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for my mother and father Apparently I’m Mom’s immaculately-conceived Irish-American son, because, Social-Security time come, my Cherokee dad could not prove he’d been born. He could pay taxes, though, financing troops, who’d conquered our land, and could go to jail, the time he had to shoot or die, by a Caucasian attacker’s knife. Eluding recreational killers’ calendar’s enforcers, while hunting my family’s food, I thought what the hunted think, so that I ate, not only meat but the days of wild animals fed by the days of seeds, themselves eating earth’s aeons of lives, fed by the sun, rising and falling, as quail, hurtling through sky, fell, from gun-powder, come— as the First Americans came— from Asia. Explosions in cannon, I have an English name, a German-Chilean-American wife and could live a white life, but, with this hand, with which I write, I dug, my sixteenth summer, a winter’s supply of yams out of hard, battlefield clay, dug for my father’s mother, who— abandoned by her husband—raised, alone, a mixed-blood family and raised—her tongue spading air— ancestors, a winter’s supply or more.

It is not pain that holds me back, but time With its sad prefigurations and smell, Its flowers and echoes, rivers and crime. Even now, without a future, I tell Myself lies in future tense. As my hair Thins, I collect combs. When clocks chime, I groan. The falling world finds pleasure in despair Because to suffer means to be alone, And I suffer through all the accidents Of change as though I were settling a score, As if to disinvent what death invents. I once built a castle, now I do chores. To pass the time I rearrange my things. To fall asleep I recite names of kings.

We had a city also. Hand in hand Wandered happy as travellers our own land. Murmured in turn the hearsay of each stone Or, where a legend faltered, lived our own. The far-seen obelisk my father set (Pinning two roads forever where they met) Waved us in wandering circles, turned our tread Where once morass engulfed that passionate head. Cornice rose in ranges, rose so high It saw no sky, that forum, but noon sky. Marble shone like shallows; columns too Streamed with cool light as rocks in breakers do. O marble many-colored as reach of thought, Tones so recollected and so distraught. Golden: like swimmers when the August shore Brightens their folklore poses more and more. Or grey with silver: moon’s whirling spell Over the breathless olives we knew well; Ivory as shoulders there that summer-dressed Curve to come shyly naked, then find rest (The tresses love dishevelled leaning dazed And grateful). Or the wayward stone that blazed As cheeks do. Or as eyes half-lowered flare. Violet as veins are, love knows where. Fine coral as the shy and wild tonguetip, Undersea coral, rich as inner lip. There was a stone to build on! Friezes ran In strong chorales that where they closed began; And statues: each a wrung or ringing phrase In the soul’s passionate cadence of her days. O stone so matched and massive, worked so well, Who could believe it when the first brick fell? Who could imagine the unlucky word Would darken to the worldwide sigh we heard? How our eyes wrenched together and held fast Each face tightening to a chalky cast (So poor a copy of one hour before). Who could believe the gloom, the funnelled roar Of cornice falling, forum falling, all Falling? Or dream it fallen? Not a wall With eaves to route the rain. The rivers swelled Till roads groped in lakebottom. Nothing held Clean edge or corner. Caking, the black flood Left every luminous room tunnels of mud. Earth shook: the columns walked, in midair clashed, And the steep stone exploded as it crashed. Soon the barbarian swarmed like locusts blown Between the flood and spasm of our stone. Grunted to tug their huts and marble sties Where friezes broke like foam in the blue skies. Blue noses poked, recoiling as they found Our young and glad-eyed statues underground; Singing salvation, the lewd chisel pecks At boy and girl: one mutilated sex. All our high moments cheapened—greed and grime Charred them in rickety stithies to quicklime. Murderous world. That town that seemed a star Rose in our soul. And there the ruins are. We’ll not walk there again. Who’d wish to walk Where the rats gather and grey tourists talk? Who’d walk there even alive? Or bid his ghost Trail phosphor on the melancholy coast?

Toss in some wavy lines, an equal sign, and a squiggle, then a lilac log, boulders with faces, a few phrases like rock walls, twin marks from wagon wheels on granite. The tell-tale lilacs give away the cellar hole: magnetic lilacs, like nineteenth-century girls in pinafores and blossom sprays, stationed beside their no-longer houses. They look about to sing. Banana curls. Purple ribbons tying their waists. And boulders in the woods act as billboards interrupted by an enormous Mont Blanc fountain pen, lounging like an alligator. It intrudes. Comes out of my present time. No. Be less. It's a Bic ballpoint. Bleached by deletion, "By the middle of the nineteenth century, when de forestation reached its peak, more than half of New England's native forests"—according to Robert M. Thorson, Stone by Stone—"as much as 80 percent in the heavily settled parts of southern New England—had been cut down," "replaced with 'open space,'" the autumn foliage is paint-by-number and different tabs throughout are half-finished murals of a single type of tree in a single time of year. Here's the place where someone w/ a pewter spoon kneeled to plant the Lady's Slippers that still appear, and the mushrooms like a stack of dinner plates that run up the side of a rotting tree. Here's the fallen-in deer stand and the apple tree among maples making fruit for deer. Outside the woods, the puff of dust on the road where the school bus used to stop. Outside is the failure to stay in touch or, really, to ever be in touch. I didn't ever know them (my neighbors) well. In winter you are handed a white tray with a few tiny rock walls, short lines drawn with a ruler, an indent for where a cellar hole could be a hyperlink to once go once more to the lake and told to go at it, go play.

Decoy Gang War Victim, 1974, by Asco (photographer: Harry Gamboa, Jr.) For Harry Gamboa,   Jr. Just a tick ago, the actor was a Roman candle shot to the sky, smudged by rain’s helter- skelter. His motivation was: he’s a stooge on L.A.’s sodden turnpike, so we have “to make” art. Got to rezone and react. The world the bare wall to his bullet. Got to rile up the populace, to fortify the arsenal. Once in a while, repopulate and penetrate, paint a list of incitement onto the walls. An elder told him that to overturn the city, one must surrender body/belongings to the one explosive spectacle of truth, making it ongoing. Pay attention. To overturn the city, not just the scraps but fervor itself. Not just the wan broadcast of indignation but IRL incursions into the workhouses and poorhouses to inflame the thousand points of  light. A lean surge, departure pinks both ends of  him. He’s the n th layer folded into the stand’s nerve.

The Queen sits on a throne of gem-trimmed robes. Between her robes the jutted moth, it follows dust. She can’t rest before the funeral, her self- unmaking, some maid whose hair is browned by blood; a matching queen. Nights’ dim candles, grackles’ glib decrescence. Now dance, now weep. No rest for feet still warm from summer’s phrasing — odors / ankle / thorn. Keeping time while dying, the Queen grows bored, her hand’s throat out, amiss. (Yet I sob, I paw. Yet) I kiss.

You whom I could not save Listen to me. Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another. I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words. I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree. What strengthened me, for you was lethal. You mixed up farewell to an epoch with the beginning of a new one, Inspiration of hatred with lyrical beauty; Blind force with accomplished shape. Here is a valley of shallow Polish rivers. And an immense bridge Going into white fog. Here is a broken city; And the wind throws the screams of gulls on your grave When I am talking with you. What is poetry which does not save Nations or people? A connivance with official lies, A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment, Readings for sophomore girls. That I wanted good poetry without knowing it, That I discovered, late, its salutary aim, In this and only this I find salvation. They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds. I put this book here for you, who once lived So that you should visit us no more. Warsaw, 1945

It’s true I never write, but I would gladly die with you.

This plot of ground facing the waters of this inlet is dedicated to the living presence of Emily Dickinson Wellcome who was born in England; married; lost her husband and with her five year old son sailed for New York in a two-master; was driven to the Azores; ran adrift on Fire Island shoal, met her second husband in a Brooklyn boarding house, went with him to Puerto Rico bore three more children, lost her second husband, lived hard for eight years in St. Thomas, Puerto Rico, San Domingo, followed the oldest son to New York, lost her daughter, lost her "baby," seized the two boys of the oldest son by the second marriage mothered them—they being motherless—fought for them against the other grandmother and the aunts, brought them here summer after summer, defended herself here against thieves, storms, sun, fire, against flies, against girls that came smelling about, against drought, against weeds, storm-tides, neighbors, weasels that stole her chickens, against the weakness of her own hands, against the growing strength of the boys, against wind, against the stones, against trespassers, against rents, against her own mind. She grubbed this earth with her own hands, domineered over this grass plot, blackguarded her oldest son into buying it, lived here fifteen years, attained a final loneliness and— If you can bring nothing to this place but your carcass, keep out.

Let it finally be Friday, let me drive downtown before five, park in the one space left open in front and feed the meter the exact change it needs. Let me go into the office, sit and nod, unfold my check on the table and sign. Let the line not be dotted, let it be solid. Let it be my name. Let it be final. Let me pull into the driveway while it is still light. It’s well past five and well into October and they are just about to change the time. Saturday night on the local news they’ll remind us all to Fall Back, but I make it in under the wire. There is still light. There is still time. I am up the back porch steps, under the awning, my hand on the back door lock the realtor left on. Let me remember rightly the numbers he gave me. Let this not be the dream of the high school locker with the Master Lock whose combination you forgot or fumbled, turning too fast, going too far, everything you’d locked up irretrievable, lost. Let the lock fall open, let me leave it on the steps for the realtor to pick up. Let him pull up the flimsy stakes of the sign in the yard that says I can be bought, let him drive away. Let no Master enter through my door. Let the house be a disaster, I don’t care. Let the smoke-framed blanks where another woman’s pictures marked the wall be the story of how my edges caught fire and the ash at last let me see where I stood. Let the cracked kitchen floor make a map to teach me where not to step, how not to fall through and break my very own back. Let the broken window be a way out, the broken door a way in. Let me go to the hardware store and buy the tools to take the chain off the bedroom door, let me paint the bathroom pink without asking, walk naked and unafraid through all my rooms. Let me pick up a broom and sweep nothing under the rug. Let me sweep it all into the light. Let me do it. Let there be time. Let there be light.