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my wife’s bare footprints on these rocks after she’s been swimming where the river has dug a small pool by the road outside Bearsville it looks like rain    no    it’s raining    should I follow these delicate marks to find her no    she’s just ten feet away    and she turns back    green bathing suit    thin legs    orange and black towel    it stops raining    her footprints going away have evaporated but of course she makes new ones heading toward me    there are certain moments you stay in even as they’re gone    like wet prints on rock or the way you cannot forget your dead friends

Bungle is the password A slight matter of a deposit secures you the night's blank face on the large crude banknote I offer all the grease that's ever been on my palm as advice: Don't breathe in the lights of evening Moonshine hits the can bounces off and consumes the drapes I'm talking about here where we meet at the emergency water supply One man and one woman gets you one of each and some shadows A caress in the breeze A caress please so much? You can't even die without touching, you can't sweeten the fat street of faces without touch I don't retain the melody that set me, dressed as I am, in motion in marriage with myself It ain't no honeymoon to take off my breast and play it So it happens you notice me in my canary shorts and my crimson fez Twunk twunkity twunk My thumb piano, my very open eyes

Brimming the trees with song they flood July, spill over into August pulsing lovecries, cicadas here—one that our cat brought me lay, legs folded neatly, on clear wings as on a shroud, green and white, fizzing now and then, but when I threw it spread wings and zagged in a wide curve into the sweetgum tree where presently its dry buzzsaw whined for some significant other to auger down into dark dense earth and gnaw at the roots of things, sans eyes, sans wings, sans song for seventeen years or so. As daylight sharpens, deer slip back into the woods. I wonder what a deer, when danger grows too bright, makes of a world whose darker, truer memories in ear and nose must solve the dazzle of our alien eyes, more surgical at stripping off its cover, at masking selves as downwind leaves. I’ve read somewhere the claim, by computer people, that pain cannot be felt until self-consciousness has been achieved, and they had programmed in that level, so they said, of artificial pain. In A. R. Luria’s book The Mind of a Mnemonist

We came so trustingly, for love, but these Lowlands, flatlands, near beneath the sea Point with their cautionary bones of sand To exorcize, submerge us; we stay free Only as mermaids glittering in the waves: Mermaids of the imagination, young A spring ago, who know our loveliness Banished, like fireflies at winter’s breath, Because none saw; these vines about our necks We placed in welcome once, but now as wreath Against the scalpel cold; still cold creeps in To grow like ivy over our chilling bodies Into our blood. Now in our diamond dress We wive only the sequins of the sea. The lowlands have rejected us. They lie Athwart the whispering waters like a scar On a mirage of glass; the dooming land, Where nothing can take root but frost, has won. And what of warmth and what of joy? They are Sequestered elsewhere, southward, where the sun Speaks. For all our mermaid vigilance And balance, all goes under; underneath The land’s gray wave we falter and fall back To hibernate within the caves of death.

"The younger brother roasted a breast of Pishiboro's elephant wife and handed Pishiboro some, which he presently ate. Then the younger brother said in a voice full of scorn. 'Oh you fool. You lazy man. You were married to meat and you thought it was a wife.'" FROM A MYTH OF THE BUSHMEN Poised upside down on its duncecap, a shrunken purple head, True Blueberry, enters its tightening frame of orange lip, and the cream of a child’s cheek is daubed with Zanzibar Cocoa, while Here at the Martha Washington Ice Cream Store we outdo the Symbolistes. a fine green trickle— Pistachio? Mint Julep? Words have colors, and colors are tasty. sweetens his chin. In front of me Licorice teeters like a lump of coal on its pinkish base of Pumpkin. A Rauschenberg tongue fondles this rich donnée , then begins to erase it. Turning from all that is present in the flesh, so to speak, let the eye wander off to a menu, where it can start to ingest “Quite Sour Lemon sherbet topped with a stem cherry and chocolate sprinkles Swilling in language, all floating in bubbly cherry phosphate the bloated imagination is urged to open still wider and shovel it in, and served with a twist of pretzel.” In this world “Creamy Vanilla and Smooth Swiss Chocolate ice creams” can be “blended with chopped pineapple, dark fudge sauce, ripe bananas, whipped topping, cookies, roasted nutmeats and nippy chopped cherries.” the Unconscious, that old hog, being in charge here of the creative act. At about the moment my tastebuds receive a last tickle of Gingersnap and begin to respond to Orange Fudge, I look at you who have bought my ice cream cones for twenty years, Moving another new ice to the mouth we needn’t remember and look away it is always the same mouth that melts it. My mind assembles a ribald tower of sherbet dips, all on one cone, Apricot, Apple, Tangerine, Peach, Prune, Lime, and then it topples. You are steadier than I. You order one dip always, or, in a dish, two dips of the same flavor. In this hysterical brilliance of neon Come on, consumers, we’ve got to keep scooping it is twelve or fifteen of us to thirty ice creams. so that the creams shall not rise like cold lava out of their bins, numbing our feet, our knees, freezing our chests, our chins, our eyes, Open the door, quick, and let in two handholding adolescents. Coping with all those glands makes them good and hungry. so that, flying out of their cannisters, the chopped nuts shall not top off our Technicolor grave with their oily ashes. Listen! All around us toothsome cones are suffering demolition down to the last, nipple-like tip. How do we know where to stop? Perhaps the glasses and dishes are moulded of candy, and the counters and windows… Over your half-eaten serving of Italian Delight, why are you looking at me the way you are looking at me?

My friend was in a coma, so I dove Deep into his brain to word him back. I tried To sing Hallelujah, I Just Love Her So in Ray Charles’s voice. Of course the silence grew. I couldn’t sing the alphabet song. My voice Couldn’t say words I knew:Because I Could Not Stop for Death, He Kindly Stopped for Me

I passed through, I should have paused, there were a hundred doors. One opened. In there, someone whose name is not yet known to me lived out his middle years in simple terms, two chairs, one place laid for early breakfast, one plate with dry toast and butter softening. There his mind raced through writings he had memorized long ago while he tried to get hold of himself. Once in his youth he had studied with love in the corners of old paintings matrices of fields and towns, passages intricate and particular, wheat, columns, figures and ground, classically proportioned in lines that were meant to meet, eventually, at vanishing point. They continued, nevertheless; they troubled the eye. He collected sets of books printed in the nineteenth century, unyielding pages, memoirs of the poets, engravings of rurified private subjects in times of public sector unhappiness, frescoes of human oddity in gatefold printing. Why does it continue to chasten me, he says to no one. It does. It is a painful mistaking, this setting something down, saying aloud, “it is nothing yet” when he’d meant, not anything— but then nothing peered through the keyhole, nothing took possession. Snow on the roofs, snow in traces on the ground, passersby with wet trouser-cuffs looking to the pavement as the hill rises, light gathering in the river and gradually spreading.

My mother is dying of too much electricity on the brain, my father, a limp in his walk,& my macho lost his green card at a bus station. I want words split letter for letter to turn sound into wisdom on my losses. • My macho says:Your skin is the color of milk, you glow between sheets. ¿Who gives more light: me, or the luna lunera? Too much milk makes you sick — drink, drink, cascabelera. • I want to leave my hembra behind. ¿What are my options? She bleeds on the rug, births a litter, then hides limp bodies in kitchen cabinets. • I lied. My father is dying of too much electricity on the brain, my macho, a limp in his walk,& my mother lost her green card at a bus station. Who these losses happened to matter to no one but me. To others, my loss is only worth its sum parts. • I pour a shot to get the flies drunk. Watch their little legs stagger. I like the flies tipsy, like my macho likes me when I am glazed on the kitchen floor, begging him not to leave me. • Come kill me over the stove, under the running shower head, gravel my skin bloody. I am so afraid one night my macho will choke me to death, though I am not afraid of dying. • My macho says:Hembra, I imagine the woman I love when I’m with you, but you’re not that woman. I ask:Who is she? My macho says:Cállate, take off your dress. Each of   his fingers strokes death. I only want to die. So I die, una y otra vez.

At bedtime, my grandson’s breath rasps in and out of fragile lungs. Holding the nebulizer mask over his nose and mouth, I rock him on my lap and hum a lullaby to comfort him. The nebulizer hisses as steroids stream into his struggling chest, and suddenly he also starts to hum, his infant voice rising and falling on the same few notes—some hymn he must have learned while in the womb or carried here from where he was before— a kind of plainsong, holy and hypnotic in the dark.

Setting a trotline after sundown if we went far enough away in the night sometimes up out of deep water would come a secret-headed channel cat, Eyes that were still eyes in the rush of darkness, flowing feelers noncommittal and black, and hidden in the fins those rasping bone daggers, with one spiking upward on its back. We would come at daylight and find the line sag, the fishbelly gleam and the rush on the tether: to feel the swerve and the deep current which tugged at the tree roots below the river.