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To the one who sets a second place at the table anyway. To the one at the back of the empty bus. To the ones who name each piece of stained glass projected on a white wall. To anyone convinced that a monologue is a conversation with the past. To the one who loses with the deck he marked. To those who are destined to inherit the meek. To us.

My chicken pox hotel your machine gun pointillism My bamboo branch severed but nimble name in the air of two alphabets Picassos in bull-light routine Your mantis welded on a pole with a spiral staircase my romance between pillager and villager timed & timely intensity inversely proportional to frequency the chickadees in my voice the thrush in your mouth our polymers of I skipping their archipelago stones Your touchscreen my ringtone heart Your mahogany gift bag puffed with confetti my songs to appear as gauze for a new island

A species of tiny human has been discovered, which lived on the remote Indonesian island of Flores just 18,000 years ago. . . . Researchers have so far unearthed remains from eight individuals who were just one metre tall, with grapefruit-sized skulls. These astonishing little people . . . made tools, hunted tiny elephants and lived at the same time as modern humans who were colonizing the area. —Nature, October 2004 Light: lifted, I stretch my brief body. Color: blaze of day behind blank eyes. Sound: birds stab greedy beaks Into trunk and seed, spill husk Onto the heap where my dreaming And my loving live. Every day I wake to this. Tracks follow the heavy beasts Back to where they huddle, herd. Hunt: a dance against hunger. Music: feast and fear. This island becomes us. Trees cap our sky. It rustles with delight In a voice green as lust. Reptiles Drag night from their tails, Live by the dark. A rage of waves Protects the horizon, which we would devour. One day I want to dive in and drift, Legs and arms wracked with danger. Like a dark star. I want to last.

Like eelgrass through a glass- bottom boat on the Silver River, I see the state, obscured yet pure. Derision, a tattooed flame crackling underneath the lewd, uncool khaki of an amused park worker. I was the sometimes boy on a leash, my sliver of assent in 1984 — as if it were my decision. The I-75 signage, more than metaphor. As if I had the right to vote. The slumber parties then were hidden wood; the tea so sweet, the saccharin pink and artificial, like intelligence. The science sponsored in part by chance. I made my acting debut with the red dilettante down the street, “Rusty” Counts, in Rusty Counts Presents: Suburbs of the Dead, straight to VHS. My parents phoned a counselor. A palmetto bug read Megatrends on the fold- ing chair by our above-ground swimming pool ... The pool shark lurked, but not to fear. The end unknowable, blue, inmost, and cold, like the comfort of a diplomatic war.

“Make flour into dough,” she answers, “and fire will turn it into food. Ash is the final abstraction of matter. You can just brush it away.” She tacks a sheet of paper to the wall, dips her hand in a palette of flour and ash, applies the fine soft powders with a fingertip, highlighting in chalk and graphite, blending, blurring with her thumb. Today she is working in seven shades of gray. Outside the door, day lilies in the high flush of summer- about-to-be-fall. Her garden burns red and yellow in the dry August air and is not consumed. Inside, on the studio wall, a heavy particulate smoke thickens and rises. Footsteps grime the snow. The about-to-be-dead line up on the ramp with their boxy suitcases, ashen shoes. When I get too close she yanks me back. She hovers over her creation though she too has a mind to brush against that world and wipe it out.

The Traveler’s Vade Mecum, line 4234 Baking two parts flour to one part water could stop a bullet. So good soldiers carried their hardtack over their hearts. Break it down with a rifle butt, flood it, fry it in pig fat to make hellfire stew. Gnaw it raw and praise the juice. Does wheat prepare for this as it grows, seeking the light in a half-thawed field? Do stalks know their strength is merely in their number? What is ground down we name flour in promise that it will be made useful. Otherwise, it’s just dust. Sheet iron crackers. Teeth-dullers. Would you call it starving, if a man dies with hardtack still tucked in his pocket? Can you call it food, if the bullet comes only at the moment he gives in and swallows?

Down the path between the apples through the maple grove of suicides then left at the old wall along the wire fence to the brook- bank where narcissus noses into skunk cabbage and hepatica: Call me Apollo, crashing in the underbrush with my arrows, my bow saw and clippers out for your flash of white tail and alert to hack me a path to your lair, to your cult’s den, crisscrossing the water with Phoebe again and again as it elbows below us and runs for the creek racks strongest in springtime when everything’s liquid, tightroping over the rocks in the plashing braid, hot on your sharp scent and battling the mayflies the black flies horseflies mosquitoes there under the raspberry brambles and getting no nearer . . . Or am I fleeing your coiling uncoiling tentacular embrace battered and scarred, am I seeing your fabled face in the oily pools, are these fern hairs sprouting at your knuckles branchbones, little leaves halving our limbs with leaves—are they yours or mine? Your bloodhounds bay at the copper creek, your velvet cape’s aloft in the chiaroscuro breeze, you’re near, nearer, hieing, heying, I’m falling, failing, gashed, gutted, kneed-up, muddy and galled—call me Actaeon....

So lightly and invisibly I hardly knew it, river of blood descending without joy back to the heart through the frail vein all the time —the largest of the body!— shredded then dissolved ("obliterated") and there was a sudden seepage into surrounding tissue instead of the blood pouring out as you'd expect forever, and a new vein formed to bypass what was gone like a wild meander even the smallest flood ends, and the river goes straight from that point. But in my case the thin-walled base-ends held forming an anabranch, a section of a river that diverts from the main channel, rejoins it downstream. Local ones can be caused by or make small islands in the watercourse but sometimes they flow hundreds of miles like the Bahr el Zeraf in the south Sudan that splits from the Bahr al Jabal of the White Nile, doesn't return until Malakal instead of leaving behind, as it could have with the blood being old, a full-fledged oxbow lake that before too long will blister in the sun, become a little blue scar beside the heart.

The flower-fed buffaloes of the spring In the days of long ago, Ranged where the locomotives sing And the prairie flowers lie low:— The tossing, blooming, perfumed grass Is swept away by the wheat, Wheels and wheels and wheels spin by In the spring that still is sweet. But the flower-fed buffaloes of the spring Left us, long ago. They gore no more, they bellow no more, They trundle around the hills no more:— With the Blackfeet, lying low, With the Pawnees, lying low, Lying low.

1 I can support it no longer. Laughing ruefully at myself For all I claim to have suffered I get up. Damned nightmarer! It is New Hampshire out here, It is nearly the dawn. The song of the whippoorwill stops And the dimension of depth seizes everything. 2 The whistles of a peabody bird go overhead Like a needle pushed five times through the air, They enter the leaves, and come out little changed. The air is so still That as they go off through the trees The love songs of birds do not get any fainter. 3 The last memory I have Is of a flower that cannot be touched, Through the bloom of which, all day, Fly crazed, missing bees. 4 As I climb sweat gets up my nostrils, For an instant I think I am at the sea, One summer off Cap Ferrat we watched a black seagull Straining for the dawn, we stood in the surf, Grasshoppers splash up where I step, The mountain laurel crashes at my thighs. 5 There is something joyous in the elegies Of birds. They seem Caught up in a formal delight, Though the mourning dove whistles of despair. But at last in the thousand elegies The dead rise in our hearts, On the brink of our happiness we stop Like someone on a drunk starting to weep. 6 I kneel at a pool, I look through my face At the bacteria I think I see crawling through the moss. My face sees me, The water stirs, the face, Looking preoccupied, Gets knocked from its bones. 7 I weighed eleven pounds At birth, having stayed on Two extra weeks in the womb. Tempted by room and fresh air I came out big as a policeman Blue-faced, with narrow red eyes. It was eight days before the doctor Would scare my mother with me. Turning and craning in the vines I can make out through the leaves The old, shimmering nothingness, the sky. 8 Green, scaly moosewoods ascend, Tenants of the shaken paradise, At every wind last night’s rain Comes splattering from the leaves, It drops in flurries and lies there, The footsteps of some running start. 9 From a rock A waterfall, A single trickle like a strand of wire, Breaks into beads halfway down. I know The birds fly off But the hug of the earth wraps With moss their graves and the giant boulders. 10 In the forest I discover a flower. The invisible life of the thing Goes up in flames that are invisible, Like cellophane burning in the sunlight. It burns up. Its drift is to be nothing. In its covertness it has a way Of uttering itself in place of itself, Its blossoms claim to float in the Empyrean, A wrathful presence on the blur of the ground. The appeal to heaven breaks off. The petals begin to fall, in self-forgiveness. It is a flower. On this mountainside it is dying.