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Little Chihuahita shadowed beside Segundo barrio. A dead German sheperd with a broken neck lies on the side of the street for days. The stench of El Paso’s sewage in the air, a Mexican flag hugely flaps itself above the chain-linked fence topped with razor wire. In the morning blue mountains smog. South side of the border a man jogs. The river’s bank green, small trees bob in the wind like truffle-treats, mirage. Each day thousands cross the open bridge, both ways, each night they go home to sleep silence. Cars hum and wait for hours like sleeping cats. A cemented river half-dried, even the canal drains away. Some say droves of shadows at night move ghost-like through the dying river. These people grow invisible, as if air, irrelevant and holy; at night I can hear the whisper of my grandfather, “all the angels live in Juárez.” There is an old language broken in my throat. Some eyes mistake me for shadow. When I speak my voice a fearful phantom. In spring dust storms come, the sky browns, my visage half-forms beneath the Italian cypress; and when the day’s moon is full in its silence, I am afraid of my own darkness.

After Li Po While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead I played about the front gate, pulling flowers. You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse, You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums. And we went on living in the village of Chōkan: Two small people, without dislike or suspicion. At fourteen I married My Lord you. I never laughed, being bashful. Lowering my head, I looked at the wall. Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back. At fifteen I stopped scowling, I desired my dust to be mingled with yours Forever and forever, and forever. Why should I climb the look out? At sixteen you departed You went into far Ku-tō-en, by the river of swirling eddies, And you have been gone five months. The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead. You dragged your feet when you went out. By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses, Too deep to clear them away! The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind. The paired butterflies are already yellow with August Over the grass in the West garden; They hurt me. I grow older. If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang, Please let me know beforehand, And I will come out to meet you As far as Chō-fū-Sa.

Hardly a ghost left to talk with. The slavs moved on or changed their names to something green. Greeks gave up old dishes and slid into repose. Runs of salmon thin and thin until a ripple in October might mean carp. Huge mills bang and smoke. Day hangs thick with commerce and my favorite home, always overgrown with roses, collapsed like moral advice. Tugs still pound against the outtide pour but real, running on some definite fuel. I can’t dream anything, not some lovely woman murdered in a shack, not saw mills going broke, not even wild wine and a landslide though I knew both well. The blood still begs direction home. This river points the way north to the blood, the blue stars certain in their swing, their fix. I pass the backwash where the cattails still lean north, familiar grebes pop up, the windchill is the same. And it comes back with the odor of the river, some way I know the lonely sources of despair break down from too much love. No matter how this water fragments in the reeds, it rejoins the river and the bright bay north receives it all, new salmon on their way to open ocean, the easy tub returned.

i.m. India's missing girls This is not really myth or secret. This murmur in the mouth of the mountain where the sound of rain is born. This surging past pilgrim town and village well. This coin-thin vagina and acid stain of bone. This doctor with his rusty tools, this street cleaner, this mother laying down the bloody offerings of birth. This is not the cry of a beginning, or a river buried in the bowels of the earth. This is the sound of ten million girls singing of a time in the universe when they were born with tigers breathing between their thighs; when they set out for battle with all three eyes on fire, their golden breasts held high like weapons to the sky.

bear with me      it wasn’t long ago I was brainless lazily pulling fireflies into my teeth       chewing them into pure light       so much of me then was nothing I could have fit into a sugar cube      my body burned like a barnful of feathers        nothing was on fire but fire was on everything       the wild mustard the rotting porch chair         a box of birth records        eventually even scorched earth goes green       though beneath it the dead might still luxuriate in their rage     my ancestor was a dervish saint     said to control a thick river of dark milk under his town        his people believed he could have spared them a drought       they ripped him to pieces like eagles tearing apart a snake    immediately they were filled with remorse       instead of burying him        they buried a bag of goat bones and azalea      my hair still carries that scent my eyes      black milk and a snake’s flicking tongue does this confuse you       there are so many ways to be deceived a butcher’s thumb pressed into the scale       a strange blue dress in a bathtub    the slowly lengthening night      I apologize I never aimed at eloquence      I told my mother I wouldn’t live through the year       then waited for a disaster      sitting cheerfully on cinder blocks pulled from a drained pond      tossing peanuts to squirrels     this is not the story she tells     hers filled with happy myths       fizzy pistons and plummy ghosts it’s true I suppose       you grow to love the creatures you create some of them come out with pupils swirling       others with teeth

With el río grande~bravo in our face This river at its mouth at its source With you at its source its sources With you at the snow the evergreens The million earth holes of water emerging emerald Snakes, Gloria Anzaldúa's grave With this river on our face Neon green anole swells its throat pink-white El río bravo~ grande on its face Ocelots hunt under six foot shrub canopies With the drive of the Continental Divide with the pull of tributaries in their limbs Chicharras whining in the shade rivers in their timbals Females laying eggs in branches The young border patrol officer flashes sirens daily lifts his gun with the river on his face Upriver, Chihuahua desert ancestors' adobe bricks stand up crumble down With el río grande~bravo on our face You said you loved the river on my face You said headwaters the source el río grande rises from its source saw the lines around our mouths saw adobe-brick lines exposed Monsoon season granizo pelting the facades at its source in my mouth adobe mud bricks in my mouth the earth holes, the sources the snow avalanches granizo Río Conchos de México grandmothers' Cueva de la Olla at our face Tarahumara Rarámuri Tidal confluences in our face Some crossed with nuns during la revolución el río bravo~grande on their face Relatives disappear die detained with tributaries of many rivers on their face In Ciudad Juárez, a mother hoped her missing daughter married a rich American with the river far away Constant helicopters finding heat with the river as the source To the west, crossers lift the tortilla curtain Walk deserts without water on their face Guanajuato ancestors crossed through Cali with mirages in their face While I shower daily with el valle river water on my face Thank you and kiss you daily Julia de Burgos with el Río Grande de Loíza Puerto Rico in your face Julia I can now speak of hurricanes and being a dog at someone's feet I remember El Paso's Inca doves burrowing owls in the morning barn owls in El Valle's cemeteries great horned owl and mockingbirds Harris hawks and pauraques vecinos carrying signs two communities "¡No al muro!" "¡Segundo Barrio no se vende!" with the river on their face A daughter and mother want their ashes scattered at Boca Chica the river's mouth the end, the start another source crabs collapsing into bullets bursting out of holes carrizo, bugambilia seeds      petals      paper rose raspas the mouth the eddies the tributaries the flow Río Conchos de México the snow granizo the pelts the sources rising The confluence of people and god tortugas ribbon snakes in Roma pigs and piglets jumping from banks with the river on their face You can hear roosters crowing across the water in Miguel Alemán Hurricanes disturb unsettled graves with the river in our face You said you don't want archaic chains lowering you loudly with obvious labor six feet in You want to hear the cool chachalacas with the river on their legs flapping from ébano to ébano el chalán the ropes the pull over green water under blue sky to Díaz Ordaz I want to hear parrots sabal palms try again With the river on our face I want no medicine no ambition with the river in my face I used to love you with the river in my face I stil love you when the river's on my face I made a foot-deep grave with the river on my face I loved other rivers with el río grande~bravo on my face I want to oxbox lake in this place where children stil speak and lose multiple tongues in this place where we still lose and grow forked tongues this place where white herons hunt and drink in the resacas this place with el río grande~bravo in its pipes in its lungs in our face

I spit my smack, Jim slugs his Jack, Rob stews his lack, Carey prepares his rack, herons hunker on blowdowns, deer wait on high moon for their rounds, and the campfire might as well be an empire we all watch dissolve (in the slough, a carp roll, a splash) into ash.

That year of the cloud, when my marriage failed, I slept in a chair, by the flagstone hearth, fighting my sleep, and one night saw a Hessian soldier stand at attention there in full regalia, till his head broke into flames. My only other callers were the FBI sent to investigate me as a Russian spy by patriotic neighbors on the river road; and flying squirrels parachuting from the elms who squeaked in rodent heat between the walls and upstairs rumbled at their nutty games. I never dared open the attic door. Even my nervous Leghorns joined the act, indulging their taste for chicken from behind. A glazed look swam into the survivors’ eyes; they caught a sort of dancing-sickness, a variation of the blind staggers, that hunched their narrow backs and struck a stiffened wing akimbo, as round and round the poultry yard they flapped and dropped and flapped again. The county agent shook his head: not one of them was spared the cyanide. That year of the cloud, when my marriage failed, I paced up and down the bottom-fields, tamping the mud-puddled nurslings in with a sharp blow of the heel timed to the chop-chop of the hoe: red pine and white, larch, balsam fir, one stride apart, two hundred to the row, until I heard from Rossiter’s woods the downward spiral of a veery’s song unwinding on the eve of war. Lord! Lord! who has lived so long? Count it ten thousand trees ago, five houses and ten thousand trees, since the swallows exploded from Bowman Tower over the place where the hermit sang, while I held a fantail of squirming roots that kissed the palm of my dirty hand, as if in reply to a bird. The stranger who hammers No Trespass signs to the staghorn sumac along the road must think he owns this property. I park my car below the curve and climbing over the tumbled stones where the wild foxgrape perseveres, I walk into the woods I made, my dark and resinous, blistered land, through the deep litter of the years.

Running off with the boy at the gas station, yellow-haired, clear-eyed, with a pair of hands nothing, you understand, would prove too much for, is, it seems, a simple enough solution. Consequences never enter your thinking at the start. Whatever the implications of the act, of the speed with which you act, all one knows, and all one chooses to know, is summed in this: we are to be together. On River Road, the great elms overhead branch out to shape a tunnel which we race through as we make our escape, leaf-dappled, late, the avenue to what is possible, water on one side, deep woods on the other. The water’s depth goes down in feet and inches, but the depth of the woods is only guessed. Driving all night, deeper into the country, we pause at dawn, finding a roadside shack which serves us what we call a wedding breakfast, homemade raspberry tarts and lemon ices. I remember that first glimpse of him, sprawled over the body of a green coupé, feverish, rapt, all ardor, lean, committed, almost making love, it seemed, to the engine. The yellow hair hung down across his eyes, damp and limp with the sweat beading his forehead. Two arms lodged elbow-deep within the gearshaft, the hands, when you saw hands, the awesome gifts not of a boy who haunted the gas station but of a man for whom one understands nothing, in time, will be impossible, motor, transmission, fan-belt, valves, a life. Illumination from a single light bulb beat down across the muscles of his back. Beyond him, from the body shop, there leaked darkness to match those woods whose depth one guesses. Every night since then, since River Road and the tunnel through which, quite late, we fled, I find him sprawled over another chassis left to his care in a garage with one bulb by someone who knows what those hands can do, knows, or has heard, what can be worked with love, suspects (I am not able to say how) nothing will not be possible for him, passionate with attention, with concern, held by the task at hand as he is held by nothing in this life here, here, together, yellow hair in his eyes, light on his back. Knowing no longer what it is I want, flayed by the memory of what I wanted, the possible, the uses of the hands, the uses, later, deeper, of the body, I think of River Road turning to moonlight beneath the lyric hissing of the tires, moonlight becoming water, water woods, everything turning much too deep to guess, fragrance on all sides pinning us beneath it, sweet avenue to the nights stretched before us. It may come down to this: one’s choice of route. It may be that, at dusk, when the moon rises, when, for the thousandth time, the dark begins what it seems to know no end of beginning, the stars strung in the branches, River Road cut at an angle somehow penetrating the countryside of all we dream and long for, the heart of our location, of romance, two others, quite unknown to us, their crankcase worked to perfection, brakes fixed for endurance, their tires aligned to yield both speed and distance, bearings retooled to make good their escape, engine fitted to lead them down that route almost without their need to steer, to choose, set out this evening, late, on River Road, that avenue to what is possible, water on one side, deep woods on the other lovelier for the depths they would withhold, seeming to know precisely what the miles know, seeming to choose to go where the road goes. Knowing the risk involved now and the price of wild raspberry tarts and lemon ices, the sting, at dawn, of sour and sweet at once exotic to the tongues of two so young, two who have driven all night, running off, the spill of moonlight drenching River Road, the same fierce angle, the same penetration, I need to think again how deep the woods run (what lies beyond, of course, a myth, a guess), I need to weigh the cost of staying home.

Yes, we'll gather by the river, the beautiful, the beautiful river. They say it runs by the throne of God. This is where God invented fish. Wherever, but then God's throne is as wide as the universe. If you're attentive you'll see the throne's borders in the stars. We're on this side and when you get to the other side we don't know what will happen if anything. If nothing happens we won't know it, I said once. Is that cynical? No, nothing is nothing, not upsetting just nothing. Then again maybe we'll be cast at the speed of light through the universe to God's throne. His hair is bounteous. All the 5,000 birds on earth were created there. The firstborn cranes, herons, hawks, at the back so as not to frighten the little ones. Even now they remember this divine habitat. Shall we gather at the river, this beautiful river? We'll sing with the warblers perched on his eyelashes.