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Sing, cuccu, nu. Sing, cuccu. Sing, cuccu. Sing, cuccu, nu. Sumer is i-cumin in— Lhude sing, cuccu! Groweth sed and bloweth med And springth the wude nu. Sing, cuccu! Awe bleteth after lomb, Lhouth after calve cu, Bulluc sterteth, bucke verteth— Murie sing, cuccu! Cuccu, cuccu, Wel singes thu, cuccu. Ne swik thu naver nu!

Here comes rain on our roof! It stays just long enough to tickle me into writing this. It stays just long enough for everybody to get into a pair of PJs (silk-cotton blend) and then goes poof! At our best we exude awesomeness. At our best we are destined to turn pale with the rest of humanity. We are awesome and quick as decomposing sticks at a trail’s end. We bend dreams into circles of green zone satire. We have mahogany stuffed in our mahogany ears. To all who are not us we are sorry to say You’re welcome! Nature thankfully adores a rumor! A sunset! A glacier! Clouds glimmer and cast inevitable shadows off the groundswell footrest. I remember you from that time before we first met when our eyes were wet like summertime coasters as we Ubered noiselessly between pews. The aristocrats are failing to panhandle via email. One aristocrat is sleepily winding through the face of another.

Start this with the invocation: a seventy-seven Pinto, an eastbound freeway, two boys a few months from their driver’s license. It happens again because you’ve said it. You sit in the back seat, a ghost of red vinyl, to listen to these boys—one of whom was you, the one along for the ride—talk brave about cheerleaders and socket wrenches as they pass a stolen cigarette between them. They don’t know you’re there, wouldn’t believe in you should they look backstage, backseat. The boys are driving back from an October orchard where they’d gone to see leaves change. You remember:orange, brown, as though you’d just seen those leaves, because in this proximity to yourself—the boy in the passenger seat—you are thinking the same thing, and each of your in- carnations feels like they’ve thought this before. Your ghost, your present tense thinks that maybe this isn’t right. Now you’re along for the ride. These boys haven’t cuffed up against their own mortality yet, though one of them is sick. The other one, driving and picking at the thin hair falling from his scalp, will die soon, because what lurks in his dark blood can be cured by medical science. And that cure is what will kill him, as it leaves him weak, unable to fight off infection in his lungs. But that comes later. You are here with them now to find out what you owe to whom—your life, mortgaged to one of these boys and you’ve never been able to rectify that debt. You are the stage direction, a ghost backstage, wanting a spotlight, a soapbox a soliloquy. Dissolve back into your life, like sugar in tea—exit this scene now, stage left. * You are the apparition again in your mother’s house. You follow yourself down the yellow hallway to the ringing phone in the kitchen. You already know who’s calling, the way you knew then—when you were the self you’re haunting. Your friend is dead. You know this even before his sister tells you—but because your ghost is too close, the boy can feel your grief, but can’t feel his own. And you did know then, didn’t you? You knew that morning, that the earth awakes closest to the sun—four days into every new year. And Lazarus, dead now, four days. Roll away the stone. Believe in something besides the past. Awaken from this dream like a man called out from a cave. It happens this way each time: a bourbon breakdown in January rain—weeping an invocation, cursing corollary. * Can you go to Tom’s grave today and mandate him back to this life? Should you cue him from the wing like a stage direction? Would he damn you—a sadness, a gravestone on your chest, for calling him into this mortal suffering? If you had been in Houston that day he’d have died anyway. You’re a fool to think you can bargain across the river. Haunting the past won’t stop it from happening each time, exactly the same way. Won’t stop your heart from breaking like a glass decanter, brown whisky sliding mercury across the tile.

What is Hope? A smiling rainbow Children follow through the wet; ’Tis not here, still yonder, yonder: Never urchin found it yet. What is Life? A thawing iceboard On a sea with sunny shore;— Gay we sail; it melts beneath us; We are sunk, and seen no more. What is Man? A foolish baby, Vainly strives, and fights, and frets; Demanding all, deserving nothing;— One small grave is what he gets.

no more windows ESCape the unwound protection that heals an amorphous child, won deterrence         Voodoo bags inhibit the murder that stories tell, the incisions on our drums ‘que nuestro pais se cuenta sin hablar’ pushing on determined corn husks. count the zero that impresses germs                  upon language rails, on the tree that simmers, showering bomb threats over THE LOST TONGUE. place hand to the other torso, place heart to the horse’s hide and speaking races over sisters.          never do the ties remember all their screens, or all their hiding limbs . . . wet on the chair, ‘woven stone’ — places the INCUBATED muscle on desiccated insects, droves of mango that never fell to the floor. a welcome accomplishment. SURFACE shrinking skin, the isthmus isn’t remembered for its canals. eggs & softened lizards — poured milk on the Wheel, red faces that play the memory of your silent chairs . . . some rain makes the wind full . . . blankets into stone

He found it strange at first. A new dimension. One he had never guessed. The fourth? The fifth? How could he tell, who’d only known the third? Something to do with eyesight, depth of field. Perspective quite beyond him. Everything flat or nearly flat. The vanishing point they’d tried to teach at school was out of sight and out of mind. A blank. Now, this diaphanous dimension—one with neither up nor down, nor east nor west, nor orienting star to give him north. Even his name had left him. Strayed like a dog. Yet he was bathed in some unearthly light, a delicate no-color that made his flesh transparent, see-through, a Saran-Wrap self. His body without substance and his mind with nothing to think about—although intact— was totally minus purpose. He must

An erasure of  Laura Redden Searing’s “My Story” Generous instinct, were you My hand I must Think. The later brain. My hands craving every Learned heart. Nature, art, World. In my memories I thought of trust Then all fear. I Fell on my pain. Hope shall in loss Throb. My, my, my Stand for the release. A nation’s groan beneath Dear night. All right.

Two nights ago in the canyon darkness, only the half-moon and stars, only mere men. Prayer, faith, love, existence. We are measured by vastness beyond ourselves. Dark is light. Stone is rising. I don’t know if humankind understands culture: the act of being human is not easy knowledge. With painted wooden sticks and feathers, we journey into the canyon toward stone, a massive presence in midwinter. We stop. Lean into me. The universe sings in quiet meditation. We are wordless: I am in you. Without knowing why culture needs our knowledge, we are one self in the canyon. And the stone wall I lean upon spins me wordless and silent to the reach of stars and to the heavens within. It’s not humankind after all nor is it culture that limits us. It is the vastness we do not enter. It is the stars we do not let own us.

In life you had a temper. Your sarcasm was a whetted knife. Sometimes you shuddered with fear but you made yourself act no matter how few stood with you. Open the door for Eliyahu that he may come in. Now you return to us in rough times, out of smoke and dust that swirls blinding us. You come in vision, you come in lightning on blackness. Open the door for Eliyahu that he may come in. In every generation you return speaking what few want to hear words that burn us, that cut us loose so we rise and go again over the sharp rocks upward. Open the door for Eliyahu that he may come in. You come as a wild man, as a homeless sidewalk orator, you come as a woman taking the bima, you come in prayer and song, you come in a fierce rant. Open the door for Eliyahu that she may come in. Prophecy is not a gift, but sometimes a curse, Jonah refusing. It is dangerous to be right, to be righteous. To stand against the wall of might. Open the door for Eliyahu that he may come in. There are moments for each of us when you summon, when you call the whirlwind, when you shake us like a rattle: then we too must become you and rise. Open the door for Eliyahu that we may come in.

Inside I brought willows, the tips bursting, blue iris (I forget the legend of long life they represent) and the branch of pepper tree whose pink seeds lack the passion of most fruit. On my hands a perfume of pepper. Outside the rain walks. There were two. Their posture taken out of the wall- paper (a ghost story) Jack talked.    His determined privacy against my public face.     The poem by dictation.      A disturbance in the cone of weather. Neither of these is not making.     The comic is a matter of style as yellow hands mark the worker. The clown of dignity sits in a tree. The clown of games hangs there too. Which is which or where they go— the point is to make others see that two men in a tree is clearly the same thing as poetry.