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When the wind invades the treetops and the trees agree, shivering take me, take me, when their stealthy perfume drifts down to waft among mortals, they come out in droves: the boy whose bouncing keys speak a language all their own, the novice who gets her tricks from magazine molls (their haughtiness, swirl of cleats), the gigolo with eyes lowered, the better to judge his prey, the woman whose hemlines rise as her age does, the bad girl whose only remaining option is to get worse: despite the string of cheats and lukewarm reactions, she still has the power to pound, the knack of funneling her frustration into the arrogant click of a heel . . . at this armada of proud, unyielding soldiers I have cast ferocious stones, holding forth on barricaded gardens and souls’ communion until, heaving my bones from garret to gutter I took to the street and saw it, too, was worthy. Chasers out for a good time, flirters in for a life’s catch, strutters so skilled your lurid designs burn holes, kill the cold in the pavement, it does not matter what fever you feed, so long as you feed it freely; I hid my eyes but sickness is catching; lovers, permit me entrance.

The sun slides down behind brick dust, today’s angle of life. Everything melts, even when backbones are I-beams braced for impact. Sequential sledgehammers fall, stone shaped into dry air white soundsystem of loose metal under every footstep. Wrecking crews, men unable to catch sparrows without breaking wings into splinters. Blues-horn mercy. Bloodlines. Nothing but the white odor of absence. The big iron ball swings, keeping time to pigeons cooing in eaves as black feathers float on to blueprint parking lots.

How untouchable the girls arm-locked strutting up the main hall of Central High unopposed for decades looked. I flattened myself against the wall, unnerved by their cloudsea of élan, which pounced upon any timid girl regrettably in their way, their high-wattage lifting slow motion like curls of light strands of honey. The swagger behind their blue-tinted sunglasses and low-rider jeans hurt boys like me, so vast the worlds between us, even the slightest whiff of recognition, an accidental side glance, an unintended tongue-piercing display of Juicy Fruit chew, was intoxicating and could wildly cast a chess-playing geek into a week-long surmise of inner doubts, likelihoods, and depressions. You might say my whole life led to celebrating youth and how it snubs and rebuffs. Back then I learned to avoid what I feared and to place my third-string hopes on a game-winning basketball shot, sure it would slow them to a stop, pan their lip-glossed smiles, blessing me with their cool.

for Mark Strand La Barraca Blues Suite/i. Beneath canopies of green, unionists marched doggedly outside The Embassy. Their din was no match for light lancing through leaves of madrone trees lining the Paseo then flashing off glossy black Maybachs skidding round a plaza like a monarch fleeing the paparazzi. Your voice skipped and paused like a pencil. Layers of morning pastries flaked gingerly then fell, soft as vowels, on a china plate. One learns to cherish the wizened reserve of old world manners, two blotched hands making wings of a daily paper beside us between sips of café con leche, a demeanor in short gentle as grand edifaces along this boulevard. Yet Guernica is down the street, and some windshields wear a sinister face, sometimes two. Think Goya. Just south of here, on the lower slopes of the Sierras, fields of olive groves braid the land like a Moorish head, but those sultans were kicked out long ago. In the lobby of the Hotel Urban, I wait for a cab, my obedient rolling bag like a pet beside me. I have loved again another city but Madrid is yours: her caped olés, her bullish flag, her glass pavilions and outdoor tables like a festival of unbroken laughter, our dark harbors, finding level. ii. Salobreña That stretch of mountains features white windmill blades whose slow turns are rifles aiming, for I cannot help but think of Lorca's killing between here and the village Alfaçar, and the firing squad's gun pops are that Flamencan dancer's heel stomps. I bring back, too, her brisk hand claps and the cantor's Andalusian moans like dried sticks, or bones crumbling in his throat. Only souvenir shops and steep winding streets accrete in this region's stacked brochures.   Her dress spills across the restaurant's floor like a red shadow, darker than billboards of black bulls high above roadways, motionless but seeming to gallop like Franco's brigades. All seeing is an act of war. Tanks and artillery or Spanish castles and mosques? I choose to lose, and beneath a watercolorist's sky study Didi's splendor, nude against the unruffled backdrop of the Alboran Sea whose waves match my sighs and bomb this beach, launching sprays of white duds. iii. Córdoba, Mezquita Even if he'd pulled over to study Andalusia's road signs, after one thousand and one nights, he still could not make out its calligraphic script, its vertical lines, its dots, marks like smoke stilled from incense, its curled sand soft Arabic, but this city's voice has coffins and carnations, and its hoarse singing shoots through him like twelve bars of earthen road that lengthens into a labyrinth of knowing blood beneath black skin. More echoes: the Alhambra sent him back to the seraglio of his youth where a Moorish guard stood in a museum, unfazed by a harem's rising laughter behind palace doors. Here are pillars and banded arches to once again imagine the body passing through like a key into infinity. Was this the answer to his ghetto past? But why travel so far? Since a child, even in sleep, he voyaged and broke free, tossing dice in dreams, once below deck on a caravel next to grains of paradise. He's collecting a thousand faces. He's moving beneath eyelids, turning time into flesh. Don't judge him. The courtyard's orange trees where once he washed like a morisco are teaching his tongue the craft.

Having to make eye contact with the economy— A ball cap that says In Dog Years I’m Dead—“The moon will turn blood red and then disappear for awhile,” the TV enthused. Hunched over an anatomy textbook, a student traces a heart over another heart—lunar eclipse. In the bathroom, crayoned graffiti: fuck the ♥ • He collected CAPTCHA, one seat over, Mr. feverish Mange Denied: like puzzling sabbath or street pupas; we shared some recent typos:I’m mediated(his), my tiny bots of stimulation, he loved the smudged and swoony words that proved him human— not a machine trying to infiltrate the servers of the New York Times, from which he launched (gad shakes or hefty lama) obits and exposés, some recipes, a digital pic of someone else’s black disaster, he lobbed links at both of his fathers (step and bio) a few former lovers, a high school coach, a college chum, some people “from where I used to work,” so much info (we both agreed), “The umbra,” the TV explained, shadow the earth was about to make— • ...and if during the parenthesis they felt a strange uneasiness... ...firing rifles and clanging copper pots to rescue the threatened... ...so benighted and hopelessly lost... ...their eyes to the errors... MOON LORE , Farmer’s Almanac. Waiting room, hour two. • Urgent Care. That was pretty multivalent. As in: We really need you to take care of this. We really need you to care for this. To care about this. We really need you to peer through the clinic’s storefront window, on alert for the ballyhooed moon— And there it was. Reddening in its black sock, deep in the middle of the hour, of someone’s nutso-tinsel talk on splendor— My fevered friend. Describing the knocked-out flesh. Each of our heads fitting like a flash drive into the port of a healer’s hands.

in your arms it was incredibly often enough to be in your arms careful as we had to be at times about the I.V. catheter in my hand, or my wrist, or my forearm which we placed, consciously, like a Gamboni vase, the center of attention, placed, frail identity as if our someday-newborn on your chest— to be secluded, washed over in your arms often enough, it was in that stillness, the only stillness amidst the fears which wildly collided and the complexities of the illness, all the work we had yet to do, had just done, the hope, ridiculous ammounts of it we had to pump from nothing, really, short-lived consensus possibility & experiment to access from our pinched and tiny minds just the idea of hope make it from scratch, air and water like manufactured snow a colossal fatigue the severe concentration of that, the repetition of that lifted for a moment just above your arms inevitable, pressuring it weighed down but remained above like a cathedral ceiling, strangely sheltering while I held tightly while there I could in your arms only there, the only stillness remember the will, allow the pull, tow against inevitable ebb— you don't need reasons to live one reason, blinking in the fog, organically sweet in muddy dark incredibly often enough it is, it was in your arms

“I would make love to one of our whores before I would fuck one of their bourgeoisie.” There was a proverb, like this: Don’t trust a         if he becomes a         even though he remains a       for forty years. And the sister opposite proverb: Don’t trust a       even though he has been in the grave for forty years. It was a difficult day, a bomb had spun open a bus, and children had been crushed down by a machine. Each wondered if he was born too soon, if later would have been better, if 40 + 40 + 40 + 40

An assumption,a pejorative,an honest language, an honorable death. In grade school, I refused to accept the mayor’s handshake; he smiled at everyone except people with names like mine. I was born here. I didn’t have to adopt America, but I adapted to it. You understand: a man must be averse to opinions that have adverse impacts on whether he lives or dies. “Before taking any advice, know the language of those who seek to advise you.” Certain words affected me. Sand nigger, I was called. Camel jockey. What was the effect? While I already muttered under my breath, I did so even more. I am not altogether sure we can all together come. Everything was not all right. Everything is not all right. Imagine poetry without allusions to Shakespeare, Greek mythology, the Bible; or allusions without the adjectives “fanatical,” “extremist,” “Islamic,” “right,” “left,” “Christian,” “conservative,” “liberal.” Language written or translated into a single tongue gives the illusion of tradition.A lot of people murder language—a lot fully aware.Among all the dead, choose between“us” and “them.”Among all the names for the dead—mother, father, brother, sister, husband, wife, child, friend, colleague, neighbor, teacher, student, stranger—choose between “citizen” and “terrorist.” And poet?Immoral, yes, but never amoral? Large amounts, the number between 75 and 90 percent of the estimated 150 million to 1 billion—civilians—killed during wars, over all of recorded human history.Anxious is “worried” or “apprehensive.” American poetry, Americans. Young, I learned anyone born here could become President. Older, I can point to any one of a hundred reasons why this is a lie.Anyway, I don’t want to be President, not of a country, or club, not here or there, not anywhere. He said, “I turned the car around because it began raining bombs.” There’s no chance of ambiguity— an as here could mean “because” or “when”; it makes no difference—he saw the sky, felt the ground, knew what would come next; it matters little when the heart rate in less than a second jumps from 70 to 200 beats per minute. What they did to my grandfather was awful—its wretchedness, awe-inspiring; its cruelty, terrible; it was awfully hard to forget. Just after 8:46 AM, I wondered awhile what would happen next. At 9:03 AM, I knew there was going to be trouble for a while to come. When in her grief the woman said, “We’re going to hurt them bad,” she meant to say, “We’re going to hurt them badly.” For seventeen days, during air strikes, my grandfather slept on a cot beside a kerosene lamp in the basement of his house.Besides a few days worth of pills, and a gallon of water, he had nothing else to eat or drink. Given these conditions, none of us were surprised that on the eighteenth day, he died.Besides, he was eighty-two years old. I can write what I please. I don’t need to ask,May I? Like a song: men with capital meet in the Capitol in the nation’s capital. Any disagreements,censored; those making them—poets, dissenters, activists— censured. The aftermath, approximately 655,000 people killed. “The Human Cost of War in Iraq: A Mortality Study, 2002-2006,” Bloomsburg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, Maryland); School of Medicine, Al Mustansiriya University (Baghdad, Iraq); in cooperation with the Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, Massachusetts). The figure just cited—655,000 dead—resulted from a household survey conducted at actual sites, in Iraq, not the Pentagon, or White House, or a newsroom, or someone’s imagination. Of course, language has been corrupted. Look, the President, who speaks coarsely, says, “We must stay the course.” The problem with “Let your conscience be your guide” is you must first be aware,conscious, of the fact that a moral principle is a subjective thing. I wonder: when one “smokes ’em out of a hole,” if the person doing the smoking is conscious of his conscience at work. Am I fully conscious of how I arrived at this? The continual dissemination of similar images and ideas. The continual aired footage of planes striking the towers, the towers crumbling to the streets, dust, screams, a continuous reel of destruction, fear, as if the attacks were happening twenty-four hours a day, every day, any time. For a while, I couldn’t care less about war. Then I saw corpses, of boys, who looked just like me. This was 1982, at age ten. Ever since, I couldn’t care less why anyone would want it. In 1982, any one of those boys could have been me. Now, it’s any one of those dead men could be me. The Secretary of State offered such counsel to the ambassadors of the world that the United Nations Security Council nodded in favor of war.Criterion easily becomes criteria. Even easier: to no longer require either. The data turned out false. The doctrine of preemption ultimately negated its need. While we both speak English, our languages are so different from each other, yours might as well be Greek to me. When the black man in the park asked, “Are you Mexican, Puerto Rican, or are you Pakistani?” and I said, “I’m Arab,” and he replied, “Damn. Someone don’t like you very much,” I understood perfectly what he meant. The President alluded to the Crusades because of (not due to) a lack of knowledge. Later, he retracted the statement, worried it might offend the Middle East; it never occurred to him the offense taken was due to the bombs shredding them to bits and pieces. “You are either with us or with the terrorists” (September 20, 2001). “You’re either with us or against us” (November 6, 2001). The day after, the disc jockey advocated, on air, a thirty-three cent solution (the cost of a bullet) to the problem of terrorists in our midst—he meant in New York; also, by terrorists, I wonder did he know he meant cab drivers, hot dog vendors, students, bankers, neighbors, passersby, New Yorkers, Americans; did he know he also meant Sikhs, Hindus, Iranians, Africans, Asians; did he know, too, he meant Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Atheists; did he realize he was eliciting a violent response, on the radio, in the afternoon? Among those who did not find the remark at all illicit: the owners of the radio station, the FCC, the mayor, the governor, members of the House, the Senate, the President of the United States.Emigrate is better than immigrate. Proof: no such thing as illegal emigration. Further proof: emigration is never an election issue. I heard enthusiastic speeches. They hate our freedoms, our way of life, our this, that, and the other,and so on (not etc). Not everyone agreed every one not “with us” was “against us.” Detroit was farther from home than my father ever imagined. He convinced himself soon after arriving here he had ventured further than he should have.Fewer people live in his hometown than when he left, in 1966. The number, even less, following thirty-four straight days of aerial bombardment. First(not firstly) my father spoke Arabic;second (not secondly) he spoke broken English;third(not thirdly) he spoke Arabic at home and English at work; fourth(not fourthly) he refused to speak English anymore. Not every poem is good. Not every poem does well. Not every poem is well, either. Nor does every poem do good.“To grow the economy” is more than jargon. Can a democracy grow without violence? Ours didn’t. They still plan to grow tomatoes this year, despite what was done. Several men, civilian workers, identified as enemies, were hanged on a bridge, bodies torched, corpses swaying in the breeze. Photographs of the dead were hung with care. I can hardly describe what is going on. Day after day, he told himself,“I am an American. I eat apple pie. I watch baseball. I speak American English. I read American poetry. I was born in Detroit, a city as American as it gets. I vote. I work. I pay taxes, too many taxes. I own a car. I make mortgage payments. I am not hungry. I worry less than the rest of the world. I could stand to lose a few pounds. I eat several types of cuisine on a regular basis. I flush toilets. I let the faucet drip. I have central air conditioning. I will never starve to death or experience famine. I will never die of malaria. I can say whatever the fuck I please.” Even words succumbed;hopefully turned into a kind of joke;hopeful, a slur.However, I use the words, but less, with more care. The President implied compassion; but inferred otherwise. This is not meant to be ingenious. Nor is it ingenuous. The more he got into it, the more he saw poetry, like language, was in a constant state of becoming. Regardless, or because of this, he welcomed the misuse of language. Language is its own worst enemy— it’s the snake devouring its own tail. They thought of us not kind of or sort of but as somewhat American. Lie: “To recline or rest on a surface?” No. “To put or place something?” No. Depleted uranium, heavy like lead; its use—uranium shells—led to birth defects. When in his anger the man said, “We’re going to teach them a lesson,” I wonder what he thought they would learn. In a war, a soldier is less likely to die than a civilian. He looks like he hates our freedoms. You don’t know them like I do. He looks as if he hates our freedoms. You don’t know them as I do. When in his sorrow my father said, “Everybody loose in war,” I knew exactly what he meant. It may be poets should fight wars.Maybe then, metaphors— not bodies, not hillsides, not hospitals, not schools— will explode. I might have watched the popular sitcom if not for my family—they were under attack, they might have died. Others may have been laughing at jokes while bodies were being torn apart. I could not risk that kind of laughter. Of all the media covering war, which medium best abolishes the truth? I deceive myself. I will deceive you myself. In the Bronx, I passed as Puerto Rican. I passed as Greek in Queens, also Brazilian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, even a famous, good-looking American movie actor. As Iranian in Manhattan. At the mall in New Jersey, the sales clerk guessed Italian. Where Henry Ford was born, my hometown, I always pass as Arab. I may look like the men in the great paintings of the Near East but their lives, their ways, I assure you, are in the past. Plus, except in those paintings, or at the movies, I never saw Arabs with multiple wives, or who rode camels, lived in silk tents, drank from desert wells;moreover, it’s time to move past that. Did language precede violence? Can violence proceed without language? It broke my father’s heart to talk about the principle of equal justice. The news aired several quotations from the airline passengers, one of whom was a middle-aged man with children, who said, “I didn’t feel safe with them on board.” He used the word “them” though only one, an Arab, was on the plane. Being from Detroit, I couldn’t help but think of Rosa Parks. Then I got angry. I said to the TV, to no one in particular, “If you don’t feel safe, then you get off the goddamn plane.” You can quote me on that. I was really angry—not real angry, but really angry. The reason? A poet asked me why I didn’t write poems about Muslim and Arab violence against others, and I said I did. And then he said he meant violence against Americans and Israelis, respectively, and I said I did, and before I could go on he interrupted to ask why I didn’t write poems about mothers who sent their sons and daughters on suicide missions. As if, as if, as if. I respectfully decline to answer any more questions. Write your own goddamn poem! Does this poem gratify the physical senses? Does it use sensuous language? It certainly does not attempt to gratify those senses associated with sexual pleasure. In this way, it may not be a sensual poem. However, men have been known to experience sexual gratification in situations involving power, especially over women, other men, life, and language. My father said, “No matter how angry they make you, invite the agents in the house, offer them coffee, be polite. If they stay long, ask them to sit. Otherwise, they will try to set you straight.” When in his frustration he said, “Should of, could of, would of,” he meant, “Stop, leave me alone, I refuse to examine the problem further.” Because (not since) the terrorists attacked us, we became more like the rest of the world than ever before. This is supposed to be a poem; it is supposed to be in a conversation with you. Be sure to participate. “No language is more violent than another,” he said.Then he laughed, and said, “Except the one you use.” Do conflicts of interest exist when governments award wartime contracts to companies that have close ties to government officials? From 1995 to 2000, Dick Cheney, Vice President of the United States, was CEO of Halliburton, which is headquartered in Houston, Texas, near Bush International Airport. Would they benefit themselves by declaring war? Please send those men back home. My grandfather lay there unconscious. For days,there was no water, no medicine, nothing to eat. The soldiers left their footprints at the doorstep. His sons and daughters,they’re now grieving him. “Try not to make too much of it” was the advice given after two Homeland Security agents visited my house, not once, not twice, but three times. I’m waiting for my right mind. The language is a long ways from here. After the bombs fell, I called every night to find out whether my father was alive or dead. He always asked, “How’s the weather there?” Soon enough, he assured me, things would return to normal,that(not where) a ceasefire was on the way.Although(not while) I spoke English with my father, he replied in Arabic. Then I wondered,who’s to decide whose language it is anyway—you, me?your mother, father, books, perspective, sky, earth, ground, dirt, dearly departed, customs, energy, sadness, fear, spirit, poetry, God, dog, cat, sister, brother, daughter, family,you, poems, nights, thoughts, secrets, habits, lines, grievances, breaks, memories, nightmares, mornings, faith, desire, sex, funerals, metaphors, histories, names, tongues, syntax, coffee, smoke, eyes, addiction, witness, paper, fingers, skin,you,your,you’re here, there, the sky, the rain, the past, sleep, rest, live, stop, go, breathe

On the day a fourteen-year-old disappeared in Ojai, California, having left a Christmas Eve slumber party barefoot to “go with a guy” in a green truck, and all Christmas Day volunteers searched for her body within a fifteen-mile radius, and her father and grandfather searched and spoke to reporters because TV coverage might help them find her if she were still alive, and her mother stayed home with the telephone, not appearing in public, and I could imagine this family deciding together this division of labor and what little else they could do to do something, and the kitchen they sat in, the tones they spoke in, who cried and who didn’t, and how they comforted one another with words of hope and strokings of backs and necks, but I couldn’t imagine their fear that their daughter had been murdered in the woods, raped no doubt, tied up, chopped up, God knows what else, or them picturing her terror as it was happening to her or their own terror of her absence ever after, cut off from them before she had a chance to grow through adolescence, her room ever the same with its stupid posters of rock stars until they can bear to take them down because they can’t bear to leave them up anymore— on this day, which happened to be Christmas, at the kind of holiday gathering with a whole turkey and spiral-cut ham and beautiful dishes our hosts spent their money and time making to cheer their friends and enjoy the pleasure of giving, in a living room sparkling with scented candles and bunting and a ten-foot tree adorned with antique ornaments, the girl’s disappearance kept surfacing in conversations across the room while I was being cornered by a man who said his wife was leaving him after twenty-one years of marriage, then recited his resumé as if this couldn’t happen to someone with his business acumen; and it did again after I excused myself to refill my punch glass when someone at the punch bowl said what she had heard about it from someone else who had played tennis that morning with the girl’s mother’s doubles partner, while I filled a punch glass for somebody’s dad brought along so he wouldn’t be alone on Christmas, a man in his eighties with a face like a raven’s, his body stooped, ravaged by age and diseases, who told me he was amazed to still be alive himself after a year in which he had lost both his wife and son, then, to my amazement, began telling me how important he is in his business world just like the man I had just gotten away from, that he’s still a player in international steel involved in top-drawer projects for the navy, and I was selfish enough to be selfless enough to draw him out a little, and the younger man, too (who appeared at my elbow again and started talking again), but not selfless enough to feel what they each were going through because my own fear and hunger cloud how I imagine everyone, including the bereaved family of the missing girl, and the girl herself, and certainly her murderer, although I know what it is to hate yourself completely and believe all human community is lies and bullshit and what happens to other people doesn’t matter.

Useless! Useless! —heavy rain driving into the sea