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The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children. I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds and a dead child dragging his shattered black face off the edge of my sleep blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders is the only liquid for miles and my stomach churns at the imagined taste while my mouth splits into dry lips without loyalty or reason thirsting for the wetness of his blood as it sinks into the whiteness of the desert where I am lost without imagery or magic trying to make power out of hatred and destruction trying to heal my dying son with kisses only the sun will bleach his bones quicker. A policeman who shot down a ten year old in Queens stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood and a voice said “Die you little motherfucker” and there are tapes to prove it. At his trial this policeman said in his own defense “I didn't notice the size nor nothing else only the color”. And there are tapes to prove that, too. Today that 37 year old white man with 13 years of police forcing was set free by eleven white men who said they were satisfied justice had been done and one Black Woman who said “They convinced me” meaning they had dragged her 4'10'' black Woman's frame over the hot coals of four centuries of white male approval until she let go the first real power she ever had and lined her own womb with cement to make a graveyard for our children. I have not been able to touch the destruction within me. But unless I learn to use the difference between poetry and rhetoric my power too will run corrupt as poisonous mold or lie limp and useless as an unconnected wire and one day I will take my teenaged plug and connect it to the nearest socket raping an 85 year old white woman who is somebody's mother and as I beat her senseless and set a torch to her bed a greek chorus will be singing in 3/4 time “Poor thing. She never hurt a soul. What beasts they are.”

I Though I sing high, and chaunt above her, Praising my girl, It were not right To reckon her the poorer lover; She does not love me less For her royal, jewelled speechlessness, She is the sapphire, she the light, The music in the pearl. II Not from pert birds we learn the spring-tide From open sky. What speaks to us Closer than far distances that hide In woods, what is more dear Than a cherry-bough, bees feeding near In the soft, proffered blooms? Lo, I Am fed and honoured thus. III She has the star’s own pulse; its throbbing Is a quick light. She is a dove My soul draws to its breast; her sobbing Is for the warm dark there! In the heat of her wings I would not care My close-housed bird should take her flight To magnify our love.

The power of Armies is a visible thing, Formal and circumscribed in time and space; But who the limits of that power shall trace Which a brave People into light can bring Or hide, at will,—for freedom combating By just revenge inflamed? No foot may chase, No eye can follow, to a fatal place That power, that spirit, whether on the wing Like the strong wind, or sleeping like the wind Within its awful caves.—From year to year Springs this indigenous produce far and near; No craft this subtle element can bind, Rising like water from the soil, to find In every nook a lip that it may cheer.

I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall after an Indian woman puts her shoulder to the Grand Coulee Dam and topples it. I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall after the floodwaters burst each successive dam downriver from the Grand Coulee. I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall after the floodwaters find their way to the mouth of the Columbia River as it enters the Pacific and causes all of it to rise. I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall after the first drop of floodwater is swallowed by that salmon waiting in the Pacific. I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall after that salmon swims upstream, through the mouth of the Columbia and then past the flooded cities, broken dams and abandoned reactors of Hanford. I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall after that salmon swims through the mouth of the Spokane River as it meets the Columbia, then upstream, until it arrives in the shallows of a secret bay on the reservation where I wait alone. I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall after that salmon leaps into the night air above the water, throws a lightning bolt at the brush near my feet, and starts the fire which will lead all of the lost Indians home. I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall after we Indians have gathered around the fire with that salmon who has three stories it must tell before sunrise: one story will teach us how to pray; another story will make us laugh for hours; the third story will give us reason to dance. I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall when I am dancing with my tribe during the powwow at the end of the world.

I thought to write an elegy as  reply to your questions to pitch the word as far forward like a dolphin out of the sea over a threshold, to behold the land as practical and green as this table, a space to write and walk into like a kitchen hearing the conjuct vowels what does a reader suppose if not the promise of a text the ultimate form at the end of a chain of forms infinite summed to a singular value the elegy as a place to begin.

.            .             .          .            . Before the astronomer's table a circle with a demon inside demons with wings of a bat (Before the astronomer's table) overhead like an armada of ships .            .             .          .            . Time of the weed, time of bramble along the bank of a canal muddy with old newspaper close-held surface to write on to dance as with desire black letters where roads meet .            .             .          .            . Tonight in the city, only the chains make soft noises like bells only the dogs are awake the fences lean over to scrape their elbows on stone and broken glass

can go to Bible study every Sunday and swear she’s still not convinced, but she likes to be around people who are. We have the same conversation every few years—I’ll ask her if she stops to admire the perfect leaves of the Japanese maple she waters in her backyard, or tell her how I can gaze for hours at a desert sky and know this as divine. Nature, she says, doesn’t hold her interest. Not nearly as much as the greens, pinks, and grays of a Diebenkorn abstract, or the antique Tiffany lamp she finds in San Francisco. She spends hours with her vegetables, tasting the tomatoes she’s picked that morning or checking to see which radishes are big enough to pull. Lately everything she touches bears fruit, from new-green string beans to winning golf strokes, glamorous hats she designs and sews, soaring stocks with their multiplying shares. These are the things she can count in her hands, the tangibles to feed and pass on to daughters and grandchildren who can’t keep up with all the risky numbers she depends on, the blood-sugar counts and daily insulin injections, the monthly tests of precancerous cells in her liver and lungs. She’s a mathematical wonder with so many calculations kept alive in her head, adding and subtracting when everyone else is asleep.

I went to the city some days to learn my master's pleasure & laid fort at the farthest place where hedges are highest & terror of the obvious is a rosary of similitude Did you see some of the nudging? How did you feel about the nudging? Boats by water and wagons by land in active assistance in perpetuating fraudulent froth & hence with haste I've seen their mulchy tongues suck up every animate aim sweeping excess into piles the reserves and neocons administrators and representatives the preachers and deputies and yahoos and spodies In the evenings they come down from their operational sectors to kiss the children what terror is in them to keep the sugar boiling to restrain the wanderings as fragile and fictitious Did you see the tent on a stick? Did you see the architecture of gathering? I go to the city some days to gather what's left of scrubgrass There in the alley we converse Idris his love of fresh skim Ted his disdain for women their lack of banking Terrence and Will their concern for purity of pussy power precedes them sap-drenched & parceled across the land I go to the city some days I receive a letter Dear Comrades don't get it twisted never lick the hand that lashes you use beef when you run out of oakum

I want to write a love poem for the girls I kissed in seventh grade, a song for what we did on the floor in the basement of somebody’s parents’ house, a hymn for what we didn’t say but thought: That feels good or I like that, when we learned how to open each other’s mouths how to move our tongues to make somebody moan. We called it practicing, and one was the boy, and we paired off—maybe six or eight girls—and turned out the lights and kissed and kissed until we were stoned on kisses, and lifted our nightgowns or let the straps drop, and, Now you be the boy: concrete floor, sleeping bag or couch, playroom, game room, train room, laundry. Linda’s basement was like a boat with booths and portholes instead of windows. Gloria’s father had a bar downstairs with stools that spun, plush carpeting. We kissed each other’s throats. We sucked each other’s breasts, and we left marks, and never spoke of it upstairs outdoors, in daylight, not once. We did it, and it was practicing, and slept, sprawled so our legs still locked or crossed, a hand still lost in someone’s hair . . . and we grew up and hardly mentioned who the first kiss really was—a girl like us, still sticky with moisturizer we’d shared in the bathroom. I want to write a song for that thick silence in the dark, and the first pure thrill of unreluctant desire, just before we’d made ourselves stop.

When men are old, and their friends die, They are not so sad,