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When summer ended the leaves of snapdragons withered taking their shrill-colored mouths with them. They were still, so quiet. They were violet where umber now is. She hated and she hated to see them go. Flowers born when the weather was good - this she thinks of, watching the branch of peaches daring their ways above the fence, and further, two hummingbirds, hovering, stuck to each other, arcing their bodies in grim determination to find what is good, what is given them to find. These are warriors distancing themselves from history. They find peace in the way they contain the wind and are gone.

Last night I found my face below the water in my cupped hands. The mask made of copper and bone criss-crossing to make a smirk, a false glamour, a plated glaze. I unwound myself from the heavy machinery of my body's burden. The lute, the light, chime. I'll get up and partner myself with music, the purple moon peeling itself like a plum. Men stand in a circle and they will ask and ask again. I want to pick the thick bud, to lose myself in the body's posture bending in or away, to let my majesty and birthright go and gesture toward a waking life.

this morning I felt my life if you were dead the expansiveness of the bed the birds still singing the remnants of the smell of coffee in the morning the emptiness of thought the deafening silence of my heart

Empty empty empty so many empty chairs everywhere. They look charming in van Gogh’s paintings. I quietly sit on them and try to rock but they don’t move — they are frozen by what’s breathing inside them. Van Gogh waves his paintbrush — leave leave leave there’s no funeral tonight. He looks straight through me, and I sit down in the flames of   his sunflower like a piece of clay to be fired. Translated from the Chinese

My friends, As it has been proven in the laboratory, An empty pair of dance shoes Will sit on the floor like a wart Until it is given a reason to move. Those of us who study inertia (Those of us covered with wild hair and sleep) Can state this without fear: The energy in a pair of shoes at rest Is about the same as that of a clown Knocked flat by a sandbag. This you can tell your friends with certainty: A clown, flat on his back, Is a lot like an empty pair of dancing shoes. An empty pair of dancing shoes Is also a lot like a leaf Pressed in a book. And now you know a simple truth: A leaf pressed in, say,The Colossus by Sylvia Plath, Is no different from an empty pair of dance shoes Even if those shoes are in the middle of the Stardust Ballroom With all the lights on, and hot music shakes the windows up and down the block. This is the secret of inertia: The shoes run on their own sense of the world. They are in sympathy with the rock the kid skips over the lake After it settles to the mud. Not with the ripples, But with the rock. A practical and personal application of inertia Can be found in the question: Whose Turn Is It To Take Out The Garbage? An empty pair of dance shoes Is a lot like the answer to this question, As well as book-length poems Set in the Midwest. To sum up: An empty pair of dance shoes Is a lot like the sand the 98-pound weakling brushes from his cheeks As the bully tows away his girlfriend. Later, When he spies the coupon at the back of the comic book, He is about to act upon a different set of scientific principles. He is ready to dance.

I asked for much; I received much. I asked for much; I received little, I received next to nothing. And between? A few umbrellas opened indoors. A pair of shoes by mistake on the kitchen table. O wrong, wrong—it was my nature. I was hard-hearted, remote. I was selfish, rigid to the point of tyranny. But I was always that person, even in early childhood. Small, dark-haired, dreaded by the other children. I never changed. Inside the glass, the abstract tide of fortune turned from high to low overnight. Was it the sea? Responding, maybe, to celestial force? To be safe, I prayed. I tried to be a better person. Soon it seemed to me that what began as terror and matured into moral narcissism might have become in fact actual human growth. Maybe this is what my friends meant, taking my hand, telling me they understood the abuse, the incredible shit I accepted, implying (so I once thought) I was a little sick to give so much for so little. Whereas they meant I was good(clasping my hand intensely)— a good friend and person, not a creature of pathos. I was not pathetic! I was writ large, like a queen or a saint. Well, it all makes for interesting conjecture. And it occurs to me that what is crucial is to believe in effort, to believe some good will come of simply trying, a good completely untainted by the corrupt initiating impulse to persuade or seduce— What are we without this? Whirling in the dark universe, alone, afraid, unable to influence fate— What do we have really? Sad tricks with ladders and shoes, tricks with salt, impurely motivated recurring attempts to build character. What do we have to appease the great forces? And I think in the end this was the question that destroyed Agamemnon, there on the beach, the Greek ships at the ready, the sea invisible beyond the serene harbor, the future lethal, unstable: he was a fool, thinking it could be controlled. He should have said I have nothing, I am at your mercy.

See this house, how dark it is Beneath its vast-boughed trees! Not one trembling leaflet cries To that Watcher in the skies— ‘Remove, remove thy searching gaze, Innocent of heaven’s ways, Brood not, Moon, so wildly bright, On secrets hidden from sight.’ ‘Secrets,’ sighs the night-wind, ‘Vacancy is all I find; Every keyhole I have made Wails a summons, faint and sad, No voice ever answers me, Only vacancy.’ ‘Once, once … ’ the cricket shrills, And far and near the quiet fills With its tiny voice, and then Hush falls again. Mute shadows creeping slow Mark how the hours go. Every stone is mouldering slow. And the least winds that blow Some minutest atom shake, Some fretting ruin make In roof and walls. How black it is Beneath these thick boughed trees!

“There was poverty before money.” There was debtors’ prison before inmates, there was hunger prefossil, there was pain before a nervous system to convey it to the brain, there existed poverty before intelligence, or accountants, before narration; there was bankruptcy aswirl in nowhere, it was palpable where nothing was palpable, there was repossession in the gasses forming so many billion ... ; there was poverty—it had a tongue—in cooling ash, in marl, and coming loam, thirst in the few strands of hay slipping between a pitchfork’s wide tines, in the reptile and the first birds, poverty aloof and no mystery like God its maker; there was surely want in one steamed and sagging onion, there was poverty in the shard of bread sopped in the final drop of gravy you snatched from your brother’s mouth.

There were two kingdoms only: the first of them threw out both him and me. The second we abandoned. Under a bare sky I for a long time soaked in the rain of my body, he for a long time rotted in the rain of his. Then like a poison he drank the fondness of the years. He held my hand with a trembling hand. “Come, let’s have a roof over our heads awhile. Look, further on ahead, there between truth and falsehood, a little empty space.”

Viejo San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1998 Here in a bar on the street of the saint en la calle San Sebastián, a dancer in white with a red red scarf en la calle San Sebastián, calls to the gods who were freed by slaves en la calle San Sebastián, and his bronze face is a lantern of sweat en la calle San Sebastián, and hands smack congas like flies in the field en la calle San Sebastián, and remember the beat of packing crates en la calle San Sebastián, from the days when overseers banished the drum en la calle San Sebastián, and trumpets screech like parrots of gold en la calle San Sebastián, trumpets that herald the end of the war en la calle San Sebastián, as soldiers toss rifles on cobblestone en la calle San Sebastián, and the saint himself snaps an arrow in half en la calle San Sebastián, then lost grandfathers and fathers appear en la calle San Sebastián, fingers tugging my steel-wool beard en la calle San Sebastián, whispering your beard is gray en la calle San Sebastián, spilling their rum across the table en la calle San Sebastián, till cousins lead them away to bed en la calle San Sebastián, and the dancer in white with a face of bronze en la calle San Sebastián, shakes rain from his hair like the god of storms en la calle San Sebastián, and sings for the blood that drums in the chest en la calle San Sebastián, and praises the blood that beats in the hands en la calle San Sebastián, en la calle San Sebastián.