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Habits accrue in circular pattern and living occasion swollen among what the dead have to teach us So, ear, be an instrument for thought Tide, bring some little green thing to dust behind my eyes Touch the hotpoint and drag the tongue over the fat belly of a flapping fish Sticker book of farm animals Sticker book of ole timey cats What is life and how shall it be governed? With blind devotion and endurance in the impossible for guts in everything for roots in plain sight Share a lung Accumulate none Say hello to the crow There are certain chord progressions one should avoid

Old court. Old chain net hanging in frayed links from the rim, the metal blackboard dented, darker where the ball for over thirty years has kissed it, the blacktop buckling, the white lines nearly worn away. Old common ground where none of the black men warming up before the basket will answer or even look in my direction when I ask if I can run too, the chill a mutual understanding, one of the last we share, letting me join them here, if nowhere else, by not letting me forget I don’t belong. Old court. Old courtesy, handshake, exchange of names, in the early days of bussing, between assassinations, before our quaint welcoming of them had come to seem, even to ourselves, the haughty overflow of wealth so thoroughly our own we didn’t need to see it. Old beautiful delusion in those courtly gestures that everything now beyond our wanting just to play was out of bounds, and we were free between the white lines of whatever we assumed we each of us assumed. Old court, old dream dreamed by the weave, the trap, the backdoor pass. Old fluid legacy, among the others, that conjures even now within our bodies and between them such a useless, such an intimate forgetting, as in the moment when you get a step on your defender and can tell exactly by how another man comes at you where your own man is and, without looking, lob the ball up in the air so perfectly as he arrives that in a single motion he can catch and finger roll it in. Old court. Old dwindling cease fire, with no hope of peace, that we silently turn away from when the game is over, hurrying back (as if believing contact meant contagion) to our separate tribes, to the cleansing fires of what, despite ourselves, we momentarily forgot: old lore, old news, old burning certitudes we can’t stoke high or hot enough, yet won’t stop ever stoking until whatever it is we think we are anneals and toughens into an impenetrable shield.

I read a Korean poem with the line “Today you are the youngest you will ever be.” Today I am the oldest I have been. Today we drink buckwheat tea. Today I have heat in my apartment. Today I think about the word chada in Korean. It means cold. It means to be filled with. It means to kick. To wear. Today we’re worn. Today you wear the cold. Your chilled skin. My heart knocks on my skin. Someone said winter has broken his windows. The heat inside and the cold outside sent lightning across glass. Today my heart wears you like curtains. Today it fills with you. The window in my room is full of leaves ready to fall.Chada, you say.It’s tea. We drink. It is cold outside.

Just then, encountering my ruddy face in the grand piano's cold black craquelure, it conjured the jack-o'-lantern moon dipping up over the roofs of the Tenderloin. Only when I have done with the myths— the inner spill that triggers us to flame, breasts so sensitive a moment's touch will call down fever; the dark sea-lane between limbic squall and the heart's harbour— will I picture you, just beyond innocence, lying stripped by a thrown-wide window, letting the cool breeze covet your ardour.

for Brandon Goacher I. Let me speak with expressive hesitation & a feeling for interment why even lineate what isn’t broken by music let me speak with inextricable reluctance. I want to tear the heart from refused convalescence & feed it those long fronds of river bed grass. I want to tear the heart out of style & put it between utter thrall & the infancy of all things impure. Torn out, a flame thickens between us as if not right now we’ll be ripped from this life or each other a white lie not a little more tender than quick. Inextricable reluctance to die or even leave youth culture ever. What a stupid feeling. Do you think it isn’t true? The very existence of flame throwers proves that sometime, somewhere, someone said to themselves ‘You know I want to set those people over there on fire but I’m just not close enough to get the job done.’ Someone puts their arms around you in the cold. There’s an al- most disquieting closeness as gossamer clots & becomes an impasto derivative of some newly visible interdependence. Flame throwers then are just a description of prevailing ideology, relics, the life of the party, a soul flirts by burning that name for itself up in jonesing that comes at the end of desire? Well I wouldn’t know about that. A little goat. Why would it nuzzle dreamily up the way I nuzzle dreamily up to my knees. In the ‘fatal position’ as my nephew used to call it estranged from play waiting on the fox hunt. Oh baby it beats up my lips the somatic effects of contriving a psychic blockade against death with the contours of your face & healing in constant eclipse where all things inextricably broken by music make the basic rhythmic unit go something like this — I don’t want to loose you. I don’t want to be empty, clever hold & keep you.I was lost to you to start with still I keep on coming back. Do you think you’ll keep on coming back to me forever?That’s the meaning of our life together baby.

I am totally enamored of every person passing in this unseasonably warm mid-March evening near 39th and Park The young women, of course, with their lives in front of them, and the young men too, just standing here as I am, checking it out, hanging out, talking But everyone here, every age, every type, is beautiful, the moment, somehow, the weather, has made them all real and for this moment, before it turns to night, they're all fantastic The light is such that I can see everyone and can imagine what they are imagining for the night ahead, what dreams, what fulfilled fantasies of togetherness And the two guys who were here a moment ago, paused, have moved on, and the light is deepening, every moment or so, actually falling into a deeper stupor, which is night But if I look south I still see the pink flush of desire there at the bottom, the southness of all our lives, and it's okay that it's darkening here, people accept it as they concoct plans for tonight, Thursday Soon I'll have to go too, lose this spot, this moment, but some we've met and some experience we had somewhere else is becoming ever more important

This boy lying face down in my sleep pushes around jars of jelly, waking me the night he is found so I can drag him from the wet ground and clean his blackened belly, this boy lying face down who is somehow bound to me, this hunted herdsman, refugee waking me the night he is found. Am I to dress him in an open gown, bless the holes in his chest with tea leaves? This boy lying face down, permeating even the simplest sound, with the crack in the door he slowly cries, waking me the night he is found, lips parted to my blue-black ground, whispering red vetch inside me, this slender boy lying down, waking me the night he is found.

When I ran, it rained. Late in the afternoon— midsummer, upstate New York, mornings I wrote, read Polish history, and there was a woman whom I thought about; outside the moody, humid American sublime—late in the afternoon, toward sundown, just as the sky was darkening, the light came up and redwings settled in the cattails. They were death's idea of twilight, the whole notes of a requiem the massed clouds croaked above the somber fields.Lady of eyelashes, do you hear me? Whiteness, otter's body, coolness of the morning, rubbed amber and the skin's salt, do you hear me? This is Poland speaking, “era of the dawn of freedom,” nineteen twenty-two.

the back wings of the hospital where nothing will grow lie cinders in which shine the broken pieces of a green bottle

you must be made of money. your parents must have grown on trees. bet you’re black tinged with green. bet you sleep on bags of it. bet your barbies climb it. bet you never wanted. bet you never had to ask. bet you golf. bet you tennis. bet you got a summer house. bet you got a credit card for your 5th birthday. bet you played with bills for toys. bet you chew them up for dinner. bet you spit your black out like tobacco that’s why you talk so bet you listen to green day. bet you ain’t never heard of al. bet your daddy wears a robe around the house. bet his hands are soft as a frog’s belly. bet your house is on a hill. bet the grass is freshly cut. bet you feel like a princess. bet the police protect your house. bet you know their first names. bet your house has a hundred rooms. bet a black lady comes to clean them.