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Never reaching the promised land in Canada, HIN-MAH-TOO-YAH-LAT-KET: “Thunder-rolling-in-the-mountins,” the fugitive chief sits in a corner of the prison car headed for Oklahoma, chained to his warriors, a featherless hawk in exile. He sees out the window geese rise from the storm’s center and knows more men died by snow blizzard than by cavalry shot. Still his father’s shield of Wallowa Valley deer and elk flashes in his eyes and coyote runs the circles and a cricket swallows the dark. How many songs this elder sang to break the cycle of cold weather and disease his people coughed and breathed in this land of drifting ice. Now sleepless as the door-guard, the train rattles like dirt in his teeth, straw in his eyes. Holding rage in the palm of his fist, his people’s future spirals to red-forest dust, leaves his bones on the track, his soul in the whistle.

The ghost is a torn sheet, the skeleton’s suit came from a rack in a store the witch is flameproof, but who knows what dark streets they have taken here? Brother Death, here is a candy bar. For the lady wearing the hat from Salem: gum. And a penny for each eye, Lost Soul. They fade away with their heavy sacks. Thanks! I yell just in time. Thanks for another year!

Out of heaven, to bless the high places, it falls on the penthouses, drizzling at first, then a pelting allegro, and Dick and Jane skip to the terrace and go boogieing through the azaleas, while mommy and daddy come running with pots and pans, glasses, and basins and try to hold all of it up there, but no use, it’s too much, it keeps coming, and pours off the edges, down limestone to the pitchers and pails on the ground, where delirious residents catch it, and bucket brigades get it moving inside, until bathtubs are brimful, but still it keeps coming, that shower of silver in alleys and gutters, all pouring downhill to the sleazy red brick, and the barefoot people who romp in it, laughing, but never take thought for tomorrow, all spinning in a pleasure they catch for a moment; so when Providence turns off the spigot and the sky goes as dry as a prairie, then daddy looks down from the penthouse, down to the streets, to the gutters, and his heart goes out to his neighbors, to the little folk thirsty for laughter, and he prays in his boundless compassion: on behalf of the world and its people he demands of his God,give me more.

Minnesota snapping turtles clutched by little cities are wet busts of moonstone wreathed in scum, the gray self sugared, half a lot of granite phlegm stopped upon a chaise longue, that incoming pod of him dunked, thorny hooves aswim. Lichen licked him, then he quivered in the stem, and didactic stoicism stitched him tight with a neat twine. Even when tapped on the back by a barefoot tricyclist with a bulging wheaten midriff, he does not respond except that a flagellant paddling worm nested in the necropolis of his nape twists in disgust under the skin, keeping all the grim social hate safe in him.

frangelico It slops from coppery glass Dominican cassocks thicker than water, thinned syrup crackling and smoking over ice, pale as hearts of  hazelnuts half-caramelized or relics lit in cabinets. Angelic alcoholic for kids, all quickening sweetness without the burnt palate, it’s praline, gilt, milk chocolate. Don’t knock it. Also, don’t drink a lot of it. Handy mnemonic for nuts and Alps, the Piedmont and Languedoc,Our Father, fluent Occitan, Orthodox baroque brass fixtures, all the schmaltzy terror of Christmas    ... Bright liqueur, maple sap, throat’s lacquer, misnomer, namesake— couldn’t quench a thirst, of course, but gives occasion for it. lametta Fuck me, I love that stuff — tinsel stripped like a tarragon stalk of its million radial tines, nervy with static in shredded cascades, angle-confounding and biddable as a fistful of grasshoppers. It implicates itself perpetually in socks, hell-bent as Japanese knotweed on travel, and infiltrates the kitchenette, which seems, beside its disco stooks, too much of a muchness, too matter-of-fact. Could we dress all utilities in spangles of lametta, revel in the vulgar Italian TV indestructible attention-splatter, the cat-bewitching twitch and dangle, the dross? Would things be worse or better? periptero Apparently peripatetic, it pops up wherever I go, glistening on my shoulder, a gold epaulette, a stuffed piñata albatross of bubble-gum, filter tips, and lottery tickets, glossy cascades of laminated sleaze difficult to care about, much harder to reject. Less explicably there are sewing patterns, puzzle books, and tiny plastic helicopters bearing stigmata from the molds where they were cast. The proprietor slams the shutters up and locks himself inside like a djinn in a lamp, a night-busy, helping-hand kobold in a kitchen, utterly invested in the enterprise, inseparable from it. What is the epicenter everyone reports but the staple through the nipple of a centerfold?

She was in love with the same danger everybody is. Dangerous as it is to love a stranger, she was in love. With that same danger an adulteress risks a husband’s anger. Stealthily death enters a house: she was in love with that danger. Everybody is dangerous.

Why should the Devil get all the good tunes, The booze and the neon and Saturday night, The swaying in darkness, the lovers like spoons? Why should the Devil get all the good tunes? Does he hum them to while away sad afternoons And the long, lonesome Sundays? Or sing them for spite? Why should the Devil get all the good tunes, The booze and the neon and Saturday night?

I don’t have to outrun the elephant, I just have to outrun you. I don’t have to race with a belligerent ten-point buck, outpace an elephant in musth. I don’t need to flee a wrathful firmament or dance with a choleric jackboot. I don’t have to outrun the elephant. I only have to outrun you.

I am two fools, I know, For loving, and for saying so In whining poetry; But where's that wiseman, that would not be I, If she would not deny? Then as th' earth's inward narrow crooked lanes Do purge sea water's fretful salt away, I thought, if I could draw my pains Through rhyme's vexation, I should them allay. Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce, For he tames it, that fetters it in verse. But when I have done so, Some man, his art and voice to show, Doth set and sing my pain; And, by delighting many, frees again Grief, which verse did restrain. To love and grief tribute of verse belongs, But not of such as pleases when 'tis read. Both are increased by such songs, For both their triumphs so are published, And I, which was two fools, do so grow three; Who are a little wise, the best fools be.

When my mother She who is not All at once Was a young girl Who she was I could see Before the War Waits to be My mother Reading sad books Yet she is In eternity By the river Already I told her Sometimes, she Mother She always Looked up, wisely Whose child Would be But did not dream Though not yet The one The day I would Could not be Whose son Be born to her An other You see