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I see my mother in her laugh my father in her stubbornness myself in her worry her mother in the way she holds her hands she is made of all of us and somehow entirely herself that's the whole thing that's the miracle part

Sunday morning and everyone is somewhere else now the house is quiet in a way it wasn't for twenty years i make one cup of coffee and drink it slow which is also something

Onward is not a victory it's just: still going which is what it looks like most of the time still going not fine necessarily but still going

These people have watched me grieve and celebrate and doubt and come back that's what a church is not the building the watching the coming back

The void between galaxies is not actually empty it's full of dark matter of things we can't see but know are there the void is not nothing the void is a kind of full we don't have the instruments for yet

We pass the straits of the Cape where grazing whales gather, though they’re not, I’m told, social creatures by nature. Alice asks how they can sleep if they must think to breathe. Cranial hemispheres wink and wake and alternate, so whales are half-awake and half-asleep, balanced between each of our states through dive and breach. Once on the kitchen wall of a dune shack I saw, like a headdress, the baleen of a whale— frayed filaments run from a thin, curled, rib-like bone: sieves for the sea. Like this sickle-moon fin “negatively buoyant” I sink in sleep, but end, I think, where I begin. Following one as it leaves two other whales we see suddenly not what we’re heading for but the asymmetrically colored snout of a fin whale as it rises parallel within a stone’s throw of the boat, the great eye set back water crashing rushing to let me see where it ought to be. I lose track, the mottled chin’s marble veined, swirling through its green veil, which the top jaw slits. And then, that’s it, I think. Nights I’m thrown upright from my rest. Brine thumps my chest.

We were dreaming on an occupied island at the farthest edge of a trembling nation when it went down. Two towers rose up from the east island of commerce and touched the sky. Men walked on the moon. Oil was sucked dry by two brothers. Then it went down. Swallowed by a fire dragon, by oil and fear. Eaten whole. It was coming. We had been watching since the eve of the missionaries in their long and solemn clothes, to see what would happen. We saw it from the kitchen window over the sink as we made coffee, cooked rice and potatoes, enough for an army. We saw it all, as we changed diapers and fed the babies. We saw it, through the branches of the knowledgeable tree through the snags of stars, through the sun and storms from our knees as we bathed and washed the floors. The conference of the birds warned us, as they flew over destroyers in the harbor, parked there since the first takeover. It was by their song and talk we knew when to rise when to look out the window to the commotion going on— the magnetic field thrown off by grief. We heard it. The racket in every corner of the world. As the hunger for war rose up in those who would steal to be president to be king or emperor, to own the trees, stones, and everything else that moved about the earth, inside the earth and above it. We knew it was coming, tasted the winds who gathered intelligence from each leaf and flower, from every mountain, sea and desert, from every prayer and song all over this tiny universe floating in the skies of infinite being. And then it was over, this world we had grown to love for its sweet grasses, for the many-colored horses and fishes, for the shimmering possibilities while dreaming. But then there were the seeds to plant and the babies who needed milk and comforting, and someone picked up a guitar or ukulele from the rubble and began to sing about the light flutter the kick beneath the skin of the earth we felt there, beneath us a warm animal a song being born between the legs of her; a poem.

How do they survive, riven as they are, the one undoing the other's desire? Tell the body to outrun the mind, and the mind smirks, whispering too loudly this way   this way, blocking all the exits. And the body, luxurious sensualist by pool side or in bed, doesn't it hear the mind's impatient machinery ticking it's time   it's time? And only in our mind's eye, as we're fond of saying, someone else's body leaping nimbly in jetés of thought, or revealing to us Act V, scene iii in one gestural flourish, body and mind beautifully synchronous. Oh, the mind is eely, slipping out of its puzzle boxes, loving its own wit. And the earnest body: speak of it with the least irony, and already you've begun to unnerve it. Better to let them have their way, forgetting about them both until they meet again sometime as if for the first time in library or steam room ready to shake hello or lead you to whatever door there is and always the two sets of stairs.

Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.

I A cave with arms at the mouth. Our hero is blind: everything he hears he sees. Hear! Gold light sifts to his ear. A roar. The seas beaten—his duodenum, colon, blind intestine and appendix, destined for heat, they blush. II William's cabbage heart shook. He dragged himself from the dirt. If he could rest his ears he could see ginkgos in his city. The pretty boy I mean & Will, who were both aging with their senses curbed until they knew New York City by the root & crack. III As if there is a fig tree rooted in heaven & each of its leaves knows all the rules. 8:45 a.m. hum: he saw the boy had fallen into a manhole & the fig tree had fallen into a manhole & neither could be the sound of hands splitting gold hands landed up the breadth of William's back. God bleeding me a kind of blooded cry my lady makes me a heron or my leg for a stump the cursed in loam my venomous thumbs my His guts an a-readied muck. IV If your hand had been dusk- yellow not a lantern but winged —a bridge or a dove sprung from the dirt. Trying to make a shape. The feathered thumb herring— bone. We would not fall. V I brought you in from the garden since I can't stand the trees' visions. William you will be there the last stately in ribbons. But the vision is a fattened glee. The glee is a clubfoot. The glee is a mutt. The eyes sewn up the air & nothing can be seen but visions. You are burst sideways like a fist in water. Your maker staring into an apron of mud. Thou art bore a hole in the man. Thou art not a bloody bit, not the man.