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The fern in the rain breathes the silver message. Stay, lie low. Play your dark reeds and relearn the beauty of absorption. There is nothing beyond the rotten log covered with leaves and needles. Forget the light emerging with its golden wick. Raise your face to the water-laden frond. A thousand blossoms will fall into your arms.

On the Pan American Highway, somewhere between the north and south continent, you come across a chain of volcanoes, a coast with a thick growth of palm trees, crunching waves of the sea; an isthmus Neruda called “slender earth like a whip.” When the road bends, turns into a street, the walls splattered with “Yanqui Go Home!!!” you see a boy fifteen years old, barefoot, sniffing glue in a small plastic bag. An old woman in an apron will step out, say, “This is the right street.” In the public square, there will be no friend from school to welcome you, no drive to Sonsonate, city of coconuts, no one to order cold Pilseners, oyster cocktails, or convince the waitress into dancing a cumbia or two with you. Instead, at the local bar, you’ll raise a bottle next to strangers, stub your cigarette out on the floor. You’ll watch a country ten years after the civil war: an old man sitting on the curb, head between knees, open hand stretched out. Everything will hurt, your hair, your toenails, even your shoes. You’ll curse dusty streets, demented sun slowly burning the nape of your neck, stray dogs following you to the park. By nightfall, you drag yourself back to the bars, looking for a lost country in a shot of Tíc Táck. Against the wall, three men with their guitars. When you lie on a hotel bed, too tired to sleep, when you feel torn, twisted like an old newspaper, blown from city to city, you have reached the place. You have begun to speak like a man by the side of the road, barefoot.

Northern hemisphere it’s almost Christmas. Sunlight   withdrawing into its darkest shell of green coils ring by ring like a yellow snake in a tight burrow. The snake’s sleep maps an origin pinpoints the start of where morning lies — its polished skin a simple clock turning every so often leaving a scaled topography behind. But just as rain can fall sideways and eyes look aslant might a northern winter not widen light in the same way a snake exceeds its skin? Last summer I stood over a sheath of snake in the bush. The tail tapered the head was marked with the shape and angle of invisible eyes. It could have been a hairnet or a ghost but it was quieter than that. It could have been laid out across a plate of vine leaves. A seamstress could have used it as tulle a fisherman as netting the desert salt as cracks. Trees are empty on the sidewalk their fallen leaves layered and overlapping like shelves of ancient papyruses. One tree casts a long shadow two arms striking upwards as though piqued by pavement light. Between the shadow lying flat and still and the tree standing long and tall there is an angle of forty-five degrees. There is Icarus falling from blue to decimal to amber. The distance between north and south is mapped with the shape and angle of his eyes. The snake’s skin is colorless his eye invincible. The winter light is warm piercing darkness radiating a trajectory that points in all directions.

The mind’s black kettle hisses its wild exigencies at every turn: The hour before the coffee and the hour after. Penscratch of the gone morning, woman a pitched hysteria watching the mad-ant scramble, her small wants devouring. Her binge and skin-thrall. Her old selves being shuffled off into labyrinths, this birdless sky a longing. Her moth-mouth rabble unfacing touch-and-go months under winter, torn letters under floorboards, each fickle moon pecked through with doubt. And one spoiled onion. Pale Cyclops on her kitchen counter now sprouting green missives, some act of contrition; neighbor-god’s vacuum a loud rule thrown down. Her mother now on the line saying too much. This island is not a martyr. You tinker too much with each gaunt memory, your youth and its unweeding. Not everything blooms here a private history — consider this immutable. Consider our galloping sun, its life. Your starved homesickness. The paper wasp kingdom you set fire to, watched for days until it burnt a city in you. Until a family your hands could not save became the hurricane. How love is still unrooting you. And how to grow a new body — to let each word be the wild rain swallowed pure like an antidote. Her mother at the airport saying don’t come back. Love your landlocked city. Money. Buy a coat. And even exile can be glamorous. Some nights she calls across the deaf ocean to no one in particular. No answer. Her heart’s double-vault a muted hydra. This hour a purge of  its own unselfing. She must make a home of it.

Art thou pale for weariness Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth, Wandering companionless Among the stars that have a different birth, And ever changing, like a joyless eye That finds no object worth its constancy?

Trade, Trade versus Art, Brain, Brain versus Heart; Oh, the earthiness of these hard-hearted times, When clinking dollars, and jingling dimes, Drown all the finer music of the soul. Life as an Octopus with but this creed, That all the world was made to serve his greed; Trade has spread out his mighty myriad claw, And drawn into his foul polluted maw, The brightest and the best, Well nigh, Has he drained dry, The sacred fount of Truth; And if, forsooth, He has left yet some struggling streams from it to go, He has contaminated so their flow, That Truth, scarce is it true. Poor Art with struggling gasp, Lies strangled, dying in his mighty grasp; He locks his grimy fingers ’bout her snowy throat so tender. Is there no power to rescue her, protect, defend her? Shall Art be left to perish? Shall all the images her shrines cherish Be left to this iconoclast, to vulgar Trade? Oh, that mankind had less of Brain and more of Heart, Oh, that the world had less of Trade and more of Art; Then would there be less grinding down the poor, Then would men learn to love each other more; For Trade stalks like a giant through the land, Bearing aloft the rich in his high hand, While down beneath his mighty ponderous tread, He crushes those who cry for daily bread.

The Artichoke She bore only the heart, Worked at the stem with her Fingers, pulling it to her, And into her, like a cord. She would sustain him, Would cover his heart. The hairy needles And the bigger leaves, These she licked into shape, Tipping each with its point. He is the mud-flower, The thorny hugger. The Asparagus She sent packs of great beasts to pass Over him, trailing belly-fur and dust, Bending their nostrils to his frail spear. This was to toughen him. For what? Stupidly, like a squirrel, standing up, Looking here and there, looking to all sides, He is cut down and taken away. She can smell him steaming, his crowns Already tender, his spine giving in. Now he is threatening to wither terribly, And slip from the water altogether, And billow through the kitchen like prayer. The Cauliflower Her words clot in his head. He presses himself to remember And feels the skin peel back, The skull bleach, crack, fall away. All that's left of him is the brain, Its tissue knotting up to shade him, The pain of its light pulsing How to move, how to move. Herbs Before fog leaves the scrub-oak Or the grasses of the downland, Take dragonwort under the black alder, Take cockspur grass and henbane, The belladonna, the deadly nightshade. Free them as you would a spider's web, Singing over them: Out, little wen, Out, little wen. Sing this into the mouth of the woman. Corn I am the corn quail. What I do is quick. You will know only The muffled clucking, The scurry, the first Shiver of feathers And I will be up, I will be in your Head with no way out, Wings beating at the Air behind your eyes. Celery The hope with water is that it will conceal nothing, that a clearness will follow upon it like the clearness after much rain, or the clearness where the air reaches to the river and touches it, where the rain falls from the trees into the river. Bell Pepper To find enough rooms for the gathering The walls go on alone not waiting For corners but thinking of sleeves And how the wind fills them and the snow Fills them and how cold it is without Fires when there are not enough rooms. Potatoes It had been growing in her like vegetables. She was going into the ground where it could Do better, where she could have potatoes. They would be small and easily mistaken For stones. It would fall to her to Sort them out, persuade them to stay Close to her, comforting her, letting her Wear them on her body, in her hair, Helping her hold always very still.

The plastic Great Horned Owl, stuck with glue on the stamped tin, corbelled cornice lip impresses no one — not the starlings that dip and stitch, nor pigeons as they fluff and coo around its feet. And vinyl siding’s too regular — each molded, faux-grained strip identical, but for dents, and that drip of   bird shit from a sill. What if all you might say speaks like crafted, ersatz things: mimicry in a tongue you barely know? Your owl signs death, the cornice stone, the fake clapboard conjures farmhouse. While just below the ledge, a wren’s mindless gestures make an altar of twigs, in veneration of wings.

As I one evening sat before my cell, Methought a star did shoot into my lap. I rose and shook my clothes, as knowing well That from small fires comes oft no small mishap; When suddenly I heard one say, “Do as thou usest, disobey, Expel good motions from thy breast, Which have the face of fire, but end in rest.” I, who had heard of music in the spheres, But not of speech in stars, began to muse; But turning to my God, whose ministers The stars and all things are: “If I refuse, Dread Lord,” said I, “so oft my good, Then I refuse not ev’n with blood To wash away my stubborn thought; For I will do or suffer what I ought. “But I have also stars and shooters too, Born where thy servants both artilleries use. My tears and prayers night and day do woo And work up to thee; yet thou dost refuse. Not but I am (I must say still) Much more obliged to do thy will Than thou to grant mine; but because Thy promise now hath ev’n set thee thy laws. “Then we are shooters both, and thou dost deign To enter combat with us, and contest With thine own clay. But I would parley fain: Shun not my arrows, and behold my breast. Yet if thou shunnest, I am thine: I must be so, if I am mine. There is no articling with thee: I am but finite, yet thine infinitely.”

—I want to draw the sky. —Draw it, my darling. —I have. —And why do you spread the colors this way? —Because the sky has no edges. . . . —I want to draw the earth. —Draw it, my darling. —I have. —And who is this? —She is my friend. —And where is the earth? —In her handbag. . . . —I want to draw the moon. —Draw it, my darling. —I can't. —Why? —The waves shatter it continuously. . . . —I want to draw paradise. —Draw it, my darling. —I have. —But I don't see any colors. —It is colorless. . . . —I want to draw the war. —Draw it, my darling. —I have. —And what is this circle? —Guess. —A drop of blood? —No. —A bullet? —No. —Then, what? —The button that turns off the lights.