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Blood is gushing everywhere From the lips of the bear’s face Out the elevators The children’s eyes When they are taken down by the ax The whole hotel is overtaken with blood You know I’ve started to think You really shouldn’t say Things you don’t mean The way you gushed into me And then that woman Who seems so much older, and isn’t Dear woman, I read your essay That fate could have been me Blood is gushing from between my legs I can’t feel a thing No really I can’t feel a thing When they propped me up They said, oh, she’s so strong But I am not I cry too I cried for you You left me, always, in the rain Dear love, you were so brave The blood exploded within you You were that whole hotel Could have been us I gushed Out came the blue-green cream

You sway like a crane to the tunes of tossed stones. I am what you made to live in from what you had: hair matted as kelp, bad schools. Oh, you will never know me. I wave and you go on playing in the clouds boys clap from erasers. I am the pebble you tossed on the chalked space and war- danced toward, one-leg two-leg, arms treading air. In this, your future, waves rechristen the sea after its tiny jeweled lives that hiss “Us Us” to the shore all day. Where’s the kid called Kateydid? the moonfaced Kewpiedoll? The excitable pouting Zookie? The somber O-Be-Joyful? Lost girl, playing hopscotch, I will do what you could. Name of father, son, ghost. Cross my heart and hope. While the sea’s jewels build shells and shells change to chalk and chalk to loam and gold wheat grows where oceans teetered.

Sand Wars was first published in Flanders, but as Van Bellingen pointed out, “eggnog.”

The boys who fled my father's house in fear Of what his wrath would cost them if he found Them nibbling slowly at his daughter's ear, Would vanish out the back without a sound, And glide just like the shadow of a crow, To wait beside the elm tree in the snow. Something quite deadly rumbled in his voice. He sniffed the air as if he knew the scent Of teenage boys, and asked, "What was that noise?" Then I'd pretend to not know what he meant, Stand mutely by, my heart immense with dread, As Father set the traps and went to bed.

I laid the strewings, darling, on thine urn; I lowered the torch, I poured the cup to Dis. Now hushaby, my little child, and learn Long sleep how good it is. In vain thy mother prays, wayfaring hence, Peace to her heart, where only heartaches dwell; But thou more blest, O mild intelligence! Forget her, and Farewell.

Fifteen men on the Dead Man's Chest — Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil had done for the rest — Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

for Stephen A blind girl steps over the red staves Of a tub. Steam rising from her shoulders and hair, She walks across a dirt floor to you. I think you are not her grandfather. You watch with her a pink man Who has avoided taxes for two winters— He is being judged by roosters And has been chased this far into the countryside. Above him Burning sacks of bat dung are arranged In the purple branches of the thistle trees. The river is indifferent to him. And so are we. You tell your mistress the burning bags of shit Are like inert buddhas Dissolving in a field of merit. She giggles. A front tooth is loose. With the river bottom clear as the night air, The bargeman sings through the hungry vapors Rising now like white snakes behind him. You told his wife that Lord Buddha made wasps From yellow stalks of tobacco with a dark spit. Down in the cold bamboo a starving woman Has opened a small pig— The old moons climb from its blue glistening stomach, Or is it light From the infinitely receding sacks of shit? Master, where is the difference?

For Ben’s project he must research five facts about his African-American hero and write them on poster board. He chooses Harriet Tubman, whose five facts are:Her father’s name was Ben. Her mother’s name was Old Rit. She was born in 1820 and died in 1913. She was born in Maryland and died in New York. Ben asks for advice about his fifth fact and I suggest:She led more than 300 people to freedom. Ben sighs the way he does now and says,Everyone knows that, Mom. So I try to remember the book we read yesterday, search for the perfect fact, the one that will match his four facts and satisfy his almost-seven mind. Remember, I ask,she was a spy for the North during the Civil War? It’s a hit! He writes it: Harriet Tubman was a spy for the north during the civil war. It was a war between the north which is where the slaves were trying to get and the south which is where they were. Before the war, Abraham Lincoln signed a form that said All the slaves everywhere are free! which is one of the reasons they were fighting. On summer mornings, Lincoln rode his horse to work down the Seventh Street Turnpike close to my new home. Down Georgia Avenue past The Hunger Stopper and Pay Day 2 Go and liquor stores and liquor stores. Past Cluck-U-Chicken and Fish in the ‘Hood and Top Twins Faze II Authentic African Cuisine and the newish Metro station and all those possibilities gleaming in developers’ eyes. There goes Lincoln’s horse down Georgia Avenue from the Soldier’s Home to the White House – much cooler up here in the country, in the neighborhood, at the hospital. And there’s Walt Whitman, the sworn poet of every dauntless rebel the world over, hanging around his street corner every morning to bow to the president at Thomas Circle by the homeless guys. It’s 100 years now since any president summered at the Soldier’s Home. But I was born only 50 years after Harriet Tubman died, all the centuries we drag into the next century and the next. Writing here, in my new neighborhood, the city old and new around me, I see Harriet Tubman and Lincoln and Uncle Walt and the true stories and sometimes our own despair like Washington’s summer malaria, her 40 war hospitals, Whitman moving from bed to bed, stroking the hair of so many dying boys. North up Georgia Avenue in our own soldiers’ home – Walter Reed – the boys and now girls too mourn the ghosts of their own legs and arms and our capacity for love. Where is their sworn poet? Harriet Tubman born so close. All these heroes under our feet.

I was four in this photograph fishing with my grandparents at a lake in Michigan. My brother squats in poison ivy. His Davy Crockett cap sits squared on his head so the raccoon tail flounces down the back of his sailor suit. My grandfather sits to the far right in a folding chair, and I know his left hand is on the tobacco in his pants pocket because I used to wrap it for him every Christmas. Grandmother's hips bulge from the brush, she's leaning into the ice chest, sun through the trees printing her dress with soft luminous paws. I am staring jealously at my brother; the day before he rode his first horse, alone. I was strapped in a basket behind my grandfather. He smelled of lemons. He's died— but I remember his hands.

You can have the grackle whistling blackly from the feeder as it tosses seed, if I can have the red-tailed hawk perched imperious as an eagle on the high branch. You can have the brown shed, the field mice hiding under the mower, the wasp’s nest on the door, if I can have the house of the dead oak, its hollowed center and feather-lined cave. You can have the deck at midnight, the possum vacuuming the yard in its white prowl, if I can have the yard of wild dreaming, pesky raccoons, and the roaming, occasional bear. You can have the whole house, window to window, roof to soffits to hardwood floors, if I can have the screened porch at dawn, the Milky Way, any comets in our yard.