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The sun got its new angel wings tee-shirt smudged with the sandbox’s finest demi-mud. This would render appearances partial, with a cornball’s incongruence. Sidewalk chalk radioactive Well, we’ll never write that letter to the lozenges, I mean that shrinking postcard on the way to Saturn Will someone please hand me my martini, so I can make it through this The                                       awful ordeal? title                                Name there placed                                   in the palm the                                                of your natural action                                                         tremor off-center rendering that floating green eye, well it floated off onto some bell somewhere Yesterday’s duck seemed to have three parents: a vulture a turkey, & a something a plastic shapeliness unaccountably signaling Dark Star Winged creatures suspend shyness & we were stabbed with permission all over & again, the assemblages of guilt frozen in dispossession Did that closet just murmur? “No mere solar beam can harm the lord of photosynthesis” “No barrier can stop one who dwells between all boundaries” “Welcome back to life, my former foes” “& be tied to the end of your string / flying in the air babes at night” 9/4/16 Tompkins Square Park

The image that haunts me is not beautiful. I do not think it will open into a field of wildflowers; I doubt that it will take wing suddenly, startling us into admiration. It is one of those brutish facts of life, the awkward nakedness of the memory when it takes off its clothes and crawls between the top and bottom sheet. Or rather, It is my mother’s memory that I carry, pressed into my own: how at her grandfather’s funeral, his daughter—my mother’s mother— stood at an open door and cried, and then The blood ran down her legs, gushing from the womb where thirteen children had nestled, and now, at once horrified and at ease with her body’s impropriety, they gathered all around. This was the grandmother who lost three of those thirteen, who hung a million baskets of wash, who peeled a million potatoes, and splattered her arms with the grease of constant cooking. This was my grandmother who kept chickens, who left her voice in the throats of all my aunts, and was struck down in the cellar, legs twisted beneath the fall and half her face stiffened. Helpless until they found her, the jar of canned fruit smashed on the cement. And then at her funeral, I saw my mother’s tears, gliding ahead of me in a black limousine, a procession not beautiful but haunting.

Chemicals ripen the citrus; There are rattlesnakes in the mountains, And on the shoreline Hygiene, inhuman caution. Beef in cellophane Tall as giraffes, The orange-rancher’s daughters Crop their own groves, mistrustful. Perpetual summer seems Precarious on the littoral. We drive Inland to prove The risk we sense. At once Winter claps-to like a shutter High over the Ojai valley, and discloses A double crisis, Winter and Drought. Ranges on mountain-ranges, Empty, unwatered, crumbling, Hot colours come at the eye. It is too cold For picnics at the trestle-tables. Claypit Yellow burns on the distance. The phantom walks Everywhere, of intolerable heat. At Ventucopa, elevation Two-eight-nine-six, the water hydrant frozen, Deserted or broken settlements, Gasoline stations closed and boarded. By nightfall, to the snows; And over the mile on tilted Mile of the mountain park The bright cars hazarded.

Pale, then enkindled, light advancing, emblazoning summits of palm and pine, the dew lingering, scripture of scintillas. Soon the roar of mowers cropping the already short grass of lawns, men with long-nozzled cylinders of pesticide poking at weeds, at moss in cracks of cement, and louder roar of helicopters off to spray vineyards where braceros try to hold their breath, and in the distance, bulldozers, excavators, babel of destructive construction. Banded by deep oakshadow, airy shadow of eucalyptus, miner’s lettuce, tender, untasted, and other grass, unmown, luxuriant, no green more brilliant. Fragile paradise. .   .   .   . At day’s end the whole sky, vast, unstinting, flooded with transparent mauve, tint of wisteria, cloudless over the malls, the industrial parks, the homes with the lights going on, the homeless arranging their bundles. .   .   .   . Who can utter the poignance of all that is constantly threatened, invaded, expended and constantly nevertheless persists in beauty, tranquil as this young moon just risen and slowly drinking light from the vanished sun. Who can utter the praise of such generosity or the shame?

Born into each seed is a small anti-seed useful in case of some complete reversal: a tiny but powerful kit for adapting it to the unimaginable. If we could crack the fineness of the shell we’d see the bundled minuses stacked as in a safe, ready for use if things don’t go well.

California night. The Devil’s wind, the Santa Ana, blows in from the east, raging through the canyon like a drunk screaming in a bar. The air tastes like a stubbed-out cigarette. But why complain? The weather’s fine as long as you don’t breathe. Just lean back on the sweat-stained furniture, lights turned out, windows shut against the storm, and count your blessings. Another sleepless night, when every wrinkle in the bedsheet scratches like a dry razor on a sunburned cheek, when even ten-year whiskey tastes like sand, and quiet women in the kitchen run their fingers on the edges of a knife and eye their husbands’ necks. I wish them luck. Tonight it seems that if I took the coins out of my pocket and tossed them in the air they’d stay a moment glistening like a net slowly falling through dark water. I remember the headlights of the cars parked on the beach, the narrow beams dissolving on the dark surface of the lake, voices arguing about the forms, the crackling radio, the sheeted body lying on the sand, the trawling net still damp beside it. No, she wasn’t beautiful—but at that age when youth itself becomes a kind of beauty— “Taking good care of your clients, Marlowe?” Relentlessly the wind blows on. Next door catching a scent, the dogs begin to howl. Lean, furious, raw-eyed from the storm, packs of coyotes come down from the hills where there is nothing left to hunt.

No matter if half the park is concrete and stanchions supporting a bridge, near industrial buildings yellow in the sun, their stalks of smoke soaring awake, next to empty lots and bus stops without seats or signs or schedules, near houses bright with paint the color of dented cans of Spam, men walking the streets to work look longingly towards their doors. No matter if all the murals decay and the statue of Zapata falls, more months pile to be swept, and years ironed, folded, and put away in drawers, and if jail bars bite off chunks of your view, remember a wise gambler's words on craps: call for the dice back. And between rolls, wipe the dust off the dice, as bills coil a foot in the wind because life is a wild emotion lying in the grass, soon to be green. Not even bags of chips, cheetahs with wind, avoid being tackled, gouged, and ripped apart. We all eventually submit, are arched over by a hyena grin and growl in the sun. Soon the spots will show and the world will pull tight with relief as the jungle rallies around us, as we smile now and cry later.

1 In the rheumatic heat of July, when Public Enemy blared on the blasters in a time when arbitrage and foreign policy were bureaus of each other, I made a wrong turn off Broadway and wound up at St. John the Divine where I sat in the hot dark until the traffic died. * And a voice comes over some columns to the breeze of the Golden Horn over the cypress groves and flowing bougainvillea where the bright blue weather and the old seawalls come together, where crates of cardamom and musk are piled and the cattle hang in blood above the brass, where the grain boats stink and red pleasure barges drift where Jason sailed for his fleece— a voice comes out of the dead water. In great Sophia light pours in rosy bars on the porphyry and the green marble till the air blooms, and a chrysalis of lit crosses makes circles in the air. Light falls through the lunettes like arrows of gold that could’ve sneaked up the Virgin’s dress. Had the Holy Ghost flitted in it would’ve been lost in the glare and the kiss of peace Justinian blew from the ambo. * Incantations flutter and rhyme in the apse like wings in a cloud of incense thinning on the gold-leafed vaults where the tongue’s vibration lingers in the upper air, and rises and rises as if the dome could open to a half-hemisphere of heaven where in the translucent glitter of the Kingdom the Saints are poised in gracious robes with their thousand-year-frozen faces— the one truth glued on the grout of their lips. 2 I sit with the incense of memory, and a bath of dark pours from the vaults above the pew Outside, boutiques of money collide with the street fires in Harlem, whole skyscrapers are levitated by arbitrage, and the only inside takeover I can negotiate is myself in this pew with my herringbone jacket which I should chuck in the Salvation Army bin down the block, so I could join the line of choir- boys in their last innocent ritual as they stand before the mounted sermon sign “he shall bring forth judgment unto truth” (Isaiah 42:3). The Puritans because they believed God’s altar needs not their polish lifted the boulder of truth higher than the glittering face of the Nazarene once leaded in glass. For the spirit they swallowed stones and shattered all the panes. But beneath the lavender arch of a Canon Table in an old Gospel I once tasted the consubstantial dewdrop in the faded color of a peacock’s wing. So while a stone sinks to the bottom of my river, a peacock’s wing floats by the shore. Who tells it like it is: Isaiah or Procopius? 3 I started walking backward down the aisle when I heard and thought I saw in the strange fenestration of that light— a voice, first incoherent, and then sharp as if it were in my ear There is no reign that executes justice and judgment; is that why you whine?

You may hear that your heartbeat is uneven and let new tension climb around your shoulders, thinking you've found the trick for going mad. But try to keep a grip on where you are. Remember: all around you is pure city; try to stay alert. On the wide streets, so empty late at night, streaking in glass, the color of an alley, or the fall of a sideways flicker from a neon sign may utterly and briefly disconcert you— but as you go, you'll find that noise is worse. Prepare for noise. But never scream. Even tensing ears too far in advance can sharpen sirens, and as for horns. ... When you're back to your normal rhythm after such encounters, just try to stay alert. You'll never know exactly who is coming up behind you, but the sudden movement of pedestrians will finally, of course, be what disarms you.

in a Tex-Mex restaurant. His co-workers, unable to utter his name, renamed him Jalapeño. If I ask for a goldfish, he spits a glob of phlegm into a jar of water. The silver letters on his black belt spell Sangrón. Once, borracho, at dinner, he said: Jesus wasn’t a snowman. Arriba Durango. Arriba Orizaba. Packed into a car trunk, he was smuggled into the States. Frijolero. Greaser. In Tucson he branded cattle. He slept in a stable. The horse blankets oddly fragrant: wood smoke, lilac. He’s an illegal. I’m an Illegal-American. Once, in a grove of saguaro, at dusk, I slept next to him. I woke with his thumb in my mouth. ¿No qué no tronabas, pistolita? He learned English by listening to the radio. The first four words he memorized: In God We Trust. The fifth: Percolate. Again and again I borrow his clothes. He calls me Scarecrow. In Oregon he picked apples. Braeburn. Jonagold. Cameo. Nightly, to entertain his cuates, around a campfire, he strummed a guitarra, sang corridos. Arriba Durango. Arriba Orizaba. Packed into a car trunk, he was smuggled into the States. Greaser. Beaner. Once, borracho, at breakfast, he said: The heart can only be broken once, like a window. ¡No mames! His favorite belt buckle: an águila perched on a nopal. If he laughs out loud, his hands tremble. Bugs Bunny wants to deport him. César Chávez wants to deport him. When I walk through the desert, I wear his shirt. The gaze of the moon stitches the buttons of his shirt to my skin. The snake hisses. The snake is torn.