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Tennessee: We are here, between trees, with the tempo of a rosary being strung in a queue of escalating beads— Carolina: It’s not quite the count in the countinghouse of my chest but the heart does make an awful attempt t: and a circle wherever it may be there was music coming on c: which though machinery-like moves not in cogs, and never springs, but waves through t: like wired applause for antic backstage buds on the pre-comeuppance buzz; but it fades c: but only after the chorus has pulsed t: it drops off with sudden decision, like fountain water gone dross c: or it reaches the furthest point the branch turns from us, and is for some arc fully quiet... t: until the roulette snaps its jaw and the choir’s circuit opens to one c: like a pigeon unhinged, its wings in sudden white-rumped ascent t: unopposed by iridescence c: unopposed by iridescence

Of course they are empty shells, without hope of animation. Of course they are artifacts. Even if my sister and I should wear some, or if we give others away, they will always be your clothes without you, as we will always be your daughters without you.

When I saw one of those men touch your hair, I heard for the first time in many a year the ancient battle trumpets and I saw the banners of an army winding off to war and felt that blind power urging me to knock him out with one punch, send him tumbling to the floor. If nobody had held me back, stopped me, I would—God help me—have killed him on the spot, stomped out his blood, and spit in it. I'm sorry, but you must be aware your winding hair is different now, a hornets' nest, a snakes' lair! Yes, like a ball of snakes in a flower basket, dear.

Your idea of embracing horror was overwhelmed by the horror: in the mild milkiness of the afternoon, on the bluff that commands a vision of bank towers knifing up far higher than the rising, empty shell of the moon ... on the height where you stand and still can't understand your life as anything but slow dying, your time seeps out as into a warm bath, the way the exemplary career of Petronius the Just—pornographer and satirist- once leaked away.

It’s too cold to smoke outside, but if you come over, I’ll keep my hands to myself, or won’t I. I would like to tell you about the wall eaten up by the climbing plant—it was so beautiful. Various things have been happening to me, all of them sexual. The man on the bus took off his pants so I could see him better. Another man said, “Ignore him darlin’. Just sit on my lap.” But I’m not one of those who’s hungriest in the morning, unlike the man at the bakery who eats egg after egg after egg. Listen. Come over: the cold has already eaten the summer. I need another pair of ears: from the kitchen I can’t tell if I’m hearing wind chimes or some gray woman with failing arms dropping a pan full of onions and potatoes. This morning I need four hands— two to wash the greens, one to lift a teakettle, one to pour the milk. This morning, one little mouth will not do. We could play a game where we crouch on the tiles, two yellow dogs drinking coffee from bowls. We could play a game where we let the breakfast burn. Outside there’s a world where every love scene begins with a man in a doorway; he walks over to the woman and says “Open your mouth.”

if you like let the body feel all its own evolution inside, opening flagella & feathers & fingers door by door, a ragged neuron dangling like a participle to hear a bare sound on the path, find a red-eye-hole rabbit, fat of the bulbous stalk pecked out to the core so you can bore back to the salamander you once were straggling under the skin grope toward the protozoa snagging on the rise toward placental knowing who developed eyes for you agape in open waters the worm that made a kidney-like chamber burrows in directing your heart leftward in nodal cascade, slow at your hagfish spine who will bury your bones investigate a redwood rain or tap the garnet of your heartwood, bark, put your flat needles on dry ice to inquire after your tree family, father or mother in the fairy-ring next to you, find you are most closely related to grass your hexaploid breathing pores gently closing at night, when did you begin your coexistence with flowering plants from which arose the bee before the African honey badger but after the dark protoplanetary disk of dust grains surrounding the sun become the earth you had no nouns, did you

(A fortune cookie) Ominous inscrutable Chinese news to get just before Christmas, considering my reasonable health, marriage spicy as moo-goo-gai-pan, career running like a not-too-old Chevrolet. Not bad, considering what can go wrong: the bony finger of Uncle Sam might point out my husband, my own national guard, and set him in Afghanistan; my boss could take a personal interest; the pain in my left knee could spread to my right. Still, as the old year tips into the new, I insist on the infant hope, gooing and kicking his legs in the air. I won't give in to the dark, the sub-zero weather, the fog, or even the neighbors' Nativity. Their four-year-old has arranged his whole legion of dinosaurs so they, too, worship the child, joining the cow and sheep. Or else, ultimate mortals, they've come to eat ox and camel, Mary and Joseph, then savor the newborn babe.

1 Our last night in the house was not our last. With two cats in the yard. Our movers took the furniture in the morning.A country where they turned back time.

If your house is a dress it’ll fit like Los Angeles red sun burning west, deserts, fields, for certain it will drape even a boy no less boy in disrepair wandering from shore to crest, others mistake his searching for despair, no, never, but for thirst, cloaked as he is, warm, radiant in a house dress.

Everything that was young went quickly, the way his eyes met mine as soon as we woke together in a room outside Nanjing, feeling as if all the things that were falling would fall and make their thunder, leave us with the challenge of being happy, all the things that felt given when gifts were not just surprises, but what we knew, what we hoped to take with us to heaven, unbound by faults and sins, not deceived the way we were when the end came to what we knew of China, landing me here. I am a wish in the skies spun out from celestial space to be poor, to be covered with black skin, a felt quilt of a map with only one way to China — through pain as big as hogs squealing at killing time on black farms in Alabama — the noise of death, the shrill needle that turns clouds over to rip the air above the cities where people are young and all that is given is never taken away.