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It was the week of asking. Asking to watch her eat. Asking if she understood the doctors’ questions. Asking her to explain the difference between wanting to die right now, and dying later. The tumor making certain answers unquestionable. I watched her point to the incense dish from which someone swept all the ashes up. Asking if she recognized us. Because that is what the living want: thinking it is a sign we have been loved. But the answer was a summer drive, a mountain, piles of leaves beneath which a wolf slept, suckling her cubs. Some deaths are good and it makes them hard to grieve. She was, at times, in great pain. We wanted her to die, too. That was important. But first we wanted her to remember. From the bed, a finger pressed into a pile of leaves. Gray haunch, unmovable ashes.I didn’t want to disturb their tableau

at night while the dogs were barking Baby Gauge and I crawled under the fence with knives we made out like the rattlesnake melons were men we didn’t like the new moon ones were wolves I would cut a belly this way he would cut a belly that way the flies came around the sweet juice it was blood to us we tasted it we licked it off the blades we decided not to kill the wolves we wanted to be wolves we stuck the knives in the ground the moon shined on them we turned the pilot caps inside out so the fur would show that way when we crawled under the bob wire a little piece would get caught we wouldn’t though we wanted to leave trails but no scents we tore the melons open we licked the blood off our paws we wanted to be wolves and in the morning all those dead men with their hearts eat out

They listen to the myna birds dicker in the grass. The child’s blue shoes are caked with garden dirt. When he runs, she sees the antics of a pair of wrens. She works the garden, a pot of rusting gardenias has given off its ales and infused the danker germinations of her grief. She watches her son chase pigeons, kick at the leaves piled high. Now, a magpie adds to his cascades of laughter as he runs with the hose, pours a fine spray, happy to be giving to the grass this silver courtship. She sighs, watches the drops settle in. Today, who can explain the sadness she feels. Surely this day is to be treasured: the sun out, the breeze like a cat’s tongue licking a moon of milk; her son expending himself in small, public bursts, happy among clover where bees hover, and unfold centrefolds of nectar. Today, who can explain the heaviness in her head, as if all her worries were tomes toward a larger work, one she knows she will never finish, but to which she must keep adding, thought by thought. She sweeps the petals, smells their russet imprint. Soon dusk will come with an envoy of smoke and her son outlast her patience by a rose. Already he is tiring, puling at the flowers. It won’t be long before they’ll go in, listen to the jug purr comfort. He’ll sleep and she’ll lie back, or get up to unhook the cry of her cat from the wire door. Now, a few cicadas are idling, giving each other the gun and a cockatoo calls, a haughty felon. She sighs, knowing she won’t escape her mood today, the turned earth or its rank persuasions; her child’s petulance flaring like an orchid, or a cockatoo’s unruly crest. Today, she knows she will need to consider her unhappiness, of what she is a prisoner – if not the loss of hope’s particulars. Her son soaks the path, rinses the sky of its featureless blue. He is giving that water, now, to everything.

I. The Chihuahua Desert I rose early to wash the desert grime, watch the unearthly flight of doves, the way pigeons were poisoned incorrectly or how an elephant was beaten with a stick. This is the way of beginnings, women charmed by fits of language, the cadence of bees around garbage cans, the laughter of grackles, hot sun baking Coca-Cola to sidewalks. Tumbleweeds and arroyos hush day-long trips through barrios. I am sand. My eyes grainy, tears brown, and what of the different tones of bees or flies, how a sting can kill us? I’m speaking the language of smokers, lung-full and wary, breathing a refinery chore, my eyes black pits, Historically I was fruit, voluptuous and campy, some might say exotic, cheekbones native, my hips swaying. II. The Rio Grande I grew into the silence of third person, a landscape, a mesa. I flew hard into the silence of gray smog, my chest burning, my throat dry with the songs of women with sagging faces, children strapped to their bent backs. They have become a river metaphor, a border, a soulless chant to believers. Maquiladora workers slain and buried in shallow graves. My palms refuse to fold in prayer and god giggles in my red ears. Sand pecks my skin like a drum roll in the hot wind. The march of children, their backpacks plastic, the way they see color a mystery, a dance, the shapes of clouds, an elephant, a dove, a long-lost dog. They sing song their way past the factory-circus. III. The Potomac Years later I loved a blank-faced man in tweed who drank espresso and ate bagels in a deli outside Washington D.C. His pale face mirrored in the glass at a video-store where he grumbled artless and unfilled by the hurried ache of cicadas. His first and last job in the world of mundane labor. He was all red hair; his voice bellowed. Was it the seventh or tenth year he dubbed my language, subtitled my screens? Windows on the metro metalled sand tunneled. I lost the desert dance of blood, half-forgot the closed copper mine, the way the border’s earth is lead-filled and sullen. IV. The Vlatva Awed by cathedrals in Paris, then Prague, I was the archangel of rage with my book-bag, a wordless hum. I began to speak with my hands, my eyes Slavic dark, searching. I worshipped fat swans along the thick river taking in the green wondering why I had been blessed by such beauty. I sensed him in a snowdrift of words historically divine. And what was he or I in this world? I didn’t see the gold specks in his eyes, the way poetry became his glory, full of fan-fare and the strife of strip malls. And here, envying his pristine days, the way the books never cover his mouth, our hearts pump separately to the rhythm of loss.

The saris go by me from the embassies. Cloth from the moon. Cloth from another planet. They look back at the leopard like the leopard. And I.... this print of mine, that has kept its color Alive through so many cleanings; this dull null Navy I wear to work, and wear from work, and so To my bed, so to my grave, with no Complaints, no comment: neither from my chief, The Deputy Chief Assistant, nor his chief— Only I complain.... this serviceable Body that no sunlight dyes, no hand suffuses But, dome-shadowed, withering among columns, Wavy beneath fountains—small, far-off, shining In the eyes of animals, these beings trapped As I am trapped but not, themselves, the trap, Aging, but without knowledge of their age, Kept safe here, knowing not of death, for death— Oh, bars of my own body, open, open! The world goes by my cage and never sees me. And there come not to me, as come to these, The wild beasts, sparrows pecking the llamas’ grain, Pigeons settling on the bears’ bread, buzzards Tearing the meat the flies have clouded.... Vulture, When you come for the white rat that the foxes left, Take off the red helmet of your head, the black Wings that have shadowed me, and step to me as man: The wild brother at whose feet the white wolves fawn, To whose hand of power the great lioness Stalks, purring.... You know what I was, You see what I am: change me, change me!

Her hand is at the feedbag at her waist, sunk to the wrist in the rustling grain that nuzzles her fingertips when laced around a sifting handful. It’s like rain, like cupping water in your hand, she thinks, the cracks between the fingers like a sieve, except that less escapes you through the chinks when handling grain. She likes to feel it give beneath her hand’s slow plummet, and the smell, so rich a fragrance she has never quite got used to it, under the seeming spell of the charm of the commonplace. The white hens bunch and strut, heads cocked, with tilted eyes, till her hand sweeps out and the small grain flies.

The shed        behind the barn behind the red cottage I wait for her in the fescue grass the rye        I hear it grow over me Wait for my friends in the distance        on fire their full heads of rust (I love how the clothing drips off them I hear myself say) If the beekeeper doesn’t        come chasing behind with a hatchet I’ll wait behind Cobb’s barn        watching the distant houses She will come down this road        my shadow is paving for her a stalk of honey        and the rye grass grows from her arms (She was raised in these hills        looking down on Elk Creek) and behind her the bluegrass        it’s reaching to touch her ankle

"The Woman of Progressive Intellect (Intellectural), 1914," by August Sander If it were not for her enlightened eyes, She’d be the witch that intellect denies Has ever walked the earth: the sunken jaw, The blunt chin like a claw-toothed hammer’s claw, The stubbed and crooking finger, and the skin As stained and crinkly as her crinoline, Would make a loving grandchild run away. It takes another kind of love to see How spirit, in its tactical withdrawal From aging outworks that are doomed to fall, Consents to the bewitching of its shell As long as it can hold the citadel Where the progressive intellect has spent A lifetime plotting the enlightenment The backward and the beautiful dismiss As mind’s revenge for its unloveliness.

Is it peace, Is it a philosopher’s honeymoon, one finds On the dump? —Wallace Stevens Out of the cracks of cups and their handles, missing, the leaves unceremoniously tossed, unread, from a stubble of coffee ground ever more finely into these hollowed grounds, the first shift coaxes bulldozers to life, sphinxes to tease the riddled rubble into fresh pyramids of rot. A staleness warms enough to waft round the lord of all purveyed. His to count the hauls past the yawning gates of this New Giza into the Middle Kingdom’s Late Intermediate Period. There, to purify, to honor ourselves, we beg these offerings of refuse be cast out. To the archaeologist of the far-flung future, enough evidence in the inscriptions to identify most owners: spells scratched on the backs of envelopes to be read out before animal sacrifice, the milk, ground meat, beer, and soap joined in this hereafter with the feast’s remains. Over tomatoes splitting their sides, over a teacup stained with roses flattened into mosaic petal from petal, earthmovers move a little mountain and, having moved it, move on, overturning a diamond sprung from its ring, glitter to a magpie’s covetous eye. If the art of loneliness is landscape, armload by carload of black-bagged leaves, landfill contours its likeness.

Now thou has loved me one whole day, Tomorrow when you leav’st, what wilt thou say? Wilt thou then antedate some new-made vow? Or say that now We are not just those persons which we were? Or, that oaths made in reverential fear Of Love, and his wrath, any may forswear? Or, as true deaths true marriages untie, So lovers’ contracts, images of those, Bind but till sleep, death’s image, them unloose? Or, your own end to justify, For having purposed change and falsehood, you Can have no way but falsehood to be true? Vain lunatic, against these ‘scapes I could Dispute and conquer, if I would, Which I abstain to do, For by tomorrow, I may think so too.