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For Kelly Morgan ever do is die Her brother was thrown out the window by Black men he was drinking with His cousin was stabbed near the store She got shot Nobody knows where he ended up She hasn’t heard from her brother in 17 years He killed himself when his wife left Her son was hit by a car of drunk whites Her uncle went off a cliff in the dark Her grandmother died in the hospital because they gave her the wrong medicine Her baby was born addicted & died My brother died as a baby Her mother died of an overdose She doesn’t know how her mother died but no one has seen her for a long time She was put in foster care because her parents died in a car wreck I close my eyes & keep praying sometimes there’s nothing to do but brush back the tears & keep on folding the laundry

Sometimes I want a corset like to harden me or garnish. I think of this stricture—rain language, building—as a corset: an outer ideal mould, I feel the ideal moulding me the ideal is now my surface just so very perfect I know where to buy it and I take it off. I take it off. If all things fall and we are just emperors, serious and accurate and fugitive in such dormant lines of gorgeousness the day is a locksmith dew lies long on the grass and I a rustic ask: what is a surface—and respond only omniscience, the crumpling face as the domestic emotions elucidate themselves a sea of mist exists so strangely side by side the potent mould of anarchy and scorn.

but there is no proof but proof no mark but the good news that there is no bad news yet. again. i wish i knew the nausea, its thick yell in the morning, the pregnant proof that in you, life swells. i know i’m not a mother, but i know what it is to nurse a thing you want to kill but can’t. you learn to love it. yes. i love my sweet virus. it is my proof of life, my toxic angel, wasted utopia what makes my blood my blood. i understand belle now, how she could love the beast. if you stare at fangs long enough, even fangs pink with your own blood look soft. • low-key, later, it felt like i got it out the way, to finally know it up close, see it in the mirror. it doesn’t feel good to say that. it doesn’t feel good to know your need outweighed your fear. i braved a stupid ocean. a man. i waded in his stupid waters. i took his stupid salt & let it brine my skin, took his stupid fish into my hands & bit into it like a flapping plum. i kissed at his stupid coral & stupid algae. it was stupid. silly really. i knew nothing that easy to get & good to feel isn’t also trying to eat you. • knew what could happen. needed no snake. grew the fruit myself. was the vine & the rain & the light. the dirt was me. the hands drilling into the dirt were my hands. i made the blade that cut me down. but i only knew how to live when i knew how i’ll die. i want to live. think i mean it. take the pill even on the days i think i won’t survive myself. gave my body a shot. love myself at least that much. thank you, me. thank you, pill, seafoam & bland. thank you, sick blood, my first husband dead river bright with salmon.

Talking, we begin to find the way into our hearts, we who knew no words, words being a rare commodity in those countries we left behind. Both refugees and similarly deprived, we marvel at the many things there are to say: so many variations and colors of the same thought, so many different lengths in the words that line up together on our tongues. No scarcity, no rationing, no waiting in line in order to buy the same answer we heard each time we asked, that one word, owned by the state, manufactured by the state, serving all purposes equally alike: No, No, No, and sometimes Never.

Sometimes, when the light strikes at odd angles and pulls you back into childhood and you are passing a crumbling mansion completely hidden behind old willows or an empty convent guarded by hemlocks and giant firs standing hip to hip, you know again that behind that wall, under the uncut hair of the willows something secret is going on, so marvelous and dangerous that if you crawled through and saw, you would die, or be happy forever.

Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse unreturn’d love, But now I think there is no unreturn’d love, the pay is certain one way or another (I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return’d, Yet out of that I have written these songs).

The galloping collection of boards are the house which I afforded one evening to walk into just as the night came down. Dark inside, the candle lit of its own free will, the attic groaned then, the stairs led me up into the air. From outside, it must have seemed a wonder that it was the inside he as me saw in the dark there.

Somewhere between here and Belen, the Rio Grande will narrow to a muddy bead, no more than three feet across from shore to shore. My friend, Nick Markulis, claims he loves the river's color there, and will bathe his toes in the water, and will go on and on about a dry river in Athens that measures its life in olive groves. Stratis Thalassinos told me about these peculiar waters that disappear and turn up again, and, of course, you know of Arethusa's fountain in Syracuse. I do not accuse Markopoulos (do I have the name right?—Markopoulos, Markulis, fugitive names, fugitive lives docking in Halifax) of being too conversant with asphodel meadows, but one cannot remain composed when hunters and cultic figures press their claims upon a sainted afternoon. Think now of the intimate authority of La Candelaria, the Sunday morning concert, the walk through the abandoned streets, where all was an occasion of Bogotá, a memory of Mazatlán, a shaping necessity we might have met at Salamis. Who can be sure that this white cloth will be dissolved by death?

for Erin, for others There are places in this world where you can stand somewhere holy and be thinking If it’s holy then why don’t I feel it, something, and while waiting, like it will any moment happen and maybe this is it, a man accosts you, half in his tongue, half in yours, he asks if maybe you are wanting to get high, all the time his damaged finger twitching idly like on purpose at a leash that holds an animal you can’t quite put your finger on at first, until you ask him, ask the man, and then he tells you it’s a weasel and, of course, it is, you’ve seen them, you remember now, you say Of course, a weasel. There are men inside the world who, never mind how much they tell you that they’re trying, can’t persuade you that it isn’t you, it’s life, it’s life in general where it hurts, a fear, of everything, of nothing, when if only they would name it maybe then you’d stay, you all the time aware it’s you that’s talking, so who’s going anywhere but here, beside them, otherwise why come, why keep on coming, when you can’t get to believing what they tell you any more than you believed the drugs the other man was offering wouldn’t harm you. Still, you think, you took them and you’re still alive, enough to take the hand, that wants, that promises to take you to where damage is a word, that’s all, like yes,so Yes you say,I’ll come, you tell him Show me.

Somewhere or other there must surely be The face not seen, the voice not heard, The heart that not yet—never yet—ah me! Made answer to my word. Somewhere or other, may be near or far; Past land and sea, clean out of sight; Beyond the wandering moon, beyond the star That tracks her night by night. Somewhere or other, may be far or near; With just a wall, a hedge, between; With just the last leaves of the dying year Fallen on a turf grown green.