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I flew into Denver April. Rock salt and sand peppered the asphalt reflecting myself on a downtown street where I’d paused on my route to smell lilacs. The wanton winds chortled wickedly over remnant snows in gray clumps of doom and my heart soared gladly at winter’s death but an hour later I had whiskey breath at a dead end bar full of Indians. A Winnebago woman waltzed with me and told me how handsome I truly was so I bought her drinks and felt her hips and somewhere between the grinds and dips she lifted my wallet and split.

I forget the date: en route to Austin, Texas: soda on tray. Women at the computer, mexicanas learning to read and write at the same time, a workshop, we exchange stories the crossings: Hidalgo Texas Sonora Zacatecas Chihuahua—I think of my father, for a moment— I see him again, robust, alone, walks to the park, the heat dissolves the avenues. The Nomenclature cuts across the Arctic: snare the oil, gas lines, install the stations, derricks and surveillance towers, surveys, documents, classified pouches. Carry this microscopic fissure into South Asia. Diplomats—they say, so many teams of men, they orbit in silence and loud vests and helmets, they stoop with a sweetness and sift the granules, then, they rise, oblong, hunched, on fire, ready to dig into the ice, a new boundary for the national vortex, this undeclared war; the almost-uttered war, this war begins, listen. Listen closely— I hear a rap song in the distance: "I am standin' in Lebanon watchin' everbody get it on, why am I the only one singin' this desolation song...?"

One day the children played in the kitchen. in the cellar. in the yard. The yard looked like a meadow. a forest. an island in the sea. The children forgot their mud cakes, swing set, sticks, when a girl taught them cat’s cradles. clay people. folded paper boats. Late afternoon, whispering, they lay in a sandbox. on the sidewalk. in the grass. Each knew the others had a mother. a father. brothers, sisters, dogs. They traded blood oaths that foretold how close. how long. at what cost.

I found a four-leaf clover and was happy with my find, but with time to think it over, I’ve entirely changed my mind. I concealed it in my pocket, safe inside a paper pad, soon, much swifter than a rocket, my good fortune turned to bad. I smashed my fingers in a door, I dropped a dozen eggs, I slipped and tumbled to the floor, a dog nipped both my legs, my ring slid down the bathtub drain, my pen leaked on my shirt, I barked my shin, I missed my train, I sat on my dessert. I broke my brand-new glasses, and I couldn’t find my keys, I stepped in spilled molasses, and was stung by angry bees. When the kitten ripped the curtain, and the toast burst into flame, I was absolutely certain that the clover was to blame. I buried it discreetly in the middle of a field, now my luck has changed completely, and my wounds have almost healed. If I ever find another, I will simply let it be, or I’ll give it to my brother— he deserves it more than me.

carefully folded, swooned, postpartum posthaste— my letter to you, I gave— curious, you said uncanny you said the color of my eyes in this light is a different shade of green said you don't eat meat but you wear leather outside the birds & inside the sun on the chair & my thighs spread & stick to the plastic & you said you loved it & the ampersand & my swoon silently inside my skirt & the ochre on the building changes to umber in the light & the tree outside is bare & I am, my foot inside my slipper my toes curled behind & ow & yes & some days are sunny days & some days are

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges, I see my father strolling out under the ochre sandstone arch, the red tiles glinting like bent plates of blood behind his head, I see my mother with a few light books at her hip standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks, the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its sword-tips aglow in the May air, they are about to graduate, they are about to get married, they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are innocent, they would never hurt anybody. I want to go up to them and say Stop, don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman, he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things you cannot imagine you would ever do, you are going to do bad things to children, you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of, you are going to want to die. I want to go up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it, her hungry pretty face turning to me, her pitiful beautiful untouched body, his arrogant handsome face turning to me, his pitiful beautiful untouched body, but I don’t do it. I want to live. I take them up like the male and female paper dolls and bang them together at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to strike sparks from them, I say Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

I Google myself I want you to love me When I feel down I want you to Google me I search myself I want you to find me I Google myself I want you to remind me

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations "I grant you ample leave grant you ample leave In other words, to let you express your grand opinion To use the hoary hoary Ancient, worthy of respect for its age formula 'I am' Naming the emptiness where thought is not; But fill the void with definition, 'I' Will be no more a datum datum A single piece of data or information than the words You link false inference false inference In philosophy and logic, an inference is the act or process of deriving logical conclusions from premises known or assumed to be true. Inferences are typically evaluated to be valid or invalid. with, the 'Since' & 'so' That, true or not, make up the atom-whirl atom-whirl The orbital paths of electrons around the nucleus . Resolve your 'Ego' ‘Ego’ Latin for “I”. , it is all one web With vibrant ether clotted into worlds: Your subject, self, or self-assertive 'I' Turns nought but object, melts to molecules, Is stripped from naked Being with the rest Of those rag-garments named the Universe. Or if, in strife to keep your 'Ego' strong You make it weaver of the etherial light etherial light Heavenly light , Space, motion, solids & the dream of Time — Why, still 'tis Being looking from the dark, The core, the centre of your consciousness, That notes your bubble-world bubble-world : sense, pleasure, pain, What are they but a shifting otherness, Phantasmal flux Phantasmal flux A fantastic, ghostlike stream or flow of moments? —"

I had a tapeworm, and imagined it flat—paper-flat—like a strip of caps, pallid red, a quarter-inch wide with bulbous BB bullfrog eyes peeking out of my asshole as I lolled in a crowded fetid basement swimming pool (the kind that used to be in inner-city Ys: windowless; steamy; concrete-block moldings chalky-cracked), and you whom I’ve neither seen nor heard of for thirty years were saying I’d give everyone in the pool my tapeworm, which you knew had eaten my insides and now had threaded through both my intestines and was trying to get out. Where were we? Everyone was old, old— gray, infirm; flaccid and thin or fat and bald, all ill flesh drooping— the women in rubber-flowered bathing caps and black one-piece suits as if we were all on an outing from a nursing home. I couldn’t see myself to see how old I was, but you were thirty, at the peak of your beauty, as when you knelt naked on the motel room bed brushing out your thick dark waist-length hair after cheating on the lover you were cheating on your husband with, who was at that moment waiting for you in another motel room from which you had slipped to meet me secretly: a secret inside a secret, buried, encased, as if if we dug deep enough into it we’d find what we were trying to get or stop.

I had just hung up from talking to you and we had been so immersed in the difficulty you were facing, and forgive me, I was thinking that as long as we kept talking, you in your car in the parking lot of the boys’ school as the afternoon deepened into early evening, and me in the study, all the books around that had been sources of beauty to us, as long as we stayed in the conversation padded with history like the floor of the pine forest, as long as I thought out loud, made a joke at my own expense, you would be harbored in that exchange, but the boys were leaving the track and after we hung up I looked out the window to see the top of the bare January trees spotlit to silvery red, massive but made from the thinnest twigs at the ends of the branches at the ends of the limbs they were waving and shining in a light like no other and left only to them.