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I want to believe we can’t see anything we don’t have a word for. When I look out the window and say green, I mean sea green, I mean moss green, I mean gray, I mean pale and also electrically flecked with white and I mean green in its damp way of glowing off a leaf. Scheele’s green, the green of Renaissance painters, is a sodium carbonate solution heated to ninety degrees as arsenious oxide is stirred in. Sodium displaces copper, resulting in a green precipitate that is sometimes used as insecticide. When I say green I mean a shiny green bug eating a yellow leaf. Before synthetics, not every painter could afford a swathe of blue. Shocking pink, aka neon, aka kinky pink, wasn’t even on the market. I want to believe Andy Warhol invented it in 1967 and ever since no one’s eyes have been the same. There were sunsets before, but without that hot shocking neon Marilyn, a desert sky was just cataract smears. I want to believe this. The pale green of lichen and half-finished leaves filling my window is a palette very far from carnation or bougainvillea, but to look out is to understand it is not, is to understand what it is not. I stare out the window a lot. Between the beginning and the end the leaves unfolded. I looked out one morning and everything was unfamiliar as if I was looking at the green you could only see if you’d never known synthetic colors existed. I’ve drawn into myself people say. We understand, they say. There are people who only have words for red and black and white, and I wonder if they even see the trees at the edge of the grass or the green storms coming out of the west. There are people who use the same word for green and red and brown, and I wonder if red seems so urgently bright pouring from the body when there is no green for it to fall against. In his treatise on color Wittgenstein asked, “Can’t we imagine certain people having a different geometry of colour than we do?” I want to believe the eye doesn’t see green until it has a name, because I don’t want anything to look the way it did before. Van Gogh painted pink flowers, but the pink faded and curators labeled the work “White Roses” by mistake. The world in my window is a color the Greeks called chlorol. When I learned the word I was newly pregnant and the first pale lichens had just speckled the silver branches. The pines and the lichens in the chill drizzle were glowing green and a book in my lap said chlorol was one of the untranslatable words. The vibrating glow pleased me then, as a finger dipped in sugar pleased me then. I said the word aloud for the baby to hear. Chlorol. I imagined the baby could only see hot pink and crimson inside its tiny universe, but if you can see what I’m seeing, the word for it is chlorol. It’s one of the things you’ll like out here. Nineteenth century critics mocked painters who cast shadows in unexpected colors. After noticing green cypresses do drop red shadows, Goethe chastised them. “The eye demands completeness and seeks to eke out the colorific circle in itself.” He tells of a trick of light that had him pacing a row of poppies to see the flaming petals again and figure out why. Over and over again Wittgenstein frets the problem of translucence. Why is there no clear white? He wants to see the world through white-tinted glasses, but all he finds is mist. At first I felt as if the baby had fallen away like a blue shadow on the snow. Then I felt like I killed the baby in the way you can be thinking about something else and drop a heavy platter by mistake. Sometimes I feel like I was stupid to have thought I was pregnant at all. Color is an illusion, a response to the vibrating universe of electrons. Light strikes a leaf and there’s an explosion where it lands. When colors change, electromagnetic fields are colliding. The wind is not the only thing moving the trees. Once when I went into those woods I saw a single hot pink orchid on the hillside and I had to keep reminding myself not to tell the baby about the beautiful small things I was seeing. So, hot pink has been here forever and I don’t even care about that color or how Andy Warhol showed me an orchid. I hate pink. It makes my eyes burn.

for Arthur Freeman Pigfoot (with Aces Under) Passes The heat’s on the hooker. Drop’s on the lam. Cops got Booker. Who give a damn? The Kid’s been had But not me yet. Dad’s in his pad. No sweat. Margaret Are You Drug Cool it Mag. Sure it’s a drag With all that green flaked out. Next thing you know they’ll be changing the color of bread. But look, Chick, Why panic? Sevennyeighty years, we’ll all be dead. Roll with it, Kid. I did. Give it the old benefit of the doubt. I mean leaves Schmeaves. You sure you aint just feeling sorry for yourself? Lamb Lamb, what makes you tick? You got a wind-up, a Battery-Powered, A flywheel, a plug-in, or what? You made out of real Reelfur? You fall out the window you bust? You shrink? Turn into a No-No? Zip open and have pups? I bet you better than that. I bet you put out by some other outfit. I bet you don’t do nothin. I bet you somethin to eat. Daddy Gander’s New Found Runes Rain, rain, grow the hay. Grow the weeds another day. If I die before I wake, Skip it. Little Boy Blue come blow. Can’t Man; learning a new instrument. What’s with the old one? Where’d you get the new one? Found it in a haystack Man. Old Mother Hubbard, Decently covered, Went to her final reward. She had to laugh. Manger was half Empty and half kennel. Ol’ Shep. At it Again. Livin’ on Principal. I fired a missile up. It came down maybe. Maybe it stayed up. Things aint much like they used to be.

Inside the starboard window of his room in a boat at sea, the piece of earth he's scraped from a dead gull’s leg sprouts eighty different species, green under bell glass. By the sunlight of the oil lamp he makes rain as the wind picks up toward Chiloe, Port Famine, Concepcion, and then Galapagos. Here he finds shipwrecked sailors’ epitaphs cut into the shell of an old tortoise who’s tame enough to ride, too huge to slaughter. Here the birds are fearless. He can catch them with his hands, let them perch on his finger before he breaks their necks and wraps them in his shirt and sets their eggs on branches drifting from the shoreline, island to island. Now everywhere he meets himself. He’s tired, and half the world from home. But his mind has entered the morning the way all the animals kept in his cabin in jars along the wall grow smaller in sequence until the window opens on the sea, so that what he’ll remember are the wasted spaces, the desert rock spread out for miles as if the earth were flat again, dangerous at the horizon, where the stones, piled, shine against lava black. Dew pools in the evenings. A few pale leaves appear.

I’m overcome by the cruelty of nature no I mean I’m with it. And each little capacity it has can’t be transferred I mean a spruce can’t give its oils to you can it. But that’s how it grows in the ab sence of technology my thoughts grow. My thoughts grow among trees but I don’t help them though I’m for them. I’m for my dog & inci dentally I feed her but I don’t see her much. Joe does. Joe is my friend & also a dog father I don’t help mountains Mountains help me I know the planet is old & splashy sleep helps me. Time helps me. My mother helped me. And now she is gone. She also hurt me so it’s good that she’s gone. I can grow different in the day or three decades in which I’ve got left I can grow toward the mountains sit in solidarity with prisoners or go to jail. I’m not joking I can push different. I want to say something about my cunt. Because that’s what you ask. But I am alone. No mother no phone just a notebook & a cunt & my thoughts. I don’t even think my thoughts. You do.

All transparent things need thunder shirts. The little ghost hanging from an eave, on Underwood Street, a piece of lavender-tinted netting stretched onto a metal frame. The Boston terriers and Chihuahuas patiently wait out storms with their eyes bulging in their special wraparound shirts. My family used to laugh at me sleeping under two down quilts, wearing a wool hat in summer, when I said I was afraid otherwise I would fly up to the ceiling. Once on a sidewalk beside Erie Street around the corner from Underwood where the pointless obsolete tracks run to a dead end on the other side, I found a black and silver rosary, with shining onyx beads, like the ones that you see hanging from the belts of nuns in their habits or priests in their chasubles. I kept it carefully until either I lost it or it got buried in the bottom of a purse abandoned under my bed or in the closet. Clutter keeps me bound to this earth. I told Patti last night that the God-sized hole in me was so big and vacant, voracious and spacious, it was like I was running some kind of desperate toddler’s shape-sorter game, trying to find something that fit to plug into it. I’d stuff anything in there, regardless of whether the shape coincided with the opening. It was like I could look at the sky and attract space junk, broken satellites, spent rocket stages, micrometeoroids, to plug the gap. The wind is its own kind of chaos, sometimes like a sheet of itself tangled or flowing on a celestial clothesline. It needs a weighted blanket. Little red flags on the maple at the corner of Underwood and Erie near the switching yard. Slow-moving locomotives that might be driven by nobody. Flags hold the tree down, mark it, make it know it’s real. Flapping on the flaming maple or falling.

For my mother, Yoshiko Horikoshi Roripaugh 1.X-Ray My mother carried the chest x-ray in her lap on the plane, inside a manila envelope that read Do Not Bend and, garnished with leis at the Honolulu Airport, waited in line—this strange image of ribcage, chain-link vertebrae, pearled milk of lung, and the murky enigmatic chambers of her heart in hand. Until it was her turn and the immigration officer held the black-and-white film up to sun, light pierced clean through her, and she was ushered from one life through the gate of another, wreathed in the dubious and illusory perfume of plucked orchids. 2.Ceramic Pig Newly arrived in New Mexico, stiff and crisp in new dungarees, her honeymoon, they drove into the mountains in a borrowed car, spiraling up and up toward the rumor of deer, into the green tangy turpentine scent of pine, where air crackled with the sizzling collision of bees, furred legs grappling velvet bodies as they mated midair, and where they came upon the disconsolate gaze of a Madonna alcoved against the side of the road, her feet wreathed in candles, fruit, flowers, and other offerings. Nearby, a vendor with a wooden plank balanced between two folding chairs and the glossy row of ceramic pigs lined up across, brilliant glaze shimmering the heat. My mother fell in love with the red- and-blue splash of flowers tattooed into fat flanks and bellies, the green arabesques of stem and leaf circling hoof, snout, and ear.So exotic. Years later she still describes the pig with a sigh—heartbroken, the word she chooses with careful consideration. She’d filled the pig with Kennedy dollars from the grocery budget, each half dollar a small luxury denied at the local Piggly Wiggly, until one day, jingling the shift and clink of the pig’s growing silver weight, she shook too hard, and as if the hoarded wealth of her future were too much to contain, the pig broke open—spilling coins like water, a cold shiny music, into her lap— fragments of bright pottery shards scattering delicate as Easter eggshell. 3.Sneeze My mother sneezes in Japanese.Ké-sho! An exclamation of surprise—two sharp crisp syllables before pulling out the neatly folded and quartered tissue she keeps tucked inside the wrist of her sweater sleeve. Sometimes, when ragweed blooms, I wonder why her sneeze isn’t mine, why something so involuntary, so deeply rooted in the seed of speech, breaks free from my mouth like thistle in a stiff breeze, in a language other than my mother’s tongue. How do you chart the diaspora of a sneeze?I don’t know how you turned out this way

Well and If day on day Follows, and weary year On year. . and ever days and years. . Well?

I. Mother (1892-1973) My mother, with a skin of crêpe de Chine, Predominantly yellow-colored, sheer Enough to let the venous blue show through The secondarily bluish carapace, Coughs, rasps, and rattles in her terminal Dream, interrupted by lucidities, When, suctioned out and listening with hard Ears almost waned to stone, she hears me say, “Mother, we’re here. The two of us are here. Anne’s here with me,” and she says, “Anne is so— So pretty,” as if abdicating all Her principalities of prettiness— So noted in her teens, when she smote all Who saw her shake a leg upon the stage Of vaudeville—and sinking into deeps Where ancience lurks, and barebone toothlessness, And bareback exits from the centre ring Of cynosure. Of little, less is left When we leave: a stick figure of a once Quite formidable personage. It is, Therefore, no shock, when next day the call comes From my worn father, followed by the spade Engaged upon hard January earth In Bellevue Cemetery, where he sways And cries for fifty years of joint returns Unjointed, and plucks one carnation from The grave bouquet of springing flowers upon The medium-priced coffin of veneer, To press and keep as a venereal Greenness brought forward from the greying past. II. Father (1895-1974) Whether the rivals for a wife and mother can Compose their differences and timely warp Into concomitant currents, taken by The selfsame tide when taken at the flood— Great waters poured black downhill at the height Of melting in the middle of the night— Is to be seen. We did not find it so. My father, whom I loved as if he’d done All his devoirs (though he had not), and shone Upon my forehead like a morning sun, Came home out of his hospital to stay In our rich, alien house, where trappings tried His niggard monkishness. Four days he stayed In his ashen cocoon; the fifth he died Under my ministrations, his pug jaw Thrust out toward the port of hopelessness, Where he (I hope) received the sirens of All possible welcoming tugs, even as I Felt under his grey, waxen nose for breath And called the doctor to record a death That made shift rather easier for me, Staring at nothing standing out to sea. III. Tras Os Montes (197-) 1. In Company Inspecting their kit and equipment at first light, I am glad the dawn is behind me, so my friends Cannot reflect upon my tears. The province I Move on across the mountains is still night- Bound, deep beneath the reaches of the sun Across the passes; so it will remain All of this long and dusty day, while we— Will, Joe, Bob, Jonathan, Garth, Peter, Paul, Ed, John, Phil, Harry, and a droptic me— March up the sunstruck slopes, dots on the rock That jags two thousand metres high ahead Of us above the passes where the dead Take formal leave of life: a kiss on both Cheeks of the dear departing, medals stripped, With all due ceremony, from his breast, Both epaulets cut loose from their braid stays, His sword, unbroken, pommelled in the hand Of his reliever; lastly, a salute Fired by the arms of officers, the guns Of other ranks, and a flat bugle call Played on a battered Spanish instrument With ragged tassels as the body falls Over the parapet—gaining weightlessness As its flesh deliquesces, as its bones Shiver to ashes—into an air that crawls With all the arts of darkness far below. 2. A Deux A new scenario: on upswept slopes Of ripe green wheat—rare in this country—we Take, linked, a last long walk. In late July, The landscape waits, breath bated, on the whim Of cumulonimbi in the west, which roll In with deceptive stealth, revealing a Black heart cut with a cicatrice of fire, Zigzagging to its ground: a naked peak Kilometres away, a serra out Of mind. I fix your face with a wax smile. Our hands articulate our oneness, soon To dissipate, in a stiff splay of joints. Is all the language at my tongue’s command Too little to announce my stammered thanks For your unquestioning hand at my side, Too much to say I know the lowly deuce Is a poor card to play beside the ace, Black with his curlicues and his strong pulse Of sauve qui peut ambition? Calling a spade A spade, I’m pierced with the extreme regret Of one who dies intestate; as I’m snatched Into the stormcloud from the springing field, From green to black, I spy on you, below, A lone maid in green wheat, and rain farewells And late apologies on your grey head, And thunder sorrows and regrets. The storm Goes east, and the sun picks out my remains Against the cloud: a tentative rainbow, An inverse, weak, and spectral kind of smile. 3. Alone The long march up the fulvous ridgebacks to The marches, the frontiers of difference— Where flesh marches with bone, day marches with His wife the night, and country marches with Another country—is accomplished best, By paradox, alone. A world of twos, Of yangs and yins, of lives and objects, of Sound grasses and deaf stones, is best essayed By sole infiltrators who have cast off Their ties to living moorings, and stand out Into the roads of noon approaching night Casting a single shadow, earnest of Their honorable intention to lay down Their lives for their old country, humankind, In the same selfish spirit that inspired Their lifelong journey, largely and at last Alone, across the passes that divide A life from every other, the sheer crags Of overweening will, the deepening scarps Like brain fissures that cunningly cut off Each outcrop from the main and make it one While its luck lasts, while its bravura holds Against all odds, until the final climb Across the mountains to the farther shore Of sundown on the watersheds, where self, Propelled by its last rays, sways in the sway Of the last grasses and falls headlong in The darkness of the dust it is part of Upon the passes where we are no more: Where the recirculating shaft goes home Into the breast that armed it for the air, And, as we must expect, the art that there Turned our lone hand into imperial Rome Reverts to earth and its inveterate love For the inanimate and its return. FINIS

here they come these guys grey truck radio playing they are in a hurry it’s quite exciting: shirt open bellies hanging out they run out the trash bins roll them out to the fork lift and then the truck grinds it upward with far too much sound . . . they had to fill out application forms to get these jobs they are paying for homes and drive late model cars they get drunk on Saturday night now in the Los Angeles sunshine they run back and forth with their trash bins all that trash goes somewhere and they shout to each other then they are all up in the truck driving west toward the sea none of them know that I am alive REX DISPOSAL CO.

Hunkered down, nerve-numb, in the carnal hut, the cave of self, while outside a storm rages. Huddled there, rubbing together white sticks of your own ribs, praying for sparks in that dark where tinder is heart, where tender is not.