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Another one of those Pyrrhic experiences. Call it an ex

The senseless leaf   in the fevered hand Grows hot, near blood-heat, but never grows Green. Weeks ago the dove’s last cooing strain Settled silent in the nest to brood slow Absence from song. The dropped leaf cools On the uncut grass, supple still, still green, Twining still these fingers as they listless pull The tangle straight until the tangle tightens And the hand is caught, another fallen leaf. The poetry of the earth never ceases Ceasing — one blade of grass denies belief Until its mere thread bears the grasshopper’s Whole weight, and the black cricket sings unseen, Desire living in a hole beneath the tangle’s green.

He falls abruptly silent when we fling A basket down or bang the dryer shut, But soon takes up again where he left off. Swept by a rainstorm through a narrow trough Clotted with cobwebs into Lord knows what Impenetrable murk, he’s undeterred— You’d think his dauntless solo was a chorus, This rusty sump, a field or forest spring. And there is something wondrous and absurd About the way he does as he is bidden By instinct, with his gift for staying hidden While making sure unseen is plainly heard. All afternoon his tremolo ascends Clear to the second story, where a girl Who also has learned blithely to ignore us Sings to herself behind her bedroom door. Maybe she moves to her invented score With a conductor’s flourish, or pretends She’s a Spanish dancer, lost in stamp and whirl And waving fan—notes floating, as she plays, Through the open window where the willow sways And shimmers, humming to another string. There is no story where the story ends. What does a singer live for but to sing?

The twilight is the morning of his day. While Sleep drops seaward from the fading shore, With purpling sail and dip of silver oar, He cheers the shadowed time with roundelay, Until the dark east softens into gray. Now as the noisy hours are coming—hark! His song dies gently—it is growing dark— His night, with its one star, is on the way! Faintly the light breaks over the blowing oats— Sleep, little brother, sleep: I am astir. We worship Song, and servants are of her— I in the bright hours, thou in shadow-time: Lead thou the starlit night with merry notes, And I will lead the clamoring day with rhyme.

It was as if a flower bloomed as if Its muttering root and stem had suddenly spoken, Uttering on the air a poem of summer, The rose the utterance of its root and stem. Thus her beautiful face, the crippled girl’s, Was like the poem spoken by her body— The richness of that face!—most generous In what it keeps, giving in its having. The rose reserves the sweetness that it yields, Petal on petal, telling its own silence, Her beauty saying from its thorny stalk That what it is is kept as it is given.

Ruby, please. A night shift nurse fell asleep at the wheel. The whole earth had a fever and the heated pulse beats faster ’til everything picturesque has her reeling. Just tryna make it real baby, like it is. He condescends. Twitching a trio of flax seeds between the thumb and forefinger in a dirty spiral, these are full of phytoestrogens that turn the gender    ...    generic    ...    generous. Hey, girl! Crease in her hey the size of turning. Is that mean? I live in place where it’s mean to be honest but I come from a place where it’s generous. Freetown is hedged on a slum. The ghetto, everybody’s vigilante. Cut to the footage of a young boy swimming in floodwater made of mud and feces. Constructed. Like shelter, the safest destination the excess has. You see a fugitive, I see my daughter’s future husband, Ma quips, full sunned and sweet, a nigga who can swim, can hunt her free. Glad silk bending his teeth into a Sunday hotel. And the kind of silt that reachers for shatter. All the land is water. You come forth through the cosmic slop by drowning. The sun is a gang of murders. You come through on the new acquittal looking for chicken strips and bourbon with Netflix on in the background and I’ll kill you myself. Back on the Las Vegas strip, the sun is a bouquet of drones chasing promoters through a circus. Stand there and look indignant in a bandana and stop calling the Loa out their names before they answer. You’re on the guest list for lil yachty and one oak and it’s a mouthpiece the boxer’s choking on when the nurse wakes up, a double suicide, American, pie and guns and obscene convenience, proud mascots for an army with no one left to defend

Krystle Krystle Cole you're all I thought about sometimes I watched you while our daughter slept your Sissy Spacek ways your laconic demeanor in relaying either ecstasy or trauma & the un-embittered empathy your voice conveyed on YouTube which is our loving cup the solution of butter & DMT you took anally that really made you freak the fuck out & your friends just stood there watching you as you hurtled alone through mirrored tunnels. It's that frictionless feeling the smooth & vacant course that lacks abruption, one wave the clinical mania un- differentiated whiteness contains when cylindrical cloud hard & plastic comes to represent the mind to the mind & thus describe a model of terrible momentum with unity of purpose toward nothing so much as cold, radiant nature stripped of Eros, of becoming, just the mainframe & its withering severity without any predicate of others, save perhaps their gazes, no walls, no nothing, completely white light & your name when your consciousness was splitting time was stopping you were going always into that. I was going always to the mall in those months, the young century's rainiest April & May, to walk the baby & to understand my art. I didn't understand. I would move the stroller through the halogen, over grooved tile & across those smooth marble expanses meant to simulate floating & gliding before that pure frictionless feeling was entire. Sometimes we'd go inside the stores. Sears was still enormous & because of its design implied a bound series of discrete, related worlds linked by passages threatened & precarious to me. The connections felt besieged or like a mask for separation, they felt like connection between us in life but I didn't take my allegory further Krystle Cole, into your lysergic delirium later redeemed by a beautiful discipline of spirit & cosmography developed for praxis. I liked your video on candy flipping hard & developing ESP with friends. It suggested oneness was a leavened mix of random indiscretion, bruising wariness, & bliss obtained by synchronizing chemical encounter. Krystle, there's a made up drug I wonder if you'd do it? Bradley Cooper, in Limitless takes this little pill, which, in its candy dot translucence looks a lot like a tear plucked from the cheek in Man Ray's "Larmes." With it, he can utilize all of his brain, & so he un-riddles the patterning hidden in the ceaseless flow of capital, structuring its chaos in excess of any mortal with a terrible momentum & unity of purpose toward nothing so much as pure profit & complete subordination of the world. At the mall certain spots sold old stuff: sports memorabilia & video games, vintage organs & deluxe baby grands. In one store there were highly priced comics with toys & ephemera related to the stories. They had action figures based on some series I guess called The Crisis ofInfinite Earths. I wrote the phrase down in my notebook & realized only later that I'd made a rather telling trans- position, putting the word 'world' where 'earth' was & thinking The Crisis of Infinite Worlds I guess because anyone will occasion the world as a world its commonality precarious but real, & the person beside them does the same the person far in every way from them will as well where the wound of even being in material conditions where consciousness is made these confrontations & arrangements each taking their referent then as earth or taking something else entirely as world—the word is profligate & dense & transparent & cheap & impossibly one the clearest pill. In our minds it floods with light & we see through that, life's benevolent corruption in a radiance we can't make any sense of. Krystle, have you ever, just standing around, noticed someone smoking in an older silver Volvo & watched the comeback feelings of a Tupac Easter Sunday steep in their ambivalent features until they are more radiant than cinematic virgins having lost it in the wake of Saint Maria Goretti whose patronage is lost to the brutalized sweetness of her charges when depicted in the mind & reconstructed as a low-res simulation by scientists the weekend Wall Street's occupied & particles are found to go faster than light then weirdly feel like this is paradise not for people but paradise regardless. That same May I had gone to Detroit. I saw the most wonderful graffiti, more a prayer, written on a wall in magic marker, it read— Two Things: 1) That we would grow closer & closer as time progresses. 2) That our ships would not crash. Magic marker on a surface doesn't have much depth of skin. You move it smoothly on the wall & it stays smooth barely records the softest friction of two separate textures meeting. The wetness of its onyx dries quick or even quicker if you blow on it with circled lips, like clouds in old maps that blew ships across a flat earth to an edge I don't exactly not idealize. That somewhere there's a precipice in this world & tracing my finger along those ardent lines I'd found the fault of it a little, in its boldness far too faint & not enough.

Even after darkness closed her eyes my mother could crochet. Her hands would walk the rows of wool turning, bending, to a woolen music. The dye lots were registered in memory: appleskin, chocolate, porcelain pan, the stitches remembered like faded rhymes: pineapple, sunflower, window pane, shell. Tied to our lives those past years by merely a soft colored yarn, she’d sit for hours, her dark lips moving as if reciting prayers, coaching the sighted hands.

The one sincere crocodile has gone dry eyed for years. Why bother crying crocodile tears.

For James Welch The first harvest of wheat in flatlands along the Milk startled me into thoughts of you and this place we both remember and also forget as home. Maybe it was the familiarity or maybe it was my own need to ask if you have ever regretted leaving. What bends, what gives? And have you ever missed this wind?—it has now grown warm with late summer, but soon it will be as dangerous as the bobcat stalking calves and pets just south of the river. Men take out their dogs, a case of beer and wait in their pickups for dawn, for a chance with their rifles. They don’t understand that she isn’t going to make any mistakes. With winter my need for an answer grows more desperate and there are only four roads out. One is the same cat hunters drive with mannish glory and return along, gun still oil-shined and unshot. Another goes deeper into Assiniboine territory: This is the one I should talk myself into taking next. I haven’t much traveled the third except to visit a hospital where, after the first time, my mother had refused chemotherapy. And the last road you know as well as I do— past the coral-painted Catholic church, its doors long ago sealed shut to the mouth of Mission Canyon, then south just a ways, to where the Rockies cut open and forgive. There you and I are on the ascent. After that, the arrival is what matters most.