterre,

Then gossiping and climbing



(Like the giddy Argonauts we were)

The lofty, ancient Roman lighthouse,



All the way—Keep on truckin’, we sang—

To the top of the Tower of Hercules—  

You crawled back into your motel in a border town near the demarcation line between the nation-state of the living and the underworld. Sleepless, you peered out the window. You could see the neon lights garlanding the Gates of Horn and Ivory. The lights spelled out “OPEN 24 HOURS A DAY” in blinking red cursive. You laughed. Of course, death is the only border crossing still open to all. You watched the illumination from the street pour onto the wall above your bed: a red lasso that looped on the wall, as if the wall had begun to bleed extravagantly. Below, traffic packed the road in both directions. From the two open gates, dreams sailed into the living world from over the deserts. Some dreams true, some false. You recognized some of these dreams (Race, Nation, Gender) and could not tell from which gate they had emerged. Sleepless, you saw the line of pilgrims queued up to enter the underworld. The line seems longer lately, new refugees to the afterlife.