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I tied it to your wrist With a pretty pink bow, torn off By the first little tug of wind. I’m sorry. I jumped to catch it, but not soon enough. It darted away. It still looked large and almost within reach. Like a heart. Watch, I said. You squinted your little eyes. The balloon looked happy, waving Good-bye. The sky is very high today, I said. Red went black, a polka dot, Then not. We watched it, Even though we couldn’t Spot it anymore at all. Even after that.

Next  to white rice it looks like coral sitting next to snow Hills of starch border The burnt sienna of irony Azusenas being chased by the terra cotta feathers of a rooster There is a lava flow through the smoking white mounds India red spills on ivory Ochre cannon balls falling next to blanc pebbles Red beans and milk make burgundy wine Violet pouring from the eggshell tinge of the plate.

Willie “Slick” Williams reads William Carlos Williams, then writes a letter to the producers of the TV makeover show Pimp My Ride, explaining why his car should be featured on the program. so much depends upon a red cadillac slick with turtle wax beside the white chicks

I’ve noticed after a few sips of tea, the tip of her tongue, thin and red with heat, quickens when she describes her cuts and bruises—deep violets and red. The little girl I baby-sit, hair orange and wild, sits splayed and upside down on a couch, insists her giant book of dinosaurs is the only one she’ll ever read. The night before I left him, I could not sleep, my eyes fixed on the freckles of his shoulder, the glow of the clock, my chest heavy with dread. Scientists say they’ll force a rabbit to a bird, a jellyfish with a snake, even though the pairs clearly do not mix. Some things are not meant to be bred. I almost forgot the weight of a man sitting beside me in bed sheets crumpled around our waists, both of us with magazines, laughing at the thing he just read. He was so charming—pointed out planets, ghost galaxies, an ellipsis of ants on the wall. And when he kissed me goodnight, my neck reddened. I’m terrible at cards. Friends huddle in for Euchre, Hearts—beg me to play with them. When it’s obvious I can clearly win with a black card, I select a red. I throw away my half-finished letters to him in my tiny pink wastebasket, but my aim is no good. The floor is scattered with fire hazards, declarations unread.

The redbreast kills and kills itself against the window Sooner or later the blood in the breast will break the window into hundreds of pieces you can swallow whole Keep swallowing The redbreast loves you and wants you to remember the love So it makes you puke into the toilet blind I was blinded by love And drowned in an empty bathtub spitting up birdshit Covered in red feathers • Sometimes the redbreast likes anting with lit cigarettes safety pins paper cuts God that feels good It wraps everything in pretty pink gauze the color of fake sunset Look it is a pink soul! It wants to get naked and it wants it to hurt Red teeth red toes Open mouths Who keeps pressing my head into the sidewalk inside the bathroom Who keeps the lights on the lights stay on Who dissolves on my tongue Who flies from my finger • The redbreast sits inside behind your left eye behind your right and cleans its babies with its beak Scrubs its babies clean Shakes its tail feathers to scour the floor behind your forehead and scours the floor red My brain is a cutter My initials are beats per second Scrubbed down to zero by the rubies in the halo I whispered your name into the red air and you answered

I Every year the moon inches away from us. In time she’ll swim too far out to anchor us at our habitual angle to the sun, and that will be the end of the well-tempered and recursive wildness that conceived and suffered us, and that will be the end of us. We have just two billion years to thank her for our time here. Eternity has a use-by date II But it’ll be up long before that, and in the meantime, I sit on the cold step of the cowshed and watch the world throw its shadow on the moon like a horseblanket; in the meantime the moon reddens in the refraction of all our dawns and sunsets, in a kind of transfigured cosmic smog. An apocalypse that lasts three hours until it’s time to go to bed. III And in the meantime on the floor of my shed, blue planets sing in the hands of children as they once sang in war. Two small worlds forged to cry terribly down like creation unravelling upon one’s foes now make a peaceful clangour on my secular desk. One spins from its orbit and quakes and chips its cerulean shell on the floor of heaven. The tectonics of play. We are loved like this, and this is how it ends. IV I’m arguing a lot with death these days. And last night I found myself in court poised to clinch the case against the absurdity of life. Certainly, this was sleeping and certainly I was dreaming and I’d been losing the thread, but all at once I saw where my argument must run, and I was running it there when my small boy cried and woke me and I went to him and now I’ll never know. V Spring now, and the river has drawn back her bow. The lark ascends from the cd-player, and black ducks sip brown ditchwater in the yard. Everything’s in bud or leaf, last of all the silver poplars and the Osage Orange, trees flaring even now in the backyard of the childhood of my friend, the poet, the poet’s son. The world happens twice. Draw the linen string taut and shoot. VI One lives in paradox. Debussy plays; trucks flounder past like gods who’ve lost control of their machines. In between one makes one’s life up. The sound is the price you pay for the sight that meets you every morning and half of what you paid for the house. The shed puts the perfect sky in her pocket, and possums rut in the roof. Eternity is in rehearsal, and this is its soundtrack. VII Brad mows an acre an hour. A general at ease on his machine, a banker in overalls, he’s rationalised our small republic on one tank of gas. And this now— cutgrass at four o’clock—is how hope smells. Some days I can see no way out: the body of the world in entropy. But today I sit among the ruins of the afternoon, and I cannot see how it can’t all go on forever. VIII Meantime the moon has made herself new again, and there has been rain. The Marulan hills, which had almost forgotten the taste of the word, are spelling green again this afternoon, and there’s water in a lake that’s been a paddock for a decade. Three black cockatoos, and then three more, fly over as I take the southwest road. And into all this panoply of hope, the new moon falls.

Depressed because my book wasn’t nominated for a gay award, I lie on my couch watching—not listening to— the O.J. trial. Byron, who senses something’s wrong, hides under the bed until Ira comes home, carrying a bouquet of beautifully wrapped tulips. I press the mute button. “This is your prize,” he says. “Guess what they’re called.” A smile in- voluntarily overcomes my frown. “What?” “Red Parade.” “That sounds like the name of an old Barbie outfit,” I say. “That’s exactly what I told the florist. And you know what she told me?” “What?” “When she was a girl, she turned her Barbie into Cleopatra: gave her an Egyptian haircut and painted her nipples blue.” “How cool.” “Yeah, but now she thinks that her doll would be worth eight hundred dollars if she hadn’t messed it up.” Once in water, the tulips begin to unclench— ten angry fists. Their colors are fierce, like Plath’s “great African cat,” her “bowl of red blooms.” Poor Sylvia, who so desperately wanted awards, and only won them after she was dead. Byron jumps up, Ira sits down and massages my feet. “You guys.” My spirits are lifted by their tulips, kisses, licks.

That linkage of warnings sent a tremor through June as if to prepare October in the hardest apples. One week in late July we held hands through the bars of his hospital bed. Our sleep made a canopy over us and it seemed I heard its durable roaring in the companion sleep of what must have been our Bedouin god, and now when the poppy lets go I know it is to lay bare his thickly seeded black coach at the pinnacle of dying. My shaggy ponies heard the shallow snapping of silk but grazed on down the hillside, their prayer flags tearing at the void—what we stared into, its cool flux of blue and white. How just shaking at flies they sprinkled the air with the soft unconscious praise of bells braided into their manes. My life simplified to “for him” and his thinned like an injection wearing off so the real gave way to the more-than-real, each moment’s carmine abundance, furl of reddest petals lifted from the stalk and no hint of the black hussar’s hat at the center. By then his breathing stopped so gradually I had to brush lips to know an ending. Tasting then that plush of scarlet which is the last of warmth, kissless kiss he would have given. Mine to extend a lover’s right past its radius, to give and also most needfully, my gallant hussar, to bend and take.

O my Luve is like a red, red rose That’s newly sprung in June; O my Luve is like the melody That’s sweetly played in tune. So fair art thou, my bonnie lass, So deep in luve am I; And I will luve thee still, my dear, Till a’ the seas gang dry. Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear, And the rocks melt wi’ the sun; I will love thee still, my dear, While the sands o’ life shall run. And fare thee weel, my only luve! And fare thee weel awhile! And I will come again, my luve, Though it were ten thousand mile.

. . . makes a noisy entry into Texas like tumbling file cabinets. Four mountains Four creeks Four forts Four suns Four seasons Four nations—Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne, Arapaho * At Yellow House Canyon the river turns tight. Talons skim the water, waves confirm dawn. With white sheets tied around their waists Tonkawa scouts cannibalistically count out a bag of children’s hands. Seated in a silver Concho saddle, Death’s dirty sergeant lights up his ceremonial breathing leaf. * Where Cache Creek empties into the Red River is a nerve center of war. There Velroy fought the gruesome brotherhood: Blue Corpse, Smallpox, and the Creeper, cruel 300 lb nymphs. They tried to strip his body of Carbon-14 atoms. Velroy, knowledgeable in the Flying Crane Technique of Kung-Fu, drop-kicked Blue Corpse in the windpipe simultaneously breaking his neck in three places. He tricked The Creeper with his own taboo. By passing wolf’s milk and tequila through a hole in an oak tree, it made The Creeper vomit up his own stomach. Velroy quickly buried it, turning him into a tree. Smallpox challenged Velroy to a dance-off. It took place on top of the creek. While Smallpox was doing a head spin, Velroy pulled the cardboard out from under him. Smallpox dropped into the water and drowned. * Snake Woman sits in the deep, a cinema of silver scales. Her hair moves like meadow grass in flood water. * Members of the Black Knife Society crossed the south fork of the river on horseback in a V-formation. They possess gear simultaneously musical and military: a stretched skin to serve as both shield and drum, and a club, sword, or lance that is also a drumstick. * At the Red River Ute chief cuts my guitar strings Ute women love Punk