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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.

Because of the first, the fear of wreck, which they taught us to fear (though we learned at once, and easily), because of the wreck that was expected (and metal given velocity and heft to assure it)— we became adepts in rise above : how many versions: the church steeple that took the eye straight up to heaven (though it seemed snagged on the cross-beam of that cross, torn blue at the top, where sense leaked out). And rise above , transcendence, on that higher plane, the vertical direction of virtue (a bony finger pointing up to where matter dissolves into distaste for it); the space program, expensive tons of rocket (soon to be debris) fired off the planet's crust at anything out there, pocked moon, red rocky Mars, ever the upward urge , carved in the marble arch of the old library door under which generations passed, hoping to rise above it all— like the woman the magician levitates over the table, her body floating an unlikely inch or two above the velvet-draped plateau... watch her hovering, weightless, the crowd staring in wonder, the trick of the thing still hidden, and the magician doing something now with his hands, a flurry of brilliant silk in the air, as she floats in the endlessness of art, the magician still waving his scarves, the air a bright shatter of wings, doves from a hat, our disbelief suspended, while below, the wrecks accumulate: scrap yard, broken concrete slabs, and all those bodies not exempt from gravity, beneath our notice as we ride above it all, like froth on a wave that will be water falling by the ton, soon, when the tide turns.

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.

A branch, the hand of Apollo, The plane tree’s polished, broad bough, Spread above you, may it bring you The universe’s immortal peace. You’d meet me on the broad and shining shore Of Pylos, so I’d planned, With Mentor’s tall ship pulled up on the beach Snug in the sand. We would be bound, as those who sailed with the gods, In the winged friendship of youth, And would take our seats in the stone thrones that Time And custom had made smooth And meet that man who still in the third generation Reigned serene, a sage Whose tales of travels and holy decrees had ripened In his mind with age— At dawn, we’d attend the sacrifice to the gods, The ritual slaughters Of the three-year-old heifers, and hear the single cry That rose from his three daughters When the axe thwacked, and the black-fringed, slow-rolling eye Drowned in a swoon Of darkness, and the gilt horns were rendered idle, A hazy half moon. My love imagined you, as a sister her brother, In your virginal bath, How Polycaste rinsed your naked body and dressed you In a robe of fine cloth. I thought to prod you a little with my foot As dawn was about to break: The gleaming chariot’s yoked for us and ready. No time to lose! Awake!

My leaf blower lifted the blackbird— wings still spread, weightless, floating on the loud, electric wind almost as if it were alive. Three or four times it flew, but fell again, sideslipped down like a kite with no string, so I gave up. . . I had work to do, and when the dust I raised had settled in that other world under the rose bushes, the ants came back to finish theirs.

For Arthur Sze (Qin) Dim Sum equivalent to:dot, speck heart. Stone piled on stone I finish my meal. In this early sunrise I see shadows where a cairn of rocks used to stack in the direction of eastern light. In late morning, I lit red candles and placed them next to a three-hinged mirror, as a way of seeing shadows of shadows. Milkweed grows on the side of the road in ditches, reminiscent of professors’ soft words, amazing the brilliant contemplation and thought pattern as you learn, slowly. In my body neuron-zipped words and more words. My lexicon building from nothing to something good. Embossed tattoos like small notes on sheet music. Dots and lines, strands and strings I rest on the note D, increased by one half as my orchestra director signals, dashes and spaces for letters as grace notes in Morse code. Notes in staccato igniting instrumental waves of burning wood, a fiery spark over and speck dust played in harmonics, as a coot hovers over a brook dives in comes back with a fish. No one would ever know its true beauty and calmness, the setting sun across an arctic lake, unless it is witnessed. As speckled day owls, brants, and mergansers float in the sunset. To learn you must be open, diligent, and willing to be an individual. 11,000 murres with webbed feet land also without any fear of predators. But still, on the page grow spotted mushrooms and morels. Examine the distortion and effects of the warming earth. The change of the ice age with purpose as the warming earth today, but I take heart in sun along with the core of a gingko tree’s light.