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At fifty-six, having left my mother, my father buys a motorcycle. I imagine him because it is the son’s sorrowful assignment to imagine his father: there, hunched on his mount, with black boots, with bad teeth, between shifts at the mill, ripping furrows in the backroads, past barn and field and silo, past creek and rock, past the brown mare, sleek in her impertinence, never slowing until he sees the bull.   He stops, pulls his bike to the side of the road, where golden rod and clover grow, walks up to the fence, admires its horns, its wet snout snorting and blowing its breath, its girth, its trampling of small wild flowers.

About what’s past,Hold on when you can, I used to say, And when you can’t, let go, as if memory were one of those mechanical bulls, easily dismountable, should the ride turn rough. I lived, in those days, at the forest’s edge — metaphorically, so it can sometimes seem now, though the forest was real, as my life beside it was. I spent much of my time listening to the sounds of random, un- knowable things dropping or being dropped from, variously, a middling height or a great one until, by winter, it was just the snow falling, each time like a new, unnecessary taxonomy or syntax for how to parse what’s plain, snow from which the occasional lost hunter would emerge every few or so seasons, and — just once — a runaway child whom I gave some money to and told no one about, having promised ...You must keep what you’ve promised very close to your heart, that way you’ll never forget

for Milan Kundera This is your foreign correspondent, Aristotle, for The Poetics, reporting live from the Mediterranean where the skulls and bones of a few Egyptians crown the tradeships of His Majesty, wave back and forth: starfish—moons—Februaries. To my right, our military advisor, Hernando Cortez, oversees operations at the Aztec/ Mexican border where to the left of a stone no longer rising from water a dove collects its nest egg upon the skeleton of a hummingbird. To my left, our scribe-in-residence, St. Nickle-and-Dime-‘Em-To-Debt, scribbles furiously to a mortgaged future where the last rites of man and of-man are delivered at the near-twin births of the lyric and gunpowder.

Behind the silo, the Mother Rabbit hunches like a giant spider with strange calm: six tiny babies beneath, each clamoring for a sweet syringe of milk. This may sound cute to you, reading from your pulpit of plenty, but one small one was left out of reach, a knife of fur barging between the others. I watched behind a turret of sand. If I could have cautioned the mother rabbit I would. If I could summon the Bunnies to fit him in beneath the belly's swell I would. But instead, I stood frozen, wishing for some equity. This must be why it's called Wild Life because of all the crazed emotions tangled up in the underbrush within us. Did I tell you how the smallest one, black and trembling, hopped behind the kudzu still filigreed with wanting? Should we talk now of animal heritage, their species, creature development? And what do we say about form and focus— writing this when a stray goes hungry, and away.

Wild nights - Wild nights! Were I with thee Wild nights should be Our luxury! Futile - the winds - To a Heart in port - Done with the Compass - Done with the Chart! Rowing in Eden - Ah - the Sea! Might I but moor - tonight - In thee!

About twenty years ago Two girls came in where I worked— A bosomy English rose And her friend in specs I could talk to. Faces in those days sparked The whole shooting-match off, and I doubt If ever one had like hers: But it was the friend I took out, And in seven years after that Wrote over four hundred letters, Gave a ten-guinea ring I got back in the end, and met At numerous cathedral cities Unknown to the clergy. I believe I met beautiful twice. She was trying Both times (so I thought) not to laugh. Parting, after about five Rehearsals, was an agreement That I was too selfish, withdrawn, And easily bored to love. Well, useful to get that learnt. In my wallet are still two snaps Of bosomy rose with fur gloves on. Unlucky charms, perhaps.

And how do you survive? Your long throat, your red-rag-to-a-bull head? You rise heavy in the night, stars drinking from your poppy neck. Your henna silks serenade me under the breadth of the Pyrenees. You move like an opera, open like sea anemones. You are earth’s first blood. How the birds love you, I envy your lipstick dress. You are urgent as airmail, animal red, Ash Wednesday crosses tattooed on your head. Your butterfly breath releases your scents, your secrets, bees blackening your mouth as your dirty red laundry all hangs out.

The trees are in their autumn beauty, The woodland paths are dry, Under the October twilight the water Mirrors a still sky; Upon the brimming water among the stones Are nine-and-fifty swans. The nineteenth autumn has come upon me Since I first made my count; I saw, before I had well finished, All suddenly mount And scatter wheeling in great broken rings Upon their clamorous wings. I have looked upon those brilliant creatures, And now my heart is sore. All's changed since I, hearing at twilight, The first time on this shore, The bell-beat of their wings above my head, Trod with a lighter tread. Unwearied still, lover by lover, They paddle in the cold Companionable streams or climb the air; Their hearts have not grown old; Passion or conquest, wander where they will, Attend upon them still. But now they drift on the still water, Mysterious, beautiful; Among what rushes will they build, By what lake's edge or pool Delight men's eyes when I awake some day To find they have flown away?

the Platonic idea is “not only beauty, truth, and goodness,” but “the heavenly bed, created by God … a heavenly man, a heavenly dog, a heavenly cat, and so on …” Bertrand Russell We’re not all lesbians at this bar and grill (not yet? not practicing? only in heart?),chiaroscuro as the room is with expensive ambiance and dear cuts of meat and fish overlaid with nouveau fruit sauce, it’s clear that the most manly woman among us, older, wearing cowboy boots and a turquoise bolo, is probably neither entirely straight nor wholly queer. When she begins to confess her ‘secret’— it’s her holding of a piece of land, acres of sweet desert; its muddy roads, its remote sublime have four-wheeled deep into her being. She’s probably someone’s heavenly grandmother, as I’m still someone’s heavenly wife, despite the separation.Appearance does not really appear, but it appears to appear, yet, for a moment, it seems our conversation may open up unexpectedly or shatter into awkwardness over the word girlfriends: who in the rainy summers of our youths, we all played with our girlfriends, (what do I mean by ‘girlfriend?’ what do you mean by yours?) It’s only then, as one of the younger women (the most lovely, so silver with bracelets and earrings and a noticeable ring) laughs that I begin to guess her inclination,Does it really appear to appear, or only apparently appear to appear? It’s a long way from Plato’s symposium to this bar and grill in Arizona. At that ancient feast— whenever a number of individuals have a common name, they have also a common ‘idea’ or ‘form’— only men reclined upon the couches, and the only the love of man for man was love’s ideal, the impulse toward some boyish form becoming the ascension of being to some ever truer realm, as the souls of men became pregnant and gave birth to “not only beauty, truth, and goodness,” but “the heavenly bed, created by God… a heavenly man, a heavenly dog, a heavenly cat, and so on through a whole Noah’s ark,” but no heavenly woman, much less a heavenly lesbian, for since Aristotle, “Lesbian rule” has meant that measure made of lead so it could be bent to a curved or crooked wall. Because we are all women, how can we speak of love? In the beginning, banished from the realm of discourse, assigned to love’s servitude not its speech, to be love’s body not its tongue, so no one here speaks of her feeling, much less thinks to make it another’s measure. In our mouths, the tongue’s a knife, each word a wild edge, where we stammer only our own wound, a drop of blood sensual on the tongue, a distinctive taste of salt, more mollusk perhaps—wrapped around an I of sand— than pearl, a syllable of milk or nipple, some private body within the body, the you behind your eyes, as if being itself were poetry—passionate with nascent and protean neologism, full of the gaps of being, the oblique richness of a depth in which we begin to glimpse each other, mysterious and solo as we are, black stubborn pearls of being. If we spoke of Plato, and we don’t; each of us was banished from the womb by virtue of having a womb, to this unpredictable realm where each of us would have to discover her self, that wild tongue—never delineated, even in shadow, upon the philosopher’s cave wall.

When Ronnie’s husband stepped out of the shower She spotted bite marks on his buttocks I was so listless I wished the dog could talk