From where are we getting this information? A woman god?
I don’t think so. 

Fem greatness only ever declines on this graph
showing allowable outcomes. 

Know-it-all women decline know-it-all men 
because know-it-all men know so little it’d fit in a rice pot. 

I make my facts and data from internal sources, secret sauces.
I know better. No one knows better one’s own side of things

but knowing how to convince the true authority
on the matter that you are  

the true authority on the matter—
well…. Haven’t we all fallen for that, once?

Off-grid, between us, can you imagine knowing yourself
well enough to believe you know others as well?

This Very Dance called Every Rise, Each Fall. The one 
you must know and show in order to get anywhere in this society. 

In this stinkin’ society where you can’t even say the word
religion (doesn’t matter which) without your back

seizing up out of nowhere. I don’t know if we’re in the middle
of the ending or the beginning of some new concussion. 

I have my doubts. I think we might be fucked. 
We need some woman-greatness.

Some entity that won’t exist unless we all come together
and wish very hard for her to swim 

to our dreamy poolsides. She’d come in summer,
while everyone still wishes very hard to have a fun time.

To relax, melt in the sun, miss work. 
Float free in the water, alive-alive, not think about 

who got shot, who next, and who is right now
falling from the sky, from one side to the other one side. 

Still they ask in podcast
and electronic ink: How are you doing?

And they keep you in their hearts, pump you
to their minds, circulate you unimagined.

Take all the space you need, they say, 
empathy loves the damaged.

You offer no solutions. Only clarity
they don’t believe, only they
get to tell the future
what to be.

Then they pump you
into their viscera, and feel you
bilious, ineffable, cast iron, butterfly.

Their questions like a shovel
that doesn’t know what earth is,
but digging anyway.

They hope you would say:
“I am multigenerational
and can fracture natural
bonds in my DNA,”

for this they can sell
to a tycoon press, a Carnegie
of thought dissemination.

And your answer comes:
“Things are a seasickness
and no land in sight.

Your peeping is no witness.”

^{I.M. of David Ferry}

The mouths of the bankers are closed. The secret
Police dream of hanging and hang. The gallows

Lay down upon the hill and refuse the money
They are paid. The drowsy crows stand on the eaves,

Ridges, and composed light in mudpuddles
With their dark, wet gold out, bartering

With the wind. Money is finally no good
Here. The offered lamb, only a rumor

Of its death, the black smoke of him now nothing
More than the night extended. Sleep. The dogs

Regard the night joyfully because the dead
Let them rest in the alleys beneath the loud gods

That have gone quiet in the sky. House and vulture
Veil whatever aches or bleeds. The good axe,

The bow, the wagon, the viper forget—
As everything at rest forgets what it has

Maimed or killed. The eyes of the poor, for once,
Are bruised like eyes of the rich—only with sleep.

Come, Gods of the Night, enter here, touch
One of your sleepless clients. His head

Is a rose being burned alive. His mother 
Calls out from her urn, telling him to find her, 

As death has, does, finds, walking, not
Knowing whether … Gods of the Night,

Take this man I love who’s being promoted
Beyond his commas and the little motions

Of light on the ceiling, which is his mother
Calling him, take him now to her. Without his rose.

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

of that old feeling of being
in love, such a rusty
feeling, rusty,

functionless
toy. In odd

sequential dreams
I can still love.
Love in the old way.

Here is a sweet lozenge.
Here is some broth,

on whose surface
I have floated
edible flowers.

I can feel the old feeling
where I used to feel it,

in my chest. 
In the dream I feel it,
but when I wake

the feeling is gone.
There isn’t a word

for the feeling that replaces it.
Not numbness or emptiness.
It is a nameless feeling.

Racy in its own way.
A racy new toy.

^{For Norman}

You visit me in a dream after passing,
            after I’ve been awaiting you for weeks,
because Chinese belief teaches us our
            loved ones will appear when we’re asleep.
It’s real when I enter the hotel restaurant
            in the middle of nowhere town I live in,
as the Midwest architecture transforms
            into Kowloon at evening time. We eat
bird’s nest soup, and I remember the time
            my father ordered me this four-hundred-
year-old delicacy at Hong Kong airport.
            Out comes the Peking duck, and I ask you:
“Why did it take you so long?” You answer:
            “I arrived once you were strong and ready.” 

Foresee how dried, yellowed,
with neglect, think

of the hands that made them,
not with love, with certainty,

the leather smooth decades later,
the pages warm as wood,

the thought reaching a seed
that fell from a bird’s flight,

a hoof tucking it in folds of loam,
wispy roots sending it deeper

into the dark, the thought
like a hair in your throat.

Earth knows no such ambivalence,
good to itself, mending,

dampening sends you to self-
ignited forests, hordes fleeing,

blazes in what was there before
mouths came to call them eyes,

fear and fire, how close
the thought wanders into flood

and drought and motions
attributed to a fist-sized heart.

All those rocked, senses quaked,
those eyes flooding and welling

add up to a stone rolling
down a mountainside

into salt water, the sum the size
of a cloud or glacier thawed.

Shut the book, the thought
writes itself like yeast;

seam the sky, a smoky tail,
fastened by the measure of limitation.

And you the world’s watcher,
moments at the mirror
allowed as achievement,

the wisp of wheat (highlights)
in the coffee of her hair,

the two of you hand in hand
across a window display,

a clip from that day in Eden
the short footage of days recalled—

all illuding fingers,
hidden under the sheet’s grain.

There is a tumor in my sacroiliac joint 
and snowflakes in my coffee. 

I’m in Iowa with the cats
and you’re in Pompeii.

You send a video: lizards rushing into limestone
which remind you of being a kid in Florida. 

In Florida we memorized sonnets
while leaping around green anoles. 

I’ve forgotten the poems. 
Your black tights, even in that heat. 

Mostly that’s what I remember.
It’s okay to say it straight. 

Like: I’m scared, still,
that I might be dying. 

Pomegranates growing from Pompeiian ash, 
scandalizing propriety—

you send a picture and I do not say,
It just looks like a tree

or Another of God’s secrets 
wasted on me. 

Which part of the mind 
gets you to the soul?

I am reading St. John of the Cross,
a character you might’ve put in a poem:

In the evening of life,
we will be judged on love alone. 

Some petrified dog. Table bread,
a painted doorway. 

You’ve been with me forever.
You know all my angels.

How could I say no to you, 
taking off your earrings to kiss me?

^{Roosevelt Island, New York City}

^{The fourth is freedom from fear . . .
—Pres. Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
Annual Message to Congress January 6, 1941}

^{The weed is the Nemesis of human endeavor . . .
—Henry Miller}

Then—as if someone had switched on a black light in the sky—
 
the traceries of dread just visible all around her, the curving
       trajectories of each possible disaster
 
once seen, now indelible
 
*
 
Bristling stems of mugwort sheared to resemble a lawn
 
rhizomatic: ineradicable
 
each torn scrap giving rise 
to a new plant
 
hundred 
handed
 
*
 
The Penitentiary Hospital
The New York City Lunatic Asylum 
The Blackwell Island Workhouse 
The Smallpox Hospital
The Charity Hospital
 
“our standing army of paupers, criminals, and sick poor” 
 
This whole repurposed
Island
 
dry sponge of rootstalks, map
 
of the neural pathways 
tunneled out
 
by fear
 
*
 
Her eight-year-old at the beach adorning
 
his ring of sandcastles with bits of shell and twig reciting the “Day 
of Infamy” speech, “we will not only defend ourselves
 
to the uttermost
but will make it very certain
 
that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.” The crumbling 
gray crenellations
 
*
 
The smallpox 
hospital “our only 
landmarked ruin”
 
“No Trespassing: Structure is unstable” the winsome
 
insinuations 
of bindweed
 
at its feet
its gaping gneiss face blushed
 
with Virginia creeper its body a copse of sumac
 
*
 
In Korea, smallpox is referred to as “Your Majesty” in an effort to 
      appease the god.
 
Eradicated circa 1980. 
Who now will ride
 
the horses made of straw 
made to tempt the smallpox
 
spirits to ride home? 
 
*
 
Plaques of cellophane 
 
stillness
subdue the East River
 
The tram released like a dispensation across the swollen sky “the line
      of flight
 
is part of the rhizome. These lines 
always tie back to one another.”
 
Garbage circulating underground 
soundlessly, a system
 
of pneumatic tubes
 
*
 
The monument’s honed granite 
perpendiculars
 
a luxury of specific intention, like all luxuries most
 
poignant at its defined 
edges, subject
 
to encroachment, exhaustion
 
riprap
loosestrife, prostrate spurge