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rings diminish, duck reflects flight then threads off Long branch of land, rusted oaks smoldering fawn shore, grasses bare scripts of green black fingerbones of the willows, splayed rubric fringe of the reeds at the edge of water The reflection is its own blurred dream The blended edges, furred thing tawny path of stalks brushed into gray slope behind Bright yellow mostly gone now, the dominance of dulled bronze, ochrous, ferrous grooves of the several oaks The wrought planes and hinges of things Strange, held-off symmetry, axis of waterline rubbed, smeared, edge-shifted What is real then made more so through an intervention of element The chipmunk’s tail jerks in synch with its mouth-pops Stares hard at me from a dead willow stump Who are you and what have you done? Things moving in the leaves behind me. Dog barks from far across fields Single bird oars across lake The sky deep in: dark oxygens crimp of leaf edging in dried weed stalk miniature seedpods held forward calligraphic against gray water, white stones chipmunk-rustle, upturn duff, chirp storm whirl off, hold still hold still Gravity picks and fidgets How each blade and bract is angled just so arches, etched kerns scroll of deft beech leaf Baroque script of dried vines their wall of texture coming down Crows burr into woods fish plinks through and slacks under ducks quilt across sky, through sky-water mottled beads hovering, unchaining Reflection is a real thing set in perpetual motion, as if electron spinning and jittering made visible the static progressions The waving laminations of white stone the wandering rift through the pulse-veins Breathing thing, made to breathe, graven so Now the delicate hammers pure cuts of bird steel rings reassembling Quit path under oak Something moves off a dark road Deep-embroidered quiet the tickets slip thicket in meter-tick of duck taking off keep close, brush close to surface furl between bird and mirror-bird I am vested in sensation a suspension of yellow maple amid stalks of oak distillate of leaves saffron particulate Deep sea of trees, fanned tops of oak corals, collective bend fast tappers high up flapping across water back up the damp trough trees closing in two deer pick across, turn back clatter through woods encircling

I tell my secret? No indeed, not I; Perhaps some day, who knows? But not today; it froze, and blows and snows, And you’re too curious: fie! You want to hear it? well: Only, my secret’s mine, and I won’t tell. Or, after all, perhaps there’s none: Suppose there is no secret after all, But only just my fun. Today’s a nipping day, a biting day; In which one wants a shawl, A veil, a cloak, and other wraps: I cannot ope to everyone who taps, And let the draughts come whistling thro’ my hall; Come bounding and surrounding me, Come buffeting, astounding me, Nipping and clipping thro’ my wraps and all. I wear my mask for warmth: who ever shows His nose to Russian snows To be pecked at by every wind that blows? You would not peck? I thank you for good will, Believe, but leave the truth untested still. Spring’s an expansive time: yet I don’t trust March with its peck of dust, Nor April with its rainbow-crowned brief showers, Nor even May, whose flowers One frost may wither thro’ the sunless hours. Perhaps some languid summer day, When drowsy birds sing less and less, And golden fruit is ripening to excess, If there’s not too much sun nor too much cloud, And the warm wind is neither still nor loud, Perhaps my secret I may say, Or you may guess.

1 But I was thinking today about our conversation earlier in the summer. Exhausted, you lay your head on the kitchen table and said: “But what’s the difference between a monster and a cyborg? I need something to eat. Do you have any chocolate?” Opening the fridge, I said quietly and perhaps too seriously, trying to impress you: “The monster is that being who refuses to adapt to her circumstances.” Her fate. Her body. Great Britain. You said: “So, is Laloo English or British?” I said: “She’s from London.” But the more I said London, the more it sounded like a joke. LondonLondonLondon. 2 I was thinking today about what happens when you keep going in a car. This is something you can only do here. Wish for something. Did you ever do it? Wish you weren’t there? I want that go on, go even though it is unclear to me what happens when you get to the Panama Canal or Idaho. Hitchhiking in Idaho as a veritable child, I was taken in by a farming couple, Fatty and Daddy, a hundred miles or so outside of Boise. Fatty was rail thin, about seventy-five, and Daddy was a big man who had a reclining chair in each room and looked younger than his wife. They picked me up in their truck—I was sitting by the side of the road brushing the knots out of my hair with my fingers—and I stayed with them for five days. They said it was not the right thing for me to be in the open like that, and they took me to eat every day at a restaurant called Country Buffet. In my innocence, I had been walking on a road that led to the country compound of a KKK leader/operative, Charles Reynold. What is an operative? It is someone who is always planning a way in, like the hen-house fox with his beautifully red, bushy tail. Daddy, Fatty, and I hunkered down until Daddy’s nephew, Robert, stopped by on his way through nowhere and gave me a ride to Boise proper, where there was a bus station. I waited until Robert had gone and then I walked out to the main drag to get a cup of coffee and interview murderers. “I can take you as far as the state line.” “That would be lovely.” Obsessed, far from home with its gooseberry patches and grim professions based upon openings at Heathrow Airport or Nestle, the main employers in the dingy part of northwest London that constituted my origins, I said yes. Soft yes to the color green, which is going. 3 That is a tree (going) but also an ocean: a way of being saturated with color that only happens here in your country for me; for you it might happen in another place. Mine. Like Laloo, I lived for many years on an island with congested traffic flows. Thus, a juniper tree flying by the window, intensely blue, or the Atlantic Ocean, to the left, if the car has a destination to the south, such as to The Keys, is magical to me. Improbable in light of my origins. Hers. The girl in the car. I don’t know. I am writing to you, in your special writing dress made from scraps of lace as if it (the dress, the morning of writing ahead of you) is a café; as if, writing, you are hypnotizing not only the biologies of strangers and friends but also yourself. For this reason, when I think of you reading, I think of you as writing blindly. You read but you are also writing. As if my own eyes were closed, I see your white books floating in the sky above my painting of the red girl. These books are separate from my own work, here in the salt-water notebook, but they communicate with it in a nonlocal sense. Like birds. 4 This is pre but the notebook is after. Soaked already at the edge and foamy. Past future. Writing on the warp when dry. Pages. Entries by hand. That is the morning I woke up and walked to the Pacific Ocean, after a night in a motel in Florence, Oregon, complete with a dodgy door and the reality of pillows. The woman at the front desk was wearing a very pretty apron with purple and yellow flowers on it. An expatriate, she said exaggeratedly, oblivious to our common origin: “About four miles. You’re not going to walk, are you? Do you have an umbrella? You can’t go out like that, ducky.” 5 I walked towards the sound of something roaring in a day, the kind of day that is like darkness but lit up, on its forested, proximal verge by gorse, which is a bright yellow flower. Citron-yellow and a kind of tin or silver roofing with holes in it. The day. Like walking in a dreamed landscape drenched with the wrong rain. Monsoon. What kind of rain is this? I recognized the immensity but not the temperature. This was monstrous: the inability to assimilate, on the level of the senses, an ordinary experience of weather. Here is the tongue, for example, constantly darting out to feel the air: what is it? Is it summer? Is it a different season? It’s a different day. That’s okay. Damaged from her travels, in some sense unsettled, enormously anxious, a girl does it anway: gets up and goes. It’s as if the day has a memory of her and not the other way around.

making promises they can’t keep. For you, Grandmother, I said I would pull each invading burr and thistle from your skin, cut out the dizzy brittle eucalypt, take from the ground the dark oily poison– all to restore you happy and proud, the whole of you transformed and bursting into tomorrow. But where do I cut first? Where should I begin to pull? Should it be the Russian thistle down the hill where backhoes have bitten? Or African senecio or tumbleweed bouncing above the wind? Or the middle finger of my right hand? Or my left eye or the other one? Or a slice from the small of my back, a slab of fat from my thigh? I am broken as much as any native ground, my roots tap a thousand migrations. My daughters were never born, I am as much the invader as the native, as much the last day of life as the first. I presumed you to be as bitter as me, to tremble and rage against alien weight. Who should blossom? Who should receive pollen? Who should be rooted, who pruned, who watered, who picked? Should I feed the white-faced cattle who wait for the death train to come or comb the wild seeds from their tails? Who should return across the sea or the Bering Strait or the world before this one or the Mother Ground? Who should go screaming to some other planet, burn up or melt in a distant sun? Who should be healed and who hurt? Who should dry under summer’s white sky, who should shrivel at the first sign of drought? Who should be remembered? Who should be the sterile chimera of earth and of another place, alien with a native face, native with an alien face?

1 The brightly-painted horse Had a boy’s face, And four small wheels Under his feet, Plus a long string To pull him by this way and that Across the floor, Should you care to. A string in-waiting That slipped away In many wiles From each and every try. 2 Knock and they’ll answer, Mother told me. So I climbed four flights of stairs And went in unannounced. And found a small wooden toy For the taking In the ensuing emptiness And the fading daylight That still gives me a shudder As if I held the key to mysteries in my hand. 3 Where’s the Lost and Found Department, And the quiet entry, The undeveloped film Of the few clear moments Of our blurred lives? Where’s the drop of blood And the teeny nail That pricked my finger As I bent down to touch the toy And caught its eye? 4 Evening light, Make me a Sunday Go-to meeting shadow For my toy. My dearest memories are Steep stair-wells In dusty buildings On dead-end streets, Where I talk to the walls And closed doors As if they understood me. 5 The wooden toy sitting pretty. No, quieter than that. Like the sound of eyebrows Raised by a villain In a silent movie. Psst, someone said behind my back.

As this suburban summer wanders toward dark cats watch from their driveways — they are bored and await miracles. The houses show, through windows flashes of knife and fork, the blue light of televisions, inconsequential fights between wife and husband in the guest bathroom voices sound like echoes in these streets the chattering of awful boys as they plot behind the juniper and ivy, miniature guerillas that mimic the ancient news of the world and shout threats, piped high across mock fences to girls riding by in the last pieces of light

—not pen. It’s got that same silken dust about it, doesn’t it, that same sense of having been roughed onto paper even as it was planned. It had to be a labor of love. It must’ve taken its author some time, some shove. I’ll bet it felt good in the hand—the o

Say licked clean at birth. Say weeping in the tall grass, where this tantalizing song begins, birds perched on a crooked branch over a grave of an unending trek into the valley of cooling waters. The soil’s thirst, lessons of earth unmoor the first tongue. Say I have gone back, says the oracle, counting seasons & centuries, undoing fault lines between one generation & next, as she twirls sackcloth edged with pollen, & one glimpses what one did not know. Say this is where the goat spoke legends ago in the ring of fire to deliver a sacrifice. To feel signs depends on how & why the singer’s song puckers the mouth. Well, I believe the borrowed rib story is the other way round, entangled in decree, blessing, law & myth. One only has to listen to nightlong pleas of a mother who used all thousand chants & prayers of clay, red ocher blown from the mouth onto the high stone wall, retracing land bridge to wishbone. My own two daughters & granddaughter, the three know how to work praise & lament, ready to sprout wings of naked flight & labor. Yes, hinged into earth, we rose from Lucy to clan, from clan to tribe, & today we worship her sun-polished bones, remembering she is made of questions. No, mama is not always the first word before counting eggs in the cowbird’s nest. It begins in memory. Now, say her name, say Dinknesh, mother of us all.

I. Maggots in the food, maggots in the floorboards, maggots in the recurring nightmare in which, lying down with a rugged adonis, I wake to find him almost nibbled away. Certainly signs of death are everywhere, but love is more than combat with worms and cannot be so glibly explained away; I do not tremble or knock my knees to keep the maggots slumbering below ground, or crush them underfoot by flocking to everything they are not: raucous gatherings, stolen kisses. On the contrary, I come away from parties adoring what is wormlike in them: the unrisen soufflé, the precocious boy’s octogenarian sayings, the drooping lids of the hostess, someone’s death rattle of a laugh. Certainly love has commerce with vermin, but it is a friendly partnership, not a league of discord; a hacking cough gives proof of a full life, a passing stranger seems all the stronger when one foot is sinking quietly into the grave. II. But is is this lingering horror of dust that makes me pull us out of the cold earth any way I know how: because I strive for heaven in little rooms, visit you in order to suck your blood, then spread it over pipes and daffodils, and shove you up to the vacant sky, where you hover like a stone-cold, tedious statue who never dies, you, poor pawn, are a jack-in-the-box gone haywire, and I am a grinning humanist with bad dreams.

The potato that ate all its carrots, can see in the dark like a mole, its eyes the scars from centuries of shovels, tines. May spelled backwards because it hates the light, pawing its way, padding along, there in the catacombs.