We pull into dirt driveway in Lara’s blue Celica. The car came from her 18 money last year and it’s got only one dent on the side from a white girl in Wolf Point who slammed the door of her boyfriend’s Ford pick-up into the passenger side of Lara’s then new car. Lara was pissed, got out to kick the girl’s ass but they sped out of the Town Pump’s parking lot too fast. That girl was scared. Lara came back to the car and we laughed at that dent, but most of all we laughed at that fear. Driveway to uncle’s house, we’re bumping Tupac, get out, step into sweat lodge. Got a sick auntie. Take in a towel, leave out hip-hop beat, add in hand drum. Our uncle forgives us this time for being late and we are more sorry for this than we were for quitting the basketball team or for getting pregnant last year.

that one time in the ’98 NBA finals & in praise of one man’s hand on the waist of another’s & in praise of the ways we guide our ships to the shore of some brief & gilded mercy I touch my fingers to the hips of this vast & immovable grief & push once more & who is to say really how much weight was behind Jordan’s palm on that night in Utah & on that same night one year earlier the paramedics pulled my drowning mother from the sheets where she slept & they said it must have felt like a whole hand was pushing down on her lungs & I spent the whole summer holding my breath in bed until the small black spots danced on the ceiling & I am sorry that there is no way to describe this that is not about agony or that is not about someone being torn from the perch of their comfort & on the same night a year before my mother died Jordan wept on the floor of the United Center locker room after winning another title because it was father’s day & his father went to sleep on the side of a road in ’93 & woke up a ghost & there is no moment worth falling to our knees & galloping towards like the one that sings our dead into the architecture & so yes for a moment in 1998 Michael Jordan made what space he could on the path between him & his father’s small & breathing grace

& so yes,

there is an ocean between us the length of my arm & I have built nothing for you that can survive it

& from here I am close enough to be seen but not close enough to be cherished

& from here, I can see every possible ending before we even touch.

With cotton candy armpits and sugary
Crevices, sweat glazing your donut skin.
Have you ever been fat, Brad?
Have you ever wanted a Snickers
More than love and lain on your bed
While the phone rang and rolled one
On your tongue, afraid to eat it, afraid
It would make your jeans too tight? Have you
Barfed, Brad, because you ate it,
Ate all the take-out, licked
Brown sauce off the box while you sobbed?
Brad Pitt down in the pits chaining menthol
Ciggys in your thick-wallet life,
It’s not so bad Brad, sad Brad, is it?

The man who had never heard of Frank Sinatra: he lived
A perfectly ordinary life in America. Born in 1915,
He followed all the fads, read the newspapers, listened

To Television, knew who Dean Martin and Sammy whathisname
Were (Sinatra's friends), but somehow, by a one in a
Zillion fluke, whenever Sinatra came up, he was out of the room.

Or his attention was diverted by something else, and
(You will say this is impossible, that it cannot be), never
Heard him sing, like a man in my generation who somehow

Missed the Beatles though he had heard everything else.
Once, just as he was about to hear the name Frank Sinatra
A plane flew overhead—he was fifty-five years old—his hearing

A little more impaired. He had heard of Humphrey Bogart, 
Of Elizabeth Taylor, of Walter Cronkite, and of perhaps a hundred 
Forty thousand other celebrities names by the time he died,

And yet he had never heard of Frank Sinatra. The Greeks had
That famous saying, "The luckiest man is he who was never born."
Which is kind of gloomy, but I think they were wrong.

The luckiest man is he who never heard of Frank Sinatra.

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.

Where does the sea end and the sky begin?

We sink in blue for which there is no word.

Two sails, fog-coloured, loiter on the thin

Mirage of ocean.

There is no sound of wind, nor wave, nor bird,

Nor any motion.

Except the shifting mists that turn and lift,

Showing behind the two limp sails a third,

Then blotting it again.

A gust, a spattering of rain,

The lazy water breaks in nervous rings.

Somewhere a bleak bell buoy sings,

Muffled at first, then clear,

Its wet, grey monotone.

The dead are here.

We are not quite alone.