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I was cold and leaned against the big oak tree as if it were my mother wearing a rough apron of bark, her upraised arms warning of danger. Through those boughs and leaves I saw dark patches of sky. I thought a brooding witch waited to catch me up from under branches and take me, careening on her broom, to her home in the jaundiced moon. I looked to the roof of mom and dad's house and wondered if the paisley couch patterns would change during the day. My brother peeked from a window and waved. When the bus came, I pawed away from the trunk, fumbled, and took my first step toward not returning.

It burns up all the grass too, and breaks the stones, so tremendous is its noxious influence. — Pliny the Elder, “Natural History” On a blood- or honey-colored moon at midnight & no 60-watt abuzz. With Sirius ascendant. From a dunghill’s punk egg hatched By toad or serpent. From cold gland & pillaged crib, from ruined sluice, Bible comics & potshots at swallows. From the Ring of Fire, the Zipper, The Nighthawk with her victims taloned upside down. From pistis to gnosis To the midway where they draw a bead on cardboard sheikhs. From no harvest. From no temperate father. From years borne down tainted water & all we failed to mark in frequencies cranked up, from How laughing we cast our own forfeit. O well — It’s cinch your boots up now, it’s shoulder to the wheel, it’s soldier on To lay coins on the fang marks & stand already spent, Condemned for what we wrongly thought exhaustion. Comes now the bright arrival, comes the pageant rain of ashes: The seal torn & tablets fixed but still impossible to read.

It wouldn't kill me to find new frequencies in a temper tantrum. Tatamis and memory, magnetized selves becoming heavy. Of what is a scream composed? You may want to know. You may want to know why. It is to these arabesques that the birdsong replies. Copula, disappear. Anguish, multifoliate. I am a brother to a wandering prayer. Orb in ruined loop fluting for a lost future. I grab what is left of pistons bouncing across a street. The barricade is foolproof.

Never instead put the bales in the bounty, resize the type to provide ALLURE. Look how the picture seems to tell a story. Mother, I’m all dolled up in HOPE. My breastplate hinge needs a little oil, I’m hobbling along to kick your crutch. Mother, I’m all doped up with DESIRE. I’ve cleaned the machine with delicate hand, scrubbed the data within an inch of its life. Mother, I’m all diary today, feeling PENSIVE. The returns keep disappearing, I can’t get my hands around even one. I keep clicking through the channels, the links, little vortex displays all the characteristics of a MOTIVE, Mother, but someone’s just reported that the election has been made OFFICIAL. The results seem promising. In one version you get to keep the crown. The twin diamonds sparkling your eyes sparkle harder, the LIGHT takes on a decadence like that of old snow. In the other, your garland consumes itself, your hair falls out like nuclear, your elisions lisp the windows shut, breaking the view in half. Your face becomes but a VAGARY and there are no backups in storage. I AM a cosmos if I am still breathing. Wind breaks at my neck and spells your name acrostically. Spells your name like my BELOVED. Repetition of facts and figures keeps me apprised. Dogs mass in the streets, shaking bones, slurping scrap lifted from the MALFEASANCE of silver plates hung to dry from row house clotheslines, the tread’s worn down on the spires sagging from the GLORIOUS peaks of this great sky! Can you hear the clicking through the air vents? Did you notice the picture twitch on the bedroom wall? Leaves turn pink and blue, SUPERNATURAL is not dead, is rippling through me, I can feel my toes, I can see you staring at my nape, I can see you vivid in the dark corner of the day, taking your damask gown off one strap at a time, as if I were watching. I have a MANDATE. Nobody else would bother to see you this way.

What every painter knows, but most others forget is how bright colors dim in artificial light and lobster tastes most fresh the nearer to death you set your teeth into the lobster’s flesh.

In payment for those mornings at the mirror while, at her expense, I’d started my late learning in Applied French Braids, for all the mornings afterward of Hush and Just stand still, to make some small amends for every reg- iment- ed bathtime and short-shrifted goodnight kiss, I did as I was told for once, gave up my map, let Emma lead us through the woods “by instinct,” as the drunkard knew the natural prince. We had no towels, we had no “bathing costumes,” as the children’s novels call them here, and I am summer’s dullest hand at un- premeditated moves. But when the coppice of sheltering boxwood disclosed its path and posted rules, our wonted bows to seemliness seemed poor excuse. The ladies in their lumpy variety lay on their public half-acre of lawn, the water lay in dappled shade, while Emma in her underwear and I in an ill- fitting borrowed suit availed us of the breast stroke and a modified crawl. She’s eight now. She will rather die than do this in a year or two and lobbies, even as we swim, to be allowed to cut her hair. I do, dear girl, I will give up this honey-colored metric of augmented thirds, but not (shall we climb on the raft for a while?) not yet.

for Charles Simic Like a monstrous snail, a toilet slides into a living room on a track of wet, demanding to be loved. It is impossible, and we tender our sincerest regrets. In the book of the heart there is no mention made of plumbing. And though we have spent our intimacy many times with you, you belong to an unfortunate reference, which we would rather not embrace ... The toilet slides away ...

With spring in our flesh the cranes come back, funneling into a north cold and black. And we go out to them, go out into the town, welcoming them with shouts, asking them down. The winter flies away when the cranes cross. It falls into the north, homeward and lost. Let no one call it back when the cranes fly, silver birds, red-capped, down the long sky.

I Beginnings: a chrysalis improvisation in the wings, roles taking on flesh before a role begins… as light begins in the elm, pushing the long elm branches into night, a ghost light pressing sky… or actors, swollen with strange selves, distended to the edges of tight skin, a brightness under moth-wing fingertips. White arms stretch out toward truth. The stage is full of light. Your brightness gloves my skin. II Alice, grown huge, swollen to fit of the tunnels, tiny, unable to reach a gold key, knew what gardens were for— yet never knelt in tunnels of rough sunlight to will flamboyance from green buds. The swollen poppy twists within its cap, a pink invention wrestling light. How often I think of tunneling roots, curtains of roots, white ropes that stroked our hair when we entered tunnels. Here, we are rubbed on gold. This wedge of pink beginnings troubles gardens. III A robin listens to darkness. I think of worms, grubs, moles, the slow ballet of rootlets twisting down, of cave fish, blacksnakes, and, asleep at Nieux, the great black bulls that thunder on dark walls. When we wear another self, do our souls darken? On a bright stage, do we enter darkest places? IV There is darkness clinging to the undersides of leaves. For we are entering darkness. It skuffs along cave walls, stumbling and skuffing fingertips. At Mycenae, it is a heavy must, a musty heavy breath in the hundred-step cistern. They wait, dark passageways in old houses, their worn silence frayed under a blur of footsteps. Our stretched-out hands manipulate evasive cellar shadows. Within the garden, silence darkens windblown leaves. V Oh I think of Alice gone down, down under groundcover dreams, a man’s tunneled night. Who are these actors? On dream stages, I forget lines. My tongue-tied silence foundering…     Stage props mumble rigidities.        The audience… I think of silences at Nieux, at Mycenae, the tourists gone, guides returned to wives, houses…. And those silences of capricious light. The calex splits, an abrupt pink flame. Orpheus’ torch descends and still descends through arias of reddest blossom.

If you think you know enough to say this poem is about good hair, I'll correct you and tell you it's about history which is the blacksmith of our tongues. Our eyes. Where you see misunderstanding I see knuckles and teeth for sale in a storefront window. I see the waterlogged face of the fourteen-year-old boy. The bullet's imperceptible sizzle toward an unarmed man. And as you ask me to sign the book that is not mine, your gaze shifting between me and the author's photo, whispering, but that's not you? I do not feel sorry for you. No. I think only that when a man is a concept he will tell you about the smell of smoke. He will tell you the distance between heartbreak and rage.