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Let the blood if your belly must have it, but let it not be of me and mine. Let my momma sleep. Let her pray. Let them eat. Let the reverend’s devil pass over me. Let the odds at least acknowledge us. Let the breasts be intact, the insulin faithfully not far, and let the deep red pinpoint puddle its urgency on a pricked fingertip. Let the nurse find the vein the first time. Let the kerosene flow and let my grandma praise her bedside lord for letting her miss another winter. Let me be just a little bit bitter so I remember: Your columns and borders aint but the fractured, the broke clean, the brownest gouges in the blades of our great-great-great-shoulders. Let me leave and come back when my chest opens for you wider than your ditches did to engorge my placeless body. The mosquito-thick breath in your throat coats my skin and it almost feels as if you love me. Let the AC drown out the TV. Let the lotion bottle keep a secret corner til Friday. Let Ike, Wan, D-Block, all my brother’s brothers ride through the weekend. Let the cop car swerve its nose into night and not see none of them. Let us smell rain. Let the breeze through an oak hymn the promise that keeps us waking. Let the cicada unwind while hushpuppy steam slips out the knot of a tourist’s hand, and let him hear in it legends of how hot grease kept the hounds and the lash at bay.

Dense night is a needs thing. You were lured in a luminous canoe said to have once ruled a lunar ocean. The 2 am soda pour of stars is all but silent; only listen — sedater than a sauropod in the bone epics it spills all the moon spice, releasing a sap odour that laces us to a vaster scale of road opus. A carousel of oral cues, these spinning sonic coins. A slide show of old wishes.

Where is your father whose eye you were the apple of? Where are your mother’s parlor portieres, her slip-covered days, her petticoats? In the orchard at the other end of  time, you were just a child in ballet slippers, Your first poodle skirt, your tortoiseshell barrettes. As the peach tree grew more Scarce each day, you kept running out to try to tape the leaves back on their boughs. Once, I caught you catch a pond of sunlight in your lap and when you stood, The sunlight spilt; it could never follow you. Once, above the river, You told me you were born to be a turtle, swimming down. Under the bridge Now you take your meals where the thinnest creatures live at the end Of the world.Carpe Demon, you told me just before you put down the phone And drank the antifreeze. This year, the winter sky in Missouri is a kind of cold The color of a turtle’s hood, a soup of dandelion, burdock root, and clay.

1    I look at my hands In a dark hour. They are my wife, Another life, Fawnal, Explicitly made. I compare responsibility To journey: They are pitch-black Whirling in the outside world Left behind like a native— Possessed. 2    We are older: Toil is our long way Back home. It works. Causes the space to beat Like a heart. It is a part of the poem That appears And appears on its own. It goes on On its own, Mystical as evil But, it is called freedom. 3    I’m sorry: I was telling you about my hands. How well we are married. It follows, I recognize all truth As some part of ten. Spirit is my thumb, Passionately. Without thumb I would be nothing. I have met some who believe in reason. They have had too much wine, Confess cause and effect— It has been painful. 4    I told you it is unreasonable: I guess I should say here, I am your carpenter. Ethnically, dark wood Is my life. I could show you my story better, Sanding, Then where I speak You would hear Africa Africa

O You, Who came upon me once Stretched under apple-trees just after bathing, Why did you not strangle me before speaking Rather than fill me with the wild white honey of your words And then leave me to the mercy Of the forest bees.

Hef brings me flowers tiger lilies, ochre veined downcast, sleek black cups small shadows, are the puckers in his pyjamas where his skin caves in tired profligate, I sigh and pour the oil along your circular sheets thinking of all the times, or women on this bed glossy old bunnies I imagine their breasts, plate of fried eggs, a row of tonsured monks’ heads his tongue slithers, gaunt voluptuary, ugly old man, my eyes close when I roll his name Ner. along my tongue, like the line of cold test tubes thin bottled semen, he wants to plant it, deeply in my flat belly Hugh junior, and, or Carietta, a child is packed in dry blue ice in silk pyjamas they have an emperor’s crest it is dark in there but it’s cold as the green jacuzzi, bubbles are clouds on its face I will crush the glass with the fingers in his back and pile on my rings and all the fur coats and move down the circular stairs, bloated with gold the flowers are a venus-flytrap, with red curls flames and noxious breath his betrayal gives me granite fists, girls scatter movie stars crumple as I run away, from the gaudy prison cell, of tinsel and skin I’ll sue him and write and build a home, in the desert, on the sun a sequined empress, a mirage—in loungewear and harlequin glasses

One rainy night we sat in traffic and, overtired in back, you saw a wind-whipped grocery bag afloat beyond the clutch of jagged branches, swept by gusts and whirled in eddies. A sudden downdraft swooped it earthward, where it danced till with a whoosh a current luffed it past the power lines. Disowned by gravity, small ghost not yet snagged by twiggy fingers, it couldn’t reach the earth. Thin-skinned, it pulsed, translucent jellyfish. You wept and pled to be let out into the dark and slanted rain, somehow to save that desolate thing. The light turned green and still you begged, Go back,go back, on its behalf, caught and held, bossed and tossed by a will much greater than its own.

Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can; Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be. But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan, O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee? Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear. Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod, Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer. Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

For Edgar The submarine’s inside was dim. — Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, tr. by Will Petersen in my youth, I hitched a ride to San Diego, across chirping desert and distant night, I gazed upon a slow-moving dark, encasing a convex cerulean cavity each night, I stood beneath the sky for hours mesmerized at the perplex reformatory, twinkling lights of broken glass fragments spreading against a glistening sunset a faceless man behind a lost reflection of glass at a drive-up window informs me, too bad, you know nothing of your own past how far will I walk against the night? conforming to a captivity I had never realized some years later, under the kitchen table, they all huddle, as the rampage continues toward the back of the house, a clash of debris from the other room recoils and broken sounds escape the barricade of doors I remember I returned in 1970, all they remember is me sitting at the edge of my bed, with the war still in my hands

We are always really carrying a ladder, but it’s invisible. We only know something’s the matter: something precious crashes; easy doors prove impassable. Or, in the body, there’s too much swing or off- center gravity. And, in the mind, a drunken capacity, access to out-of-range apples. As though one had a way to climb out of the damage and apology.