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A spirit came down and whispered in our drunk ears mark your wombs with wild roses and between beers I dreamed that we were soldiers missing our mothers which explains why we are seventeen and in a tattoo parlor that smells of ships and motorcycles, of leather and ocean, of marijuana and sad men’s blood. We each ask for a single rose with a ribbon around the stem, for a word, some power. We want to be fire. The artist changes channels. We watch Looney Tunes as his needles start. When we stop at the liquor store, our roses, orange and violet, bleeding through the bandages, I want to tell you that if we ever find ourselves blindfolded in a war, or in an apple metaphor, accused of ruining it for everybody with hunger, or knowledge, I would not insist on how sacred is the tree or the light, or how sacred is what moves us— I’d become a storyteller. And out of our inevitable estrangement I’d make us up again and again.

When I go away from you The world beats dead Like a slackened drum. I call out for you against the jutted stars And shout into the ridges of the wind. Streets coming fast, One after the other, Wedge you away from me, And the lamps of the city prick my eyes So that I can no longer see your face. Why should I leave you, To wound myself upon the sharp edges of the night?

In the first taxi he was alone tra-la, No extras on the clock. He tipped ninepence But the cabby, while he thanked him, looked askance As though to suggest someone had bummed a ride. In the second taxi he was alone tra-la But the clock showed sixpence extra; he tipped according And the cabby from out his muffler said: ‘Make sure You have left nothing behind tra-la between you’. In the third taxi he was alone tra-la But the tip-up seats were down and there was an extra Charge of one-and-sixpence and an odd Scent that reminded him of a trip to Cannes. As for the fourth taxi, he was alone Tra-la when he hailed it but the cabby looked Through him and said: ‘I can’t tra-la well take So many people, not to speak of the dog.’

What bright soft thing is this? Sweet Mary, the fair eyes’ expense? A moist spark it is, A wat’ry diamond; from whence The very term, I think, was found The water of a diamond. O ’tis not a tear, ’Tis a star about to drop From thine eye its sphere; The sun will stoop and take it up. Proud will his sister be to wear This thine eyes’ jewel in her ear. O ’tis a tear Too true a tear; for no sad eyne, How sad so e’re, Rain so true a teare as thine; Each drop leaving a place so dear, Weeps for itself, is its own tear. Such a pearl as this is, (Slipped from Aurora’s dewy breast) The rose bud’s sweet lip kisses; And such the rose itself, when vexed With ungentle flames, does shed, Sweating in too warm a bed. Such the maiden gem, By the wanton spring put on, Peeps from her parent stem, And blushes on the manly sun: This wat’ry blossom of thy eyne, Ripe, will make the richer wine. Faire drop, why quak’st thou so? ’Cause thou straight must lay thy head In the dust? o no; The dust shall never be thy bed: A pillow for thee will I bring, Stuffed with down of angels’ wing. Thus carried up on high, (For to Heaven thou must go) Sweetly shalt thou lie And in soft slumbers bathe thy woe; Till the singing orbs awake thee, And one of their bright chorus make thee. There thy self shalt be An eye, but not a weeping one, Yet I doubt of thee, Whether th’hadst rather there have shone An eye of Heaven; or still shine here, In th’Heaven of Mary’s eye, a tear.

The 3-D printer worked overtime sculpting lemon trees complete with bees on budding flowers. The overheated machine filled the cardboard orchard with the scent of hot plastic. The 12th nightingale arrived like a prophet in a cloud of smoke, considering the same hand that pushed “print” remained destined to strike a single match and wave goodbye to a paradise of paper. Translated from the Persian

A mockingbird perched on the hood of a pay phone half-buried in a hedge of wild rose and heard it ring The clapper ball trilled between brass gongs for two seconds then wind and then again With head cocked the bird took note absorbed the ringing deep in its throat and frothed an ebullient song The leitmotif of bright alarm recurred in a run from hawk to meadowlark from May to early June The ringing spread from syrinx to syrinx from Kiowa to Comanche to Clark till someone finally picked up and heard a voice on the other end say Konza or Consez or Kansa which the French trappers heard as Kaw which is only the sound of a word for wind then only the sound of wind

A Colonial Custom Bathsheba came out to the sun, Out to our wallèd cherry-trees; The tears adown her cheek did run, Bathsheba standing in the sun, Telling the bees. My mother had that moment died; Unknowing, sped I to the trees, And plucked Bathsheba’s hand aside; Then caught the name that there she cried Telling the bees. Her look I never can forget, I that held sobbing to her knees; The cherry-boughs above us met; I think I see Bathsheba yet Telling the bees.

Where ever something breathes Heart beating the rise and fall Of mountains, the waves upon the sky Of seas, the terror is our ignorance, that’s Why it is named after our home, earth Where art is locked between Gone and Destination The destiny of some other where and feeling The ape knew this, when his old lady pulled him up Off the ground. Was he grateful, ask him he’s still sitting up there Watching the sky’s adventures, leaving two holes for his own. Oh sing Gigantic burp past the insects, swifter than the ugly Stanleys on the ground Catching monkey meat for Hyenagators, absolute boss of what does not Arrive in time to say anything. We hear that eating, that doo dooing, that Burping, we had a nigro mayor used to burp like poison zapalote Waddled into the cave of his lust. We got a Spring Jasper now, if you don’t like that woid, what about courtesan, dreamed out his own replacement sprawled Across the velvet cash register of belching and farting, his knick names when they let him be played with. Some call him Puck, was love, we thought, now a rubber Flat blackie banged across the ice, to get past our Goli, the Africannibus of memory. Here. We have so many wedged between death and passivity. Like eyes that collide With reality and cannot see anything but the inner abstraction of flatus, a biography, a car, a walk to the guillotine, James the First, Giuliani the Second When he tries to go national, senators will stab him, Ides of March or Not. Maybe Both will die, James 1 and Caesar 2, as they did in the past, where we can read about The justness of their assassinations As we swig a little brew and laugh at the perseverance Of disease at higher and higher levels of its elimination. We could see anything we wanted to. Be anything we knew how to be. Build anything we needed. Arrive anywhere we should have to go. But time is as stubborn as space, and they compose us with definition, time place and 
condition. The howlees the yowlees the yankees the super left streamlined post racial ideational chauvinists creeep at the mouth of the venal cava. They are protesting 
fire and Looking askance at the giblets we have learned to eat. “It’s nobody’s heart,” they say, and we agree. It’s the rest of some thing’s insides. Along with the flowers, the grass, the tubers, the river, pieces of the sky, earth, our seasoning, baked throughout. What do you call that the anarchist of comfort asks, Food, we say, making it up as we chew. Yesterday we explained language.

for Nathaniel, 1900—1968 All afternoon you worked at cutting them down. Branch after branch tossed into the heap. You had your ceremony. Old pants. The pipe. The pipe rested in the cleft of the tree. When the pile got big enough, you threw the kerosene. Now the woods are clouded again. You forgot the world could be this messy. Air thickens into leaves, the leaves into worms. Behind the barn, overnight, it seems, tents have spread out in the apple trees. There’s work for you. So you come back in your pants old as dirt. With a pipe heavy as stone. No time to lose. Whatever is rotten, whatever won’t hold the weight of another season, you hack down. There’s one moment, though, when you feel almost sorry for them. The tents break into flame and the small, black pieces of anguish crawl out into the grass. Those that get away, well, you let them get away this time.

In reality my loves are the strange box of a Polish doll The blonde’s eyes appearing fixed to her hips long after midnight the garret always singular to loosen a massive mane across her back, its strands thick and fine draping her otter-like chin Deliberately she’d peer out from the wall and nothing could be seen but the shadow of  her breasts hidden beneath marmots of  hair And lovely was her skin’s radiance at that unusual hour Her waist’s digressions easily discerned as bees through grass the window neither open nor closed What I saw, yellow like crystal, rose from sleepy thighs amassed in unseemly tourniquets Everything before me, a pale shimmer of  hairs fanning delicately to reveal the pink or green skin I no longer know of  hips a million centimeters from my gaze.