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Listen to the creepy proclamation, Blown through the lairs of the forest-nation —Vachel Lindsay 1 Who knows why my baby left me? Who knows where she could have gone? Is she hiding in the center Of some little-known downtown? Has she been seduced by villains? Have they got her gagged and bound? Vanished from the lost and found With no trace and no reminder . . . ? Yeah, she’s lost, but I will find her Down in the faraway suburbs. 2                        Puerto Rico In Guaynabo and Tao Baja The theorists and professors Are playing rhetorical poker With their identity cards, They are shooting wads of wisdom To impress the senile deans; Meanwhile, the good citizens Are all working for the government, Cheating on taxes and spouses Down in the faraway suburbs. 3                        New York The Greyhound wheezes its way From New York up to Poughkeepsie; I pass the time singing “Gypsy” By Fleetwood Mac, a cappella; And the watercolor landscape Falls apart on the gray planes; The diners and the dead-ends, The deserted factories, And the doors creak noisily Down in the faraway suburbs. 4 The are prehistoric skeletons At the beach on Staten Island And the jellyfish are dancing Slow, hydrochloric waltzes: There are Doric-style chalets With South American servants Where the little brothers play; Sniffing underarms and solvents While the dog shows off its teeth Down in the faraway suburbs. 5 Here the end of the expressway Gives way to medieval forests And correctional facilities And McDonald’s without tourists; I’m overwhelmed by the view Of the mansions on the plains, The housing projects, the flames Creeping through the dead of winter As the landfill burns tonight Down in the faraway suburbs. 6                        California In the righteous neighborhoods, Atherton, West Palo Alto, They’re paving over the asphalt With the gravel of privilege— All ones hears are the arpeggios Of the pre-recorded pianos, And the trembling of the hands That are serving themselves gin And the shot glass shattering Down in the faraway suburbs. 7 Far from all the shantytowns, In Millbrae and Redwood City, One more neighborhood committee Is creating civic centers And more monumental malls Catering to healthy pleasures: Peewee softball in the summers, Window-shopping, Cineplex, And those fruity Tex-Mex shakes Down in the faraway suburbs. 8 A distant, majestic Sun Licks the cliffs and the embankments, I search for your embalmed eye On the coast of the Pacific. Marin County  in particular Has its share of urban ghosts, Like those midget saxophonists Who long for their days of glory And are now telling their story Down in the faraway suburbs. 9 I’ve searched for you in each corner of This innocuous continent— Could it be you’re facing me? Could it be that you’re my neighbor? That the downtown and the eye balm And the grime that coats your hands Are all arcane holograms? That your epileptic smile Died that antiseptic night Down in the faraway suburbs.

Early in the morning a dough rises from the bowl curling upward. He clenches his fists of bean paste, his mouth dripping a black cocoa stream    ... Hey, I say, have you just smuggled nine knife mountains and nine oil pans from hell? Deep-fried ghosts are the sweetest the crispiest the most intelligent even in burned rims, and taste even better with soybean drinks. He droops his sad expressions like Oedipus’s crutch. Collapsed in the steamer, he squeaks out a sweet smell of duck soup from his soul — quack, quack. Translated from the Chinese

What seemed a mystery was in fact a choice. Insert bird for sorrow. What seemed a memory was in fact a dividing line. Insert bird for wind. Insert wind for departure when everyone is standing still. Insert three mountains burning and in three valleys a signal seer seeing a distant light and a signal bearer sprinting to a far-off bell. What seemed a promise was in fact a sigh. What seemed a hot wind, a not quite enough, a forgive me, it has flown away, is in fact. In the meantime we paint the floors red. We stroke the sound of certain names into a fine floss that drifts across our teeth. We stay in the room we share and listen all night to what drifts through the window— dog growl, owl call, a fleet of mosquitoes setting sail, and down the road, the swish of tomorrow’s donkey-threshed grain.

That sound Arvo Pärt does with one piano note stars split, fade, wander in cosmic expansion— First responder’s genesis and torch of metadatacrunch tumbling in a burnt and weedy churchyard equal parts Lethe and lithe— Grass, is it hollow, hallow to wake no longer among mortals? The woman her dress flowered from a blown ceiling silver-rosed— Flat plasm’s archangel coming clear out of sheetrock and screen shield and spear in hand let us do all the cooking if she will lead the pack, remember the route, read the waters— After the great fire we tread river’s late cream and flare. We woke in a city. Where who slew us into portions on a block out of earth gathered our limbs and we were allowed to continue unhunted. If “if” is the one word one is given with God to explain how one survived. Oh.  Ah.  Siren, white cockatoo meets deep blue. Fog.  Pour ammonia on coyote scat.

Alone in the library room, even when others Are there in the room, alone, except for themselves: There is the illusion of peace; the air in the room Is stilled; there are reading lights on the tables, Looking as if they're reading, looking as if They're studying the text, and understanding, Shedding light on what the words are saying; But under their steady imbecile gaze the page Is blank, patiently waiting not to be blank. The page is blank until the mind that reads Crosses the black river, seeking the Queen Of the Underworld, Persephone, where she sits By the side of the one who brought her there from Enna, Hades the mute, the deaf, king of the dead letter; She is clothed in the beautiful garment of our thousand Misunderstandings of the sacred text.

Praised be the moon of books! that doth above A world of men, the fallen Past behold, And fill the spaces else so void and cold To make a very heaven again thereof; As when the sun is set behind a grove, And faintly unto nether ether rolled, All night his whiter image and his mould Grows beautiful with looking on her love. Thou therefore, moon of so divine a ray, Lend to our steps both fortitude and light! Feebly along a venerable way They climb the infinite, or perish quite; Nothing are days and deeds to such as they, While in this liberal house thy face is bright.

A tail, a torso, a tiny face. A longing, a journey, a deep belief. A spawning, a fissioning, a bit of tissue anchored to a psyche, stitched to a wish. Watery. Irony. Memory. My mother, my face, and then the last thing she’d ever see, and then the last words I’d hear her say:You’re killing me

There she was standing over me. She inched her face close to my face. She put her hands on my face. I remembered her immediately, but did not speak. My eyes blurred. They were hot and heavy. It hurt to look at Ain’t Sally. It hurt to see. I closed my eyes. I felt her cool touch. She chanted. “You will be well. You will not die.Chim chukma taha che. You will be well.Chi pesa taha che.” She sang to me. Then I heard her leave. A woman whose bed was surrounded by white partitions, moaned again. This was not a new sound. It was a constant. Her breath whistled irregularly. There was no escaping the whistle. The whistling sounds were everywhere in the white room. Then they stopped. Another woman in another bed called out. No answer. She pushed the bell. Women wearing white dresses came into the room. They pushed the partitions back. They said the whistling woman was dead. I went back to sleep. Before the hospital. Before rheumatic fever. Before the dead woman. I had met Ain’t Sally. I was seven years old. Ain’t Sally was an ancient Indian relative who lived in Hayrick, outside of Dublin. A place of the Snakes. A place of memory. Once a base camp for nomadic tribes following buffalo, once a county seat, Hayrick, Texas took its name from a solitary mountain standing in the breadth of open grasslands. Only a state government road sign remains, marking the place of Hayrick. Marking the sign of the Snakes. The only time we visited Ain’t Sally, I rode in the back seat of our green 1950 Chevrolet, and listened to my Indian grandmother tell stories about our family. Chapters went like this: —Life in a  Dugout. —Making Lye Soap. —How Grandfather got VD. I don’t remember much of the drive to Hayrick. We drove the rural roads of West Texas. There were two lanes of dust and dirt, stagnant, green-belted river beds and one-lane bridges. When we arrived at Ain’t Sally’s the old woman ambled out of a rusted screen door of a paintless wooden house. Breasts sagging, her thin body lacking in strength seemed unable to support her weight. She wore a sleeveless dress that revealed naked brown skin, skin that was no more than a sheath for aging bones. Hairless underarms. She fed us saltine crackers and cold squirrel dumplings. She asked me questions. She asked me about my secrets. I don’t remember having any to tell. She told me hers while I ate. She said I reminded her of someone she’d seen a long time ago. I remember dancing for her. I told her I was a bird. A manbird. A hunter. I danced around the kitchen table and sang and pretended to be PowWow Dancer. A bird of dance. A bird of rhythm. When my mother and grandmother went to town, Ain’t Sally took me for a walk around her place. The farm had belonged to her relatives. We went down to the dry gorge and she pointed out all kinds of roots and trees. She asked me if I knew about the plants of the pasture. I said yes. I thought I was lying. As we walked farther from the house, I remember a hot gusty wind picked up her voice like dust tendrils on bedrock and blew it away from me. I ran to catch the sound. I found Ain’t Sally sitting on a granite rock. —Ala Tek. Indian girl. —Come and see, on our land, the four winds of the old days will blow through our hair. Then she tugged at my black braids. —Come and visit the Snakes, Ala Tek. —When I was your age they blew across this place like red dust devils on flat neutral plains. —Can you see them. —Do you hear the Snake People calling us? —Yes. I can see them. I hear them. They are naked and wild. Their eyes, like black grapes shining in the Sun, stare back at me. —They’re hungry. I watch the Snake People eat the fleshy intestines of my uncle’s butchered cow. I taste the hot blood, roll it around on my tongue and remember. It makes me sweat. I watch the Snake People play games around the carcass. And before we walk back into the house, the old woman and me, she runs her crooked fingers across my eyes and says. —Ala Tek. Indian Girl. —The ghosts of your ancestors will visit you there. The rest of the visit blurs. My last memories are from that day. She waves to me from her front porch. She never explained the Snakes. She only said, “Che pisa lauchi. I’ll see you. Indians never say good-bye.” I never saw Ain’t Sally again until she appeared in my hospital room. I thought she was dead. I didn’t know about the Snakes until some twenty-five years later. To make the sign of the snake means: Comanches are here.

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations The house was just twinkling in the moon light, And inside it twinkling with delight, Is my baby bright. Twinkling with delight in the house twinkling with the moonlight, Bless my baby bless my baby bright, Bless my baby twinkling with delight, In the house twinkling in the moon light, Her hubby dear loves to cheer when he thinks and he always thinks when he knows and he always knows that his blessed baby wifey is all here and he is all hers, and sticks to her like burrs burrs In the phrase “sticks to her like burrs,” these are prickly flower heads. One other definition of a burr is a circle of light about the moon or a star. , blessed baby

before iced coffee came to town, a sump from which I’ve fished many a memory of regret and loneliness and whose misery I now understand came less from my pocked nature than from the chokehold of blue laws, and from my broken-willed Eeyore of a used car which liked to stop stubbornly in Sealy, halfway to Hill Country, and always one day after the insurance ran out, and from the paucity of public space so that we drove (locally) from shopping strip to balding park, once to a leech-infested pond; and owing also to the blinding afternoons that made invisible,