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This poem is not addressed to you. You may come into it briefly, But no one will find you here, no one. You will have changed before the poem will. Even while you sit there, unmovable, You have begun to vanish. And it does not matter. The poem will go on without you. It has the spurious glamor of certain voids. It is not sad, really, only empty. Once perhaps it was sad, no one knows why. It prefers to remember nothing. Nostalgias were peeled from it long ago. Your type of beauty has no place here. Night is the sky over this poem. It is too black for stars. And do not look for any illumination. You neither can nor should understand what it means. Listen, it comes without guitar, Neither in rags nor any purple fashion. And there is nothing in it to comfort you. Close your eyes, yawn. It will be over soon. You will forget the poem, but not before It has forgotten you. And it does not matter. It has been most beautiful in its erasures. O bleached mirrors! Oceans of the drowned! Nor is one silence equal to another. And it does not matter what you think. This poem is not addressed to you.

You have changed me already. I am a fireball That is hurtling towards the sky to where you are You can choose not to look up but I am a giant orange ball That is throwing sparks upon your face Oh look at them shake Upon you like a great planet that has been murdered by change O too this is so dramatic this shaking Of my great planet that is bigger than you thought it would be So you ran and hid Under a large tree. She was graceful, I think That tree although soon she will wither Into ten black snakes upon your throat And when she does I will be wandering as I always am A graceful lady that is part museum Of the voices of the universe everyone else forgets I will hold your voice in a little box And when you come upon me I won’t look back at you You will feel a hand upon your heart while I place your voice back Into the heart from where it came from And I will not cry also Although you will expect me to I was wiser too than you had expected For I knew all along you were mine

—after Steve Scafidi The way the universe sat waiting to become, quietly, in the nether of space and time, you too remain some cellular snuggle dangling between my legs, curled in the warm swim of my mostly quietest self. If you come to be— And who knows?—I wonder, little bubble of unbudded capillaries, little one ever aswirl in my vascular galaxies, what would you think of this world which turns itself steadily into an oblivion that hurts, and hurts bad? Would you curse me my careless caressing you into this world or would you rise up and, mustering all your strength into that tiny throat which one day, no doubt, would grow big and strong, scream and scream and scream until you break the back of one injustice, or at least get to your knees to kiss back to life some roadkill? I have so many questions for you, for you are closer to me than anyone has ever been, tumbling, as you are, this second, through my heart’s every chamber, your teeny mouth singing along with the half-broke workhorse’s steady boom and gasp. And since we’re talking today I should tell you, though I know you sneak a peek sometimes through your father’s eyes, it’s a glorious day, and there are millions of leaves collecting against the curbs, and they’re the most delicate shade of gold we’ve ever seen and must favor the transparent wings of the angels you’re swimming with, little angel. And as to your mother—well, I don’t know— but my guess is that lilac bursts from her throat and she is both honeybee and wasp and some kind of moan to boot and probably she dances in the morning— but who knows? You’ll swim beneath that bridge if it comes. For now let me tell you about the bush called honeysuckle that the sad call a weed, and how you could push your little sun-licked face into the throngs and breathe and breathe. Sweetness would be your name, and you would wonder why four of your teeth are so sharp, and the tiny mountain range of your knuckles so hard. And you would throw back your head and open your mouth at the cows lowing their human songs in the field, and the pigs swimming in shit and clover, and everything on this earth, little dreamer, little dreamer of the new world, holy, every rain drop and sand grain and blade of grass worthy of gasp and joy and love, tiny shaman, tiny blood thrust, tiny trillion cells trilling and trilling, little dreamer, little hard hat, little heartbeat, little best of me.

Detroit – where the weak are killed and eaten. – T-shirt slogan, circa 1990 . . . the 33 year old woman . . . leapt to her death . . . from a crowded bridge that . . . connects Detroit . . . with its famous island park, Belle Isle. She was trying to escape the 300-pound man whose car she had accidentally bumped into. According to police, the man had smashed her car windows with a tire iron, dragged her from the vehicle – stripping off most of her clothes in the process – slammed her against the hood of her car and pounded her with his fists. Deletha Word . . . could not swim . . . She jumped into the water 40 feet below. – James Ricci , Los Angeles Times [August 31, 1995] The road to the afterlife – There was . . . a river that had only one bridge across it . . . This bridge was guarded by a dog that jumped at souls and made many of them fall into the river and drown. – Bruce G. Trigger , The Huron: Farmers of the North Not really a river at all, but a handshake between two Great Lakes, Huron stretching to embrace Erie in its green-gray grasp. You stitch the liquid boundary of a city dismantling itself, bricks unmortared, spires sagging, burnt out structures razed to open field. Prairies returning here, foxtails and chicory, Queen Anne’s lace sways; tumbleweeds amble down Woodward Avenue, blow past fire hydrants, storefronts and rusted Cadillacs. You are the mirror into which we plunge. Towers of a stillborn renaissance bend to admire their vacant beauty; automobiles built in Mexico catch the chrome reflection of your waves. They speed across the bridge to the island whose willows spill their tears against your breast. Darkness closes our eyes; the park empties, bridge bears a chain of headlights. Perfume of exhaust drifts over your blackened currents; cars jostle for their place in line. Not the fist of one man but the sucker punch of a city taking scrappy pride in its bruised countenance. One bumper kisses another like gunshot; the town explodes. You swallow the blood of a woman’s shattered cheekbone, pressed to metal hood, scorched by engine’s heat.Who wanna buy some of dis bitch – she got to pay fo’ my car.

For Etan Patz The parents whose boy went off to school that morning — the police may have found someone who saw their son, alive, after they saw him for the last time.Step away! Someone who saw that elfin face change, at the word “soda.”Step back! And change again, and change. And down the basement steps, down into the earth, the stairs down into the underworld. Don’t go there. Close your eyes. Someone may know the unbearable — someone in custody. O, “custody.” A wall of dirt, a wall of stone, a bare bulb, like the uterus upside down. No Kaddish, no washing of the dead, no linen shroud, no company through the long night. Whatever honor can be kept for him — his pure and whole honor is kept by his parents, for the rest of the hard labor of their lives. All this time, they could not die, so they’d be here, in case he came back.Unspeakable. And now, the one taken in for questioning cries out, “I don’t know why, I don’t know why.” He will not tell. Is he holding that hour to himself. Did he hold that child in his hands, 39 years ago. Vanished. The spirit mattered away. And the dear matter —don’t. The bag, the truck. The landfill or the barge, the burial at sea — the dispersal, the containment within the bounds of the oceans, crested on top and cragged at the floor where the innards of the planet pour up, molten, through fissures — contained in the air bound by the atmosphere, the clouds of mourning pressing against the inner surface of the casing.Shut your mouth. Put down your pen. Drop your weapon! Stop! In the name of the law and the prophets.

"At pet stores in Detroit, you can buy frozen rats for seventy-five cents apiece, to feed your pet boa constrictor" back home in Grosse Pointe, or in Grosse Pointe Park, while the free nation of rats in Detroit emerges from alleys behind pet shops, from cellars and junked cars, and gathers to flow at twilight like a river the color of pavement, and crawls over bedrooms and groceries and through broken school windows to eat the crayon from drawings of rats— and no one in Detroit understands how rats are delicious in Dearborn. If only we could communicate, if only the boa constrictors of Southfield would slither down I-94, turn north on the Lodge Expressway, and head for Eighth Street, to eat out for a change. Instead, tomorrow, a man from Birmingham enters a pet shop in Detroit to buy a frozen German shepherd for six dollars and fifty cents to feed his pet cheetah, guarding the compound at home. Oh, they arrive all day, in their locked cars, buying schoolyards, bridges, buses, churches, and Ethnic Festivals; they buy a frozen Texaco station for eighty-four dollars and fifty cents to feed to an imported London taxi in Huntington Woods; they buy Tiger Stadium, frozen, to feed to the Little League in Grosse Ile. They bring everything home, frozen solid as pig iron, to the six-car garages of Harper Woods, Grosse Pointe Woods, Farmington, Grosse Pointe Farms, Troy, and Grosse Arbor— and they ingest everything, and fall asleep, and lie coiled in the sun, while the city thaws in the stomach and slides to the small intestine, where enzymes break down molecules of protein to amino acids, which enter the cold bloodstream.

Inside the brand-new museum there’s an old synagogue. Inside the synagogue is me. Inside me my heart. Inside my heart a museum. Inside the museum a synagogue, inside it me, inside me my heart, inside my heart a museum

A photograph on the back of a hand mirror resembles someone you knew who sang themselves utterly away. It cannot touch you or the sound of the rapids. Leave it, and walk farther crawling up my leg to find me all smiles attached to nothing. You and I can stay in the morning dew. My little telephone in the mulberry fields going unanswered on that blade of grass.

The sound of the water jar empties in the open graves where the refugees live. Because it does not touch me near my pillow I can sleep and dream of  the clean lines of  summer. What I thought were faces turn out to be elaborate plates of sweets not this human sadness. One or two inches above my head until the mosquito sticks his snout into my dream.

How long and thin she seems today a field of mustard smiling up at the sun it draws her eyebrows together in a little pain I don’t think I ever saw calligraphy of geese like this overseas oaks and pines pretending to be asleep not quite dark yet as it is at home poor people, midnight