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slicing this frozen sky know where they are going— and want to get there. Their call, both strange and familiar, calls to the strange and familiar heart, and the landscape becomes the landscape of being, which becomes the bright silos and snowy fields over which the nuanced and muscular geese are calling—while time and the heart take measure.

Evolution settles for a while on various stable balances. One is that some of the girls like cute boys and some like ugly older men and sometimes women. The difference between them is the ones who like older men were felt up by their fathers or uncles or older brothers, or if he didn't touch you, still you lived in his cauldron of curses and urges which could be just as worse. They grow already old, angry, and wise, they get rich, get mean, get theirs. The untouched/uncursed others are happy never needing to do much, and never do much more than good. They envy their mean, rich, talented, drunk sisters. Good girls drink milk and make milk and know they've missed out and know they're better off. They might dance and design but won't rip out lungs for a flag. Bad ones write books and slash red paint on canvas; they've rage to vent, they've fault lines and will rip a toga off a Caesar and stab a goat for the ether. It's as simple as that. Either, deep in the dark of your history, someone showed you that you could be used as a cash machine, as a popcorn popper, as a rocket launch, as a coin-slot jackpot spunker, or they didn't and you grew up unused and clueless. Either you got a clue and spiked lunch or you got zilch but no punch. And you never knew. It's exactly not anyone's fault. If it happened and you don't like older men that's just because you like them so much you won't let yourself have one. If you did everyone would see. Then they would know what happened a long time ago, with you and with that original him, whose eyes you've been avoiding for decades gone forgotten. That's why you date men smaller than you or not at all. Or maybe you've turned into a man. It isn't anyone's fault, it is just human and it is what happens. Or doesn't happen. That's that. Any questions? If you see a girl dressed to say No one tells me what to do, you know someone once told her what to do.

This stream took a shorter course— a thread of water that makes oasis out of mud, in pooling, does not aspire to lake. To river, leave the forest, the clamorous wild. I cannot. Wherever I am, I am here, nonsensical, rhapsodic, stock-still as the trees. Trickling never floods, furrows its meager path through the forest floor. There will always be a root too thirsty, moss that only swallows and spreads. Primordial home, I am dying from love of you. Were I tuber or quillwort, the last layer of leaves that starts the dirt or the meekest pond, I would absorb everything. I would drown. Water makes song of erratic forms, and I hear the living push back branches, wander off trail.

“Good-morning, good-morning!” the General said When we met him last week on our way to the line. Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead, And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine. “He's a cheery old card,” grunted Harry to Jack As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack. But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

[To be sung to the tune of The Blood of the Lamb with indicated instrument] [BASS DRUM BEATEN LOUDLY] Booth led boldly with his big bass drum— (Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?) The Saints smiled gravely and they said: “He’s come.” (Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?) Walking lepers followed, rank on rank, Lurching bravoes from the ditches dank, Drabs from the alleyways and drug fiends pale— Minds still passion-ridden, soul-powers frail:— Vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath, Unwashed legions with the ways of Death— (Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?) [BANJOS] Every slum had sent its half-a-score The round world over. (Booth had groaned for more.) Every banner that the wide world flies Bloomed with glory and transcendent dyes. Big-voiced lasses made their banjos bang, Tranced, fanatical they shrieked and sang:— “Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?” Hallelujah! It was queer to see Bull-necked convicts with that land make free. Loons with trumpets blowed a blare, blare, blare On, on upward thro’ the golden air! (Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?) [BASS DRUM SLOWER AND SOFTER] Booth died blind and still by Faith he trod, Eyes still dazzled by the ways of God. Booth led boldly, and he looked the chief Eagle countenance in sharp relief, Beard a-flying, air of high command Unabated in that holy land. [SWEET FLUTE MUSIC] Jesus came from out the court-house door, Stretched his hands above the passing poor. Booth saw not, but led his queer ones there Round and round the mighty court-house square. Yet in an instant all that blear review Marched on spotless, clad in raiment new. The lame were straightened, withered limbs uncurled And blind eyes opened on a new, sweet world. [BASS DRUM LOUDER] Drabs and vixens in a flash made whole! Gone was the weasel-head, the snout, the jowl! Sages and sibyls now, and athletes clean, Rulers of empires, and of forests green! [GRAND CHORUS OF ALL INSTRUMENTS. TAMBOURINES TO THE FOREGROUND] The hosts were sandalled, and their wings were fire! (Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?) But their noise played havoc with the angel-choir. (Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?) O shout Salvation! It was good to see Kings and Princes by the Lamb set free. The banjos rattled and the tambourines Jing-jing-jingled in the hands of Queens. [REVERENTLY SUNG. NO INSTRUMENTS] And when Booth halted by the curb for prayer He saw his Master thro’ the flag-filled air. Christ came gently with a robe and crown For Booth the soldier, while the throng knelt down. He saw King Jesus. They were face to face, And he knelt a-weeping in that holy place. Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?

Oh, I said, this is going to be. And it was. Oh, I said, this will never happen. But it did. And a purple fog descended upon the land. The roots of trees curled up. The world was divided into two countries. Every photograph taken in the first was of people. Every photograph taken in the second showed none. All of the girl children were named And. All of the boy children named Then.

And surfaced a flame in the dark elsewhere of one remembered form: just one, suppose it the flesh of unspecified man a mouth down deeper between my legs his heavy beard in the beginning against these wet thighs our bodies scribbled in signs to draw the grey curtain of steam back by which we found ourselves surrounded sound of water off the tile (or on this sheet of paper stammering) by which we came to nestle a will from which the colors rose resilient sparks of orange over the waves of trickled hair on chest and forearm light green to trace the conduits formed by vein of biceps and prick the pink ridges of his brown nipples in brackets raised this tongue in blue translucent embers to emanate where a moon of fingers along the dark red notch of earth is a field over which armies raged with catapults of burning stones until all was left there smoldering below.

My mother has a gap between her two front teeth. So does Daddy Gunnar. Each child in this family has the same space connecting us. Our baby brother, Roman, was born pale as dust. His soft brown curls and eyelashes stop people on the street. Whose angel child is this? they want to know. When I say,My brother, the people wear doubt thick as a cape until we smile and the cape falls.

(Oakland) Make it the place it was then, so full it split vision to live there in winter so late & wet abundance toppled toward awful—birds of paradise a profusion the ripe colors of anodized metal; in gutters umbrellas smashed like pigeons, bent ribs bright among black slack fluttering; camellias’ pink imagoes dropping into water & rotting, sweet stink— & did not stop : the inundated eye, over- populous urban eye, the whole place, to look at it, was a footprint in January : everywhere cloudy water rising to fill in the outlines, & meanwhile indoors differed by degree alone : without love, loosed from God, there were lovers & touch rushing in to redraw your boundaries constantly because it was a tune you kept getting wrong, the refrain of what it meant to live alone, months of that and then . sudden summer, sheer release, streets all cigarettes & sashay, balls-out tube tops, low-riders & belly fat, the girls on the block all like Oh no she didn’t, and girl, she did, she was mad skills with press-ons & a cell phone telling him where to stick it, a kid on her hip, just like that, summer, sheer beauty & lip gloss that smelled like peaches, & you going to the store for whiskey & condoms like everyone else on a hot, long afternoon so long & hot it would just be sunburn to walk anywhere if it weren’t also a pleasure, thoughtless & shiftless & horny & drunk, just someone thinking summer wasn’t up to anything deep, & lo there he was, his punk ass pink as a Viking in a tight wifebeater & lingering by the public pool, drinking beer so sly it didn’t look illegal, & he wasn’t a good idea but did you have a light? & it seemed the whole summer went like that, taking fire out of your pocket & giving it away, a ditty you could whistle it was so cliché, like the numbers they gave you after & you never called, the number of swollen nodes of the kissing colds you got & later the number to call to get tested, the number of the bus to the clinic, the number they gave you when they asked you to wait, the number of questions asked, number of partners, number of risks, number of previous tests, the number of pricks —one—to draw the blood, the number of minutes you waited before results, & then you decided you had to get the tune right, the how to live it so it doesn’t kill you, to take a number & wait in the long line of the city’s bankrupt humanism like the bus that never comes no matter how long you wait, & the grocery bag breaking, & if you were going to sing that one, the one that sounds like all I got is bruised tomatoes, broken glass & dirty bread & no one waiting at home, would you . start with genius, as in, the spirit of a place?, &small, as in of the back, wet in heat & the urge to touch him there, skin just visible between his jeans & t-shirt, to see if he’s sweating, to see if he feels what you feel?, & if he does, is that all the spirit the place will give, a small thing shared, just a phrase, not a whole song, but something to build on?, & if it isn’t bread & if it sure ain’t tomatoes it isn’t empty, is it, like the signage you walk by that fronts the Lakeside Church of Practical Christianity, hawking a knowledge of God so modest it seems trivial?, & it isn’t ever, is it, the how to live it so it doesn’t kill you, the where to touch it, the when will genius sing your name so it sounds like a place you can live?

The earth has feelings some killed others in its mud and it has lots of mud The earth builds a scrapyard, a sequence of them to tell of this, a seam on its embalmed glabella future galaxies caress The earth knows André Breton, compiles ingenuous personalities in its fevered correspondence Out of its winding sheet rolodex the earth erodes another name, your name Beware, the earth prepares to say one final time, construction eclipses It hoped to say nothing further and then was disappointed, its hope misplaced it knew deep down Say more, you say, the earth had hoped you would Express as little as possible with your furniture, find the little that is as near to nothing as can be The monuments unpictured drift up like watermarks through the odor of the lens You make things happen all the time, says the earth, take my advice look the other way