It is really something when a kid who has a hard time becomes a kid who’s having a good time in no small part thanks to you throwing that kid in the air again and again on a mile long walk home from the Indian joint as her mom looks sideways at you like you don’t need to keep doing this because you’re pouring with sweat and breathing a little bit now you’re getting a good workout but because the kid laughs like a horse up there laughs like a kangaroo beating her wings against the light because she laughs like a happy little kid and when coming down and grabbing your forearm to brace herself for the time when you will drop her which you don’t and slides her hand into yours as she says for the fortieth time the fiftieth time inexhaustible her delight again again again and again and you say give me til the redbud tree or give me til the persimmon tree because she knows the trees and so quiet you almost can’t hear through her giggles she says ok til the next tree when she explodes howling yanking your arm from the socket again again all the wolves and mourning doves flying from her tiny throat and you throw her so high she lives up there in the tree for a minute she notices the ants organizing on the bark and a bumblebee carousing the little unripe persimmon in its beret she laughs and laughs as she hovers up there like a bumblebee like a hummingbird up there giggling in the light like a giddy little girl up there the world knows how to love.

A long, slow dusk on the day before solstice—
I did it, I did it, I did it: song of the pond frogs.
Shrill piping of the cliff swallows, fluting of a vireo,
Raspy song of the Bewick’s wren. So commotion
In the trees! These evenings of long light
Must be high festival to them. It’s the time
When the light seems tender in the needles
Of the pine, the shimmer of the aspen leaves
Seems kindly on the cliff face, gleams
On the patches and gullies of snow summer
Hasn’t touched yet. And the creek is flush
With life, streams of snow melt cascading down
The glacial spills of granite in a turbulence
The ouzel, picking off insects in the spray,
Seems thrilled by, water on water funneling,
Foam on foam, existence pouring out
Its one meaning, which is flow. Up here,
In the last light, the vireo’s warble declares,
Repeats, falls silent. The swallows, soaring,
Dipping. They must be feeding their young
The insects they are gleaning from the pond.
And the frogs: I did it, I did it, I did it
Fall silent one by one as dark comes on.

My life had stood a loaded gun
In corner, till a day
The owner passed — identified,
And carried me away.

And now we roam the sov’reign woods,
And now we hunt the doe —
And every time I speak for him
The mountains straight reply.

And do I smile, such cordial light
Upon the valley glow —
It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let its pleasure through.

And when at night, our good day done,
I guard my master’s head,
’Tis better than the eider duck’s
Deep pillow to have shared.

To foe of his I’m deadly foe,
Non stir the second time
On whom I lay a yellow eye
Or an emphatic thumb.

Though I than he may longer live,
He longer must than I,
For I have but the art to kill —
Without the power to die.

Small fellowship of daily commonplace
    We hold together, dear, constrained to go
   Diverging ways. Yet day by day I know
   My life is sweeter for thy life’s sweet grace;
And if we meet but for a moment’s space,
   Thy touch, thy word, sets all the world aglow.
   Faith soars serener, haunting doubts shrink low,
   Abashed before the sunshine of thy face.
Nor press of crowd, nor waste of distance serves
   To part us. Every hush of evening brings
   Some hint of thee, true-hearted friend of mine;
And as the father planet thrills and swerves
   When towards it through the darkness Saturn swings,
   Even so my spirit feels the spell of thine.

¹⁸⁸⁸

My friends are dead who were

the arches    the pillars of my life 

the structural relief when

the world gave none.

My friends who knew me as I knew them

their bodies folded into the ground or burnt to ash.

If I got on my knees

might I lift my life as a turtle carries her home?  

Who if I cried out would hear me?

My friends—with whom I might have spoken of this—are gone.

A nightly spell of sleep falls  
heavy on the sea.  
Blue whales undulate their slow song,  
while soft-bellied mollusks are carried  
down, sand-ways like a wound. 

These swaying underwater breezes, 
this gentle flotsam of an oceanic dream 
are all for me, querida – a keepsake 
of my savage grief. 
Artifacts of deaths that no one died, 
ashes brimming with unnamed souls. 
I hate this disconnected dream,  
this crystalline suburbia,  
this history without light.  
You are the machine, I make and 
remake in my sleep. 

                        We could not save  
each other or ourselves in this forgetfulness. 
Yet, in the making, we disappeared 
into sound dressed in gray,  
where they said our hearts lived.  
Where the sword decides and  
Foucault lectures to the ghosts of crows 
about sex and the biopolitic. 
And what of colonialism? they squawk,  
Y que del negro atado?  
The sea distanced itself and sang 
of its guilty blood, of the bodies  
consumed in its salty lather. 
Forgive these ravenous waves  
for demanding sacrifice, a buffet of 
flesh and fat spread thick and fragrant.  
Pain is a difficult animal to domesticate.

Ask me about the time
my brother ran towards the sun
arms outstretched. His shadow chased him
from corner store to church
where he offered himself in pieces.

Ask me about the time
my brother disappeared. At 16,
tossed his heartstrings over telephone wire,
dangling for all the rez dogs to feed on.
Bit by bit. The world took chunks of
my brother’s flesh.

Ask me about the first time
we drowned in history. 8 years old
during communion we ate the body of Christ
with palms wide open, not expecting wine to be
poured into our mouths. The bitterness
buried itself in my tongue and my brother
never quite lost his thirst for blood or vanishing
for more days than a shadow could hold.

Ask me if I’ve ever had to use
bottle caps as breadcrumbs to help
my brother find his way back home.
He never could tell the taste between
a scar and its wounding, an angel or demon.

Ask me if I can still hear his
exhaled prayers: I am still waiting to be found.
To be found, tell me why there is nothing
more holy than becoming a ghost.

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.