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Negative, chalk (how I first saw your sign) reads like smoke signals. Has an extensive collection of glasses. On this side of the earth, no sides: where we practice our marksmanship, like soldiers in the city square, on corpses, no matter many beetles in the grass. Find it. Obstinately refuse to grasp. The spades, today valiantly shouldered, submerge in the unprofitable patch. Beetles are back-up plan zero, the if I were you thing inside the water container, which is too blind to trust with the wheel, to leave alone, even if in for the eve. The wounds we gave ourselves have just begun us, irreligious, and are the deterrents, as escarpments, of else but warlike heads. Go get your own aquarium, each fin becoming coiled beneath the bus, cruising along. There you'll find the nasal passage. Ask the operator for extreme commitment from the lamp shade to the table, all reflected in the unwashed window. Table of omens. Flotation devices murmured and murdered. The shutters of thunder are forlorn like the song of the sound of my own voice: a different tattooed country. Nationalism. At the rally, everybody's grin gives away two bags. All are watered, her body slipping out from under the dripping awning, effortlessly.

At Pearl Street station, two brown-skinned men in painter’s pants stand out in a sea of white I am just one more face sticking out in a crowd & it is my privilege that prevents me from understanding why the workers want to know how to buy one-way trips the automated machine sells only one roundtrip fee, back to where you came from he isn’t asking me for change says it clear enough so that there can be no mistake Sí. Yo sé. But a dollar fifty is a lot of money.

The giant Slinky of  Spring approaches & I have nothing to sport after spending a fortune on hooded sweaters that make me look like I’m searching for the Holy Grail. Struggling with granola & soy milk, dental bills accumulate like snow & the potatoes I forgot have rotted. I’m broke & broke & broke & broke & broke, a bowling ball spiraling down a middle-aged staircase of doubt. The night I crazily fled for the gentrified grids of  14th Street. A pinball, I landed in Playbill. I left Brooklyn tossing televisions & futons like bombs in the bowels of  hipster bohemia. In the piano karaoke bar, I met Kevin, a Peter Pan Tennessee man who spun quips & wit like pixie dust about me. A puckish chariot fueled by moxie, this lean tambourine of charms leaned over me, a hot flamingo in the midnight light & admitted his once-upon-a-time fetish for Laotian men in his youth. I wanted him to fall for me as if  he stumbled into the inside of an Oriental mansion shaking the tchotchkes in my heart, steeping my crush into sweet green tea. Kevin would be my model of elegance, unabashed confidence, a dragon fierceness. He said, There’s more to Rainbow Pride than RuPaul & Stonewall kickball & I finally felt I belonged in DC. November, Kevin’s jaw ached. He showed up at The Black Fox mumbling  jumble garble through tears. His feature canceled. After the first break from winter gray to blue, Facebook alerts Kevin’s wheeled to hospice, liver cancer. I teach Donmike how to make pancit noodles. We become the curse of gossiping Filipina spinster aunts. How have we become giggling little lily pad princesses behind invisible hand fans, waiting for our potential suitors to make the first move? I wonder whether you’re afraid my hug lingers a little too long after I rub your feet or maybe you’re just a Scorpio expressing affection & I know I have 3rd world Daddy issues but I don’t want to bring up hopes & fuck ups. Maybe I’m in love with you like that baby weasel riding the flying woodpecker’s back. It’s an Avatar magical, sci-fi, unexpected flash of  bliss when really, the woodpecker is fighting for his life. The weasel doesn’t know what it’s gotten itself into but a thrill that will never come again, something better than a feathered Baby Jane din-din. Tomorrow, you’ll want to go to Rehoboth & kite surf at the beach house of the guy who lusts after you. The priest’s sermon makes no sense: Forest Fires in the Bay, Water Well Maidens &“Let It Go” from Frozen. It’s not that I hate white people or that we’re soul mates. It’s that you’re beginning to wash off me like ashes in holy water.

Chandelier too full of brilliance to be indolent. Your prisms enunciate the light and don’t need rain to break it into rainbows. Snow with six crutches in each crystal. Your livery your glitter, your purring made visible. Only inanimate things can sparkle without sweat. My spinet, the threat of music in its depths and miniature busts of men composers carved of time on top. The hollow bench held sheet music. Sing me Charm Gets In Your Eyes. I hear you best when undistracted by your body. In headspace technology, where flowers are living in glass globes, their fragrance vivisected. Anything that blooms that long will seem inanimate. Heaven. Grief like the sea. Keeps going. Over the same wrought ground. The whole spent moan. Praise dies in my throat or in the spooky rift between itself and its intended. Like a wish- bone breaking. The little crutch inside is not a toy. There is no night asylum. A restless bed, a haunt preserve, a blanket rough as sailcloth. But sing me, was it kind snow sometimes? With true divided lights and nothing flawed about it? If song goes wrong, be dancerly. Dance me, at what point does west turn to east as it spins? I’ve never understood. Perspective. How charm gets to yes. Dance me Exile and the Queendom, by request. It is a ferocious thing to have your body as your instrument. Glove over glove, let your dance express what I’ve been creeping like a vein of sweat through a vastness of. This tune with mountains tied inside and many silent letters can be read as trackers scan the spaces between toes and birders read the rustle left by birds. As any mammal in its private purr hole knows, the little crutch inside is not a crutch. More a sort of steeple. Neither silver to be chased nor gold to be beaten. You were==you are more than ever like that too. Noon upon noon, you customize this solitude with spires that want nothing from me and rise with no objective as everything does when happy.

What are days for? Days are where we live. They come, they wake us Time and time over. They are to be happy in: Where can we live but days? Ah, solving that question Brings the priest and the doctor In their long coats Running over the fields.

Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days, Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, And marching single in an endless file, Bring diadems and fagots in their hands. To each they offer gifts after his will, Bread, kingdoms, stars, or sky that holds them all. I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp, Forgot my morning wishes, hastily Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day Turned and departed silent. I, too late, Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.

Swift and subtle The flying shuttle Crosses the web And fills the loom, Leaving for range Of choice or change No room, no room.

O the days gone by! O the days gone by! The apples in the orchard, and the pathway through the rye; The chirrup of the robin, and the whistle of the quail As he piped across the meadows sweet as any nightingale; When the bloom was on the clover, and the blue was in the sky, And my happy heart brimmed over in the days gone by. In the days gone by, when my naked feet were tripped By the honey-suckle’s tangles where the water-lilies dipped, And the ripples of the river lipped the moss along the brink Where the placid-eyed and lazy-footed cattle came to drink, And the tilting snipe stood fearless of the truant’s wayward cry And the splashing of the swimmer, in the days gone by. O the days gone by! O the days gone by! The music of the laughing lip, the luster of the eye; The childish faith in fairies, and Aladdin’s magic ring— The simple, soul-reposing, glad belief in everything,— When life was like a story, holding neither sob nor sigh, In the golden olden glory of the days gone by.

for Edmund White Lunch: as we close the twentieth century, death, like a hanger-on or a wanna-be sits with us at the cluttered bistro table, inflecting the conversation. Elderly friends take lovers, rent studios, plan trips to unpronounceable provinces. Fifty makes the ironic wager that his biographer will outlive him— as may the erudite eighty-one-year-old dandy with whom a squabble is simmering. His green-eyed architect companion died in the spring. He is frank about his grief, as he savors spiced pumpkin soup, and a sliced rare filet. We’ll see the next decade in or not. This one retains its flavor. “Her new book ...” “... brilliant!” “She slept with ...” “Really!” Long arabesques of silver-tipped sentences drift on the current of our two languages into the mist of late September midafternoon, where the dusk is curling Just thirty-eight: her last chemotherapy treatment’s the same day classes begin again. I went through it a year before she started; but hers was both breasts, and lymph nodes. She’s always been a lax vegetarian. Now she has cut out butter and cheese, and she never drank wine or beer. What else is there to eliminate? Tea and coffee ... ? (Our avocado salads are copious.) It’s easier to talk about politics than to allow the terror that shares both of our bedrooms to find words. It made the introduction; it’s an acquaintance we’ve in common. Trading medical anecdotes helps out when conversation lapses. We don’t discuss Mitterrand and cancer. Four months (I say) I’ll see her, see him again. (I dream my life; I wake to contingencies.) Now I walk home along the river, into the wind, as the clouds break open.

What was the future then but affirmation, The first yes between us Followed by the first lingering dawn? Waking below a window shaded by redwoods (Waking? We hadn’t slept—), We found time saved, like sunlight in a tree. Still, the house was cold, and there were shadows. The couple in the next room Rapped the wall to quiet us, like them, Condescending from a bitter knowledge That, young as we all were, Love didn’t last, but receded into silence. Wedging our pillows back of the headboard That clapped in time with us, We let them think we agreed. Then, holding on, We closed each other’s mouths and felt that slowness That the best days begin with Turn into the speed with which they fly. Flight was that year’s theme, all around us— Flight of hunter and hunted, The President turning inward on one wing, And, on the patio, the emigration Of termites, a glittering fleet, Leaving that shadowed house a little lighter. Within it all, above it, or beyond, We thought we were the fixed point, And held still as the quail lit down beside us And waited for her plump mate to appear, His crest a quivering hook. The valley’s reach of sunshine reeled them in. There was wilderness around us, don’t forget. Behind the nets of fragrance Thrown across our path by the acacia Lurked the green man or the kidnapper. And there was the Pacific With its own passions taking place as rain. The sorrow of the couple in the next room Was a deep muteness nightly. That loneliness could come of loving was Like news of time cored out of the redwood. The house that we made shake, Or thought we did, was taking wing already. After we left, still it took us years Before we stopped comparing Every morning together to that first one And every place we lived to that first place And everything we said To that first word repeated all night long.