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Still, citizen sparrow, this vulture which you call Unnatural, let him but lumber again to air Over the rotten office, let him bear The carrion ballast up, and at the tall Tip of the sky lie cruising. Then you’ll see That no more beautiful bird is in heaven’s height, No wider more placid wings, no watchfuller flight; He shoulders nature there, the frightfully free, The naked-headed one. Pardon him, you Who dart in the orchard aisles, for it is he Devours death, mocks mutability, Has heart to make an end, keeps nature new. Thinking of Noah, childheart, try to forget How for so many bedlam hours his saw Soured the song of birds with its wheezy gnaw, And the slam of his hammer all the day beset The people’s ears. Forget that he could bear To see the towns like coral under the keel, And the fields so dismal deep. Try rather to feel How high and weary it was, on the waters where He rocked his only world, and everyone’s. Forgive the hero, you who would have died Gladly with all you knew; he rode that tide To Ararat; all men are Noah’s sons.

You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I'll rise. Does my sassiness upset you? Why are you beset with gloom? ’Cause I walk like I've got oil wells Pumping in my living room. Just like moons and like suns, With the certainty of tides, Just like hopes springing high, Still I'll rise. Did you want to see me broken? Bowed head and lowered eyes? Shoulders falling down like teardrops, Weakened by my soulful cries? Does my haughtiness offend you? Don't you take it awful hard ’Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines Diggin’ in my own backyard. You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air, I’ll rise. Does my sexiness upset you? Does it come as a surprise That I dance like I've got diamonds At the meeting of my thighs? Out of the huts of history’s shame I rise Up from a past that’s rooted in pain I rise I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide, Welling and swelling I bear in the tide. Leaving behind nights of terror and fear I rise Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear I rise Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise I rise I rise.

Down by the pond, addicts sleep on rocky grass half in water, half out, and there the moon lights them out of tawny silhouettes into the rarest of amphibious flowers I once heard called striders, between, but needing, two worlds. Of what can you accuse them now, beauty?

I’m having trouble looking animals in the eye. Their empty suits in outer space! Monkeys injected with a virus to show off Our eminent domain, the nervous system. Teacup pigs we breed and obsessive mice Worrying themselves bald in a miniature opera. For pleasures of the tongue we are Winking cattle out of meadows Slashing their throats and swiftly quartering them. In riding habits with gold flame pins we ride horses To hounds, chase a fennec fox until his red Coat flares up against the extinction Of light. Once in a circus we made An elephant disappear and he did not mind.

We’d often been included in the weather, whose changes (as in the still, portending darknesses of after noon) were hardly evident, if even manifest at all. The August rain over Mixcoac & the deadening of all aspect at a distance: yet our sudden wet bodies, firm swelling divested finally of shirts & trousers, left beside turbid footprints on the tiled floor; this tongue, these lips the lightning over the unchartered landscape of your thigh: successive terra nova to resist the still life of the body

Look deep into the blueberry eyes of  breakfast.

July 13, 2013 Saturday afternoon: in the driveway between buildings they blow up balloons—yellow, red, blue—for a 3-year-old’s party. The intermittent pops startle me like random gunfire—remind me of birthdays brown boys will no longer celebrate. The DJ, having set up the speakers, begins to play—the music, a rapid fire of bass thump, commandeers the apartment. We have no choice but leave. An art show: canvases colored with boxes and lines—a grid of red on a backdrop of yellow. We speak of the abstract with wine in our mouths. Meanwhile, in an antechamber, six are sequestered. They speak of mali- cious intent, blood, evidence, testimony—murder versus manslaughter. We arrive home to a throng of brown bodies, hands clutching red cups, and music: its insistent treble stabbing the ears. Inside, we slam all windows, but the music still blares as my niece shoots people on the video game—its sounds are too realistic to bear. Instead, the news, a verdict is in: not guilty. And everything is a blur of sound, my heart beating so fast I put a hand to my chest. I watch the TV screen: a collage of abstractions—spotlights, microphones, smiles, handwritten signs. I stare, as if it were a painting— a smear of twisted faces smothered in gesso and oil, a grid of red on a backdrop of yellow—to make sense of. The party continues. The 3-year-old probably in bed dreaming of melted ice cream, and I am tired of partying. There is a police station a half block away and I want it to burn. Instead, only the smoke of weed, the meaningless music droning on, the popping of balloons. Sunday morning, the birds are angry—their chirping a noisy chant: NO NO NO NO. Outside, the rubbery flesh of balloons color the driveway like splotches of paint. In an instant, those still lives of heave and breath—gone in a pop.

It was night, it had rained, there were pieces of cars and half-cars strewn, it was still, and bright, a woman was lying on the highway, on her back, with her head curled back and tucked under her shoulders so the back of her head touched her spine between her shoulder-blades, her clothes mostly accidented off, and her leg gone, a long bone sticking out of the stub of her thigh— this was her her abandoned matter, my mother grabbed my head and turned it and clamped it into her chest, between her breasts. My father was driving—not sober but not in this accident, we’d approached it out of neutral twilight, broken glass on wet black macadam, like an underlying midnight abristle with stars. This was the world—maybe the only one. The dead woman was not the person my father had recently almost run over, who had suddenly leapt away from our family car, jerking back from death, she was not I, she was not my mother, but maybe she was a model of the mortal, the elements ranged around her on the tar— glass, bone, metal, flesh, and the family.

As if engine parts could be wrenched out at random and the car would still start and sound even, hearts can go with chambers broken open.

Still to be neat, still to be dressed, As you were going to a feast; Still to be powdered, still perfumed; Lady, it is to be presumed, Though art's hid causes are not found, All is not sweet, all is not sound. Give me a look, give me a face, That makes simplicity a grace; Robes loosely flowing, hair as free; Such sweet neglect more taketh me Than all th'adulteries of art. They strike mine eyes, but not my heart.