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Mother Dear, never apologize for nettles I yanked in fury from Lottie Shoop’s side yard — they stung me into seeing fairy mosses lilypad her middened juniper, the quivering gobble of her chin, teacup clicking dentures as she sprang up into her wattle hut and broke a rib of aloe vera — gel belling the top of that claw goblet. It didn’t cool the sting, and yet, noticing sunshine thumbing plums in a string catch-all — I was already well.

Something has come between us— It will not sleep. Every night it rises like a fish Out of the deep. It cries with a human voice, It aches to be fed. Every night we heave it weeping Into our bed, With its heavy head lolled back, Its limbs hanging down, Like a mer-creature fetched up From the weeds of the drowned. Damp in the tidal dark, it whimpers, Tossing the cover, Separating husband from wife, Lover from lover. It settles in the interstice, It spreads out its arms, While its cool underwater face Sharpens and warms: This is the third thing that makes Father and mother, The fierce love of our fashioning That will have no brother.

First we tamp down the ridges that criss-cross the yard then wait for the ground to move again. I hold the shoe box, you, the trowel. When I give you the signal you dig in behind and flip forward. Out he pops into daylight, blind velvet. We nudge him into the box, carry him down the hill. Four times we’ve done it. The children worry. Have we let them all go at the very same spot? Will they find each other? We can’t be sure ourselves, only just beginning to learn the fragile rules of uprooting.

under the gervais st. bridge, our voices domed   like a cathedral. shoulders dipped in sunlight, a baptism of sorts. we came to take pictures. searched for subjects like graffiti on piers, what my mother calls angel     rays in the sky,      that yellowed, humid glint in your eyes. maybe i ran out of film     or my batteries died      because when we finally found our shot, you used your iphone. neither of us have a right to decide what is holy.                       i told you i was almost a catholic baby, a half-lie i wanted to be true if only because i knew     you would be disappointed. there is no glory in either of our doubts: your face when i talked of  prayer, how walking across that bridge  back to your car,             i remembered that what gives a photo life is artificial light.

It’s not just this.Every written word is a suicide note. And a love letter, too. There may be no one to talk to who would get it, but if you write it down maybe someone will get it after you’ve left the room, or in five hundred years, or maybe someone from Sirius, the Dog Star, will get it. The composer Karlheinz Stockhausen claimed he was born on Sirius. You remember him: the genius who said the crashing of planes into the World Trade Center was the greatest concert ever held, although he later conceded the audience had not been given the option to not attend and that somewhat diminished its perfection. I heard Stockhausen interviewed at Davies Symphony Hall before the orchestra played one of   his works that sounded to me like the voices of   the parents in A Charlie Brown Christmas if they’d been arguing about real estate. No, I was not impressed by Karlheinz. His daughter Christel was a flautist in the orchestra, and she joined him for the interview and said her father would take her and her brother out on the lawn of their summer house outside Cologne (this was years before he was on the cover of Sgt. Pepper) and teach them to read each constellation as notes on a stave and to sing the words of their favorite nursery rhymes to the stars’ melody: “The dog ran away in the snow” and “Go get the sleigh in the cellar.” It was a game but it was hard: work and play at once. Their father explained to them, “God does not write catchy tunes.” You could tell she meant it to be a charming story, but the audience sat in silence. Suffer the little children.

After Ian Sanborn’s ASL poem of the same title A man with eyes as blank as the indifference of nature is staring straight ahead as the whole thing unfolds. He has a black beard, black shirt, black woolen cap — he could be a thief — you better keep your eyes on his hands which have begun clearing a clearing. Here he plants a seed as small as his own fingernail, and shazam! it sprouts roots, shoots, stems, branches — a whole tree shouldering up, tossing and swaying in the air between the sun’s magic hands and the man’s indifferent eyes. Next thing you know, an orphan index finger is worming its way across the stage that wasn’t a stage until your eyeing it made it so. It inches over to the tree like a lost knuckle finding its way home, its feelers testing, feeling, sniffing, finding purchase, finding a toe-hold, the tiny, spiny, hairy, leg-like appendages beginning to wiggle, to climb, to shinny up the tree, the elbow, the sheer escarpment, pausing to send out a line, a lasso, a long rope as fine as the filament of a spider launched from its abdomen and hooking the thumb of the lowest branch. A rope for rappelling, for jumping off this cliff, taking this dive, twisting as it untwists, enfolding as it unfolds, holding on for dear life as it spins itself into silk, those indifferent eyes almost imperceptibly squinting in sympathy with this closing up, this cloaking, this cloistering, this hanging upside down with a pulse inside. A fluttering pulse. A pulse like the flutter of eyelids. Like the flutter of wings. A heartbeat growing stronger, stronger, breaking out, breaking free, the wings opening, the eyes opening as if all this time they were closed — the blank eyes opening to the wings, taking them in, incredulous, in love with them — and the black and white has grown iridescent; the orphaned knuckle has found the hands; the hands have found their wings, and we are all utterly blown away. Ian Sanborn's ASL poem may be viewed here .

They came like dewdrops overnight Eating every plant in sight, Those nasty worms with legs that crawl So creepy up the garden wall, Green prickly fuzz to hurt and sting Each unsuspecting living thing. How I hate them!   Oh, you know I’d love to squish them with my toe. But then I see past their disguise, Someday they’ll all be butterflies.

It nuzzles oblivion, confuses itself with mud. A creature of familiar taste, it ambushes from its nest of ooze the pond's brighter fish, clears its palate with their eggs, lumbers fat and stagnant into winter, lulled into dreams of light sinking until light drowns, and all is as before.

Wrongheaded and obsequious on vacation, unnerved by new surroundings, I miss the bright feeling of belonging and the familiar patterns of my country, its virginity and schizophrenia, my several stolen bicycles.

Beneath all this I’m carving a cathedral of salt. I keep the entrance hidden, no one seems to notice the hours I’m missing  ...    I’ll bring you one night, it’s where I go when I hang up the phone  ... Neither you nor your soul is waiting for me at the end of this, I know that, the salt nearly clear after I chisel out the pews, the see-through altar, the opaque panes of glass that depict the stations of our cross —Here is the day we met, here is the day we remember we met