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One girl a full head taller Than the other—into their Sunday dresses. First, the slip, hardly a piece of fabric, Softly stitched and printed with a bud. I’m not their mother, and tangle, then untangle The whole cloth—on backwards, have to grab it Round their necks. But they know how to pull Arms in, a reflex of being dressed, And also, a child’s faith. The mass of stuff That makes the Sunday frocks collapses In my hands and finds its shape, only because They understand the drape of it— These skinny keys to intricate locks. The buttons are a problem For a surgeon. How would she connect These bony valves and stubborn eyelets? The filmy dress revolves in my blind fingers. The slots work one by one. And when they’re put together, Not like puppets or those doll-saints That bring tears to true believers, But living children, somebody’s real daughters, They do become more real. They say, “Stop it!” and “Give it back!” And “I don’t want to!” They’ll kiss A doll’s hard features, whispering, “I’m sorry.” I know just why my mother Used to worry. Your clothes don’t keep You close—it’s nakedness. Clad in my boots and holster, I would roam with my six-gun buddies. We dealt fake death to one another, Fell and rolled in filth and rose, Grimy with wounds, then headed home. But Sunday ... what was that tired explanation Given for wearing clothes that Scratched and shone and weighed like a slow hour? That we should shine—in gratitude. So, I give that explanation, undressing them, And wait for the result. After a day like Sunday, such a long one, When they lie down, half-dead, To be undone, they won’t help me. They cry, “It’s not my fault.”

I’ll go anywhere to leave you but come with me. All the cities are like you anyway. Windows darken when I get close enough to see. Any place we want to stay’s polluted, the good spots taken already by those who ruin them. And restaurants we’d never find. We’d rut a ditch by a river in nights so long they must be cut by the many pairs of wrong-handled scissors maybe god owns and doesn’t share. I water god. I make a haunted lake and rinse and rinse. I take what I want, and have ever since what I want disappeared, like anything hunted. That’s what you said. Disappointment isn’t tender, dried and wide instead. The tourists snapped you crying, and the blanket I brought was so dirty it must have been lying around in lice and blood that whole year we fought. It wasn’t clear, so I forgot. I haven’t been sleeping, next to you twitching to bury my boring eyes. The ship made you sad, and the ferry, and canoe. All boats do.

in his white light dreams at Discovery Hut Herbert Ponting meets the Siberian ponies he’d once photographed on the Terra Nova the ponies no longer flexible refuse to wear equine pajamas or trap their hooves in bamboo snowshoes for his Royal Collection inside the stomach of ice the ponies more still than life soften the silver shadows of Scott and his team and turn from Herbert’s bromide into the drift and whiff of themselves

Now I can see: even the trees

When the fire bell rang its two short, one long electric signal, the boys closest to the wall of windows had to raise the blinds and close the sashes, and then join the last of our line as it snaked out the classroom onto the field of asphalt where we stood, grade-by-grade, until the principal appeared with her gold Timex. We learned early that catastrophe must always be attended in silence, that death prefers us orderly and ordered, and that rules will save us from the chaos of our fear, so that even if we die, we die together, which was the calm almost consoling thought I had each time the yellow C.D. siren wailed and we would tuck ourselves beneath our sturdy desktops. Eyes averted from the windows, we’d wait for the drill to pass or until the nun’s rosary no longer clicked and we could hear her struggling to free herself from the leg-well of her desk, and then her call for us to rise and, like herself, brush off the dust gathered on our clothes. And then the lessons resumed. No thought of how easily we interred ourselves, though at home each would dream the mushroom cloud, the white cap of apocalypse whose funnel stem sucked glass from windows, air from lungs, and made all these rehearsals the sad and hollow gestures that they were, for we knew it in our bones that we would die, curled in a last defense— head on knees, arms locked around legs— the way I’ve seen it since in nursing homes and hospices: forms bedsheets can’t hide, as if in death the body takes on the soul’s compact shape, acrobatic, posed to tumble free of the desktop or bed and join the expanse and wide scatter of debris.

Wine comes in at the mouth And love comes in at the eye; That’s all we shall know for truth Before we grow old and die. I lift the glass to my mouth, I look at you, and I sigh.

When the end was near He threatened   hands trembling There is no end    never his hands reaching to my face You can’t leave taking off his shirt   going for his pants The trickle of sweat beading off his nose Moon-orb spray   metallic shimmer     slicklove Tripping numb night shadows Crows perched on a streetlight We’re terrestrial ants living in fragility On Huhugam sacred ground Jar of our dead Like ragged cats my ghosts and I Gossip in the alley behind a bar My eyes grasp theirs     a spark     revolution Feet without tracks on gravel Our existence erased   far off From clinking beer bottles and vanity On the bench outside a bookstore We get erased    see the news of the street Resistance getting milled My favorite ghosts and I bear down harder    birth ourselves On the bench outside a bookstore Frigid wind wants to snatch our secrets Hey nay ya na ya na ya na I thank you thank you for your presence My ghosts   I thank you for your presence Hey nay ya na   ya na   ya na  ya na This dilemma  oh ancestors O! ancestors !!!!   I thank you  thank you  thank you Hey nay ya na ya na ya na ya na

Bangkok Caught in a slip of particulars, say, between the dirt road and the brand-new Seven-Eleven, a bucket of lotus, three shades of red in the mudbank giving way to workers, faces hidden behind kerchiefs, binding the copper tines of another half-constructed building, this fretwork, that rooftop’s progress up and up, the eye riding a motor’s rev, coming to a woman who leans over the seventh story’s edge for the pulley rope’s basket of rice or rubber mallets, then a sweep down into cattle now, their beige skin over bones, the look of loose tents, or taking in a bronze Buddha, hands folded over the First National Melting Company, the red gate, black gate, red, retina arriving at a man throwing straw clumps to earth so the seeds don’t wash away, and the light behind him washing away, and this desire, a gaze shot along the border which is shaped like a question mark, cramped with hotels, pink neon grammars blinking Alpha, Alpha, Alpha Is The Bank For You And Your Needs, another quick catch, the glance stippled with disappearances, a girl who lifts her skirt to bathe near the bus stop, a fire burning/burnt/burning in the field of bulldozers, an eye trying to fix itself as the vehicle turns, the mind from nascent to nation, drifting in instances, a grit in wind worrying the surface, the facts, out to finger the invisible gap we would inhabit, pulsing always in between.

On humming rubber along this white concrete, lighthearted between the gravities of source and destination like a man halfway to the moon in this bubble of tuneless whistling at seventy miles an hour from the windvents, over prairie swells rising and falling, over the quick offramp that drops to its underpass and the truck thundering beneath as I cross with the country music twanging out my windows, I'm grooving down this highway feeling technology is freedom's other name when —a meadowlark comes sailing across my windshield with breast shining yellow and five notes pierce the windroar like a flash of nectar on mind, gone as the country music swells up and drops me wheeling down my notch of cement-bottomed sky between home and away and wanting to move again through country that a bird has defined wholly with song, and maybe next time see how he flies so easy, when he sings.

This could be the town you’re from, marked only by what it’s near. The gas station man speaks of weather and the high school football team just as you knew he would— kind to strangers, happy to live here. Tell yourself it doesn’t matter now, you’re only driving through. Past the sagging, empty porches locked up tight to travelers’ stares, toward the great dark of the fields, your headlights startle a flock of old love letters—still undelivered, enroute for years.