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Mary who mattered to me, gone or asleep among fruits, spilled in ash, in dust, I did not leave you. Even now I can't keep from composing you, limbs & blue cloak & soft hands. I sleep to the sound of your name, I say there is no Mary except the word Mary, no trace on the dust of my pillowslip. I only dream of your ankles brushed by dark violets, of honeybees above you murmuring into a crown. Antique queen, the night dreams on: here are the pears I have washed for you, here the heavy-winged doves, asleep by the hyacinths. Here I am, having bathed carefully in the syllables of your name, in the air and the sea of them, the sharp scent of their sea foam. What is the matter with me? Mary, what word, what dust can I look behind? I carried you a long way into my mirror, believing you would carry me back out. Mary, I am still for you, I am still a numbness for you.

After Alice Maher’s “Andromeda” Kind bolus of hair, we who have shoehorned ourselves into dream dresses, spooled Louis heels down fettled steps to grooms, or steeled ourselves in suits for the clinch, counter- signatures gripped in fists; we who have lain on carpets beside infants, parched for clear shocks of blue, feculence collecting in our drains, do not forsake us. Domesticated chyme, damp hank slap-lavished on pillow, pray for us. We who have fetched home inventing storage solutions, breaking up space, who feed you and braid you, scratch compact plans on compact days, give us thole to bear up. We’d bindle paradise and stow it where the dust bunnies futz, given leave. Swindle us, please, some less dear salvation. Croon of nootropics, caffeine, tacit utopia, game feel. How the way we live days is the means to live lives. Chevy us through. Tonight, in the kitchens where we make obstacles of each other, we’ll fiddle with the knobs of electrical cookers. Hobs simulacra for hobs, pixelating heat, steam, spall; tumble from above as if from nowhere. Let one of us fright, dash a palm too near. Let flesh char, hair. Give us our brimstone. Be in our waking.

Can the bald lie? The nature of the skin says not: it's newborn-pale, erection-tender stuff, every thought visible,—pure knowledge, mind in action—shining through the skull. I saw one, a woman, hairless absolute, cleaning. She mopped the green floor, dusted bookshelves, all cloth and concentration, Queen of the moon. You can tell, with the bald, that the air speaks to them differently, touches their heads with exquisite expression. As she danced her laundry dance with the motes, everything she ever knew skittered under her scalp. It was clear just from the texture of her head, she was about to raise her arms to the sky; I covered my ears as she prepared to sing, roar, to let the big win resonate in the little room.

For the earth has spoken, to you, her magma Creole. Full-throated syllables, up- rising from deep down, an honest elocution — rudimentary sound: guttural nouns, forthright, strong, the rumbled conviction of verbs unfettered by reticence as the first poetry of creation. A secret has passed between you so wonderfully terrible, it laid your cities prostrate, raptured your citizenry. Now, we look to your remnant courtesy cable TV and garble theories thinking ourselves saved. Only the wise among us pin our ears to the ground, listening in hope of catching even a half syllable of the language forming like a new world on your tongue.

Granma cautioned in a kitchen off Century and Hoover: Never throw your hair away. Burn it. Till yellow cornbread bakes and greens release pot liquor, her garnet-polished fingers unraveled each cornrow. Never throw your hair away, burn it till yellow flames flick up and turn orange, blue. Overhead, her garnet-polished fingers unraveled each cornrow, wrestling. I reminisce, standing over her deathbed. Rain picks up and turns ocher, blue. Unsaid were simple things. Oxtail stew and yam recipes I recollect, standing over her deathbed. She smoked Mores leaning in the kitchen doorjamb, when simple things — oxtail stew and yam recipes — were not measured nor written. Cooking while she smoked Mores leaning in the kitchen doorjamb, her left hand in the profound curve of her hip. She’d say, Chile, ma recipes are not measured nor written. Cooking while I sat alongside the stove waiting for the hot comb, meantime her left hand in the profound curve of her hip, she’d say, Chile, I may be dead and gone, but you mark my words. Sometimes I sat alongside the stove waiting for the hot comb, meantime I loved watching her smoking, cooking, talking with More fingers, I may be dead and gone, but you’ll mark my words. This time, she is quiet. I hold maroon-polished hands as her soul lifts, waits, lingers. I loved watching her smoking, cooking, talking with More fingers. Halcyon rain picks up, soaks me blue. Nothing unsaid. She is quiet. I hold maroon-polished hands as her soul lifts, waits, lingers, restful. I’m remembering — standing over her deathbed.

Hurt, hurtful, snake-charmed, struck white together half an hour we tear through the half-dark after some sweet core, under, over gravity, some white shore ... spin, hidden one,spin, trusted to me! laugh sore tooth sucked warm, sweet; sweet wine running cool through new dry shrewd turnings of my soul, opening veins. Gull-feathers beating, beating! Gliding. Still, sidelong eye ... wings beating like words against my eyes. And your eyes— o brother-animal, mild, terrible!—your eyes wait, have been waiting, knowing, unknowable, on that sky shore. A life is waiting. Its webbed hand reached out ... Trust me! truth- telling fish of the sky! your hand beyond my hand, your phosphorous trail broken, lost.

Customs and chemistry made a name for themselves and it was Spot. He's gone to some utopos now, the dirty dog, doctor of crotches, digger of holes. Your airy clarities be damned, he loved our must and our mistakes — why hit him, then, who did us good? He's dead, he ought to be at home. He's damned put out, and so am I. *       *       * When blue is carried out, the law is red. When noon is said and done, it's dusk again. The greed for table makes the greed for bed. So cave canem, even stars have litters — little lookers, cacklers, killers . . . Morning raises up the hackled men. (What's milk, among our ilk, but opportunity for spillers?) *       *       * He saved our sorry highfalutin souls — the heavens haven't saved a fly. Orion's canniness who can condone? — that starring story, strapping blade! — and Sirius is  just a Fido joke — no laughter shakes the firmament. But O the family dog, the Buddha-dog — son of a bitch! he had a funny bone —

I used to think that if I loved hard enough and long enough passion would always win out like the way I loved cologne, venturing teenaged into congested malls, abusing testers only a salesperson surly enough inquiring if he or she could help me in any way, spitting the prices of even the smallest bottles of the scents I had slathered on, forcing me out in a cloud of confidence that I was the Calvin Klein Man, not the Old Spice Man, not the Zest Man, and certainly not the My Drafty House Is Warmed Badly by Kerosene Heaters Man impervious to my real life where I would sneak down in the middle of the night, passing snow collecting on the inside of the window sill, trying to descend the stairs silently to complete the night lying before the stove’s vents blowing sooty warm air deep into my sleeping lungs, clutching a broken lacrosse stick to intimidate rats so brazen our housecats accepted them as equal occupants until I exit those automatic doors, leave fountains where just out of range I envy white families tossing entire cigarette packs’ worth of what they call spare change, wishing for things they could already buy if they wanted laughing as those presidential faces fall sometimes up and sometimes down, all drowning in three inches of chlorinated well water return to the reservation where my sister- in-law embraces me later the same day, drawing deeply, saying she loves the scent of burned heating oil on men, that it reminds her of when she and my brother dated and she would hold him long in those last moments before allowing him to walk out her door, meander through snowy grooves, finding his way home while she looked out windows where ice crystals gathered on the proper side of the pane holding her breath as long as she dared, letting his presence seep out only when she could no longer bear, leaving him to be a vapor ghost on her window, a fog sure to vanish even before she turned from the window and here I am years later living in that same state, you miles away and I, knowing how presence disperses into air, wonder how long I can hold my breath.

When everything finally has been wrecked and further shipwrecked, When their most ardent dream has been made hollow and unrecognizable, They will feel inside their limbs the missing shade of blue that lingers Against hills in the cooler hours before dark, and the moss at the foot of the forest When green starts to leave it. What they take into their privacy (half of his embrace, Her violence at play) are shadows of acts which have no farewells in them. Moons unearth them. And when, in their separate dwellings, their bodies Feel the next season come, they no longer have anyone to whom To tell it. Clouds of reverie pass outside the window and a strange emptiness Peers back in. If they love, it is solely to be adored, it is to scatter and gather Themselves like hard seeds in a field made fallow by a fire someone years ago set. In the quiet woods, from the highest trees, there is always something Weightless falling; and he, who must realize that certain losses are irreparable, Tells himself at night, before the darkest mirror, that vision keeps him whole. On the verge of warm and simple sleep they tell themselves certain loves Are like sheets of dark water, or ice forests, or husks of ships. To stop a thing Such as this would be to halve a sound that travels out from a silent person’s Thoughts. The imprint they make on each other’s bodies is worth any pain They may have caused. Quiet falls around them. And when she reaches For him the air greens like underwater light and the well-waters drop. They will see again the shadows of insects. They will touch the bark and feel each age of the tree fly undisturbed Into them. If what is no longer present in them cannot be restored, It can at least be offered. Through long bewildered dusks, stalks grow; Rains fill and pass out of clouds; animals hover at the edges of fields With eyes like black pools. For nothing cannot be transformed; Pleasure and failure feed each other daily. Do not think any breeze, Any grain of light, shall be withheld. All the stars will sail out for them.

If you sleep the night inside someone, her cells, saltwater-stained, fuse with yours like the blood of twins. Apes in Mauritania grow stronger, Galileo tells us, influenced by the sphere of angels. Here, then—thumbnail sketches for zoning changes along the riparian bank of the species boundary, for a chimera. Like fiber optics, human nerves lay along glassy bone