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For Timothy Yu For us. They say: just dig your hands into the good, good soil of the field and you will grow into a child of our heart. Be quiet and work, for you are good at it, for you are almost a child of our heart already. Listen and we will reward you. We will reward you, but don’t talk — you will want to have earned the reward. We will reward you later, much, much later. Are you not a child of the field, a child native to the field? But I have never seen the field. I was born in it but squeezed my eyes shut. I squeezed my eyes hard shut so I could imagine another field....

While the Doormat asks neurotic questions about his ex, the Dream Girl looks at her watch if her man brings up the ex, and if the man ever says, “Everyone was in love with my ex,” a Dream Girl won’t ask for a photo, but if a photo of the ex is provided, the Dream Girl won’t demean the appearance of the ex because her man will likely rush to his ex’s defense. The lesson is that when a man considers his ex a prize looks have little to do with it, for when a woman acts like a prize a man can forget he’s with a battle axe. What should you say when he asks questions about your ex? Remember you’re a prize, so you needn’t report that your ex stole appliances or defaulted on child support or that your ex has a Mafioso brother doing time for racketeering or that your ex is “still stalking you” — because your man will not find these ex stories charming, if he’s classy, so what you say about your ex is simply, “We wanted different things,” or, alternatively, “My ex and I went separate ways.” It’s none of his business: your ex and all the vicissitudes of your past, like the jewelry your ex gave you which you pawned, or your violent fantasies about your ex because inquiring minds don’t need to know. Did you know that exes are a common conversation topic among men: “You remember my ex, the one who snapped ... ?” they might say, referring to the “terrible” ex who was “possessed by demons,” thus causing the inevitable ex- tramarital affair? Of course he never had anything to do with his ex’s transformation, he was a perfect angel, but lo and behold, the ex- orcist was suddenly required! Women believe these narratives and ex- coriate themselves if they’re Doormats, but love is beset by variables, and Dream Girls must take control in this world of unknowns.

(to remind myself) i Make a place to sit down. Sit down. Be quiet. You must depend upon affection, reading, knowledge, skill—more of each than you have—inspiration, work, growing older, patience, for patience joins time to eternity. Any readers who like your poems, doubt their judgment. ii Breathe with unconditional breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensioned life; stay away from screens. Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in. There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places. iii Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came.

Everything is perfect, dear friend. — KEROUAC Get some sleep. Don't give advice. Take care of your teeth and gums. Don't be afraid of anything beyond your control. Don't be afraid, for instance, that the building will collapse as you sleep, or that someone you love will suddenly drop dead. Eat an orange every morning. Be friendly. It will help make you happy. Raise your pulse rate to 120 beats per minute for 20 straight minutes four or five times a week doing anything you enjoy. Hope for everything. Expect nothing. Take care of things close to home first. Straighten up your room before you save the world. Then save the world. Know that the desire to be perfect is probably the veiled expression of another desire—to be loved, perhaps, or not to die. Make eye contact with a tree. Be skeptical about all opinions, but try to see some value in each of them. Dress in a way that pleases both you and those around you. Do not speak quickly. Learn something every day. (Dzien dobre!) Be nice to people before they have a chance to behave badly. Don't stay angry about anything for more than a week, but don't forget what made you angry. Hold your anger out at arm's length and look at it, as if it were a glass ball. Then add it to your glass ball collection. Be loyal. Wear comfortable shoes. Design your activities so that they show a pleasing balance and variety. Be kind to old people, even when they are obnoxious. When you become old, be kind to young people. Do not throw your cane at them when they call you Grandpa. They are your grandchildren! Live with an animal. Do not spend too much time with large groups of people. If you need help, ask for it. Cultivate good posture until it becomes natural. If someone murders your child, get a shotgun and blow his head off. Plan your day so you never have to rush. Show your appreciation to people who do things for you, even if you have paid them, even if they do favors you don't want. Do not waste money you could be giving to those who need it. Expect society to be defective. Then weep when you find that it is far more defective than you imagined. When you borrow something, return it in an even better condition. As much as possible, use wooden objects instead of plastic or metal ones. Look at that bird over there. After dinner, wash the dishes. Calm down. Visit foreign countries, except those whose inhabitants have expressed a desire to kill you. Don't expect your children to love you, so they can, if they want to. Meditate on the spiritual. Then go a little further, if you feel like it. What is out (in) there? Sing, every once in a while. Be on time, but if you are late do not give a detailed and lengthy excuse. Don't be too self-critical or too self-congratulatory. Don't think that progress exists. It doesn't. Walk upstairs. Do not practice cannibalism. Imagine what you would like to see happen, and then don't do anything to make it impossible. Take your phone off the hook at least twice a week. Keep your windows clean. Extirpate all traces of personal ambitiousness. Don't use the word extirpate too often. Forgive your country every once in a while. If that is not possible, go to another one. If you feel tired, rest. Grow something. Do not wander through train stations muttering, "We're all going to die!" Count among your true friends people of various stations of life. Appreciate simple pleasures, such as the pleasure of chewing, the pleasure of warm water running down your back, the pleasure of a cool breeze, the pleasure of falling asleep. Do not exclaim, "Isn't technology wonderful!" Learn how to stretch your muscles. Stretch them every day. Don't be depressed about growing older. It will make you feel even older. Which is depressing. Do one thing at a time. If you burn your finger, put it in cold water immediately. If you bang your finger with a hammer, hold your hand in the air for twenty minutes. You will be surprised by the curative powers of coldness and gravity. Learn how to whistle at earsplitting volume. Be calm in a crisis. The more critical the situation, the calmer you should be. Enjoy sex, but don't become obsessed with it. Except for brief periods in your adolescence, youth, middle age, and old age. Contemplate everything's opposite. If you're struck with the fear that you've swum out too far in the ocean, turn around and go back to the lifeboat. Keep your childish self alive. Answer letters promptly. Use attractive stamps, like the one with a tornado on it. Cry every once in a while, but only when alone. Then appreciate how much better you feel. Don't be embarrassed about feeling better. Do not inhale smoke. Take a deep breath. Do not smart off to a policeman. Do not step off the curb until you can walk all the way across the street. From the curb you can study the pedestrians who are trapped in the middle of the crazed and roaring traffic. Be good. Walk down different streets. Backwards. Remember beauty, which exists, and truth, which does not. Notice that the idea of truth is just as powerful as the idea of beauty. Stay out of jail. In later life, become a mystic. Use Colgate toothpaste in the new Tartar Control formula. Visit friends and acquaintances in the hospital. When you feel it is time to leave, do so. Be honest with yourself, diplomatic with others. Do not go crazy a lot. It's a waste of time. Read and reread great books. Dig a hole with a shovel. In winter, before you go to bed, humidify your bedroom. Know that the only perfect things are a 300 game in bowling and a 27-batter, 27-out game in baseball. Drink plenty of water. When asked what you would like to drink, say, "Water, please." Ask "Where is the loo?" but not "Where can I urinate?" Be kind to physical objects. Beginning at age forty, get a complete "physical" every few years from a doctor you trust and feel comfortable with. Don't read the newspaper more than once a year. Learn how to say "hello," "thank you," and "chopsticks" in Mandarin. Belch and fart, but quietly. Be especially cordial to foreigners. See shadow puppet plays and imagine that you are one of the characters. Or all of them. Take out the trash. Love life. Use exact change. When there's shooting in the street, don't go near the window.

Oh there once was a woman and she kept a shop selling trinkets to tourists not far from a dock who came to see what life could be far back on the island. And it was always a party there always different but very nice New friends to give you advice or fall in love with you which is nice and each grew so perfectly from the other it was a marvel of poetry and irony And in this unsafe quarter much was scary and dirty but no one seemed to mind very much the parties went on from house to house There were friends and lovers galore all around the store There was moonshine in winter and starshine in summer and everybody was happy to have discovered what they discovered And then one day the ship sailed away There were no more dreamers just sleepers in heavy attitudes on the dock moving as if they knew how among the trinkets and the souvenirs the random shops of modern furniture and a gale came and said it is time to take all of you away from the tops of the trees to the little houses on little paths so startled And when it became time to go they none of them would leave without the other for they said we are all one here and if one of us goes the other will not go and the wind whispered it to the stars the people all got up to go and looked back on love

If your mother’s like mine wanting you honeyed and blithe you’ll get cooked by getting evicted since the mothers can teach with a dustpan the tons of modes of tossing. And the fathers will lift your eyes too-early-too-open: the fathers can creep up on anything when it’s still too wet to cloister with their weeping and strand you like a seed or cook at the carnivals with the can-do caroling and storefronts and foodstuffs and annulments and Scotch and off-handed fucking and walking out and moving on until they’re cooking the drift of you wanting a whole bayou up in you and cooking and cooking the gist of you needing your crannies hot with a good man’s body-silt until your head is stuffed with a pining for diapers and the most minuscule spoons made mostly of silver and Ajax too and Minwax Oh in this the dumbstruck story of the American female as a cut of terracotta and some kindling in a dress while howling at the marrow of the marrow of the bone.

Measure two handfuls for a prosperous man. Place in pot and wash by rubbing palms together as if you can’t quite get yourself to pray, or by squeezing it in one fist. Wash several times to get rid of the cloudy water; when you are too high in Heaven, looking down at the clouds, you can’t see what’s precious below. Rinse with cold water and keep enough so that it will barely cover your hand placed on the rice. Don’t use hot water, there are metallic diseases colliding in it. This method of measuring water will work regardless of the size of the pot; if the pot is large, use both hands palms down as if to pat your own belly. Now place on high heat without cover and cook until the water has been boiled away except in craters resembling those of the moon, important in ancient times for growing rice. Now place lid on top and reduce heat to medium, go read your newspaper until you get to the comics, then come back and turn it down to low. The heat has been gradually traveling from the outside to the inside of the rice, giving it texture; a similar thing happens with people, I suppose. Go back to your newspaper, finish the comics, and read the financial page. Now the rice is done, but before you eat, consider the peasant who arcs in leech-infested paddies and who carefully plants the rice seedlings one by one; on this night, you are eating better than he. If you still don’t know how to cook rice, buy a Japanese automatic rice cooker; it makes perfect rice every time!

I can imitate the spheres of the model’s body, her head, Her mouth, the chin she rests at the bend of her elbow But nothing tells me how to make the pupils spiral From her gaze. Everything the eye sees enters a circle, The world is connected to a circle: breath spools from the nostrils And any love to be open becomes an O. The shape inside the circle Is a circle, the egg fallen outside the nest the serpent circles Rests in the serpent’s gaze the way my gaze rests on the model. In a blind contour drawing the eye tracks the subject Without observing what the hand is doing. Everything is connected By a line curling and canceling itself like the shape of a snake Swallowing its own decadent tail or a mind that means to destroy itself, A man circling a railway underpass before attacking a policeman. To draw the model’s nipples I have to let myself be carried away. I love all the parts of the body. There are as many curves As there are jewels of matrimony, as many whirls as there are teeth In the mouth of the future: the mute pearls a bride wears to her 
wedding, The sleeping ovaries like the heads of riders bunched in a tunnel. The doors of the subway car imitate an O opening and closing, In the blood the O spirals its helix of defects, genetic shadows, But there are no instructions for identifying loved ones who go crazy. When one morning a black man stabs a black transit cop in the face And the cop, bleeding from his eye, kills the assailant, no one traveling To the subway sees it quickly enough to make a camera phone 
witness. The scene must be carried on the tongue, it must be carried On the news into the future where it will distract the eyes working Lines into paper. This is what blind contour drawing conjures in me. At the center of God looms an O, the devil believes justice is shaped Like a zero, a militant helmet or war drum, a fist or gun barrel, A barrel of ruined eggs or skulls. To lift anything from a field The lifter bends like a broken O. The weight of the body Lowered into a hole can make anyone say Oh: the onlookers, The mother, the brothers and sisters. Omen begins with an O. When I looked into my past I saw the boy I had not seen in years Do a standing backflip so daring the onlookers called him crazy. I did not see a moon as white as an onion but I saw a paper plate Upon which the boy held a plastic knife and sopping meat. An assailant is a man with history. His mother struggles To cut an onion preparing a meal to be served after the funeral. The onion is the best symbol of the O. Sliced, a volatile gas stings The slicer’s eyes like a punishment clouding them until they see What someone trapped beneath a lid of water sees: A soft-edged world, a blur of blooms holding a coffin afloat. The onion is pungent, its scent infects the air with sadness, All the pallbearers smell it. The mourners watch each other, They watch the pastor’s ambivalence, they wait for the doors to open, They wait for the appearance of the wounded one-eyed victim And his advocates, strangers who do not consider the assailant’s funeral Appeasement. Before that day the officer had never fired his gun In the line of duty. He was chatting with a cabdriver Beneath the tracks when my cousin circled him holding a knife. The wound caused no brain damage though his eyeball was severed. I am not sure how a man with no eye weeps. In the Odyssey Pink water descends the Cyclops’s cratered face after Odysseus Drives a burning log into it. Anyone could do it. Anyone could Begin the day with his eyes and end it blind or deceased, Anyone could lose his mind or his vision. When I go crazy I am afraid I will walk the streets naked, I am afraid I will shout Every fucked up thing that troubles or enchants me, I will try to murder Or make love to everybody before the police handcuff or murder me. Though the bullet exits a perfect hole it does not leave perfect holes In the body. A wound is a cell and portal. Without it the blood runs With no outlet. It is possible to draw handcuffs using loops Shaped like the symbol for infinity, from the Latin infinitas Meaning unboundedness. The way you get to anything Is context. In a blind contour it is not possible to give your subject A disconnected gaze. Separated from the hand the artist’s eye Begins its own journey. It could have been the same for the Cyclops, A giant whose gouged eye socket was so large a whole onion Could fit into it. Separated from the body the eye begins Its own journey. The world comes full circle: the hours, the harvests, When the part of the body that holds the soul is finally decomposed It becomes a circle, a hole that holds everything: blemish, cell, Womb, parts of the body no one can see. I watched the model Pull a button loose on her jeans and step out of them As one might out of a hole in a blue valley, a sea. I found myself In the dark, I found myself entering her body like a delicate shell Or soft pill, like this curved thumb of mine against her lips. You must look without looking to make the perfect circle. The line, the mind must be a blind continuous liquid Until the drawing is complete.

be born: black as ants on a chicken bone black as Nina Simone and Mahalia’s moan black as rock pile smile and resilience black as resistance and rhythm and Sonny’s blues black as no shoes and dirt floors black as whore and Hottentot foxtrot Lindy Hop and Watusi pussy and pyramids black as darkness under your eyelids black between your legs black as dregs of rum sugarcane summer plums holyghost hum black as bruised throat fieldholla wading in the shallow black as ocean river stream creek running black transparent translucent transatlantic slanted shanties planted in red clay black as funky chickens and chitlins and kinfolk sold away black as auction block and slop and hip-hop and rock and roll and chop shop and cop cars and parole and overseer patrols and one drop rules and pools of blood black as beige and good hair and sounding white and light-skindeded and my grandmamma is Cherokee, Iroquois, Choctaw black as pit bulls and lockjaw and rage and hoodies black eyes and black-eyed peas peasy heads and loose tracks black as trees and noose and hounds let loose in the night black as fist and fight Sojourner and Nat Turner and righteousness black as fuck and not giving a fuck mud-stuck and quicksand quick hand hustle thigh muscle and hurdle black as cotton and tobacco and indigo black as wind and bad weather and feather and tar and snap beans in mason jars black as nigga please and hallelujah black asses and black strap molasses and turn your black back on audiences black as banjo and djembe and porch and stoop and spooks sitting by the door black as roaches in front of company and lawn jockeys and latchkey kids and high bids and spades and shittalk black as cakewalk and second line and black magic and tap dance, lapdance and alla that ass black as jazz and juke and juju and spirit disguised as harmonica spit black as cast-iron skillets and grits and watermelon seeds flitting from lips black as tambourines hitting cornbread hips black batons splitting lips and Martin Luther King, Jr. boulevards and downtown beatdowns black sit-ins and come-ups and oops upside yo’ heads and we shall overcomes and get down on it black get into it black let’s get it on and get it while the getting is good black as white hoods and backwood revivals black as survival and Trayvon and Tyrone and Josephus and amen and Moses and Jesus and getting over black—

for those of us who can’t quite quit her when the poem flirts similes hugging her thighs like a tight skirt: consider the possibilities. if the poem follows you home, whiskey pickling her tongue: make her coffee, black. if the poem arrives dressed as metaphor, begging for candy: trick or retreat till the mask falls. should the poem slink outta panties, stand naked demanding touch: finger her lines till her stanzas beg for an encore: come again, explore, imagine odd positions of sweet revision. and whenever she whispers, stop: listen and leave her be.