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An apple tree bent double with fruit grew in the middle of the living room shaking gently as the average family pootled by with plates or devices in their hands The room was almost all tree everyone edged round it Curiously no one picked a single apple nor did the ripe fruit ever fall The full tree stood there a daemon to behold Who lives in that house now I can’t tell you My childhood lives on there and my parent shadows and all my days and nights that will never bear fruit The apple tree I speak of roots itself partly in truth and partly in lies Those roots are splinters of the true cross They alone know why miracles are best avoided

I really fucked up. My E-flat key was loose. I only got a few hours of sleep the night before because Robyn and I were on the phone. They gave me the wrong repertoire list. How was I to know that high altitude affects clarinet reeds? I ran out of beta blockers. I forgot to bring a water bottle. I was worried that they’d hire that asshole who they don’t like because he threatened to blackball them at the union meeting. The acoustics were terrible. The second violinist used a new rosin and that threw her off, which unnerved me. My tinnitus roared the whole time. Robyn auditioned right before me. Just as I blew the first note, it dawned on me that Robyn might be sleeping with the conductor. Someone backstage slammed a door and I had to start all over again. The concertmaster doesn’t know a trumpet from a trombone, but since he’s powerful in a certain tiny corner of the music world everyone feels forced to curry favor with him. I forgot to eat. The audition committee talked the whole time. A clang in the heating system was near deafening. My carpal tunnel flared up. My neck twinges flared up. My arthritis flared up. I only got a few hours of sleep. I would have won the last competition, except that the concertmaster’s student was appointed with no audition, so I kept wondering if the same thing would happen again. I forgot I wasn’t playing the flute. I only got a few hours of sleep because Robyn and I were on the phone all night and decided to end our marriage. I really fucked up.

I play the egg and I play the triangle I play the reed and I play each angle I play the lyre and I play the lute I play the snare and I play the flute I play the licorice stick and I play the juke I play the kettle and I play the uke who ever thought of the triangle who ever thought of the clarinet the castanets the cornet the discotheque the harmonium the euphonium marimbas and maracas harmonicas tom-toms and tatas I play the fiddle and I play the jug I play the washboard and the washtub I play kalimba and I play the koto I play the organ and I play the banjo I play the fool I play it cool I play hot and I play pranks I played your mixtape forgot to say thanks

In one version you must convince every living thing one by one to weep until he climbs back into the marriage-house, that earth about which it is said that bread is the glue of the earth. Certainly glue is money, the phrase “the tears of things” is money, the revelation of the Woman Clothed in the Sun is money. The lake is a disc of bright money buying a few plain birds down, they climb back nervously as you hurry through, plain birds like a plain song, that moment when four or five are around your knees like Zeno’s arrow, rising by halves, like Eurydice’s bread, & still the possibility they might intersect, you would be the one who was struck by a flying bird, somewhere between a blesséd fool & village idiot, the only one to persist outside the local economy, drooling at travelers, holding yourself, slinging incomprehensible advice, you would learn the trick with museum wire where you snap the heads off quiet animals in front of the store, tempted equally by science & dirty work. . . . I am trying to invent a way for you to buy me back—

A narrow girl sells purses made of reed. Dead rabbits hang by feet, their red eyes dull, while chickens crammed in cages peck their seed. A vessel in Juan’s brain begins to bleed, spreading into the fissures of his skull. A narrow girl sells purses made of reed. The madams in the district underfeed hookers they line up for a spectacle while chickens crammed in cages peck their seed. A vendor buys his wares, then smokes some weed; he seldom deems police an obstacle. A narrow girl sells purses made of reed. Redeemers tend the poor, avoiding greed and never gesture for a miracle while chickens crammed in cages peck their seed. This is the life they know and that they need, the common life that no one can annul. A narrow girl sells purses made of reed while chickens crammed in cages peck their seed.

Jesus did not ride that monstrous wave, not Yahweh, Jah, Allah, none of the major Gods or the minor ones, not even the godless strode that bugger which sliced our lives in two: the past where we danced ballroom while the children played carom, and mangos stained our lapels, and today, hobbling, scavenging in ash heaps, how easy the arithmetic, day and night, two by two. Bring on the mind workers. Let a thousand doctors bloom. I lived right here on the x, my name is blue: sea green blue blue green I do not speak in tongues. I am not disordered, a babbler. I did not lose anybody close to me, just 30,000 fellow island bees, not to worry,machan, old fellow, I will subscribe tomorrow, the order of every day, skip and jump rope, whistle, talk to aid workers, even swim.

Ancients threw the masks down the cenote— the faces smashed first in little ways before the long drop, an eye or an ear broken, a mouth snapped in half. Then, lifted from the well, two thousand years later, still grinning and golden. The loose spooling of two people fast unravels—how we let go of time spent, how heat fades, how a body forgets fully what it knew. I have learned your face as you will never. The third day we met you gave me all your secrets until I held an ocean in a cradle. Now all I ask for is more.

Good sisters mine, when I shall further from you dwell, Peruse these lines, observe the rules which in the same I tell. So shall you wealth possess, and quietness of mind: And all your friends to see the same, a treble joy shall find. In mornings when you rise, forget not to commend Your selves to God, beseeching him from dangers to defend Your souls and bodies both, your parents and your friends, Your teachers and your governers. So pray you that your ends May be in such a sort as God may pleasèd be: To live to die, to die to live, with him eternally. Then justly do such deeds as are to you assigned: All wanton toys, good sisters now, exile out of your mind. I hope you give no cause whereby I should suspect, But this I know, too many live that would you soon infect. If God do not prevent, or with his grace expell, I cannot speak, or write too much, because I love you well. Your business soon dispatch and listen to no lies, Nor credit every fained tale, that many will devise. For words they are but wind, yet words may hurt you so, As you shall never brook the same, if that you have a foe. God shield you from all such as would by word or bill Procure your shame, or never cease till they have wrought you ill. See that you secrets seal, tread trifles under ground: If to rehearsal oft you come, it will your quiet wound. Of laughter be not much, nor over solemn seem, For then be sure they'll compt you light or proud will you exteem. Be modest in a mean, be gentle unto all: Though cause they give of contrary yet be to wrath no thrall. Refer you all to him, that sits above the skies: Vengeance is his, he will revenge, you need it not devise. And sith that virtue guides, where both of you do dwell: Give thanks to God, and painful be to please your rulers well. For fleeting is a foe, experience hath me taught: The rolling stone doth get no moss your selves have heard full oft. Your business being done, and this my scroll perused, The day will end, and that the night by you be not abused. I something needs must write: take pains to read the same. Henceforth my life as well as pen shall your examples frame. Your Masters gone to bed, your Mistresses at rest, Their daughters all with haste about to get themselves undrest. See that their plate be safe, and that no spoon do lack, See doors and windows bolted fast for fear of any wrack. Then help if need there be, to do some household thing: If not, to bed, referring you unto the heavenly King. Forgetting not to pray as I before you taught, And giving thanks for all that he hath ever for you wrought. Good Sisters, when you pray, let me remembered be: So will I you, and thus I cease, till I your selves do see.

One spring night, at the end of my street God was lying in wait. A friend and I were sitting in his new sedan like a couple of cops on surveillance, shooting the breeze to pass the time, chatting up the daydreams, the raw deals, all the wouda-coulda-shoulda’s, the latest “Can you believe that?” As well as the little strokes of luck, the so-called triumphs, small and unforeseen, that kept us from cashing it all in. And God, who’s famous for working in mysterious ways and capable of anything, took the form of a woman and a man, each dressed in dark clothes and desperate enough to walk up to the car and open the doors. And God put a gun to the head of my friend— right against the brain stem, where the orders go out not only to the heart and the lungs but to consciousness itself—a cold muzzle aimed at where the oldest urges still have their day: the one that says eat whatever’s at hand, the one that wants only to fuck, the one that will kill if it has to… And God said not to look at him or he’d blow us straight to kingdom come, and God told us to keep our hands to ourselves, as if she weren’t that kind of girl. Suddenly time was nothing, our lives were cheap, the light in the car cold, light from a hospital, light from a morgue. And the moments that followed—if that’s what they were— arrived with a nearly unbearable weight, until we had acquired a center of gravity as great as the planet itself. My friend could hardly speak— he was too busy trying not to die— which made me chatter all the more, as if words, even the most ordinary ones, had the power to return us to our lives. And behind my ad-libbed incantation, my counterspell to fear, the orders still went out: keep beating, keep breathing, you are not permitted to disappear, even as one half of God kept bitching to the other half that we didn’t have hardly no money at all, and the other half barked, “I’m telling you to shut your mouth!” and went on rummaging through the back seat. And no one at all looking out their window, no one coming home or going out… Until two tall neighbors came walking toward us like unsuspecting saviors…  And God grabbed the little we’d been given, the little we still had, and hustled on to the next dark street.

the trapdoor is closed; am finite again, but a moment ago—levitation! purple lights the bluewater bridge turned on the oil- black river st clair became fuel for the nightfishers there it was the dream of a memory or the memory of a dream that dumped me below a window, watching a woman change into a man. she entered his dairy log:at first all the world was america and didn’t that suck, he thunk, and strunk his cunk against an overwrought iron fence. they stood waiting like that photograph of the bootblack jack and the aristocrat looking away from her window at a fact well worth recording—Alexander Graham Bell wanted to call his daughter Photophone. between the forest and the gander i hand her over to Metacomet. yes i certainly did. and King Philip sayeth unto me: nature denatured thee friction alone makes her come therefore i need some more before you make me wear’um pants. O failed invention! where’d you get that voice? refusing to come to a particular point, castration finally made sense.