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for my father 1 When the thought came to him it was so simple he shook his head. People are always looking for kidneys when their kidneys go bad. But why wait? Why not look when you’re healthy? If two good kidneys do the trick, wouldn’t three do the job even better?

Some feel rain. Some feel the beetle startle in its ghost-part when the bark slips. Some feel musk. Asleep against each other in the whiskey dark, scarcely there. When it falls apart, some feel the moondark air drop its motes to the patch-thick slopes of snow. Tiny blinkings of ice from the oak, a boot-beat that comes and goes, the line of prayer you can follow from the dusking wind to the snowy owl it carries. Some feel sunlight well up in blood-vessels below the skin and wish there had been less to lose. Knowing how it could have been, pale maples drowsing like a second sleep above our temperaments. Do I imagine there is any place so safe it can’t be snapped? Some feel the rivers shift, blue veins through soil, as if the smokestacks were a long dream of exhalation. The lynx lets its paws skim the ground in snow and showers. The wildflowers scatter in warm tints until the second they are plucked. You can wait to scrape the ankle-burrs, you can wait until Mercury the early star underdraws the night and its blackest districts. And wonder. Why others feel through coal-thick night that deeply colored garnet star. Why sparring and pins are all you have. Why the earth cannot make its way towards you.

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church – I keep it, staying at Home – With a Bobolink for a Chorister – And an Orchard, for a Dome – Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice – I, just wear my Wings – And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church, Our little Sexton – sings. God preaches, a noted Clergyman – And the sermon is never long, So instead of getting to Heaven, at last – I’m going, all along.

What is the head a. Ash What are the eyes a. The wells have fallen in and have Inhabitants What are the feet a. Thumbs left after the auction No what are the feet a. Under them the impossible road is moving Down which the broken necked mice push Balls of blood with their noses What is the tongue a. The black coat that fell off the wall With sleeves trying to say something What are the hands a. Paid No what are the hands a. Climbing back down the museum wall To their ancestors the extinct shrews that will Have left a message What is the silence a. As though it had a right to more Who are the compatriots a. They make the stars of bone

stepping off the curb onto the right foot, the left foot following in due time, dragging a heavy weight that goes “thud” as if falls those few inches collective guilt cannot fit inside individualism In the cabinet under the bathroom sink, the household items, bottles and canisters of detergent, Pledge Lemon Trigger, and, along the inner corners of the cabinet and its edges,—dark stains, eukaryotic organisms, branched filamentous hyphae —screaming and pointing at the crud women whose hair was stiffened into “beehives,” as they were called,— —canceling out the odor-producing glands under their shaven armpits by spraying on chasm lice chemicals sliding the waist-line down to pierce the gluteus with the splinter of a hypodermic The dishes sparkle, they literally glitter and throw off incandescent particles barely able to eat, no appetite, not taste buds the food stays fresh for months and, even after over a year, is still crunchy when chewed holding a clean handkerchief over nose and mouth eyes irritated with a burny carbolic sensation irrigate the sunken cheeks, the sandpaper lips tongue blindly groping upward to lap at the moisture of tears droplets of a fluid dispensed from small milky-plastic bottles only a couple of inches in height might reduce the discomfort,—later tossing the expired bottle into a wastebasket, the fumes distorting whatever’s seen through the vapors, like a road on a hot summer day What started as a slight dryness in the throat soon progressed to desiccated lips crinkly as crepe paper it’s perfectly natural to ignore a faint aftertaste it involved no joke saying “Does this taste funny to you?,” very dour look on their faces, to the extent that the word “faces” still applies plants other than the desired plant life are ripped from the ground wearing a thick glove The gardener finished with his chores, and went around to the back of the shed to hose himself down with a garden hose, bare-chested, rubbing his hand over his glistening pectoral muscles, the nozzle—

I am watching the movie Twelve Angry Men because there is a character in it who reminds me of him. He is the one who wants to go to the baseball game instead of decide on a man’s life, he is the weak one, the one afraid to reveal what he really feels, the one for whom everything is a joke. He is not Henry Fonda, the tight-lipped moral one. The man is despicable, his weaknesses obvious to all, as obvious as Henry Fonda’s goodness. I watch the movie again and again, loving the black and white of it, soothed by the sound of my father’s voice, the careless pronunciation, the easy shrugging of the shoulders at every crucial question. I sink lower into the dark arms of the sofa. Strange how comfortable the familiar is, how we can even prefer it, however terrifying.

Some motionless conflict in the sky As of Milton’s angels painted there In all their radiance and red malice It is a special happiness and universal Simply to know the names of colors And to see them said She mixed the colors for house painters That was Binghamton Rochester Indianapolis I’ll take less luck if it means less stink she said A special happiness When clouds contest with clouds In fixed flamboyance Good versus Evil or beautiful cold hair God loosed angels on us and they are the air

Did you know I’m in this hospital bed? I’m not. I’m in the same light you stand in, much the same way I’m in the waist of your Carolina watching from the screen across the bed whose pulse is worn down with an IV to the head. We are all snow birds atop the cherry blossoms of August. Springtime in Washington D.C. passed too fast, nearly in the flash of Rose brushing her teeth over the bedpan. No adrenal gland has known such cortisol, such heartbreaking I love you O my God, so many soldiers on the brink of their lives returning! Are we still talking to the same god? I can’t imagine the heart anymore now that it presses my ribs apart, a balloon of such gravity I ache for stars in a jar, wasps whose love reminds me of fireflies tonight.

What's the bird ratio overhead? Zero: zero. Maybe it's El Niño? The storm, was it bad? Here the worst ever. Every tree hurt. Do you love trees? Only the gingko, the fir, the birch. Yours? Do you name your trees? Who owns the trees? Who's talking You presume a dialogue. Me and You. Yes. Your fingers tap. I'm listening. Will you answer? Why mention trees? When the weather turned rain into ice, the leaves failed. So what? Every year leaves fail. The cycle. Birth to death. In the night the sound of cannon, and death everywhere. What did you see? Next morning, roots against the glass. Who's talking now and in familiar language? Get real. What's real is the broken crown. The trunk shattered. Was that storm worse than others? Yes and no. The wind's torque twisted open the tree's tibia. Fool. You're talking about vegetables. Do you love the patio tomato? The Christmas cactus? Yes. And the magnolia on the roof, the felled crabapple, the topless spruce.

1 Moving over the hills, crossing the irrigation canals perfect and profuse in the mountains the streams of women and men walking under the high- tension wires over the brown hills in the multiple world of the fly