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There is no Rescue Mission where it isn’t freezing from the need that created it. The lost children distill to pure chemical. Where Good is called No-Tone it’s the one who cries out who doesn’t get a coat. The children fuse colors because they don’t want to separate. Daughters shot off of hydrants who cut each other in the neck and gut, don’t care which one of them will end up later in surgery. And drugged sons pretending to be costumes, well, they’re not welcome to comprehension either. Why does a wild child confuse a moon with a hole in his skin? One was born soaked in gin. His first sip was from a bottle of denial. What can “leave me alone” mean after that? The system is settled, dimensions fixed. Another one’s hand feels like a starfish. Makes me hysterical like the word perestroika. But they all dig the way the pepper is rosy in the vodka. It’s verbocity that creates jokers. Brick and grit are the candy and frosting where volunteers and teachers write cards that go: “Donate books that say NOT and NO and poets who say Urn instead of Oh.” How do the children convert their troubles into hip-hop? Dunno—but it’s wonderful.

Green miles of leafy peace are spread Over these ranks, unseen and serried; Screening the trenches with their dead And living men already buried. The rains beat down, the torrents flow Into each cold and huddling cave; And over them the beet-fields grow, A fortress gentle as a grave. “Morose, impatient, sick at heart, With rasping nerves and twitching muscles, We cannot even sleep; we start With every twig that snaps or rustles. Sought always by an unseen foe Over our heads the bullets fly; But more than these, we fear the snow, The silent shrapnel of the sky. “Yonder our colonel stalks and grieves, Meeting the storm with thoughts more stormy; But we, we sit and watch the leaves Fall down, a torn and crumpled army. We mourn for every leaf that lies, As though it were a comrade slain; Each was a shelter from the eyes Of every prying aeroplane. . . ”

My girlfriend is a miracle. She’s so young but she’s so beautiful. So is her new bikini trim, A waxed-to-neatness center strip of quim. Now there’s a word you haven’t heard for a while. It makes me smile. It makes me think of James Joyce. You hear his Oirish voice. It’s spring on Broadway, and in the center strip mall The trees are all Excited to be beginning. My girlfriend’s amazing waxing keeps grinning. It’s enough to distract From the other drastic act Of display today—Osama bin Laden is dead! One shot to the chest and one to the head, SEAL Team 6 far away from my bed Above Broadway—in Abbottabad, Pakistan, instead. Bullets beyond compare Flew over there, Flew through the air To above and below the beard of hair, A type of ordnance that exploded Inside the guy and instantly downloaded The brains out the nose. Our Vietnam Is now radical Islam. I tip my hat and heart to the lovely tiny lampshade Above her parade.

All hail the crumbling stone monument to the Battle of Bad Axe, the wooden helve long rotted and burned, the short walk to the river, where we can bathe in its brown, where a steamboat ghost huffs out a stream of bullets. We are invulnerable to their spectral lead, descendants of fur traders (beaver, ermine, skunk). Our lungs are clean and pink. Let’s visit the saw shop, the greenhouse with bluff views, the pines and stacks of firewood, the Blackhawk general store, named for the warrior who waved a chalky, misunderstood flag and eluded capture for weeks. In winter, eagles dive here, gathering lift when the wind hits the bluffs: all hail the migrating raptor, its piercing talon and yellow cere.

My husband has a crush on Myrna Loy, and likes to rent her movies, for a treat. It makes some evenings harder to enjoy. The list of actresses who might employ him as their slave is too long to repeat. (My husband has a crush on Myrna Loy, Carole Lombard, Paulette Goddard, coy Jean Arthur with that voice as dry as wheat ...) It makes some evenings harder to enjoy. Does he confess all this just to annoy a loyal spouse? I know I can’t compete. My husband has a crush on Myrna Loy. And can’t a woman have her dreamboats? Boy, I wouldn’t say my life is incomplete, but some evening I could certainly enjoy two hours with Cary Grant as my own toy. I guess, though, we were destined not to meet. My husband has a crush on Myrna Loy, which makes some evenings harder to enjoy.

They are weighing the babies again on color television. They are hanging these small bags of bones up in canvas slings to determine which ones will receive the dried-milk mush, the concentrate made out of ground-up trash fish. For years we have watched them, back-lit by the desert, these miles of dusty hands holding out goatskins or cups, their animals dead or dying of rinderpest, and after the credits come up I continue to sit through Dinner with Julia, where, in a French fish poacher big enough for a small brown baby, an Alaska salmon simmers in a court bouillon. For a first course, steak tartare to awaken the palate. With it Julia suggests a zinfandel. This scene has a polite, a touristy flavor to it, and I let it play. But somewhere Oxfam goes on spooning gluey gruel between the parched lips of potbellied children, the ones who perhaps can be saved from kwashiorkor—an ancient Ghanaian word— though with probable lowered IQs, the voiceover explains, caused by protein deficiencies linked to the drought and the drought has grown worse with the gradual increase in herds overgrazing the thin forage grasses of the Sahel. This, says the voice, can be laid to the natural greed of the nomad deceived by technicians digging new wells which means (a slow pan of the sand) that the water table has dropped. And now to Julia’s table is borne the resplendent fish. Always the camera is angled so that the guests look up. Among them I glimpse that sly Dean, Jonathan Swift. After the credits come up I continue to sit with those who are starving to death in a distant nation squatting, back-lit by the desert, hands out, in my head and the Dublin Dean squats there too, observing the population that waits for too little dried milk, white rice, trash fish. Always the camera is angled so they look up while their babies are weighed in slings on color television, look into our living rooms and the shaded rooms we sleep in.

The shape of it bending like an eel or disfigured quarter moon, pink and green and brown, like a rainbow trout. The wall along my bed covered with the map I cut from the newspaper, and next to it the fishing calendar from Abonauder’s Texaco. The square cages of days with their numerals and effigies of moon and fish shaded to indicate the shape of the moon, the hunger of the fish. The white bread stripped of its crust, dampened, then dusted with flour, compressed into a tight ball, wrapped in foil and chilled all night. A piece of it pressed and shaped on the tip of an Eagle Claw hook, then lowered into the nesting holes of blue gill. The plastic bobber floating on the surface like a silent doorbell. A whole world of cause and effect, framed day-by-day and week-by-week. The passage of time as a kind of game in which I transferred numbers from the newspaper to the calendar. The body counts and their categories of NVRA, Marines, Montagnards. And each morning I put a bold X through the previous day not to erase or forget it but to connect the corners, make four triangles of the square. And it was rare if not impossible to catch the blue gill that swam and swam around the tidy pebble craters of their nests, or coax them out except in hostile swerves and feints toward the bait that hung like a balloon of gravity over their homes, a suspicious egg pouch or cocoon, something a storm might have dislodged from the bank and blown like a feared gift into the water, a thing swallowed whole then run with until the line played out and the hook set fast.

It doesn’t matter A damn what’s playing— In the dead of winter You go, days of 1978— 79, and we went Because the soldiers were beautiful And doomed as Asian jungles Kept afire Christ-like In the hopeless war I did not go to in the end Because it ended. The 20 th century? It was a war Between peasants on the one side, Hallucinations on the other. A peasant is a fire that burns But is not consumed. His movie never ends. It will be beautiful Every winter of our lives, my love, As Christ crushes fire into his wounds And the wounds are a jungle. Equally, no matter when their movies end, Hallucinations destroy the destroyers. That’s all. There has never been a President of the United States. And the 21 st century? Hallucination vs. hallucination In cold battle, in dubious battle, No battle at all because the peasants Have gone away far Into the lost traveler’s dream, Into a passage from Homer, A woodcutter’s hillside Peacetime superstition movie. On a cold night, Hector. On a cold night, Achilles. Around the savage and the maniac The woodcutter draws a ring of fire. It burns all winter long. He never tires of it And for good reason: Every face of the flames is doomed and beautiful; Every spark that shoots out into the freezing air Is God’s truth Given us all over again In the bitter weather of men’s Hallucinations. There has never been A President of the United States. There has never been a just war. There has never been any life Beyond this circle of firelight Until now if now is no dream but an Asia.

after Hokusai and Hiroshige I dreamt half my life was spent in wonder, and never suspected. So immersed in the moment I forgot I was ever there. Red-tailed hawk turning resistance into ecstasy. The patrolmen joking with the drunk whose butt seemed glued to the sidewalk. A coral quince blossom in winter, pink as a lover’s present. And tilting my bamboo umbrella against the warm slant of rain, was I not a happy peasant crossing the great bay on a bridge that began who knows when, and will end who knows when?

A mutable shape stating that downtime hasn’t gone the way of the dodo. Yet the days of sitting around seem extinct. Now it’s all go-go. No need to go into it; who doesn’t know the feeling? The dodo, maybe? Its temporality is other. Its inability to adapt rendered it obsolete. And so this prop here is adaptable as if to right evolutionary wrongs. It encourages a certain flight, of the sitter’s focus inward, when tilting back, and when sitting straight, to one’s surroundings, an outrospection. English? Both ways must be had, or else ... All hinging on a lever and a handle, not as foolproof as the nod to Alice might lead you to believe. Some groping under the seatback and trial and error is required. And there’s no how-to either. “The best way to explain it is to do it.” Feet on the ground, it’s the drama of everyday living. Feet up, it’s the island of the mind, the dwelling place for other dodos whose existence only pictures and written accounts 
corroborate. Change or die. Who wants to go back to zero again?