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Offer your usual posy of goatheads. Proffer sharp garlands of thistle & Incas’ thin down; of squash bugs strung on blighted stems; send back necklaced every reeking pearl I crushed, each egg cluster that I scraped away with knife or twig or thumbnail. Wake me sweat-laced from a dream of hidden stables: the gentle foals atremble, stem-legged, long-neglected. Dear drought our summer’s corn was overrun again with weed & cheat; the bitter zinnias fell to bits. Dear yearlings our harvest is lattice & husk.

dear dusty moth wearing miller’s cloth, Sophia Nichols’ soft voice calls wings at dusk across railroads and sagebrush to lull me to sleep, ‘Come to these window corners, come, rest on my boy’s dreams and flight, come tonight’ 2 September 2002

Now I know what it is to bite the tongue inside the mink stole: I do not want my inspiration stolen! ms. merongrongrong , for you I do my husband’s hairdo in a kind of flip. Now for once I want to build a data cage, a firewall, encrypt a fiber option, to lock up his image, lock the tick into his rib. I grasp his slim wrist and mask him for the gas: what a pheasant operation, his plumage brilliants as he whites out in closed caption, under glass. A harmless operation, a lipid removal or a viscous camera drip. ms. merongrongrong , please do not misprism me, for normally I am not like this, I do not creep or crypt, do not go hissing, bent double, kettlewaisted, clinched. When pressed I spread; when pinched, pinch; shiv and shinny my way out, make a finger mouth that shrinks the moon to a pupa, shove it in my purse to pupate on my cabbage stash, my petty rash cashola. In your stall, I dump the stenchy contents of my clutch on your counter, your clerk Moonlight scrubs the Wikifile, slicks the nail down to a nib, mums me in muff, ruff, muffler, ruffle, stomacher, pannier of ribbed silk, knight’s visor, hutch where I keep my prize rabbits, ms. merongrongrong I and II, which liplop the moonlit garden in stitched minks. ms. merongrongrong you send the Dutchman moon to touch us you cinch my betrothed ’s throat till he has to swallow what I bite, he drags himself to the window to vomit, he drags the bile sea in drag like a widow with a ghost lover, mourning over the suck white sand in white I wear a glass pane over my face, a teller’s window or a train’s, ms. merongrongrong , I stutter by in sailor’s guise, adrenal sink disguised as swagger, a thickened chest wall, a fat and padded neck. I go a specimen, I pose between the slides for my decline, ms. merongrongrong time thins and quickens, I help my husband up over the lip of the Dutch oven, his flank is ripped, one paw limp, one soft ear hangs by a thread, I lug myself up the path you have prepared for us, the trestle, the wooden tread—

X. Your bags were packed and left at the door, the vase you filled with shells, wrapped in tissue, your books boxed. I have the whelk you found on shore, the small conch, intact—the point, the fine grooves— and keep it in a box with a picture of you at the beach: your hair slicked back, head cocked at an angle. Behind you, the green jacket you told me to throw away. Strewn over a chair, its arms dangle above the floor—a hole in the pocket, the elbows thin from years of use. Y. I become each day more reckless, too impatient for summer, the unbearable heat, the calm that comes with it. There are no hills here, not one, and I’m bored with the stillness of the yellow field outside my window. And you, who cannot keep still, who can never look back, where will you go next? How will I find you? Can you feel the world pull apart, the seams loosen? What, tell me, will keep it whole, if not you? if not me? Send a postcard, picture, tell me how you’ve been. Z. Running down the stairwell in the garden, I divide the steps by three, until my foot catches the edge, wet with rain, and my frame, flung forward by its own momentum, leans into the night as if reaching for something I didn’t know I wanted. Not the moon. No. Not the sky, suspended and limitless. Not even the tulips standing on their stems (their petals cup the air). But in the streetlamp’s circle of light, I land among them, broken. My body can’t contain itself, as blood burgeons in my hands.

What will be served for our reception in the devastation? Finger food, of course and white wine, something printed on the napkins. We were not children together but we are now. Every bird knows only two notes constantly rearranged. That’s called forever so we wear pajamas to the practice funeral, buckeroos to the end. We make paper hats of headlines and float them away. My home made of smoke, tiny spider made of punctuation, my favorite poem is cinder scratched into a sidewalk. My friend’s becoming the simplest man, he sees a lesson in everything, in missing his train, in his son hollering from the first branch, Dad, guess where I am. I was with him for my first magpies, governmental and acting like hell. And the new nickel with Washington hard to recognize. We’d driven by a Rabbit flattened by an upset truck, jars of Miracle Whip broken over the toll road in heavy snow. We watched an old lady eat a hot dog in a bun with a knife and fork. A few emeralds winged off a fruit leaf. What happens when your head splits open and the bird flies out, its two notes deranged? You got better, I got better, wildflowers rimmed the crater, glitter glitter glitter. We knew someone whose father died then we knew ourselves. Astronomer, gladiator, thief, a tombstone salesman. All our vacations went to the sea that breathed two times a day without a machine. We got in trouble with a raft doing what we promised not to. Further out to be brought further back. There’s my friend in his squashed hat trying to determine if a dot is a living thing and do no harm. He’s having trouble remembering street names but there’s still plenty of Thoreau. All that a human is made of is gold, very very little gold.

The most inscrutable beautiful names in this world always do sound like diseases. It’s because they are engorged. G., I am a fool. What we feel in the solar plexus wrecks us. Halfway squatting on a crate where feeling happened. Caresses. You know corporeal gifts besmirch thieves like me. But she plucks a feather and my steam escapes. We’re awake each night at pennymoon and we micro and necro. I can’t stop. But love and what-all: the uncomfortable position of telling the truth, like the lotus, can’t be held long. If she knew would she just take all her favors from my marmalade vessel and chuck them back into the endless reversible garment which is my life— an astonishing vanishing. G., I know this letter is like a slice of elevator accident. As smart folk would say, “Everything is only Nothing’s Truck.” I would revise it and say that everything is only nothing, truncated. Love, Your Igor

Dear, if you change, I’ll never choose again; Sweet, if you shrink, I’ll never think of love; Fair, if you fail, I’ll judge all beauty vain; Wise, if too weak, more wits I’ll never prove. Dear, sweet, fair, wise,-change, shrink, nor be not weak; And on my faith, my faith shall never break. Earth with her flowers shall sooner heaven adorn; Heaven her bright stars through, earth’s dim globe shall move; Fire heat shall lose, and frosts of flame be born; Air, made to shine, as black as hell shall prove: Earth, heaven, fire, air, the world transformed shall view, Ere I prove false to faith, or strange to you.

a love supreme, a love supreme a love supreme, a love supreme Sex fingers toes in the marketplace near your father's church in Hamlet, North Carolina— witness to this love in this calm fallow of these minds, there is no substitute for pain: genitals gone or going, seed burned out, you tuck the roots in the earth, turn back, and move by river through the swamps, singing:a love supreme, a love supreme; what does it all mean? Loss, so great each black woman expects your failure in mute change, the seed gone. You plod up into the electric city— your song now crystal and the blues. You pick up the horn with some will and blow into the freezing night: a love supreme, a love supreme— Dawn comes and you cook up the thick sin 'tween impotence and death, fuel the tenor sax cannibal heart, genitals, and sweat that makes you clean— a love supreme, a love supreme— Why you so black? cause I am why you so funky? cause I am why you so black? cause I am why you so sweet? cause I am why you so black? cause I am a love supreme, a love supreme:

I’m here, one fat cherry blossom blooming like a clod, one sad groat glazing, a needle puling thread, so what, so sue me. These days what else to do but leer at any boy with just the right hairline.Hey! I say, That’s one tasty piece of nature. Tart Darkling, if I could I’d gin, I’d bargain, I’d take a little troll this moolit night, let you radish me awhile, let you gag and confound me. How much I’ve struggled with despicing you, always; your false poppets, relentless distances. Yet plea-bargaining and lack of conversation continue to make me your faithful indefile. I’m lonely. I’ve turned all rage to rag, all pratfalls fast to fatfalls for you, My Farmer in the Dwell. So struggle, strife, so strew me, to bell with these clucking mediocrities, these anxieties over such beings thirty, still smitten with this heaven never meant for, never heard from. You’ve said we’re each pockmarked like a golf course with what can’t be said of us, bred in us, isn’t our tasty piece of nature. But I tell you I’ve stars, I’ve true blue depths, have learned to use the loo, the crew, the whole slough of pill-popping devices without you, your intelligent and pitiless graze. Everyone knows love is just a euphemism for you’ve failed me anyway. So screw me. Bartering Yam, regardless of want I’m nothing without scope, hope, nothing without your possibility. So let’s laugh like the thieves we are together, the sieves: you, my janus gate, my Sigmund Fraud, my crawling, crack-crazed street sprawled out, revisible, spell-bound. Hello, joy. I’m thirsty. I’m Pasty Rectum. In your absence I’ve learned to fill myself with starts. Here’s my paters. Here’s my blue. I just wanted to write again and say how much I’ve failed you.

you dream in the language of dodging bullets and artillery fire. new, sexy diagnoses have been added to the lexicon on your behalf (“charlie don’t surf,” has also been added to the lexicon on your behalf). in this home that is not our home, we have mutually exiled each other. i walk down your street in the rain, and i do not call you. i walk in the opposite direction of where i know to find you. that we do not speak is louder than bombs. there are times that missing you is a matter of procedure. now is not one of those times. there are times when missing you hurts. so it comes to this, vying for geography. there is a prayer stuck in my throat. douse me in gasoline, my love, and strike a match. let’s see this prayer ignite to high heaven.