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At last we decoded the terminal message, Only to find the pattern we had expected Was false — a false trail of false bread crumbs Designed to leave pitfalls undetected. We found a new pattern. We found a hand Moving pieces we had thought were only Part of  the board, and shifting them to vantage points We had ignored. We rewrote the battle plan And reconfigured the satellite array To show our progress from the very beginning. The fault should be traceable — and hence correctable — And once we found it, we’d be winning. We found a new pattern. We followed its track To a forest beside an abandoned tunnel Diving wide as a boxcar into the rock. A stale breeze blew over rusting shovels And all of our instruments confirmed a hit. We set a perimeter. We sent in a scout. From the interior, nothing looked back at us. No tracks indicated a force had come out. But we had a pattern. At dawn, we dispatched A team of our best, our trackers and stone killers, To see if  the signals were finally a match And if so, to counterattack. And now we wait. And now we wait. The tunnel gives nothing back. The trees are revealing the first signs of gold But the air is unmoving. The air is still. It is quiet here, and getting cold.

He promises a canary dress, white gloves, says they’ll eat chops, thick as her thighs, that they’ll order doubles of the “finest,” see all the Big Names when they arrive. But it’s the thought of them dead: half of what they own draped around them, her head against his chest, his back slack against the headboard, all their letters unopened, bills not paid, long knocks, the notices tacked outside their door. It’s not knowing whether some smell would introduce them to their neighbors or a landlord wheeling them out into the hallway; the highboy he chipped on the drive up, the silver she inherited from her mother, her hatboxes, stacked high next to them like a wedding cake waiting to be buried. He heard that “up there” the wind had talons sharp enough to hook a grown man beneath his collarbone and carry him a full city block. He heard that you learned the months by measuring the length of their shadows and even summer was like a quality of night.

Use me Abuse me Turn wheels of fire on manhole hotheads Sing me Sour me Secrete dark matter’s sheen on our smarting skin Rise and shine In puddle shallows under every Meryl Cheryl Caleb Syd somnambulists and sleepyheads Wake us Speak to us Bless what you’ve nurtured in your pits the rats voles roaches and all outlivers of your obscene ethic and politics Crawl on us Fall on us you elevations that break and vein down to sulfuric fiber-optic wrecks through drill-bit dirt to bedrock Beat our brows Flee our sorrows Sleep tight with your ultraviolets righteous mica and drainage seeps your gorgeous color-chart container ships and cab-top numbers squinting in the mist

Use me Abuse me Turn wheels of fire on manhole hotheads Sing me Sour me Secrete dark matter’s sheen on our smarting skin Rise and shine In puddle shallows under every Meryl Cheryl Caleb Syd somnambulists and sleepyheads Wake us Speak to us Bless what you’ve nurtured in your pits the rats voles roaches and all outlivers of your obscene ethic and politics Crawl on us Fall on us you elevations that break and vein down to sulfuric fiber-optic wrecks through drill-bit dirt to bedrock Beat our brows Flee our sorrows Sleep tight with your ultraviolets righteous mica and drainage seeps your gorgeous color-chart container ships and cab-top numbers squinting in the mist

Fiddle no further, Führer. Rome is built. It took all day. Now let us so love the world. I’m just thinking out loud. My stigmata bring out my eyes. The smallpox uses every part of  the blanket, and the forest is a lady’s purse. The Indian is a pink Chihuahua peeking his head from the designer zipper. Out here it’s mostly light from the fifteenth century slamming into the planet. I can’t see the forest for the burn unit. All the planet does is bitch bitch bitch. I know it’s last minute but could you put out my eyes? At the subatomic level, helmeted gods help themselves to gold. Up here? The body’s an isolation ward.

The scruffy house cat aches to fly— she dreams all day of wings and sky! So tonight she climbs the ladder, mounts a platform, nothing matters except to catch a thin trapeze then hold on tight with grace and ease. She swings herself by both front paws then somesaults to wild applause of kitchen mice, who, though dizzy, encourage Cat, to keep her busy.

The guardian angel sits in the tree above the black lip of street the man walks down. He calls the man Cargo. The angel sees a pinewood box in place of the man, and the street he walks is a boat, the hull like a coal crater. Somewhere in the real world there is such a boat and box. The angels call these overlays dreams, and believe they crop up because angels can’t sleep but want to — space falls apart when you have unlimited time. • The cargo is rattling in the boat. Maybe it’s just the waves, maybe it’s rats. What’s the difference? Either way: it’s the box. The angel sends the man a happy vision from his past — the time he fed birthday cake to his goldfish after an unsuccessful party. The angel thinks he’s applying lemon oil to the creaky, wounded wood of the box. He knows it’s palliative, but it’s beautiful. • The man reaches the end of the street. He’s a sick man and he starts to ponder death as he often does these days: All of death is right here — the gods, the dark, a moon. Where was I expecting death to take me if everywhere it is is on earth? At life’s close, you’re like the child whose parents step out for a drive — everyone else out on a trip, but the child remains in the familiar bed, feeling old lumps like new in the mattress — the lights off — not sleeping, for who can sleep with the promise of a world beyond the door? • That night the child dreams he’s inside the box. It’s burning hot, the heat coming from bugs and worms raping and devouring one another. He starts the hard work of the imagination, learning to minister to the new dream. Perhaps all that’s needed is a little rain — for everyone to drink and have a bath. Outside: a car humming, somewhere, his mother’s singing.

The Angry God of  This World & His Throne in Purgatory Fog day, give us the sun. But the particulate hangover from Stuttgart’s bad days obscures. The weather of modernity. The lady’s tattooed musculature is what comes of getting too close to the angry father. Decode. He’d been left behind. We get on well now. Punk diadem, scales unjust, iced and fired, messianic Virgil and the golden aspiration for one wandering around in diaphanous red, the zoo escapees looking on hungrily but nervously. And a little bit curious. Even at the height of Coondle heat when I rose before dawn to catch the sun’s origins I realized I was looking into the core of purgatory. The house would stretch and crack with heat but then, as the sun played its games with the horizon, the curve of the hill, the house was at its coolest and retracted so a glass pane shattered into the corridor. The conspiracy of good and bad. Who is to choose? I don’t mind the walk, negotiating rough ground, but when jerks are taking potshots at you, it makes it impossible. I don’t use a GPS. A bit of bush knowledge, a lot of common sense. But this is Tübingen and we’re nearing our time: the songbird insurgence and weather vanes and swans, the bare branches and killed trees, the welcome and hatred of refugees, questions of which fruit will ripen or mature or fall or offer seed when its time comes. I study Hölderlin manuscripts with a friend and we will rewrite “Half of Life” upside down. The inversions of travel and temporariness and permanence. Tracy speaks to me from across the old town. It hasn’t rained today but the Ammer River is still swift outside this window. Classic. Stock epithet burnout. Behind the glissade of faces the goings home. Vengeance lurks therein. Such beautiful youth. Floating on Friday night promise. This brutal God watching on. In store. Adorning places of worship. I apologize for the distractions. Wondering while I write.

(From tablet writing, Babylonian excavations of the 4th millennium B.C.) Bilbea, I was in Babylon on Saturday night. I saw nothing of you anywhere. I was at the old place and the other girls were there, But no Bilbea. Have you gone to another house? or city? Why don’t you write? I was sorry. I walked home half-sick. Tell me how it goes. Send me some kind of a letter. And take care of yourself.

My father liked them separate, one there, one here (allá y aquí), as if aware that words might cut in two his daughter’s heart (el corazón) and lock the alien part to what he was—his memory, his name (su nombre)—with a key he could not claim. “English outside this door, Spanish inside,” he said, “y basta.” But who can divide the world, the word (mundo y palabra) from any child? I knew how to be dumb and stubborn (testaruda); late, in bed, I hoarded secret syllables I read until my tongue (mi lengua) learned to run where his stumbled. And still the heart was one. I like to think he knew that, even when, proud (orgulloso) of his daughter’s pen, he stood outside mis versos, half in fear of words he loved but wanted not to hear.