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It’s my lunch hour, so I go for a walk among the hum-colored cabs. First, down the sidewalk where laborers feed their dirty glistening torsos sandwiches and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets on. They protect them from falling bricks, I guess. Then onto the avenue where skirts are flipping above heels and blow up over grates. The sun is hot, but the cabs stir up the air. I look at bargains in wristwatches. There are cats playing in sawdust. On to Times Square, where the sign blows smoke over my head, and higher the waterfall pours lightly. A Negro stands in a doorway with a toothpick, languorously agitating. A blonde chorus girl clicks: he smiles and rubs his chin. Everything suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of a Thursday. Neon in daylight is a great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would write, as are light bulbs in daylight. I stop for a cheeseburger at JULIET’S CORNER

He forgets that he used to call me mariconcito- that I harbored years of hatred toward him while hoping to find my real father. My childhood memories of him reminding me I was my mother's son, not his. I tried to poison him once and scattered sharp nails inside the shoes in his closet. By the time one of his sons died of AIDS I was already lost in contempt for the man I blamed for everything. There was the time I was in love and he met my boyfriend. Now he forgets to go to the bathroom or where he is but he still remembers Michael and asks about him. I help him walk slowly outdoors to step outside the prison cell that is the tiny apartment with no windows in which I grew up abused by both of them. He barely understands. His fate has been torture. I know that I cannot be his savior. I used to pray for him to die but here he is slowly fading. In his eyes I see that he learned to love me and wishes he could take it all back. He is unable to recall those drunken nights and hateful words. I should do the same. I left a long time ago but he still remains haunted by the little boy who wanted to belong. Like him, I want to forget that we made mistakes and caused so much pain. I need for both of us to remember how he taught me how to ride a bike and how to swim and told me, better late than never, that he loved me and was proud of all I had done. I have to help him settle into his favorite chair and let him know that I forgive him. There is a place somewhere where he will call me hijo and I will know him as my dad.

Stepping crow. Moon at half mast. Dawn horse, horse, blanket and mule. The fool knows something you don’t. Stepping crow. Both feet in the boat. Books stacked up, and nowhere to store ’em. Decorum is spontaneous order. Stepping crow. Gone north of the Border. Magic in motion and magic at rest. Only divest, no need to announce it. Stepping crow. Locked in from the outset. Feet in the boat and we’re already rowing. I don’t like thinking, I like already knowing. Stepping crow. Take hammer to coin. Anvil to anvil, and figure to ground. Hateful, the sound of recriminations. Stepping crow. Uncountable Haitians. Hospital, barracks; Harvard and prison. Give the rhythm what it wants. And the people. Stepping crow. Horace primeval. Wrist-deep in sheep’s guts, breaking the set. But memory is the better poet. Stepping crow. Clogged is the conduit. Explain and explain, you try and get on with it: You just give ’em something to fight with. Stepping crow. Christian Enlightenment. A bubble, sluggish, in a carpenter’s level. But bad’s not the Devil.  Bad can be good. Stepping crow. They misunderstood. Nobody rightly prefers a surprise. The wise like looking forward. Stepping crow. Don’t try to ignore it: The strain in the closet and school letting out. I doubt it’ll ever be casual. Stepping crow. I just happen to know. I don’t happen to trust the self I’m serving. This pleasure’s a lie, unless it’s permanent. Stepping crow. And thirteenth tercet. The place where the Wall tunnels into the sea. It’s not not me you’re aiming at. Stepping crow. Gotta add and subtract. I see now we have no choice but to leave The brutal honesty to the brutes. Stepping crow. I know it’s no use. The Sport of Kings and the Book of Love. They’re not above irregular perquisites. Stepping crow. Can never be sure of it. Blood orange, orange; persimmon and onion; And women are young men too … Stepping crow. Oh, say it ain’t so. A fist full of leaves and another of arrows: I’m setting the trap where the passage narrows.

Fog swaddles the trunks and so delineates, from a vast of green, the silhouette of each pine on the slope. Maybe it’s like that, only all along it was obscured by what — rush, distraction? Fog. A pine. Querying grosbeak. Something shifts. You find yourself in another world you weren’t looking for where what you see is that you have always been the wolves at the door. Left ajar, gaping, your own door. And you burst in as the Mangler, you gouge out your right eye which hath offended. And you burst in as the Great Liar gorging on your own flesh and as Won’t Let Go who shreds your tendons, gnaws your femur. You can’t stop bursting in, coming upon yourself alone, vulnerable, in the privacy of your dying, bending to pick up with a tissue a crushed spider from the bedroom floor, half-sensing in your solar plexus the forces of that which cannot yet be sussed, discovering yourself once again already to have been inside something like an equation with a remainder, a deodand, a reminder of the impossibility of reconcilement — to what? Once again. Forgive yourself, they say, but after you forgive what you have lived, what is left? You can’t set aside the jigger of  the present from the steady pour of hours or even differentiate trails of ants scurrying through some massive subterranean network from the shredded remains of a galaxy backlit by star glow. Time to close the door you think but your face is changed, so many crow’s feet. You must be on to the next stage in which you begin to recognize your mortal body, that nexus of your various holds on the world, as repository of every- thing you didn’t know you took in, human and not, all of it charged and reactant which accounts for the trembling in your hands as now you discern the body of your body — like a still, hanging bell that catches and concentrates each ghostly, ambient reverberation.

Our islands are Tagaloaalagi’s stepping stones across Le Vasa Loloa small and frail but courageous enough to bear his weight and mana high enough to keep us above the drowning and learning how to navigate by the stars    currents and the ferocity of storms Point and sail in any direction as long as you know how to return home You have to navigate the space between the borders of your skin and the intelligence of the tongueless horizon and learn the language of touch    of signs and pain of what isn’t and what may be in the circle of the tides that will stretch until you understand the permanent silence at the end of your voyage and our islands are your anchor and launching site for the universes that repeat and repeat like the long waves of our ocean    like Tagaloaalagi’s compulsive scrutiny of what is to come and fear

For sleeplessness, your head face down, your shoulder blades floating and aspirin as a last resort, when death is threatening, though lately I have experimented with numbers and as for dreams I've never been boring and only once did I bite the arm of a woman sitting next to me and I should be careful, she might have a hand-written poem or a memoir and didn't I bite her arm and aren't we both poets, though I warn her that I make gurgling noises and twitch in both legs and make the bed jump and I am exhausted from looking at poems and I don't care about her nuts and bolts and she has to go to the wilderness herself and fuck the exercises, let her get smashed by a Mack truck, then she'll be ready to mourn.

i.m. Denis Johnson, 1949–2017 the unified field It wasn’t that there was anything to say that would stop him from feeling this way — the X of himself splayed out in space where gravity was weakest. He and his father and talkative mother suffering tiny strokes that took away this syllable from this word, that syllable from that, all this lay in one pan of the balance scale while in the other there was nothing but dark matter and the cosmic inconsequence of his literal physical heart beating. And then the unified field, faced with its own emptiness, bent down to his chest as if to listen. a toast to pavlov’s dogs Oh Leash held by a hand I can’t see, here in the laboratory where nothing can change and where yips and bites are fine-tuned to the pack’s mentality, am I one of his dogs, the three-legged one that knows nothing of my lack except for how I bark, growl, and whine to be let in? Am I the salivating triangle guided only by my nose that keeps me on the move in my limping trot away from you, Leash, yanking me back from all the filth I want to shove my nose in? Why won’t you let me go free? The sad gestures of our growing intimacy is a reflex we can’t escape or express: sometimes, emotion is just mange. So Leash, here’s a toast to my lab pals: August, Fast One, Pretty Little Lady, Joy, Beauty, MiLord, Clown. the judgment after the last What would we like to see happen? Would we like to drive nails into our hands? Would the shame engulfing us like flame on a computer screen make us understand that throwing a match into the Grand Canyon while snapping a selfie, and never once thinking how far that match falls, is the original sin that a donkey’s ears twitching as we ride it to the bottom reveal as the truth about our consciences? How many nails will we need? Go to the movies, do research, be the Regulator forced to kill kill kill and that’s when we’ll find out just who we are or if there’s anything like “who” anymore. mission It’s not simply that the palm trees are on fire but that they waver up more fire than fire, brighter and harsher and more intoxicating than the flames spreading ever thought of being — the thick black smoke turning noon to midnight rears up in a wall that nobody can see over or around or through even as this nobody comes crashing through the screen right into my living room: poor nobody! In this loneliest of times, he tells me how much he loves me, how his lack and mine feel somehow the same and that the flames crawling over him have become his mission: burning, he erects a burning house of smoke we can neither live in or abandon. sunday is never the last day of the week Using zip ties and Velcro to strap on a homemade bomb, who is to blame, who should have told us that on the far side of the screen in this Sunday calm our generation has had its time? In that corner where we slept together so many nights, yes, in that corner where the bed of the dead lovers has been put out with all the other Monday morning trash, there are always two doors opening and closing as one of us goes out and the other comes in. Why couldn’t we show our love for one another the way the void dissolves into the zero? Why did the animal grafted to the human find such satisfaction in explosions? Darkness to darkness, ashes to ashes, the animal to the human, why shouldn’t we take pleasure where and when we can — provided this is pleasure, provided that the body isn’t null. last rites Even if the suit they dress me in for my funeral is dry-cleaned at Perfection Laundry, then washed and washed in the blood of the lamb, the knees will still be muddy from kneeling down, the sleeves, mismatched, will tell their own threadbare tale about the breath of life breathed into tabletop dust. What would the naked man and woman and talking snake say about the god who no longer remembers if they’re forgiven or not? Listening as a kid to the old stories, there were never enough beanstalks and giants and Jacks. Now, the pallbearers pick up my coffin, they carry me out to the ruined cathedral where the saints’ wooden faces, frozen in their homely expressions of grace, are shadowed by flocks of  blackbirds whirling past. coda: the hunger artist as a senior citizen Nowadays, in my cage in old straw, where my brother keeper forgets to come feed me anymore, at last I’m fasting for its own sake, not to break records I’ve broken a thousand times before. Besides, nothing could be easier than to starve forever if the food they keep on giving you makes you sick. This hunger is a moment’s vision that will persist in a pillar of radiant house dust.

The dead were still singing Turn the lights down low Beneath Yellow Bridge where years before, clowning And ass out, Stick jumped with nothing but the State Championship trophy in his righteous clutch. The water Was supposed to be deepest there, and for three seasons Straight MVPs: Charlie "Fly" Kennison, Long Timmy Long, And Rocket Jefferson, those are the names I knew, jumped Free. But Stick's ankle broke. I fished him out, crumpled And bawling like the day he was born, like an object of Baptism, and a life of bad luck followed in the shape of Floods and fractured lightning, and then, numb, tooth- Less, and changed, the dead refused burial, striking out, 2 By 2, 4 by 4, from the morgue house to raise trouble at The bridge. I started hearing birds everywhere after that.

My father was an enormous man Who believed kindness and lack of size Were nothing more than sissified Signs of weakness. Narrow-minded, His eyes were the worst kind Of jury—deliberate, distant, hard. No one could outshout him Or make bigger fists. The few Who tried got taken for bad, Beat down, their bodies slammed. I wanted to be just like him: Big man, man of the house, king. A plagiarist, hitting the things he hit, I learned to use my hands watching him Use his, pretending to slap mother When he slapped mother. He was sick. A diabetic slept Like a silent vowel inside his well-built, Muscular, dark body. Hard as all that With similar weaknesses —I discovered writing, How words are parts of speech With beats and breaths of their own. Interjections like flams. Wham! Bam! An heir to the rhythm And tension beneath the beatings, My first attempts were filled with noise, Wild solos, violent uncontrollable blows. The page tightened like a drum Resisting the clockwise twisting Of a handheld chrome key, The noisy banging and tuning of growth.

Me trying to understand say whence say whither, say what, say me with a pencil walking, say reading the dictionary, say learning medieval Latin, reading Spengler, reading Whitehead, William James I loved him, swimming breaststroke and thinking for an hour, how did I get here? Or thinking in line, say the 69 streetcar or 68 or 67 Swissvale, that would take me elsewhere, me with a textbook reading the pre-Socratics, so badly written, whoever the author was, me on the floor of the lighted stacks sitting cross-legged, walking afterwards through the park or sometimes running across the bridges and up the hills, sitting down in our tiny diningroom, burning in a certain way, still burning.