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[Étude from the Fourth Treatise of the Convivio, Chapter XXVII] In my youth, not unstaind and in much ignoble;   in manhood, struggling to ring true   yet knowing often my defection from these graces Dante lists proper to Man:   temperance, courage, love, courtesy, and loyalty.   I speak still to sustain his meaning in my own. And, in you, whatever I have known of grace comes through to me. Now, upon old age:“Our life has a fixt course and a simple path” I would not avoid,“that of our right nature” —then Dante adds, himself quoting: “and in every part of our life place is given for certain things

In homage to Osip Mandelshtam I am sure I do not believe we can move a pencil through a white field, pulled by a team of upside- down ox-head letter A s, and in real fact furrow it. Poor old page-earth — sized, cut, scraped, ploughed with mule-pencils or impressed by ink, illuminated, printed, obscurely inscribed, and revered or destroyed, revered and destroyed, and here comes yet another walled-garden crop for eye, ear, lungs, legs, mind. • The cranium dome hangs from its own silk conceptual thread of thought, conceiving its infinite in- complete perfection: its Zeno, its Zeus, its Dante, its Te Deums and freak shows, frescoes, twine theory, money, bread, bricks and wine, six-syllable abstractions, axes and facts, its every variation of custom, including vertical graves of men buried upside down without their heads. • (In dusk-lit, telling ways, tell me, little swallow, Tuscan or T’ang or wrung somehow from time: since I have neither feather nor wing, how I too can go into a grave made only of air.) • “For your sweet joy, take “from my cupped hands a “little glittering “of sun, a little “honey — for this is “what Persephone’s “bees have commanded. “A boat can’t cast off “if it isn’t moored; “no one can hear a “shadow that wears fur “boots; we can’t best our “fright in this dark wood. “Our kisses — these are “all that we can save, “velvety as bees “that die if they are “exiled from the hive. “They’re murmuring in “the transparent groves “of the night; the wilds “of mountain Greece are “their motherland; their “diet is time, lung- “wort, pale meadowsweet. “For joy, please take this “pagan gift: this rude, “rustling necklace of “the bees that died, for “these had transmuted “honey into sun.”

let’s start there. let’s start there.   (3 /9 new oddcouple friendship raised many eyebrows one thing he doesn’t want “I come in peace and basketball some hungover blue blue a doe-eyed girl, I was trying to tell you a simple story did you want me back on Celebrity Apprentice yes yes yes yes a real human being who let his guard down ((he’s not his dad I’m sleeping in your bed while you sleep smothered in stars, a foreign city not the dirtbag you fight to shrug off inside he says that he don’t want war

On limbs of slanted light painted with my mind’s skin color, I step upon black braids, oil-drenched, worming from last month’s orphaned mouth. Winged with burning — I ferry them from my filmed eyes, wheezing. Scalp blood in my footprints — my buckskin pouch filling with photographed sand. No language but its rind crackling in the past tense. • Tearing apart cloud names — pierced fog commands: douse the inferno’s ribs with opaque forgetting; clip dawn from the book’s dusk, unfasten the song’s empty auditorium over a garden of mute foals. Tearing apart fog names — pierced cloud sings: let them shriek from their hinges, let them slice their gills open with flint knives and circle their ghosts as frog-skinned antelope, let them drag their legs over a trail anchored to a ladder that has soaked up blood since land began crawling out of anthills. • Slipping into free fall, we drip-pattern:the somewhere parts, our shoulders dissolving in somewhere mud. The arcing sun whistles across the mask’s abalone brow, its blurring pouts into a forest chirping from a lake’s bite marks stamped vertically on this map’s windowsill. Kneeling our thoughts on ellipses evaporating from ollas of fragrant wet clay — we saddle the drowning’s slippery rim.

what thoughts I have of you tonight, Du Bois of bodies rocked and minds embalmed in bark our blanched arrival—seethin with scandal's mark nowadays I peep you in the bean-pie seller's poise with that silhouette fit for bust or cameo I can't always divine your debonair birth or your boocoo brain laborin like an earth in hallelujah's ether, somehow duckin death's blow sure sprung from Imhotep's kundalini stitchin white reconstruction's funeral shroud scriptin Philly dirges for the cryin out loud cussin Garvey's name over martinis sometimes I wonder if you double agent on the page or mastermind of our ordered rage

What can I do but make of the eyes of others my own eyes, but make of the world a ghazal whose radif is a haunting of me, me, me? Somewhere there are fingers still whole to tell the story of the empire that devours fingers. Somewhere there is a city where even larvae cannot clean the wounds of the living and cannot eat on the countless dead who are made to die tomorrow and tomorrow. Carrion beetles and boot bottoms grind corpses powder-soft to feed the small-mouthed gods of gardens and wind. Roses made to toss their silk to earth like immolated gowns, hills spewing ribbons of charred air from cities occupied by artillery and pilfered grain, limbs blown from their bodies and made into an alphabet that builds this fool song, even now, presented before you as false curative, as vacant kiss — even what is lost in the fabrication of strangers needs naught from strangers. Even somewhere stings with stillness, stings with a home not surrendered but a given. • But I have not been with my feet on the earth there where bullets make use of skin like flags make use of the land. My thinking is as skeletal as the bombed-out schools and houses untelevised. What do I know of occupation but my own colonized thinking to shake free from. While my days themselves tremble from time and shake off place to feel falsely placeless, a hollow empathy as if its soft chisel could make of this wall — my ignorance mighty before me upon which drawn figures alight against the stone — my own; what is mine is the wall my votes and non-votes, my purchases wrapped in unthought have built and stretched, undead gray. There are no secrets in debris. I have a home I hate, its steel and lights red and blue upon me. Home itself a mist through which I pass and barely notice. Home, to assume you are home is to assume I am welcome in you — to what degree let the wounds say so — and can come and go as I please. The television tells me Over there, and one must point with a fully extended arm to show how far from, how unlike here there really is.Over there where they blow each other up over land and God. And it feels good to stretch as if from waking — this silence could be called a kind of sleep — and think beyond, where I am not and where those who are are not — wall upon which drawings of fists strike skyward and faces of activists stare into me from my Google search. Turnstiles separate home from home. Barbed wire catches clouds in its coil saws. What do I know of injustice but having a home throughout which bullets, ballots, and brutality trifecta against people who were here before here was here and people were brought here to change the landscape of humanity? That word has rolling hills and towering walls. To hammer against it not to get to the other side — believe nothing is there — but to make obsolete side— know there is nothing. I know this: my metaphors have small arms, my wallet has made monstrous my reflection, I have done terrible things by being alive. I have built a wonder of terror with my life. • [Image of an eight-meter-tall wall, constructed by connected prefabrications. Interspersed among them are surveillances (I’ll make them pay). What is closed opens then settles. Spill: a scream, what makes it. On the wall a body leans, which is a caption: “This is not prayer.” (Which side are you on?) Here where there is no here, endurance measured by a field’s disruption and around it what makes possible a furthering (to settle this in court or to settle in this courtyard). Argument: this thinking is real because it has been made touchable if touch is the mutual rejection of objects from entering into the other (let’s settle this once and for all) who’s going to pay for what reaches toward and fails at heaven? To settle the debt, settle in silence. If it is not silent (this roaring (is it fire / stone / a pen lifting (ban no ban no b — ) or falling?) is it home?) make it so.] • Between his war with self and the war in a sand-sealed country neither of us could spell, juvie took from R what little childhood Chicago hadn’t taken. Between bloody showers and rushed meals, him forced by bigger boys until pain became expectation and expectation pleasure. A shortened sentence meant fighting for a country against people for whom R held no hatred while hating the ones he fought for. There is venom in coercion misnamed loyalty. Boys and bloody water in his head when he left to fight in heat and camo. Then in the barrack’s shower, three soldiers raped R. Sand is the Plaza of Pardon. Wind draws its name across the grains and leaves the grains with the name it gave. Who would I be after so many tried to live in me forcibly? R in the desert, our Skype lost connection when an explosion blew out what little service he had.Oh shit, we been hit. Then blackout silence and my pulse explicit. Let us rejoice in this: war is a love song that makes your body dangerous to others, that makes you unlivable. You become more private. You are always early to yourself. When I saw him again, marijuana discharged him dishonorably and the men inside him shooting guns and shooting cum went with him. This is one veteran’s legacy, one man I know and have lost to distance, my own pulling me from everything I’m meant to hold close. What do I know of exile but self-imposed self-removal. When R kissed my forehead goodbye the first time I felt citizenly, patriotic, my white handkerchief au revoir-ing a friend from my mind who returned with sand hissing down his pant legs. A hero is an hourglass. For what does his countdown drop its grains, skull to heel? • One night, words came, swift as if prayed for, showing myself to me to correct myself: Grief unhides beneath bombed mosques while the sky blows into pale blue absence dust and vaporized skin. Grief and sky, unrequited lovers. Whose hurt could hold the other’s? Grief knows the passage of the worm and the temperatures of dirt. Sky knows the neon of kite sail and tail. Fifteen thousand names written in the air by ribbon, rhombi billowed into shields, glide into the Guinness Book of Records , memories passed page to page across oceans and treaties in ink out-blacking smoke. Waves leave soft creases on the Gaza Strip and know airborne diamonds by the shadows of their measured shapes tethered like falcons to a child’s quick hands ... How to mistake American arrogance for love, to think kites could humanize the already-human and hide the anti-human from its history. Why cloak our custom of cloaking? To make palatable the blade we turn on ourselves we turn it on others. In good light the metal will give us back to ourselves. Does the wolf know it has a reflection? Ask the water if it shows to us its beast self or has one given to it. • [Image of an eight-meter-tall wall, over which is painted “Is you coming or going or is I?” A ray of light ballistic through the form is both answer and rejection of an answer’s possibility.] • Tragedy disturbs tragedy. There can never be just one way to see the end to ourselves. The Mediterranean has endless room where capsized boats of hundreds bloomed once with refugees. Water can’t be trusted. The wind with its countless hands hasting water into waves can’t be seen so can’t be trusted even though we feel it, even when we know along its unseen force bobs curt hymns from the dead to the living. We don’t hear them rising from the salt like fins. We hear bombs and think Each storm carries the broken criesof a broken nation in its contortion. Alibi for the living is the land: it’s the earth itself that refuses the dead a home in burr or field, in the stone plateaus or tableaux of scree from a city of wild boars and roads that lead to a burning garden, a gutted church, a school uniform hemmed by soldiers, a birch limned with blood and pointing dually west to a row of houses roofless but for crows and east to a rifle hung above a threshold like a saint. Something’s always watching, well-aimed and unkind, empty and on fire or just- finished burning. And the water will rust the skin, will extinguish the fire and the flesh. Baptism is what the living do. The rest are left to idols of fish and worm, are left with the living’s pens and books bereft and intricate as mausolea woven from husks of stories the dead cannot tell. They brux in our renditions as we cull their truth for our song. • The wilderness within us creeps closer to the surface of thought and burial. We drag ourselves from the selves that laid bear traps that trapped us into our own dragging, one leg limp behind like a memory pain brings forward. Low grass collects pockets of our blood as if any gloss could reduce droughts in the smallest needs. If we make eye contact with the most beleaguered of us, we pray the remains of god would shower spears to smite clean such embarrassment. We are not neighbors, just near. We are failures of nature and the stars burn down through trees no light we can trust. Because we were shrewd with conviction the pads of our right hands’ digits have singed into them one letter each to spell faith. What we touch with that hand will fell our enemies who are ourselves. We draw a maze with our blood, follow paths drawn from the cruelties sculpted into another’s body. I am losted by a child’s missing eye, dead-ended by a family encrusted with shrapnel. If I follow my own disaster more closely, if I allow buzzards spiraling above prophecy enough to reveal time as caught in the loop of their pinions, if I remove my shirt from my bloodied torso and twist from it my own oil, if in my pocket I find the final ballot before the mine was tripped in god’s patience, if I see my vote had predicted the immolation of seasons and the beheading of goats sacrificed to rain that washed away no blood and emulsified sickness into the oceans and seas, if pain rises from the mouths of the dead in the shape the dead took when alive, if all this time we’ve been building tombs and calling them home — • [Image of an eight-meter-tall wall bearing a hole in its center, or a 1.7272-meter-tall wall, which is me, bearing a hole in my center. I am the wall and the hole is what makes me better. I want to be better.] • Hajjar, does a body on its back act as the body’s own grief? Is a body downed the mind’s shadow? If we must love our souls, does that mean we must love what leaves?

From Mars cruel god of war The desire to tie the corpse to the chariot And drag it around each morning, From Mercury the idea to put a stop to that And buy the body back. Because everything sooner or later becomes a musical Or a collectible card or figurine Hitler or the Fierce Saladin Dracula the Impaler All stripped of any awareness of suffering: There is no voice in stones No word that turns to flesh or blood. (At that auction held at Bolaffi, Those intriguing heart-shaped or "C" postmarks Stamped after their arrival in Florence On two letters sent from the field to the family Of a student volunteer at Curtatone.)

We got sent home early & no one knew why.I think we are at war! I yelled to my sister knapsacks ringing against our backs. I copy -catted from Frances who whispered it when the teachers got silent. Can’t blame me for taking a good idea. I collect words where I find them. I’m young & no one around knows where my parents are from. A map on our wall & I circle all the places I want to be. My auntie, not-blood but could be, runs the oil through my scalp. Her fingers play the strands of my hair. The house smells like badam. My uncle, not-blood but could be, soaks them in a bowl of water. My auntie says my people might be Afghani. I draw a ship on the map. I write Afghani under its hull. I count all the oceans, blood & not-blood, all the people I could be, the whole map, my mirror. The kids at school ask me where I’m from & I have no answer. I’m a silent girl, a rig ready to blow. The towers fell two weeks ago & I can’t say blow out loud or everyone will hate me. They all make English their own, say that’s the bomb. I know that word’s not meant for me but I collect words where I find them. I practice at night, the crater it makes of my mouth. I whisper it to my sheets, bombbombbombbombbombbombbombbombbombbombbombbombbomb a little symphony, so round. I look up & make sure no one heard.

I.“Before the War” “Before the war” means Fresno, a hedged-in house, two dogs in the family. Blackie, the small one, mine, lapped at his insides on the floorboard, on the way to the doctor. Jimmy, my father's shepherd, wouldn't eat after the evacuation. He wouldn't live with another master and pined away, skin and bone. With feelings more than pride, we call him our one-man dog. II. Mud Mud in the barracks— a muddy room, a chamber pot. Mud in the moats around each barracks group. Mud on the shoes trudging to the mess hall. Mud in the swamp where the men chopped wood. Mud on the guts under a loaded wagon— crushed in the mud by the wheel. III.  Desert Songs 1. all that we gathered Because there was little else to do, they led us to the artillery range for shells, all that we gathered, and let us dig among dunes for slugs, when they were through. Because there was little else to do, one of them chased a stray with his tail between his legs and shot him through the head. 2. shells A desert tortoise— something mute and hard— something to decorate a desert Japanese garden: gnarled wood, smooth artillery shells for a border. When a guard smashes one, the shell cracks open and the muscles ooze. 3. it is only natural The pheasant is an Oriental creature, so it is only natural that one should fly into camp and, famished by rations and cans, break out in secret, native dance over a fire, on a black coal stove. 4. song of the 442nd Caged creatures have curious moods. Some of them choose to be turned loose in a group, to take their chances in the open. 5. steers Because a dentist logically drives a butcher truck, I rode with my father to the slaughterhouse on an afternoon. Not hammers, not bullets, could make him close his eyes. 6. he teaches He jerks the eyes from birds, feet from lizards, and punishes ants with the gaze of a glass. And with his sly gaze, his child's face, he teaches what has its place, and must be passed on to others. IV. Song of Chicago When the threat lessened, when we became tame, my father and friends took a train to Chicago for factory work, for packaging bolts. One grew a mustache and called himself Carlos. And they all made a home with those of their own— rats, bedbugs, blacks.

Time only cause of my unrest By whom I hop’d once to bee blest How cruell art thou turned? That first gav’st lyfe unto my love, And still a pleasure nott to move Or change though ever burned; Have I thee slack’d, or left undun One loving rite, and soe have wunn Thy rage or bitter changing? That now noe minutes I shall see, Wherein I may least happy bee Thy favors soe estranging. Blame thy self, and nott my folly, Time gave time butt to bee holly; True love such ends best loveth Unworhty love doth seeke for ends A worthy love butt worth pretends Nor other thoughts itt proveth: Then stay thy swiftnes cruell time, And lett mee once more blessed clime To joy, that I may prayse thee: Lett mee pleasure sweetly tasting Joy in love, and faith nott wasting And on fames wings I’le rayse thee: Never shall thy glory dying Bee untill thine owne untying That time noe longer liveth; T’is a gaine such tyme to lend: Since soe thy fame shall never end Butt joy for what she giveth.