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Here the readers gather to watch the books die. They die suddenly, as if thrown from an airplane, or from spontaneous cardiac arrest. They live, and then suddenly they die, and the reader who watches this is at the moment of the books' death bombarded with images documented through the smiling lipstick face of a journalist who has shown up to report on the death of the books. The milk was poisoned and forty-two babies died, she laughs, as she fondles the ashes of the dead books. And the death of forty-two babies is equal in value to the death of this book which is equal in value to the ninety-year old woman who shot herself while the sheriff waited at her door with an eviction notice which is equal in value to the collapsing of the global economy which is equal to the military in country XYZ seizing the land of the semi-nomadic hunters and cultivators of crops who have lived in the local rain forest for thousands of years. The reader opens a dead book and finds an infinite amount of burnt ash between the bindings, and when the ash blows in the wind the lipstick says that every death in the world is equal to every other death in the world which is equal to every birth in the world which is equal to every act of dismemberment which is equal to the death of a jungle which is equal to the collapse of the global economy; and hey look there’s another lady falling out of a window; she looks about equal to the poet hurled out of his country for words he wrote but which did not belong to him and whose death is about equal to the girl who was shot on the bus on her way to school this morning which is just about the same as the bearded man whose head was shoved into a sac while water was dumped over it and he died for an instant and came back to life and talked and talked and that’s about equal to the steroid illegally injected into the arm of a beautiful man who makes forty million dollars a year for injecting his arms with steroids so he can more skillfully wave a wooden stick at a ball, and in the ash we see the truest democracy there ever was: hey look it’s a little baby found in a dumpster how equal you are says the smiling lipstick to the civilized nation whose citizens walk the flooded streets looking for their homes, and in the ashes of the dead book the dead streets are equal to the eating disorders of movie stars which are equal to the dead soldiers who are equal to the homeruns which are equal to the bomb dropped by country ABC over weddings in the village of country XYZ which is equal to the earth swallowing up and devouring all of its foreigners which is just about equal to the decline in literacy in the most educated nation in the planet. There is no end to this book. There are no paragraph breaks to interrupt the smiling lipstick that goes on and on in one string of ashy words about how the declaration of peace is equal to the resumption of war and how the bodies that fall are equal to the birds that ascend and how the bomb in the Eiffel Tower is equal to the rising cost of natural gas, and the murmurs of the voices in the mud are equal to the murmurs of the expensive suits falling out of buildings and these are equal to the silence that kills with one breath and coddles life with another.

Myth is prison, a palace, truth without fact. Myth is birth and pleasure, teeth and death, sharp shiver of that which is broken. Myth is patriarchal and worn, full of fratricide and rape. Myth is a garden, makes good television, memoir, the scandal of animals and people coupling beneath the stars. Myth is crow eating roadkill and dodging the occasional cars, a pile of guts and bones. Myth is carrying the body back to the den. –Close your eyes and count to ten. 1. “In language, there are always two.” The Iliad stolen from Thoreau’s cabin, the only thing taken during those years. Remember, too,The Aenied (we all have lived through times of war) and that passage a friend said to know well, “Learn fortitude and toil from me, my son, Ache of true toil. Good fortune learn from others.” 2. Ultrasound images of my heart. That it moves and moves and then moves again, plump muscle shuddering, laboring to make up for one bad valve. Spots in the ocean where nothing lives and yet there is movement, water moving. I stand in the river fishing and watching an osprey slide through the air ten feet above the water. I hear those wings. 3. Eleven years of loving can’t just vanish. I have photographs. I have facts. “Hapy Birthday Dady” scribbled on a card. How easy to sit at a desk and not see the full moon through the window. Roy Sullivan, Virginia Park Ranger, struck by lightning seven times, kills himself after being dumped by a lover. “Present fears are less than horrible imaginings.” A friend asks, “Why are you hiding in myth?” 4. I gather a lock of his hair, a scrap of T-shirt, a baby tooth, his tiny spoon, a diaper pin with a blue plastic stork, the quilted blanket, his first steps, hands clutching my fingers, the long night when his fever rose to 104˚, his split lip at age six when he jumped with outspread arms, the first shoe, a locket with a toddler photo, first day of school, first finger painting, the green cardboard sculpture like something shaped by Breton, T-ball games, the flopping trout he squeezed too hard, his first broken bone, his fear when he felt my trembling hands trying to tell him something about the sun. 5. Trout with a slashed back where talons tore dorsal flesh and the flesh slipped from an osprey’s grip to a lucky landing in the creek’s waiting water, thrashing and calming, lingering beneath a deep cutbank, and weeks later, taking my elk hair caddis and leaping completely out of the water. On the far bank, a muskrat struggles and does a melodramatic gangster fall into the creek where it splashes and sinks. “Rattlesnake,” my friend says, and I nod and stare at where the ripple swirls into the current and think about sinking bones. 6. The court acknowledges the petitioner’s long involvement with _________’s life and sincerely hopes that the parties involved will have the generosity and wisdom to honor that relationship. Do not blame the wind that scatters apple blossoms ruthlessly. Allow that flowers desire farewell blessings before their time has come. 7. Fishing in the desert creek a few days after the hearing, I find bones, steer skulls with round sockets for horns, and step near three rattlesnakes, almost grab a fourth when climbing a steep bank. The snakes were sluggish, though, late spring when the temperatures in the desert dipped into the thirties at night. Only one rattled, and the rain of the previous days made the fishing terrible, water brown and swift. I didn’t get a bite and drove home, bought a bucket of fried chicken, and ate in front of the television his clothes still hanging in a closet. 8. There is no end to the hours when cedars and peaks scratch the sky’s belly. No garden, but sometimes, wildflowers. Sometimes, fish hold against the river’s current then dart with a silvery flash downstream. Sometimes, deer on the other shore stand still for a moment, then hunch toward their grazing. 9. A birthday party and he’ll have nothing to do with the inflatable  castles rented and set up on the lawn, only wants to run all afternoon, playing chase, tag-like game where I growl and laugh and lumber around the playground, his giggling, both of us laughing and roaring, and I catch him and he gets away and climbs to the top of the jungle gym where he looks at me with worry, and I know that the game is on break, that this is real, and I walk beneath him and he doesn’t pause. He jumps into my arms, and I catch him. 10. Ready or nothere I come— A feather floats downstream, the rings of a ripple smooth. Love is possible. The heron hunts in the shallows with slow deliberate steps, startles from the creek, and rises. Sunlight warms basalt walls fields of sage, and Hawthorne groves, here, where tumble- weeds rove for home.

The light here leaves you lonely, fading as does the dusk that takes too long to arrive. By morning the mountain moving a bit closer to the sun. This valley belongs to no one— except birds who name themselves by their songs in the dawn. What good are wishes, if they aren't used up The lamp of your arms. The brightest blue beneath the clouds— We guess at what's next unlike the mountain who knows it in the bones, a music too high to scale. *       *       * The burnt, blurred world where does it end— The wind kicks up the scent from the stables where horseshoes hold not just luck, but beyond. But weight. But a body that itself burns, begs to run. The gondola quits just past the clouds. The telephone poles tall crosses in the road. Let us go each, into the valley— turn ourselves & our hairshirts inside out, let the world itch—for once— *       *       * Black like an eye bruised night brightens by morning, yellow then grey— a memory. What the light was like. All day the heat a heavy, colored coat. I want to lie down like the lamb— down & down till gone— shorn of its wool. The cool of setting & rising in this valley, the canyon between us shoulders our echoes. Moan, & make way. *       *       * The sun's small fury feeds me. Wind dying down. We delay, & dither then are lifted into it, brightness all about— O setting. O the music as we soar is small, yet sating. What you want— Nobody, or nothing fills our short journeying. Above even the birds, winging heavenward, the world is hard to leave behind or land against— must end. I mean to make it. Turning slow beneath our feet, finding sun, seen from above, this world looks like us—mostly salt, dark water. *       *       * It's death there is no cure for life the long disease. If we're lucky. Otherwise, short trip beyond. And below. Noon, growing shadow. I chase the quiet round the house. Soon the sound— wind wills its way against the panes. Welcome the rain. Welcome the moon's squinting into space. The trees bow like priests. The storm lifts up the leaves. Why not sing.

Like the blue angels of the nativity, the museum patrons hover around the art historian, who has arrived frazzled and limp after waking late in her boyfriend’s apartment. And here, she notes,the Procession of St. Gregory, where atop Hadrian’s mausoleum the angel of death returns his bloody sword to its scabbard

I. Isaiah awoke angry. Lapping at Isaiah’s ears black birdsong no it was anger. God had filled Isaiah’s ears with stingers. Once God and Isaiah were friends. God and Isaiah used to converse nightly, Isaiah would rush into the garden. They conversed under the Branch, night streamed down. From the sole of the foot to the head God would make Isaiah ring. Isaiah had loved God and now his love was turned to pain. Isaiah wanted a name for the pain, he called it sin. Now Isaiah was a man who believed he was a nation. Isaiah called the nation Judah and the sin Judah’s condition. Inside Isaiah God saw the worldsheet burning. Isaiah and God saw things differently, I can only tell you their actions. Isaiah addressed the nation. Man’s brittleness! cried Isaiah. The nation stirred in its husk and slept again. Two slabs of bloody meat lay folded on its eyes like wings. Like a hard glossy painting the nation slept. Who can invent a new fear? Yet I have invented sin, thought Isaiah, running his hand over the knobs. And then, because of a great attraction between them— which Isaiah fought (for and against) for the rest of his life— God shattered Isaiah’s indifference. God washed Isaiah’s hair in fire. God took the stay. From beneath its meat wings the nation listened. You, said Isaiah. No answer. I cannot hear you, Isaiah spoke again under the Branch. Light bleached open the night camera. God arrived. God smashed Isaiah like glass through every socket of his nation. Liar! said God. Isaiah put his hands on his coat, he put his hand on his face. Isaiah is a small man, said Isaiah, but no liar. God paused. And so that was their contract. Brittle on both sides, no lying. Isaiah’s wife came to the doorway, the doorposts had moved. What’s that sound? said Isaiah’s wife. The fear of the Lord, said Isaiah. He grinned in the dark, she went back inside.

In my seeing there was a blank and he filled that blank with words, there were words for darkness which made it lift, there were words for cover which ripped them off, there were legs that crossed and hearts that crossed, promises red and read, and the pluck of banjo had a name for that twang, and the way he called the world into notice, that had a word, too. Once I saw I couldn’t unsee and the worst was that the light glaring from the letters left blue haze under my eyelids. There are no photographs of this time, and I can only go by what others tell me: I was blurred and erratic, I drew a circle of white chalk around me and called myself inviolate, I watched for horses on the horizon, my walls were under siege from smaller men who called themselves heroes. They say I reached over the balustrade and picked up the tiny ships and threw them over the edge of the world. I tore my hair, cut one breast from my body and plattered it as around my fortifications one man pulled another man behind his chariot. If they say that’s how I was, that’s how I was. I have no words for the one in the mirror who apes me every morning. She’s not the one I remember imagining as a young girl. There must be a way to unsee how I tap the glass and she taps back, and which wall, which Cassandra weeping—everything I saw I spoke to his ear, and the wall crashed into place between us, the horse had a bellyful of it, the blank was full of small soldiers, and he turned from my beauty and said my name.

Son of Man. Son of Marvin & Tallulah. Son of Flatbush & roti & dollar vans bolting down the avenue after six. The boy grew like a debt, & beautified every meter of the pockmarked, jet black asphalt which held him aloft on days he sped from much larger men along its skin. Godfathers & hustlers, Division 1 scholarship forfeiters, alchemists, liars, lasagna connoisseurs, Internet mixtape DJs & baby mama conflict consultants, each one appearing as if from the smoke of our 
collective imagination, Jordans laced, drawstrings taut, all of them gathered one by one to race the gangly, mop-top prodigy from the front of Superior Market to the block’s endarkened terminus, the same corner where Man Man got jumped so bad at the back end of last summer, neighborhood residents came to regard the place as a kind of memorial & it was like this every other afternoon, you know, from June through the final days leading up to the book drives & raucous cookouts which signaled our school year’s inauspicious return, this was the manner by which Mycah Dudley first gained his fame, dusting grown men without so much as the faintest scintillation of sweat to make the performance ethical. It was damn near unsportsmanlike, his effortlessness, mass cruelty in a New York City dreamscape, the laughter of girls with hip-length, straight-back braids & baby powder Forces making every contest an event worth leaving the perch of your bunk bed, stepping out into the record-breaking swelter that summer held like a trap door for kids with broken box fans & no mother home for at least four more hours to fill the quiet with discipline. • We gathered in swarms to gawk at our boy before takeoff. His flesh maroon-clad from head to foot like an homage to blood, black plastic afro pick with a fist for a handle jutting from the left side of his high-top fade, his high-top Chuck Taylors, size 12, sounding like ox hooves once he entered the groove of a good run & the distinction was basically moot at that point is what I am saying, the line between him & any other mystical creature, any worthwhile myth, any god of prey or waning life. • The entire block was out that night. Firecrackers packed the blackening air, their fury matched only by the exorbitance of dope-boy 
convertibles turned mobile dancehalls by the moment’s weight. Which might explain why no one quite remembers when, or how, the now-infamous brawl began. Only that Mycah was in rare form earlier that evening, having just embarrassed Mars Patterson — so named, it bears mentioning, for the chocolate bars he loved to steal & trade on the 4 train, not the red rock planet or lord of war — but was now in his everyday mode, seated on the stoop, a seer with so few words for devotees & passersby, each eventually stopped asking for his backstory, 
for his praise or functional wisdom, & instead were content to let him eat his veggie patty with cheese without interruption, which he did, which he was, when the din that always accompanies someone’s son’s public pummeling rang out, cut through our scene lengthwise, compelled the boy, for the first time on record, to leap from the steps of the brownstone his nana died braiding hair inside of, enter the scrum, thresh the crowd for signs of the conflict’s center. • General consensus has it he was looking for his little cousin, & found him, even before the initial cop car ran like a living ram through the people. Before the boys in blue sprang, a spray of navy fléchettes, from behind its doors. Before they were caught in the scuffle, released ten to twenty rounds of ammo into the crowd without warning, bullets glancing off of Cutlass doors & corner store glass built for battle, all but three or four of which entered the boy mid-stride, lifted his six-foot frame from the ground, legs still pumping. For a second, you would almost swear he was running through the gunfire, preparing for liftoff or something, baby cousin held firmly in his arms, shielded from the onslaught.They never would have caught him if he hadn’t been holding that child, said no one, though we all thought it during the weeks following that moment we each froze, the moment his body collapsed slow as petals upon the unremarkable cement, & we stared at our champion felled by an outcome so common we don’t even have a special name for it. Still. No one standing ran that day. Most of us turned to face his killers, hands at our sides, determined to make them make it a massacre. But all that was before we heard Man Man let off a scream so full it rent the crowd in two, split the circle we had built around the boy’s corpse, our human wall parting to watch each casing fall from Mycah’s still-wet, dark red sweatshirt onto the street. Hear me. I heard the gunman’s greeting. Saw hollow points etch 
apertures into the boy’s clothes. They shot Mycah Dudley, quite 
legally. He died that night. He rose.

There should be a writing of non-writing. Someday it will come. A brief writing, without grammar, a writing of words alone. Words without supporting grammar. Lost. Written, there. And immediately left behind. —Marguerite Duras (translated by Mark Pollizzotti) It came. Words smashed out of the sky and from the mouths and off the pages and from the flesh and blood of the bodies and the words hit the readers and were destroyed like more bodies and the fields of the nation were littered with bodies and dead. Carcass love, they called it. Carcass economy, they called it. And the readers found the carcasses strewn across the pages and the readers came and stripped their innards and twirled intestines above their heads like lassos. The carcasses fell onto the pages and were taken away in wagons and trucks and they were replaced with new carcasses that were sold for words before the flies laid eggs and the wounds had time to fester. FALSE CARCASS ECONOMY! Will the souls of the carcasses miss themselves when they die? Will the bodies whose lips slurp out the souls of the carcasses miss themselves when they die? Will the words from the bodies who slurp out the souls of the carcasses cease to exist when the bodies themselves die? The readers grovel in the pages and find themselves in ditches with the carcasses but they do not know the rules of the false carcass economy. In this book the readers can feel their feet being removed. In this book the readers can feel the splash of the abattoir blood that sprinkles the page with poems. How do you know if the poems have too many bubbles? That is, how do you know if the blood of the poems has too many bubbles? When we speak of our own lives, says the collective voice of the readers, we certainly don’t mean human life. On the page the readers find themselves crawling around like quadrupeds with hands full of grass and earth uprooting plants and trees setting out for home and not getting far counting corpses on the fields to hell with animals there is God grinding his teeth with joy forging his way through the ruins of failing flesh there is the machine that has annihilated the bulk of humanity is it semen or is it a carburetor that makes us unrecognizable we know who we are through decay and in someone else’s story this is a lot worse than knocking your own brains out with good results then drinking tea with sugar and milk and suddenly feeling revived then exploding with words and speaking with animals and sinking in mud and being found by peasants who clean turds and who are like silent gods with holes in their shoes it is horrible to eat horrible to bulge in the belly with food horrible to blink when so many can’t blink oh to ruminate once more on the air polluted with liability on the hair singed from pollution the eyes burning fingers shrivelling the exact moment of ending will not come for many millennia we will not be able to document it it will document us it’s okay to kill some bodies speak of nothing and you’re lucky to make friends flank kidney liver swollen body on the sand who are you now that I am speaking with a mouth full of words that do not belong to me I crawl across the page and I don’t know if I’m dying or dead.

Pla ce bo, Who is there, who? Di le xi, Dame Margery; Fa, re, my, my, Wherfore and why, why? For the sowle of Philip Sparowe, That was late slayn at Carowe, Among the Nones Blake, For that swete soules sake, And for all sparowes soules, Set in our bederolles, Pater noster qui, With an Ave Mari, And with the corner of a Crede, The more shalbe your mede. Whan I remembre agayn How mi Philyp was slayn, Never halfe the payne Was betwene you twayne, Pyramus and Thesbe, As than befell to me: I wept and I wayled, The tearys downe hayled; But nothinge it avayled To call Phylyp agayne, Whom Gyb our cat hath slayne. Gib, I saye, our cat, Worrowyd her on that Which I loved best: It can not be exprest My sorowfull hevynesse, But all without redresse; For within that stounde, Halfe slumbrynge, in a swounde I fell downe to the grounde. Unneth I kest myne eyes Towarde the cloudy skyes: But whan I dyd beholde My sparow dead and colde, No creatuer but that wolde Have rewed upon me, To behold and se What hevynesse dyd me pange; Wherewith my handes I wrange, That my senaws cracked, As though I had ben racked, So payned and so strayned, That no lyfe wellnye remayned. I syghed and I sobbed, For that I was robbed Of my sparowes lyfe. O mayden, wydow, and wyfe, Of what estate ye be, Of hye or lowe degre, Great sorowe than ye myght se, And lerne to wepe at me! Such paynes dyd me frete, That myne hert dyd bete, My vysage pale and dead, Wanne, and blewe as lead; The panges of hatefull death Wellnye had stopped my breath. Heu, heu, me, That I am wo for the! Ad Dominum, cum tribularer, clamavi: Of God nothynge els crave I But Phyllypes soule to kepe From the marees deepe Of Acherontes well, That is a flode of hell; And from the great Pluto, The prynce of endles wo; And from foule Alecto, With vysage blacke and blo; And from Medusa, that mare, That lyke a fende doth stare; And from Megeras edders, For rufflynge of Phillips fethers, And from her fyry sparklynges, For burnynge of his wynges; And from the smokes sowre Of Proserpinas bowre; And from the dennes darke, Wher Cerberus doth barke, Whom Theseus dyd afraye, Whom Hercules dyd outraye, As famous poetes say; From that hell-hounde, That lyeth in cheynes bounde, With gastly hedes thre, To Jupyter pray we That Phyllyp preserved may be! Amen, say ye with me! Do mi nus, Helpe nowe, swete Jesus! Levavi oculos meos in montes: Wolde God I had Zenophontes, Or Socrates the wyse To shew me their devyse, Moderatly to take This sorrow that I make For Phylyp Sparowes sake! So fervently I shake, I fele my body quake; So urgently I am brought Into carefull thought. Like Andromach, Hectors wyfe, Was wery of her lyfe, Whan she had lost her joye, Noble Hector of Troye; In lyke maner also Encreaseth my dedly wo, For my sparowe is go. It was so prety a fole, It wold syt on a stole, And lerned after my scole For to kepe his cut, With, "Phyllyp, kepe your cut!" It had a velvet cap, And wold syt upon my lap, And seke after small wormes, And somtyme white bred crommes; And many tymes and ofte Betwene my brestes softe It wolde lye and rest; It was propre and prest. Somtyme he wolde gaspe Whan he sawe a waspe; A fly or a gnat, He wolde flye at that; And prytely he wold pant Whan he saw an ant; Lord, how he wolde pry After the butterfly! Lorde, how he wolde hop After the gressop! And whan I sayd, "Phyp! Phyp!" Than he wold lepe and skyp, And take me by the lyp. Alas, it wyll me slo, That Phillyp is gone me fro!

I first discovered what was killing these men. I had three sons who worked with their father in the tunnel: Cecil, aged 23, Owen, aged 21, Shirley, aged 17. They used to work in a coal mine, not steady work for the mines were not going much of the time. A power Co. foreman learned that we made home brew, he formed a habit of dropping in evenings to drink, persuading the boys and my husband — give up their jobs and take this other work. It would pay them better. Shirley was my youngest son; the boy. He went into the tunnel. My heart     my mother     my heart     my mother My heart     my coming into being.