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This sunlight on snow. This decrescendo of covered stumps & brush — stop for it. Stop before the sled end- over-ends down the chin of the hill — the way it always will at the rock ⅔ of the way down. Stop & shiver in it: the ring of snow inside gloves, the cusp of red forehead like a sun just waiting to top the hill. Every ill-built snowball waiting to be thrown, every bell-shaped angel stamped over the brown leaves. When my daughter ranges in winter, she works every dazzling angle — the crestfallen pinecones, the grizzled beards of bushes in the morning, a furnace’s windup huffing in this throat- clearing of snow.

This admirable gadget, when it is Wound on a string and spun with steady force, Maintains its balance on most any smooth Surface, pleasantly humming as it goes. It is whirled not on a constant course, but still Stands in unshivering integrity For quite some time, meaning nothing perhaps But being something agreeable to watch, A silver nearly silence gleaning a still- ness out of speed, composing unity From spin, so that its hollow spaces seem Solids of light, until it wobbles and Begins to whine, and then with an odd lunge Eccentric and reckless, it skids away And drops dead into its own skeleton.

The Powers-that-Be decreed that from the—of—the sausage rolls, for reasons Of security, would be contracted to a different firm. They gave the prisoners no reasons. The prisoners complained. We cannot reproduce his actual words here, since their spokesman is alleged To be a sub-commander of a movement deemed to be illegal. An actor spoke for him in almost-perfect lip-synch:It’s not the quality We’re giving off about. Just that it seems they’re getting smaller. We’re talking quantity. His ‘Belfast’ accent wasn’t West enough. Is the H in H-Block aitch or haitch? Does it matter?What we have we hold?Our day will come? Give or take an inch? Well, give an inch and someone takes an effing mile. Everything is in the ways You say them. Like, the prison that we call Long Kesh is to the Powers-that-Be The Maze.

Yet the after is still a storm as witness bent shadbush and cord grass in stillness sand littered with the smallest of fragments whether shell or bone That city we are far from is still frozen, still in ruins (except its symmetries be renewed by sleep, its slant colors redeemed) Nothing has changed but its name and the air that it breathes There’s still no truth in making sense while the ash settles, so fine that planes keep falling from the sky And the name once again to be the old one Saint Something, Saint Gesture, Saint Entirely the Same as if nothing or no one had been nameless in the interim or as if still could be placed beside storm that simply, as in a poem Have you heard the angels with sexed tongues, met the blind boy who could see with his skin, his body curled inward like a phrase, like an after in stillness or a letter erased Have you seen what’s written on him as question to an answer or calendar out of phase Add up the number of such days Add illness and lilt as formed on the tongue Add that scene identical with its negative, that sentence which refuses to speak, present which cannot be found

God knows how our neighbors manage to breathe. No one is allowed to touch me for infection is a hazard of mercy I will not transmit as Legion transcribed from the mouth of Error into his body and sent into a herd of swine who sent it to the sea who’s been trying to return to earth since creation and nearly succeeds every day. I just took my temperature. 98 degrees. I am better than healthy. I am cooling even as earth heats, even as it meets the sea further inland and negotiates distance from increasingly disadvantaged position. I am cooling because nothing touches me. Others may go to the petting zoo and country fair but don’t even tell me what they touch there. I’m taking my temperature again; my thermometer is digital and pink and its beep is my name being read from the book of life, which is available on Kindle and allows me to avoid the public library but contains peculiar punctuation errors and is transcribed by evangelists while they wait in line at gates you can’t see from here. 98.5. Still cooler than life. I have another glass of water, and feel you turning in me, my little book, flipping over and over, it’s time for bed little sow, little sow. The book of death is open on my bedside table and is called The Pregnancy Countdown

Knots, a thousand lights, in sheer dark, aimed at my window, tinny crystals, so mother dies in my sleep. The snow turns coarse, goes out. An axe sounds where I'd never heard an axe before. Breathing becomes dangerous. I can't help it, making me her, even before I was born, her brain burning out patterns I follow like will o' the wisps, sparks popping. I put on heels and find I can balance, twist my spine, bend to get my seams straight on my own, no one to call on, like she called me, sheer nylon turning on sheer skin under my palms. I pull on the ratty musquash coat. I have the body. I move off in it, eddying, trying to see who I am now. I totter down the street thinking, one day he'll be sorry. And here I am. Sorry. I watch her getting smaller up the road. I watch us both, till nothing's all there is.

The long road south, the pavement flat and black as a dash without end, no signs, no houses, the heat like an unseen fog and the sun a swollen crimson clot above fields where frazzle-haired palm trees rose sporadic and unwieldy, the miles of pasture where cattle of every conceivable color, rust and tobacco and ashen, fed and nursed their stumbling young, heavy heads bent to the ground. And insects that crashed against windshield so tiny, no body was left behind. Then a wooden shack where we stopped to pee and the shock of iron-red flecks against bowl, the water placid, unmoved. There was hardly any pain. What could we do but continue on as scattered street-lamps gradually revealed a landscape inhabited once again: the still shuttered windows of bungalows pink as scrubbed flesh, the small dark yards of abandoned Bigwheels and plots of petunias or cukes, the closed, expectant mailboxes and the living already dead inside me.

i be but i don’t is. i been & i am one who be on my own biz. i love not a b____. but see know i been loved. i’m one who been that & then not deserved much cuz i been on my own dirt. i don’t know love. i been a lie but don’t be a lie i be fly sometimes but don’t be a fly sometimes i be addict-like but not high like an addict’s like. just scratching low stones like an addict might. stop? not an option. i be getting mine. been getting over. been over this but be caught in a cycle. but you be what you be & it be good. & i be moved & making new habits.

Had death not had me in tears I would have seen the barges on life's stream sail. I would have heard sorrow songs in groves where the road was lost long where men foot prints mix with other men foot prints By the road I wait "death is better, death is better" came the song I am by the roadside looking for the road death is better, death is much better Had death not had me in tears I would have seen the barges I would have found the road and heard the sorrow songs. The land wreathes in rhythm with your soul, caressed by history and cruel geography landscape ineffable yet screaming eloquent resonant like the drums of after harvests. We pile rocks on terracing love Carry the pithy cloth to cover the hearths of our mother. Come now, you lucky ones come to the festival of corn and lamb to the finest feast of this land come, now, your lovers have unfurled their cloths their thighs glistening like golden knives ready for the plunging, for the plentiful loving time. To whom shall I turn to what shall I tell my woes ? My kinsmen, the desert tree denied us sustenance long before the drought. To whom shall I turn to whom shall I tell my woes? Some say tell the mother goat she too is my kinswoman elemental sister of your clan But I cannot tell the mother goat for she is not here.

1 Eastern guard tower glints in sunset; convicts rest like lizards on rocks. 2 The piano man is stingy, at 3 A.M. his songs drop like plum. 3 Morning sun slants cell. Drunks stagger like cripple flies On jailhouse floor. 4 To write a blues song is to regiment riots and pluck gems from graves. 5 A bare pecan tree slips a pencil shadow down a moonlit snow slope. 6 The falling snow flakes Cannot blunt the hard aches nor Match the steel stillness. 7 Under moon shadows A tall boy flashes knife and Slices star bright ice. 8 In the August grass Struck by the last rays of sun The cracked teacup screams. 9 Making jazz swing in Seventeen syllables AIN’T No square poet’s job.