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I’m not sure whether it happened in Manitoba or Alberta:go home, they complained,go back, wherever pakis or niggers come from. Was 
I seven years old? Was I five? The day was cloudy; there was wind, and a sidewalk underfoot — a path of cement on which we kids marched. In whose place was I a guest, if home wasn’t this flat territory we were on? The hard sidewalk under my shoes, their sense of here. 
I walked home alone — I say “home” — I went where my parents paid rent, right? Our house wasn’t ours? Overhead, the sky spread out; the sky’s country was itself. We had moved from Ontario, but my gut got that they didn’t mean there. Immigrants, all of us, we’d chorused in assembly — the more immigrants, the kindlier the country, the folksier the mosaic. First the English and the French, then Western Europeans and the Ukrainians, I guessed, then Chinese and Indians, then the Guyanese and other such Commonwealth stragglers? Eventually we’d bring into “us,” Canadians, a panoply of the human race — so my sweet young self, in Trudeau’s aftermania, believed. Those children’s hate had a kind of guilelessness, however, that conveyed my abjection straight from their Canadian parents’ hearts. I was foreign to clear distinctions between master and savage — to fantasies of homesteaders who, by subjecting trees to their saws, had “mixed their labor” with “unowned” lands. Homesteaders, they called themselves, by principle: “home” was theirs, because they were first to fence it. As if we still were at war with whatever made entreaty against their fencing, my existence existing too near threatened. My very being entreated something before I ever opened my mouth.Get lost! Here kingly kids drink from institution’s cup. Something older than English yea well knows what with his guts he must disagree. Something français dit bon, histoire-là, je parle 
au-dessus du poète: domination, Dominion, domicile, home. I protested: one of my parents is here’s occupying family! Don’t blacken 
me! Please see my colonists’ blood, inside! They practiced the 
policing of reserve on the surface of my brown skin. They practiced homing in on enemy. The clouds above, the sky above, witnessed. The land underfoot said, here was here first. We thought about 
beginnings.

To say how much I've missed you, I offer this, at most mist, at least assorted letters, lists, numbers I insist tell stories. I kissed you last, Dad, in the casket in which you passed on, to some next place, but last listened for your voice last night, these long years after, will listen next when next oppressed by blue-gray, as I am now, as I, thus lost, am always by your absence.

As gestures to beckon geometry's end I post letters to my lost Mayan sisters, solicit layers sussed from layers to test history, push past parallel. Mystery becomes you, Mother, as does the lust the rest of us suffer, lust you must once have induced. What perceptions I trust defy perspective. I take my troubles scribbled, not erased.

A mountainous and mystic brute No rein can curb, no arrow shoot, Upon whose doomed deformed back I sweep the planets’ scorching track. Old is the elf, and wise, men say, His hair grows green as ours grows grey; He mocks the stars with myriad hands, High as that swinging forest stands. But though in pigmy wanderings dull I scour the deserts of his skull, I never find the face, eyes, teeth, Lowering or laughing underneath. I met my foe in an empty dell, His face in the sun was naked hell. I thought, ‘One silent, bloody blow, No priest would curse, no crowd would know.’ Then cowered: a daisy, half concealed, Watched for the fame of that poor field; And in that flower and suddenly Earth opened its one eye on me.

cymothoa exigua *: the tongue as what it is not—blemish and parasite: gimp and glottal stop: what question can be answered with a truant mouth: can the lynched man hung from the sails of a windmill taste the lead pipe wedged between his lips: when the signifiers dangle, empty chum lines in a cold creek: when the men in Waco, wearing white straw hats, fraying at the crisp edges of their white shirts, leave Jesse, leave John, leave Paul in ashes in the unpaved streets to choke passing mules into prophecy: when we pinch our noses to staunch the smell of the twice burnt black man burning for a third time this day: when the boys, sweet and good animals, come to what’s been left in shallow ditches: false rib and femur, clavicle and severed hand—quite simply, the language of sorrow: glyph of the gadfly rooting himself into the rotting meat of the dead: when it is too late to refuse our bodies being made urns: corn, unharvested and heavy in its husks: when, in the marketplace, the butcher lifts our tongue from a bed of ice, shouts:who will speak for this flesh: when the tongue answers as all severed tongues do:

You are a seahorse unraveling. You are the back of a landhorse looking backward. Gotten away form have you thrown yourself racing. Who took what was not out of thunderous shade In an all-knowing sycamore's branches. What who do you make of stone steps you stepped through. You took the boat onto flattened waters. White wall of blue morning fog to slip into. You withstood what is was that was wailing you through. There you were standing on nothing, looking down at two Blackfeathered slashes your two hands held on to. Off were you going aloft would birds such as these take You. Who leaned you and stood you and shook you and shook you.

On my way, I come upon them— A gathering of old women Soaking their cracked, graying skin, Their thick bodies sprawling voluptuously: Knees bent, Curving out of the water, Heads thrown back in a tangle of vines and leaves. I pause a moment, Waiting to hear their voices echoing with years, Telling me what I need to know, But the sun has made them sleepy and secretive; I hear only their whispered laughter. They do not trust me; I am not yet ready to listen.

D always felt, somehow or other, double. He was an upright line, but then again, he was a curve. When he looked in the mirror straight on, he saw the dapper features of the diplomat he was. But sideways, if he took off his horn-rimmed glasses, he imagined he could be taken for a rather distinguished Dame. He always saw both sides to everything. Would he ever find his dæmon—the divine spirit within? Did he really have one spirit? D seemed to be singing a duet with himself. Seeing both sides made him a champion procrastinator. D dilly-dallied. Waited till the last minute to decide anything. At every posting, he drove the staff crazy. But that was diplomacy. Now dusk dropped on the gated embassy grounds. D flipped on his desk lamp, and the pool of light shut out the trees, looming and dissolving. D drew the drapes, deaf to the delicate drone of insect wings. He returned to his desk, trying to distract himself from a strange little pain that had come to him all his life, like a recurrent dream. (Except, he had to confess, he never dreamed.) The pain was a distinct tiny stab in a spot, well, what would you call that? D called it down there. For years, since he was a little d, he considered all the options about this strange pain. It was nothing, really. He went long times between feeling it. Maybe it was too slight to worry about, but then again . . . At last D decided to see a doctor. As a matter of fact, he saw a number. “Tell me your dreams,” the first doctor said. “Don't bother to ask me, I never dream,” D said. “In dreams begin responsibilities,” the doctor quoted. D demanded a referral. “I've got a very specific pain,” he said to the next doctor. He pointed to, well, down there. “Your testicle,” the physician said. Which required a test. Several. And more. Finally the second doctor read all the results and announced, “Aha, a dermoid cyst.” What? Inside the cyst were hair follicles and an eye-type thing with eyelashes and a tooth. “Do you think I was a twin?” D wondered with a weird kind of delight as he examined the x-ray. Well, the doctor wouldn’t go that far. These dermoid cysts were usually removed in childhood. No reason, however, to remove it now. D wouldn’t dream of having it removed! It explained everything! That slightly creepy darling little creature in there must have been a twin, someone D had grown around as she dissolved. D was convinced it was a twin sister. And D had absorbed her. Of course he wanted to keep her with him. That very day, he had his first dream. Exhausted after his discovery, he had returned to the embassy in the late afternoon. Unable to face his office, he diverted his steps from the front walk toward the deserted path on the grounds where no one ever seemed to stroll. He walked deeper into the woods. The path sloped into a shaded dimple in the earth. It was dusk in the dell. D heard the drone of insect wings. In the mottled light a dragonfly dove straight down. Up curved a damselfly. Impulsively D lay down in the leaves in his three-piece suit and curled up like a praying divine, two hands under his chin. He felt himself melting a little. All the old bedevilments dispersed into a delicate dampness. The world softened from darkling to darling . . . . . .A stately antlered stag appeared in the distance and slowly, with a calm command, walked closer until D could see that he wore a diamond necklace around his neck. The stag slowly bowed his head, doffed his entire rack of antlers, and raised his head up again, looking directly at D.Now the deer was a doe! The doe blinked her eyes at D, as if waking. Then she donned the antlers, and turned and walkedaway . . . D woke up ravenously hungry—and overjoyed. He dusted himself off and drove straight to dinner. As he stared out the restaurant window, eating his dumplings, he wondered if responsibilities really do begin in dreams. Maybe dreams are responsible to us, he thought. He felt his sister inside him. She was the reason he was a debonair man, a man who understood that everything has two sides: inner/outer, yes/no. D thought both in lines as sharp as the creases in trousers, and in curves like the swirls of a skirt. What do I really know? he asked himself. Only that he had woken strangely endeared to himself—and satisfied. Now he understood the necessity of delay. To wait, and then to discover. Never to have only one answer. The napkin at the restaurant had come rolled inside a little sparkly ring. “Add this to my bill,” he said to the waiter. And pocketed the little diadem as a reminder of the dyad he was.

Welcome to your day of sanity! Come in and close the door it will likely lock behind you and you will be home alone waste disposal will take care of your needs : at long last undisturbed phenomena without the heavy metal background of the street will be yours for observation and response : do you have visions? do you think? Your mouth do you open it for more than medication? I should know I know that I should know : we’ve watched centuries erode the fortress drain the moat the poet’s clumsy beast has reached its home and prey we wither 
in the gridlock of our power only the guns remain and are in use pure accident is beauty to be glimpsed your trembling only further clouds your sight I in my home you in your other place harmonize 
the fading anthem of an age the cracked bell of our liberty keeps time a penny for the corpse you left behind keep on recycling all that you have heard before call it a double bind much like the dead bolt that locked the door that keeps you safe and sane : ho — hum — harry who? oh that’s just a phrase found in a time capsule capped and sealed and shot up in the air : no I cannot tell you where it fell to earth that page was torn out years ago it’s chance that we have a fragment of that language left : do your archaeology before a mirror the canyons and the barren plains are clear but where to dig for a ruined golden age a fiction we were served with breakfast flakes say have you forgot this day of sanity? No problem the heavy key was thrown away as soon as the door was closed and locked you’re safe : some day the asylum may be torn down to make way for a palace of the mad it does not follow that anything will change : choose your executioner by lot almost 
everyone is trained and competent there are different schools of course check out degrees fees can become an issue of your choice and some may be in service or abroad as usual nothing’s simple it’s all a part of the grand unraveling that must take place before the new line can be introduced : prepare now don’t be shocked when the music starts the year’s fashions may feature pins and nails.

Assume you have discovered an entropy of spirit, immeasurable of course, but it pulls graveward all those whose element is breath, not as the in and out again of water and the sun, but oblivion’s ass-first downhill twenty-four-hour drag. Knowledge is an after-the-fact affair, fair game for a hunger striker’s skeptic gopher tooth. Remember your “agenbite of inwit,” but don’t, please don’t, go knocking on doors declaring you’ve gone hollow with all the others, no one will believe you so long as your bag of flesh is fair. Fall down the stairs to another street. Have you noticed nature does not care for you, no matter the pathos of your fallacies, your antiperspirant, or you arms folded over the stretch marks of your hardest years? That’s you, cell mate, roping a Platonic calf. Rare air, this is all you’ll catch and never can. Live on that for a week and leave a message on your machine, “nourished by words alone.” Those fireworks you inherited, where are they now? Will you set them off to end the show? You have a story that simply cannot be sold, and no rewrite can change country or cast, so here you are in never-never land again. That figure off there in the mist is Nietzsche, stay clear, they say his breath is vile, he needs his space or so the professors say. Were you handed this out of an old script or are you improvising this to-do? Whatever you are, an actor or a human merely with all the other actors, or can you tell the difference without a script in hand, you talk about a text that is not there. Each morning your own short-form obituary appears on every page. An open mike will follow. But this is only in the babblesphere, don’t inhale those dialogues that bubble up. Weariness grows in direct proportion to answers that recede nightly as you snore. Did you audition for this part or did you win it in an all-night poker game? The difference is the same, none, today. Don’t give your chips to another to bet, that’s stacking the odds in your favor, sharing the blame. Avoid places where the lights are always on. Try finding a sunset through a simple gift of looking west. There can be too much light for your own good. Pace Pascal. Let someone close your eyes. Necessary, or so I’m told. That hand in front of your face, try it now.