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Dusk to dawn, sleek skunks enjoy avocados in my yard. I give wide berth. Before the first jogger leaves her prints on pavement, tough raccoons appear. They pretend they don’t hear my keys click but they peek to make sure it’s me. Foxes play hide-and-seek, sometimes on our lawn, other times across the street, but never after seven; and brazen squirrels eye me from the center of the street, dare me to approach. Will this be a day for Catalina eddies, clouds stacked, catching like magnets in a liquid air swirl? Or will it blow a fierce Santa Ana, days of fires in the hills, smoldering chaparral, winds so fierce birds do low-crawls? I cast a spell for Santa Anas the shallow coast a censer mixed with black sage, Torrey Pine, Engelmann oak—precious oils to fumigate the San Diego skies, the annual burning pulse.

Friends, will you bear with me today, for I have awakened from a dream in which a robin made with its shabby wings a kind of veil behind which it shimmied and stomped something from the south of Spain, its breast aflare, looking me dead in the eye from the branch that grew into my window, coochie-cooing my chin, the bird shuffling its little talons left, then right, while the leaves bristled against the plaster wall, two of them drifting onto my blanket while the bird opened and closed its wings like a matador giving up on murder, jutting its beak, turning a circle, and flashing, again, the ruddy bombast of its breast by which I knew upon waking it was telling me in no uncertain terms to bellow forth the tubas and sousaphones, the whole rusty brass band of gratitude not quite dormant in my belly— it said so in a human voice, “Bellow forth”— and who among us could ignore such odd and precise counsel? Hear ye! hear ye! I am here to holler that I have hauled tons—by which I don’t mean lots, I mean tons— of cowshit and stood ankle deep in swales of maggots swirling the spent beer grains the brewery man was good enough to dump off holding his nose, for they smell very bad, but make the compost writhe giddy and lick its lips, twirling dung with my pitchfork again and again with hundreds and hundreds of other people, we dreamt an orchard this way, furrowing our brows, and hauling our wheelbarrows, and sweating through our shirts, and two years later there was a party at which trees were sunk into the well-fed earth, one of which, a liberty apple, after being watered in was tamped by a baby barefoot with a bow hanging in her hair biting her lip in her joyous work and friends this is the realest place I know, it makes me squirm like a worm I am so grateful, you could ride your bike there or roller skate or catch the bus there is a fence and a gate twisted by hand, there is a fig tree taller than you in Indiana, it will make you gasp. It might make you want to stay alive even, thank you; and thank you for not taking my pal when the engine of his mind dragged him to swig fistfuls of Xanax and a bottle or two of booze, and thank you for taking my father a few years after his own father went down thank you mercy, mercy, thank you for not smoking meth with your mother oh thank you thank you for leaving and for coming back, and thank you for what inside my friends’ love bursts like a throng of roadside goldenrod gleaming into the world, likely hauling a shovel with her like one named Aralee ought, with hands big as a horse’s, and who, like one named Aralee ought, will laugh time to time til the juice runs from her nose; oh thank you for the way a small thing’s wail makes the milk or what once was milk in us gather into horses huckle-buckling across a field; and thank you, friends, when last spring the hyacinth bells rang and the crocuses flaunted their upturned skirts, and a quiet roved the beehive which when I entered were snugged two or three dead fist-sized clutches of bees between the frames, almost clinging to one another, this one’s tiny head pushed into another’s tiny wing, one’s forelegs resting on another’s face, the translucent paper of their wings fluttering beneath my breath and when a few dropped to the frames beneath: honey; and after falling down to cry, everything’s glacial shine. And thank you, too. And thanks for the corduroy couch I have put you on. Put your feet up. Here’s a light blanket, a pillow, dear one, for I can feel this is going to be long. I can’t stop my gratitude, which includes, dear reader, you, for staying here with me, for moving your lips just so as I speak. Here is a cup of tea. I have spooned honey into it. And thank you the tiny bee’s shadow perusing these words as I write them. And the way my love talks quietly when in the hive, so quietly, in fact, you cannot hear her but only notice barely her lips moving in conversation. Thank you what does not scare her in me, but makes her reach my way. Thank you the love she is which hurts sometimes. And the time she misremembered elephants in one of my poems which, oh, here they come, garlanded with morning glory and wisteria blooms, trombones all the way down to the river. Thank you the quiet in which the river bends around the elephant’s solemn trunk, polishing stones, floating on its gentle back the flock of geese flying overhead. And to the quick and gentle flocking of men to the old lady falling down on the corner of Fairmount and 18th, holding patiently with the softest parts of their hands her cane and purple hat, gathering for her the contents of her purse and touching her shoulder and elbow; thank you the cockeyed court on which in a half-court 3 vs. 3 we oldheads made of some runny-nosed kids a shambles, and the 61-year-old after flipping a reverse lay-up off a back door cut from my no-look pass to seal the game ripped off his shirt and threw punches at the gods and hollered at the kids to admire the pacemaker’s scar grinning across his chest; thank you the glad accordion’s wheeze in the chest; thank you the bagpipes. Thank you to the woman barefoot in a gaudy dress for stopping her car in the middle of the road and the tractor trailer behind her, and the van behind it, whisking a turtle off the road. Thank you god of gaudy. Thank you paisley panties. Thank you the organ up my dress. Thank you the sheer dress you wore kneeling in my dream at the creek’s edge and the light swimming through it. The koi kissing halos into the glassy air. The room in my mind with the blinds drawn where we nearly injure each other crawling into the shawl of the other’s body. Thank you for saying it plain: fuck each other dumb. And you, again, you, for the true kindness it has been for you to remain awake with me like this, nodding time to time and making that noise which I take to mean yes, or,I understand, or,please go on but not too long, or,why are you spitting so much, or,easy Tiger hands to yourself. I am excitable. I am sorry. I am grateful. I just want us to be friends now, forever. Take this bowl of blackberries from the garden. The sun has made them warm. I picked them just for you. I promise I will try to stay on my side of the couch. And thank you the baggie of dreadlocks I found in a drawer while washing and folding the clothes of our murdered friend; the photo in which his arm slung around the sign to “the trail of silences”; thank you the way before he died he held his hands open to us; for coming back in a waft of incense or in the shape of a boy in another city looking from between his mother’s legs, or disappearing into the stacks after brushing by; for moseying back in dreams where, seeing us lost and scared he put his hand on our shoulders and pointed us to the temple across town; and thank you to the man all night long hosing a mist on his early-bloomed peach tree so that the hard frost not waste the crop, the ice in his beard and the ghosts lifting from him when the warming sun told him sleep now; thank you the ancestor who loved you before she knew you by smuggling seeds into her braid for the long journey, who loved you before he knew you by putting a walnut tree in the ground, who loved you before she knew you by not slaughtering the land; thank you who did not bulldoze the ancient grove of dates and olives, who sailed his keys into the ocean and walked softly home; who did not fire, who did not plunge the head into the toilet, who said stop, don’t do that; who lifted some broken someone up; who volunteered the way a plant birthed of the reseeding plant is called a volunteer, like the plum tree that marched beside the raised bed in my garden, like the arugula that marched itself between the blueberries, nary a bayonet, nary an army, nary a nation, which usage of the word volunteer familiar to gardeners the wide world made my pal shout “Oh!” and dance and plunge his knuckles into the lush soil before gobbling two strawberries and digging a song from his guitar made of wood from a tree someone planted, thank you; thank you zinnia, and gooseberry, rudbeckia and pawpaw, Ashmead’s kernel, cockscomb and scarlet runner, feverfew and lemonbalm; thank you knitbone and sweetgrass and sunchoke and false indigo whose petals stammered apart by bumblebees good lord please give me a minute... and moonglow and catkin and crookneck and painted tongue and seedpod and johnny jump-up; thank you what in us rackets glad what gladrackets us; and thank you, too, this knuckleheaded heart, this pelican heart, this gap-toothed heart flinging open its gaudy maw to the sky, oh clumsy, oh bumblefucked, oh giddy, oh dumbstruck, oh rickshaw, oh goat twisting its head at me from my peach tree’s highest branch, balanced impossibly gobbling the last fruit, its tongue working like an engine, a lone sweet drop tumbling by some miracle into my mouth like the smell of someone I’ve loved; heart like an elephant screaming at the bones of its dead; heart like the lady on the bus dressed head to toe in gold, the sun shivering her shiny boots, singing Erykah Badu to herself leaning her head against the window; and thank you the way my father one time came back in a dream by plucking the two cables beneath my chin like a bass fiddle’s strings and played me until I woke singing, no kidding, singing, smiling, thank you,thank you, stumbling into the garden where the Juneberry’s flowers had burst open like the bells of French horns, the lily my mother and I planted oozed into the air, the bazillion ants labored in their earthen workshops below, the collard greens waved in the wind like the sails of ships, and the wasps swam in the mint bloom’s viscous swill; and you, again you, for hanging tight, dear friend. I know I can be long-winded sometimes. I want so badly to rub the sponge of gratitude over every last thing, including you, which, yes, awkward, the suds in your ear and armpit, the little sparkling gems slipping into your eye. Soon it will be over, which is precisely what the child in my dream said, holding my hand, pointing at the roiling sea and the sky hurtling our way like so many buffalo, who said it’s much worse than we think, and sooner; to whom I said no duh child in my dreams, what do you think this singing and shuddering is, what this screaming and reaching and dancing and crying is, other than loving what every second goes away? Goodbye, I mean to say. And thank you. Every day.

You give me flowers resembling Chinese lanterns. You give me hale, for yellow. You give me vex. You give me lemons softened in brine and you give me cuttlefish ink. You give me all 463 stairs of Brunelleschi’s dome. You give me seduction and you let me give it back to you. You give me you. You give me an apartment full of morning smells—toasted bagel and black coffee and the freckled lilies in the vase on the windowsill. You give me 24-across. You give me flowers resembling moths’ wings. You give me the first bird of morning alighting on a wire. You give me the sidewalk café with plastic furniture and the boys with their feet on the chairs. You give me the swoop of homemade kites in the park on Sunday. You give me afternoon-colored beer with lemons in it. You give me D.H. Lawrence, and he gives me pomegranates and sorb-apples. You give me the loose tooth of California, the broken jaw of New York City. You give me the blue sky of Wyoming, and the blue wind through it. You give me an ancient city where the language is a secret everyone is keeping. You give me a t-shirt that says all you gave me was this t-shirt. You give me pictures with yourself cut out. You give me lime blossoms, but not for what they symbolize. You give me yes. You give me no. You give me midnight apples in a car with the windows down. You give me the flashbulbs of an electrical storm. You give me thunder and the suddenly green underbellies of clouds. You give me the careening of trains. You give me the scent of bruised mint. You give me the smell of black hair, of blond hair. You give me Apollo and Daphne, Pan and Syrinx. You give me Echo. You give me hyacinths and narcissus. You give me foxgloves and soft fists of peony. You give me the filthy carpet of an East Village apartment. You give me seeming not to notice. You give me an unfinished argument, begun on the Manhattan-bound F train. You give me paintings of women with their eyes closed. You give me grief, and how to grieve.

From the unfathomed, farthest away from the light, from the sea’s iron guardedness they come — pin-eyed, with flesh like tree bark. Their jaws are gorgeously spiked, ragged with toothpick teeth, goon teeth, prison-bar teeth. O anglerfish, vampire fish, oarfish, goonch. A strange fish holds himself upright and fast to the park railings. He is white knuckled. His eyes focus upwards as if counting or reciting, tugging at the brain’s stubborn pinions. When you ask if there’s somewhere he needs to get to, he only sets his jaw harder. You both know that if he acknowledges you, he’ll fall. Every one of your dreams is about the president, however tangentially. Each morning, 
pre-waking, mucid insects seem to attach themselves to your collarbone and gnaw in at the marrow. What if we could all say whatever came first to mind, whenever we wanted to? No perusal.Scullion! Arse-wipe! Warp-faced pignut! Invincible as a body that’s snug in the womb. What if we could all get whatever we wanted, whenever — as in the fairy tale? On the beach at Marazion the surf is spangled with mackerel scales. The sands heave with stranded bodies, underwater silver bullets, drying and curling up in the winter light, so close to home.

for Joshua Starbuck, master of montage A Caledonian megalith. A tinted bather from Cape Ann. The 1937 kith and kin of a Kentuckian beside their Model T sedan. The Celts. Who set me this arith- metic of icons? Who began by pasting in Bob Dylan? Zith- erpicking rhinestone charlatan. He tries to be American. Who tries to be American as hard as him? Not Aly Khan. Not George F. Babbitt the Zenith- ophiliac Zenithian. As sure as God made Granny Smith a pricier-sounding product than the Winesap or the Jonathan, there is a mystery and myth to being an American, and being an American compounds it. Kurosawa-san, steady my Nikon while I pan across the porches of forsyth- iabedizened Mattapan in search of ... dot dot dot ... the plan, the weltanschauung, the ethnith- ifying principle a pith helmeted Oxbridge fancy-dan could pounce on like a fiend from Ran and authenticate forthwith. The cromlech beetles o’er the frith. The ultimate American possession rattles his Kal-Kan, Prince, you’re a prince. A dog a man can talk to. What this caravan of adumbrations and antith- esises panteth for is Dith Pran and the long-lost Mrs. Pran: Far-fetched, tenacious, captious: fan tabulously American.

The catalpa’s white week is ending there in its corner of my yard. It has its arms full of its own flowering now, but the least air spills off a petal and a breeze lets fall whole coronations. There is not much more of what this is. Is every gladness quick? That tree’s a nuisance, really. Long before the summer’s out, its beans, long as a stick, will start to shed. And every year one limb cracks without falling off and hangs there dead till I get up and risk my neck to trim what it knows how to lose but not to shed. I keep it only for this one white pass. The end of June’s its garden; July, its Fall; all else, the world remembering what it was in the seven days of its visible miracle. What should I keep if averages were all?

"How does the water Come down at Lodore?" My little boy asked me Thus, once on a time; And moreover he tasked me To tell him in rhyme. Anon, at the word, There first came one daughter, And then came another, To second and third The request of their brother, And to hear how the water Comes down at Lodore, With its rush and its roar, As many a time They had seen it before. So I told them in rhyme, For of rhymes I had store; And 'twas in my vocation For their recreation That so I should sing; Because I was Laureate To them and the King. From its sources which well In the tarn on the fell; From its fountains In the mountains, Its rills and its gills; Through moss and through brake, It runs and it creeps For a while, till it sleeps In its own little lake. And thence at departing, Awakening and starting, It runs through the reeds, And away it proceeds, Through meadow and glade, In sun and in shade, And through the wood-shelter, Among crags in its flurry, Helter-skelter, Hurry-skurry. Here it comes sparkling, And there it lies darkling; Now smoking and frothing Its tumult and wrath in, Till, in this rapid race On which it is bent, It reaches the place Of its steep descent. The cataract strong Then plunges along, Striking and raging As if a war raging Its caverns and rocks among; Rising and leaping, Sinking and creeping, Swelling and sweeping, Showering and springing, Flying and flinging, Writhing and ringing, Eddying and whisking, Spouting and frisking, Turning and twisting, Around and around With endless rebound: Smiting and fighting, A sight to delight in; Confounding, astounding, Dizzying and deafening the ear with its sound. Collecting, projecting, Receding and speeding, And shocking and rocking, And darting and parting, And threading and spreading, And whizzing and hissing, And dripping and skipping, And hitting and splitting, And shining and twining, And rattling and battling, And shaking and quaking, And pouring and roaring, And waving and raving, And tossing and crossing, And flowing and going, And running and stunning, And foaming and roaming, And dinning and spinning, And dropping and hopping, And working and jerking, And guggling and struggling, And heaving and cleaving, And moaning and groaning; And glittering and frittering, And gathering and feathering, And whitening and brightening, And quivering and shivering, And hurrying and skurrying, And thundering and floundering; Dividing and gliding and sliding, And falling and brawling and sprawling, And driving and riving and striving, And sprinkling and twinkling and wrinkling, And sounding and bounding and rounding, And bubbling and troubling and doubling, And grumbling and rumbling and tumbling, And clattering and battering and shattering; Retreating and beating and meeting and sheeting, Delaying and straying and playing and spraying, Advancing and prancing and glancing and dancing, Recoiling, turmoiling and toiling and boiling, And gleaming and streaming and steaming and beaming, And rushing and flushing and brushing and gushing, And flapping and rapping and clapping and slapping, And curling and whirling and purling and twirling, And thumping and plumping and bumping and jumping, And dashing and flashing and splashing and clashing; And so never ending, but always descending, Sounds and motions for ever and ever are blending All at once and all o'er, with a mighty uproar, - And this way the water comes down at Lodore.

Big Boy came Carrying a mermaid On his shoulders And the mermaid Had her tail Curved Beneath his arm. Being a fisher boy, He’d found a fish To carry— Half fish, Half girl To marry.

if this is a game then we have made it, unknowing, to the final four. unlikely underdogs. spectators turned to suspect sport. anti-athletes. out of shape beyond reason. at season’s height we fight for a limited audience. few dancers. fewer cheers. down by 30 and our coach m.i.a. we, foolish, dribble. each bounce-back brings a stranger. can’t call us for traveling because we ain’t going nowhere. instead, we trade terrified looks. search for the pass but no one stays open for long. even if we knew what to do to pull this through we’ve got two other teams waiting, impatient, to take us out.

Once upon a time I caught a little rhyme I set it on the floor but it ran right out the door I chased it on my bicycle but it melted to an icicle I scooped it up in my hat but it turned into a cat I caught it by the tail but it stretched into a whale I followed it in a boat but it changed into a goat When I fed it tin and paper it became a tall skyscraper Then it grew into a kite and flew far out of sight ...