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It seemed those rose-pink dishes she kept for special company were always cold, brought down from the shelf in jingling stacks, the plates like the panes of ice she broke from the water bucket winter mornings, the flaring cups like tulips that opened too early and got bitten by frost. They chilled the coffee no matter how quickly you drank, while a heavy everyday mug would have kept a splash hot for the better part of a conversation. It was hard to hold up your end of the gossip with your coffee cold, but it was a special occasion, just the same, to sit at her kitchen table and sip the bitter percolation of the past week’s rumors from cups it had taken a year to collect at the grocery, with one piece free for each five pounds of flour.

1 he picks a coin up from the ground it burns his hand like ashes it is red & marks him as it marks the others      hidden he is hidden in the forest in a world of nails his dibbik fills him 2 Each night another one would hang himself. Airless boxcars. Kaddish. "What will they do with us?" The brown & black spots on their bellies. So many clothes. The field was littered. Ten thousand corpses in one place. Arranged in layers. I am moving down the field from right to left—reversing myself at every step. The ground approaches. Money. And still his great- est fear was that he would lose his shoes. 3 earth, growing fat with the slime of corpses      green & pink that ooze like treacle, turn into a kind of tallow that are black at evening       that absorb all light

And the high winds bore down, and the sky built up that grey wall:derecho. The taverns by the sea closed their shutters, and the stands selling battered fries,derecho. On the boardwalk, pieces of salt-water taffy, half- eaten funnel cakes oozing grease and cream:derecho. And the people on every highway, panicked, sought a clear route for their exodus:derecho. What’s in your emergency backpack? Beef jerky, mineral water, flashlight, solar cells? Snap in the sound of derecho. Yesterday, white and blue sails pretty on the water; sharp glint of skyscraper glass. Then this derecho.

I left my heart in the teeth of jumper-cables— black tongue, superfluous nipples . . . By The Time I hit the yellow tape— it was already turning red . . . Of my fair and alabaster love? My redundant chains drawn in chalk? Halfway to the stars I stopped— turned, spat—it’s too late, baby. . .

Toward evening, the natural light becomes intelligent and answers, without demur: “Be assured! You are not alone. . . .” But in fact, toward evening, I am not convinced there is any other except myself to whom existence necessarily pertains. I also interrogate myself to discover whether I myself possess any power by which I can bring it about that I who now am shall exist another moment. Because I am mostly a thinking thing and because this precise question can only be from that thoughtful part of myself, if such a power did reside within me I should, I am sure, be conscious of it. . . . But I am conscious of no such power. And yet, if I myself cannot be the cause of that assurance, surely it is necessary to conclude that I am not alone in the world. There is some other who is the cause of that idea. But if, at last, no such other can be found toward evening, do I really have sufficient assurance of the existence of any other being at all? For, after a most careful search, I have been unable to discover the ground of that conviction—unless it be imagined a lonely workman on a dizzy scaffold unfolds a sign at evening and puts his mark to it.

From the far star points of his pinned extremities, cold inched in—black ice and squid ink— till the hung flesh was empty. Lonely in that void even for pain, he missed his splintered feet, the human stare buried in his face. He ached for two hands made of meat he could reach to the end of. In the corpse’s core, the stone fist of his heart began to bang on the stiff chest’s door, and breath spilled back into that battered shape. Now it’s your limbs he comes to fill, as warm water shatters at birth, rivering every way.

My father drummed darkness Through the underbrush Until lightning struck I take after him Clouds crowd the sky Around me as I run Downhill on a high— I am my mother's son Born long ago In the storm's eye

The descent has deepened the interior lengthened designated ending Blind pulled down inside and then shot up again to see east via the plateglass a moon a monsoon an ashram I used time almost wantonly in that bald but sensual sky to give me gusts and more measurement not to snap the stars shut but Joseph said you really ought to tender how you sail by eye your soul is just a length of baby

I The weight of my son at the emergency room for an eye injury, sack of flour, sack of salt, dusty bag of bones collapsed after all those tears. Why does Turner come to mind, those shackled ankles, those drowning slaves? II And horizons. Each measure, each cleaving of flesh to soil, breath to sentence, body toward earth. The shepherd watches his flock cross the stream; nymphs bathe and flirt and sun themselves on rocks. Water against ankles, pebbles beneath feet. III An old woman sits next to us, and every time she shifts in her seat, I can hear her bones click. Dying, her faulty architecture like an old radiator, cooling engine. IV The burden of seeing, explosive sunlight, the swirling painted water pouring over Turner’s slaves. My son sleeps. Have you ever walked out into the sticky heat of a Memphis night and asked for gunshots to stop for just one hot hour? O heap of body, heap of bones, heap of dreams, heap of moans. V A story with a happy ending and no answers, slight corneal scratch healed with anti-bacterial rinse, the eyeball’s protective pocket cupping the universe like a calm inlet offering a foundering ship protection from rough seas. You tell me: What washes blood from a balcony? I’m listening. I’m saying please. The sun rises quickly. And so do sea monsters.

After Ed Sanders We’d been squatting     near the worms in the White House lawn, protesting the Keystone Pipeline =$=$=$=$=$=$=>>; i could sense      the dear worms through    the grillwork fence, twists & coils   of flexi-script, remaking the soil    by resisting it    ... After the ride in the police van telling jokes, our ziplocked handcuffs pretty tight, when the presiding officer asked: —Do you have any tattoos? — Yes, officer, i have two. —What are they? — Well, i have a black heart on my inner thigh & an alchemical sign on my ankle. —Please spell that? — Alchemical. A-L-C-H-E-M-I-C-A-L. —What is that? — It’s basically a moon, a lily, a star & a flame. He started printing in the little square MOON, LILY, STAR Young white guy, seemed scared. One blurry tattoo on his inner wrist    ...     i should have asked about his, but couldn’t cross that chasm.     Outside,   Ash Wednesday in our nation’s capital.     Dead grass, spring trees about to burst, two officers beside the newish van. Inside, alchemical notes for the next time —