These kids watching so intently
on every side of the display
must love the feeling of being gigantic:
of having a giant’s power
over this little world of snow, where buttons
lift and lower
the railway’s crossing gate, or switch the track,
or make the bent wire topped with a toy helicopter
turn and turn
like a sped-up sunflower. A steam engine
draws coal tender, passenger cars, and a gleaming caboose
out from the mountain tunnel,
through a forest of spruce and pine, over the trestle bridge,
to come down near the old silver mine.

Maybe all Christmases
are haunted by Christmases long gone:
old songs, old customs, people who loved you
and who’ve died. Within a family
sometimes even the smallest disagreements
can turn, and grow unkind.

The train’s imaginary passengers,
looking outward from inside,
are steaming toward the one town they could be going to:
the town they have just left,
where everything is local
and nothing is to scale. One church, one skating rink,
one place to buy a saw.
A single hook-and-ladder truck
and one officer of the law. Maybe in another valley
it’s early spring
and the thick air is redolent of chimney smoke and rain,
but here the diner’s always open
so you can always get a meal. Or go down to the drive-in
looking for a fight. Or stay up
all night, so tormented by desire, you can hardly think.

Beyond the edges of the model-train display, the food court
is abuzz. Gingerbread and candy canes
surround a blow mold Virgin Mary, illuminated from within;
a grapevine reindeer
has been hung with sticks of cinnamon. One by one, kids
get pulled away
from the model trains: Christmas Eve is bearing down,
and many chores remain undone.

But for every child who leaves, another child appears.
The great pagan pine
catches and throws back wave on wave of light,
like a king-size chandelier, announcing
that the jingle hop has begun,
and the drummer boy
still has nothing to offer the son of God
but the sound of one small drum.

—then lightly rubs the
                                          inside of her wrist

to wrist         the flower
                                          fullness         the furrows

like heirloom roses
                                          or attar crushed from 

weapons thrown aside
                                          the century gone

as though bound         now in
                                          not shame         not shyness

meanwhile         and lace cuffs—
                                          making scent circles—

Phrases in italics are from "Black and Copper in a Crush of Flowers" by Carl Phillips.

The life-size, sculpted Buddha I met yesterday
on the ground floor of the Art Institute
was born some nine hundred years ago in Tamil Nadu, South India,
and came to Chicago as a missionary of bliss just prior to my birth.

(I, too, was a missionary child, but my family went the other way—
from America to Tamil Nadu—and all of us have returned
to America, and two of us have returned to the earth.)

But the dark granite of the Buddha’s body was the dark granite
of the rough grindstone behind my father’s flute teacher’s house
on the southern plains near Madurai. A black water-buffalo calf
lay in the shade and rested his chin on the stone and sighed.

And the mandala etched in the Buddha’s hand was a lotus blossom
that bloomed on the lake in Kodaikanal, where we lived.
A green butterfly flew out over the water and settled on the white petals
of the lotus blossom.

And the stone flame above the Buddha’s head was the flame
on the single-burner kerosene stove in my ayah’s home near the bazaar.
She boiled water with the flame and made Darjeeling tea,
sweetening it with jaggery and handing it to me in a shining metal cup.

Other visitors to the museum wanted to see the Buddha, too,
so I moved slowly round him. On his back, an inscription in Tamil,
starting between his shoulder blades, went on to cover the stone.
I heard a docent say the inscription was no longer legible, but no,
I could read it:

Dear Little Brother . . .

it began.

In beautiful, spacious September,
When pears in their boxes were golden and full,
We laid her ashes in the Minnesota earth.

Two years on, September still tastes a little like ashes.

Though pears, I have noticed, have decidedly sweetened,
And a number of trademark routines in this ambivalent month—
Say, walking the woods shifting to the red end of the spectrum
Or hearing the home crowd cheer at the homecoming game—
Have flared into a new expository grace.

Despite, or because of, her death?
It seems too cruel to say.

that we might’ve been together 
at the union hall, with the beer

bottles and the night that didn’t fall
away? I might’ve saved you from

that car ride to the end of this calm

world. Would we have been happy?
The morning you died, I slept.

I got the kids up for school in the dark. 
There were hours that I thought

you were alive. I keep thinking
about the cost of living. Your body,

unwrung and above me. Clothes
scattered like the hours you were

missing. What is happiness?
What I count on is the dark. The light.

Wanting to live anyway. The river
in my teeth and the reasonable grass

under my feet like someone I loved
once, impossibly alive.

What does it mean to say we know the properties
of ice, of snow? The wheat berries piled in metal bins

in the silos. The house on a corner lot, properly
broken down, the septic tank leaking

into the closets for years, rats in the attic, box
upon box upon box of belongings that belong

to the long dead. Sex toys and pornography.
Money stashed in old socks. In ties. In tobacco

tins. The house was once lovely. Flower boxes at the sills.
Large picture windows that held up the prairie

sky, faces of the parents we knew little, if at all.
How easily people end up like this, perhaps. We stand

at the tree line, and I can’t decide if Mother’s Ruin
is an appropriate name for gin, or screech,

or every century where someone died bleary-
eyed, a bottle within reach. How do we love

what is damaged? Ahead, the valley rivers through
the city. Ahead, the frozen prairie, the lone cross-

country skier. No one will find us here, I fear.
Here, the world is desperately bare. What now

is the prairie sky, if not another relic, burning?

        adj. or n. (1891) : that has or have been left over : not used up or disposed of : surviving from an earlier time

xiao mei, xiao mei, they call you
mini-America, little beauty
stranger woman-girl

your body has more definition
than when you left at twelve
& nobody knows what to do with it

the men talk to you about choices
as in the ones they made for their wives
the women talk to you about children
but not the ones they buried in shame

they insist on being helpful
as in they don’t want you to be
one of those, as in wan le, as in

game over, which you used to confuse
with its homophone, as in
frolicked, as in finished joy

they gave you a name & once again
you had no say in the matter, as in
abandon, as in you leave home
to find it had left you

When pulled, the spider web took another form.
The bull’s-eye relaxed, the bull unseen but felt,
skull on muscle paused on the forest floor.
The girl said oh, as she had heard her mother
say before. The spider had already hidden
in the labyrinth of a tree. The city ran
on coal and gasoline as it breathed, impatient
in the heat it generated in its need. The bull
kept one hoof in the woods, one on the road,
and didn’t blink. The girl, gone backward
from his eye, wiped the silver of his face
off of her own, aware now of its size, one eye
as large as her face. Even after she’d walked on,
she still sensed threads across her skin.

or bear, came from the swamp,
what had once been a lake from a glacier,
then the meandering bed of a river, softer
than any bed a man had ever made.
The river had been dammed,
slowing, filling to prevent a drought
in a place where clay prevents rain
from becoming groundwater.
Instead the water runs away.
The mine had been closed in strike,
and the water seeped in
the ceiling of slate.
In time, they mined again, even under the lake.

A child ran in his house to say
the white ghost was in the yard,
and no one believed him until the neighbors
saw it, too. The stories started this way
on the edge of the orchards,
acres of apples:
summer, seven feet tall,
heavy in white fur and mud,
what our mothers said you could smell
before you saw it, or sometimes only
could smell, never see,
but you would know it was near. How it screamed.
How it didn’t seem to care.

I notice it first while standing outside
looking up at the garage loft’s window:
pure verb overwhelming the noun,
or panic, rather, obscuring its author,
until the action stops and, like a gemstone
sifted from silt, the bird, a cardinal,
emerges from the motion, perched
on the wrong side of the sill.
I suppose I could make this a metaphor
or something, for the soul, maybe,
as Bede does, but it’s really just a problem,
another life to prolong so its death
isn’t my responsibility. For two days
I keep the garage door open, but the bird
trusts only the light from the window
that won’t open, not the dull fluorescence
from below or the saucer of water
and the trail of seeds I leave on the steps.
On the third day, wearing a hockey helmet
and gardening gloves, I face an old fear
and climb those steps to tape cardboard
over the window. Hunched over,
as if fending off an explosion,
I think of last summer’s jays dive-
bombing my dog’s skull, then the bat
that bit my brother in our childhood basement.
But the bird doesn’t attack, just watches
from the rafters, as I watch for hours
from our porch for the escape
I never see for sure. Here, success for once
dictated by what’s lost. I push through
our boxes of junk, the stuff we discard
but can’t throw out completely, and find
nothing to describe, just the sudden light
from the windows when the cardboard comes off,
and then the tiny marks left by something—
I suppose the evidence is there—I cared for.

Her fake majolica
brimming with moral fables
(the pelican of piety,
a lion ponderously tangled
in “Ave Maria”’s

golden script, the lambs
with their crosscut vexilla)
make a gradual conquista
of tabletops and shelves. Reverted
years ago to a faith

that loves a hoarder, she
buys ersatz antiquities
as if preponderance breeds grace,
props them on display stands—serving plates,
carafes, and bowls staggered

like mosaicked peacocks
with antimony eyespots—
enshrines them like they’re bona fide,
not mailed from SoCal Renaissance fairs
in crates lined with the Times,

as were her icon bread
stamps, her “German” cookie molds
depicting the Crucifixion
(sorrowful treat). A miracle, then,
each time she pulls them down

and plates a meal, heaping
meat sauce on the backs of saints
mopping Mary’s brow, pouring tea
from the mouth of an aquamanile
that is the mouth of God.

When the deified Nero

ordered Seneca to “open his veins,”
                                                                the playwright
complied—though he was, by then, sick and infirm
and his blood wouldn’t flow quickly enough
from the wounds,
                                 so his friends gave him poison
to speed his demise,
                                      though this, too, failed,
and, seeing no other option, they ran a bath
for the groaning old man and, finally
successful,
                      drowned him in it—

+

and that is the end of Seneca who,
until then, astonished the world.

+

I was awakened late that election night
by raccoons.
                         They were plundering the garbage
again, their claws scraping
inside the bins,

                             the noise of ripping plastic bags.
A bottle rolled down the driveway into the grass
while I lay in bed, my book where I’d left it
under the lamp.
                              Then a sudden, frantic shuffling
as they fought over, what?
                                                A piece of old bread,
an apple, sweet with rot.
                                             Beside me, my wife
never woke

+

                       even when I went to the window,
moving the curtains aside,
                                                squinting into the dark yard
where there were so many raccoons
climbing among the garbage bins that I couldn’t
count them.

+

Whether Seneca had conspired against Nero
remains an open question,
                                                 but his friends
had more immediate concerns.
                                                        The emperor had said
the old man must die, 
                                         and helping him on his way
was the proper thing to do,

+

                                                 no matter that the empire itself
was thick with rot,
                                   no matter that Nero was lavish and plundering,
homicidal,

                      that he’d “lost all sense of right and wrong,
listening only to flattery,”
                                               as the historian I’d been reading
that election night
                                    told it. “Opening his veins,” she wrote, 

+

“was simply the best way to accomplish

                                                                       a patriotic exit,
and the only pity was
                                         it didn’t work exactly as Seneca
had planned—”

+

                              and what of the citizens
who took years to tire of Nero?
                                                         He had, after all,
to execute his own mother before they turned
against him—

+

                          while the raccoons scrambled in the trash,
and “Darling?” I said,
                                       but my wife didn’t stir,
she was dead asleep.
                                       And then the raccoons
turned to face the flashlight
I aimed at them from the porch steps,
                                                                      their eyes reflecting
the glare greenly.

+

                                They froze that way—
cold air swirling,
                                a night breeze
high in the trees,

                                a car passing somewhere,
the darkness, for a moment,

                                                     quiet as history,
their glowing eyes—
                                        before they returned to their work,

+


as, the next morning,
                                          I’d return to mine
picking cold, wet trash from the lawn,
                                                                     filling fresh
black bags with it,
                                   hosing down the driveway,

+

while my wife slept in,
and the raccoons,
                                  fat and satisfied, dozed
in a black drain somewhere,
                                                    and Seneca stayed dead
in the book on the table by the bed,
                                                                having shown
with his friends

                                 a correct awareness
for the truth of power
                                          and the rightness of the state.

A chance so close to zero, zero’s a baby
pool shoved against your screen door

thirty-six thousand feet below this airplane
where a preschooler chokes on a pretzel.

Every passenger stands, clutching
their necks as the mother scrapes her finger

down the girl’s throat. “You’re living in despair,”
the psychiatrist said back home. Long after

she forgets she once stopped breathing,
the girl asks if a plane ever falls from the sky.

“Sometimes it does,” you say. “Sometimes it does.”
One in eleven million. And when she says,

“They’ll catch us, the yellow trees,” you see
the start of a ginkgo tunnel: You haven’t lost

a baby. You go to work, sell tires, rinse
your feet at dusk in your makeshift plastic

pond, where soon all the suns will float:
the bright petals you won’t win, but find.

You were a witness
To so many crimes
In your lifetime, my friend,
No wonder most nights
You can be found
Testifying in a trial
In some country
Whose language
You don’t understand.

The proceedings
Interminably slow
With more corpses
Being dragged in
Their ghastly wounds
As you recall them
In your own eyes
And news photographs.

You’ll be asked
To return tomorrow
So once more
You’ll crawl out of bed
And grope your way
Toward the silent
Crowded courtroom
They’ve set up
Just down the hall.

Some people are not destined for happiness,
            and I may be one of them.

You see, in certain parts of the world where
            I have been and now live,

at least in my dreams, happiness is only
               granted to a woman 

who leaves a dish of mashed peas out in
               the moonlight overnight.

But superstition does not name what moon
               phase or if one must

eat the peas. Instructions too vague.
               Peas uneaten. Moon dark.

No happiness yet. I’d ask my nana if she
               were still here,

but she was the one who gauged oven heat
               with a bent elbow

and said happiness was to bake a cake
               until done.