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“The orgasm has replaced the cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.” —Malcolm Muggeridge, 1966 I. Hubbie 1 used to get wholly pissed when I made myself come.I’m right here!, he’d sputter, blood popping to the surface of his fuzzed cheeks, goddamn it, I’m right here! By that time, I was in no mood to discuss the myriad merits of my pointer, or to jam the brakes on the express train slicing through my blood, It was easier to suffer the practiced professorial huff, the hissed invectives and the cold old shoulder, liver-dotted, quaking with rage. Shall we pause to bless professors and codgers and their bellowed, unquestioned ownership of things? I was sneaking time with my own body. I know I signed something over, but it wasn’t that. II. No matter how I angle this history, it’s weird, so let’s just say Bringing Up Baby was on the telly and suddenly my lips pressing against the couch cushions felt spectacular and I thought wow this is strange, what the hell, I’m 30 years old, am I dying down there is this the feel, does the cunt go to heaven first, ooh, snapped river, ooh shimmy I had never had it never knew, oh i clamored and lurched beneath my little succession of boys I cried writhed hissed, ooh wee, suffered their flat lapping and machine-gun diddling their insistent c’mon girl c’mon until I memorized the blueprint for drawing blood from their shoulders, until there was nothing left but the self-satisfied liquidy snore of he who has rocked she, he who has made she weep with script. But this, oh Cary, gee Katherine, hallelujah Baby, the fur do fly, all gush and kaboom on the wind. III. Don’t hate me because I am multiple, hurtling. As long as there is still skin on the pad of my finger, as long as I’m awake, as long as my (new) husband’s mouth holds out, I am the spinner, the unbridled, the bellowing freak. When I have emptied him, he leans back, coos, edges me along, keeps wondering count. He falls to his knees in front of it, marvels at my yelps and carousing spine, stares unflinching as I bleed spittle unto the pillows. He has married a witness. My body bucks, slave to its selfish engine, and love is the dim miracle of these little deaths, fracturing, speeding for the surface. IV. We know the record. As it taunts us, we have giggled, considered stopwatches, little laboratories. Somewhere beneath the suffering clean, swathed in eyes and silver, she came 134 times in one hour. I imagine wires holding her tight, her throat a rattling window. Searching scrubbed places for her name, I find only reams of numbers. I ask the quietest of them: V. Are we God?

The boy who is kind to animals has tied a firecracker to the cat’s tail he is stoning the spotted bitch he is called Wind-Chaser Yesterday he gave bread and broken meat to the street dogs, his friends His friends are catching lizards behind the wall they killed a songbird with their catapults with the boy who is kind to animals they set fire to a grasshopper, laughing Along the road the children are shaking boxes something wants to get out The mother spits curses she says we should pay because they are hungry Wind-Chaser, Eye-of-the-Heart, Comes-Again, run away from their baffled eyes

at a certain time the kitten stopped moving I wanted to see if it would burn rain like cane fields when they’re scorched after harvesting through the phone Abuelita remembers the black kitten I threw in the fire still trying to crawl out that ash isn’t snow Abuelo said shirtless I picked up a mound in my hand if I look back at my front door barefoot kids in the street try catching the flakes on their tongues come visit us they say nextyearnextyear I’ll try again dust covers the roof my toys my hair my expired work permit burns black the sky it is march again & again there’s no wind Abuelita asks us to send a bag of autumn leaves she wants to keep in a book the color so pretty interesting what if there’s no wind I ask while acid at Joshua Tree camping the slight movements of the twigs of the ocotillo sound like mice deep in their burrows with the silence of only this pen writing the only words I can hear hella yellow now I’m in a similar dirt to Abuelita’s yellow but here there’s healing the cold the sky the same I’m staring at clouds the same thought of then now again I could this could be the very cloud the very dirt but this time I’m happy yes I can be I’m smiling

Whatever is we only know As in our minds we find it so; No staring fact is half so clear As one dim, preconceived idea -- No matter how the fact may glow. Vainly may Truth her trumpet blow To stir our minds; like heavy dough They stick to what they think — won’t hear Whatever is. Our ancient myths in solid row Stand up — we simply have to go And choke each fiction old and dear Before the modest facts appear; Then we may grasp, reluctant, slow, Whatever is.

You can say the broken word but cannot speak for it, can name a precise and particular shade of blue if you can remember its name (Woman of the South, New Lilac, Second Sky?) As the light, close to blinding, fell—falls in bars across a particular page, this then another, some other followed far too closely by night Or as the sleeping pages recall themselves, one by one, in dream-riddled, guarded tones, recall themselves from path to sloped meadow, meadow to burnt shore, shore to poised wave, dismay to present, any present of the bewildered and the buried alive (we’ve been told they were buried alive) Is there a door he hasn’t noticed and beyond it a letter which created the door or claims it created a door which would open either way

They flared on the sea green of the Subaru that seemed netted under the unleafing maple, a limestone moulage cut from a quarry and cast in immemorial arrest behind Pete’s Absolute Asphalt truck, throttling still when I alighted and said, besides, in Aleppo once — to nothing but the wind photographed in sunlight; the pavement’s watery brier and children and their ghosts and the air-raid screams of mothers, once, in Aleppo, altered that moment in history when titihihihihi titihihihihi those white houses, stiffened with silence, broke the private change, the public good to dive into pits of leaves.

You were a girl of satin and gauze Now you are my mountain and waterfall companion. Long ago I read those lines of Po Chu I Written in his middle age. Young as I was they touched me. I never thought in my own middle age I would have a beautiful young dancer To wander with me by falling crystal waters, Among mountains of snow and granite, Least of all that unlike Po’s girl She would be my very daughter. The earth turns towards the sun. Summer comes to the mountains. Blue grouse drum in the red fir woods All the bright long days. You put blue jay and flicker feathers In your hair. Two and two violet green swallows Play over the lake. The blue birds have come back To nest on the little island. The swallows sip water on the wing And play at love and dodge and swoop Just like the swallows that swirl Under and over the Ponte Vecchio. Light rain crosses the lake Hissing faintly. After the rain There are giant puffballs with tortoise shell backs At the edge of the meadow. Snows of a thousand winters Melt in the sun of one summer. Wild cyclamen bloom by the stream. Trout veer in the transparent current. In the evening marmots bark in the rocks. The Scorpion curls over the glimmering ice field. A white crowned night sparrow sings as the moon sets. Thunder growls far off. Our campfire is a single light Amongst a hundred peaks and waterfalls. The manifold voices of falling water Talk all night. Wrapped in your down bag Starlight on your cheeks and eyelids Your breath comes and goes In a tiny cloud in the frosty night. Ten thousand birds sing in the sunrise. Ten thousand years revolve without change. All this will never be again.

Someone is about to come but doesn't. Is about to turn on the stairs but doesn't. I button my shirt come from the laundry with all its dazzling blots, like one's peculiar fate. I shut the door, sit quietly. The fan begins to whirl and turn the air into a whirlpool of fire, making a noise bigger than the house. Someone is about to come and doesn't. It doesn't matter. Calmly I lean against the wall, become a wall. A wounded bird on my shoulder laughs raucously, laughs at the shoulder it perches on! My soul of flesh and blood puts a long thread in the needle's eye. I stitch a patch on my son's umbrella. I pick his nose and name the pickings: I call one "Elephant" and another "Lion." Someone is about to come and doesn't. Is about to turn on the stairs and doesn't. I tickle my children, they tickle me in turn; I laugh, with a will; for I do not feel tickled. It doesn't matter. I scan their fingers for signs: Nine conches and one wheel. Note: "Nine conches and one wheel" are formations of lines on the tips of fingers which, in Indian palmistry, foretell a happy life.

O sleepy city of reeling wheelchairs where a mouse can commit suicide if he can concentrate long enough on the history book of rodents in this underground town of electrical wheelchairs! The girl who is always pregnant and bruised like a pear rides her many-stickered bicycle backward up the staircase of the abandoned trolleybarn. Yesterday was warm. Today a butterfly froze in midair; and was plucked like a grape by a child who swore he could take care of it. O confident city where the seeds of poppies pass for carfare, where the ordinary hornets in a human’s heart may slumber and snore, where bifocals bulge in an orange garage of daydreams, we wait in our loose attics for a new season as if for an ice-cream truck. An Indian pony crosses the plains whispering Sanskrit prayers to a crater of fleas. Honeysuckle says: I thought I could swim. The Mayor is urinating on the wrong side of the street! A dandelion sends off sparks: beware your hair is locked! Beware the trumpet wants a glass of water! Beware a velvet tabernacle! Beware the Warden of Light has married an old piece of string!

how can I tell you baby, oh honey, you'll never know the ride the ride of a lowered chevy slithering through the blue dotted night along Riverside Drive Española poetry rides the wings of a ’59 Impala yes, it does and it points chrome antennae towards ’Burque stations rocking oldies Van Morrison brown eyed girls Creedence and a bad moon rising over Chimayo and I guess it also rides on muddy Subarus tuned into new-age radio on the frigid road to Taos on weekend ski trips yes, baby you and I are two kinds of wheels on the same road listen, listen to the lonesome humming of the tracks we leave behind