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She is girl. She is gravel. She is grabbed. She is grabbed like handfuls of gravel. Gravel grated by water. Her village is full of gravel fields. It is 1950. She is girl. She is grabbed. She is not my grandmother, though my grandmother is girl. My grandmother’s father closes the gates. Against American soldiers, though they jump over stone walls. To a girl who is not my grandmother. The girl is gravel grabbed. Her language is gravel because it means nothing. Hands full of girl. Fields full of gravel. Korea is gravel and graves. Girl is girl and she will never be a grandmother. She will be girl, girl is gravel and history will skip her like stone over water. Oh girl, oh glory. Girl.

There was a man. A Japanese soldier. One that did not believe in old superstitions. One that did not believe in sex before battle as charm against harm. He was an odd man. One that did not carry an amulet with pubic hair of a comfort woman. Or any piece of her. His comrades said,Be a man. The equation is, an odd man out is not man. There is no reason for logic in war. There is no reason. There was a man. His comrades said,Come raid, come pillage. Pushed him into the station. Their eyes on the holes in the wall. Watched as he came. Became. What is the equation here. There is a no equation. There was a man. One who said weeping,I am not a man, I am not a man.

Which are the magic moments in ordinary time? All of them, for those who can see. That is what redemption means, I decide at the meeting. Then walk with David wearing his new Yale T-shirt and new long hair to 103. Leonard and Eileen come, too. Leonard wears a shark’s tooth on a chain around his neck and long blond hair. These days he’s the manager of Boots and Saddles (“Bras and Girdles,” my beloved Bobby used to say) and costumer for the Gay Cable Network’s Dating Game. One week the announcer is a rhinestone cowboy, sequin shirt and black fur chaps, the next a leatherman, etc. Eileen’s crewcut makes her face light up. Underneath our hairstyles, 23 years of sobriety, all told— the age of a girl who’s “not so young but not so very old,” wrote Berryman, who flew from his recovery with the force of a poet hitting bottom. It’s not the way I choose to go out of this restaurant or day today, and I have a choice. Wanda the comedian comes over to our table. “Call me wicked Wanda,” she smirks when we’re introduced. Why is New York City awash in stand-up comics at the least funny point in its history? Still, some things stay the same. People wonder what the people in their buildings would think if the ones who were wondering became incredibly famous, as famous as Madonna. Debby Harry lived in Eileen’s building in the Village in the early seventies, and she was just the shy girl in the band upstairs. Poets read the writing of their friends, and are happy when they like it thoroughly, when the work’s that good and the crippling sense of competition stays away. Trips get planned: David home to California, Eileen to New Mexico, Chris and I to France and Spain, on vectors which will spread out from a single point, like ribs of an umbrella. Then after the comfort of a wedge of blueberry peach pie and cup of Decaf, sober friends thread separate ways home through the maze of blankets on the sidewalk covered with the scraps of someone else’s life. Mine consists of understanding that the magic isn’t something that I make, but something that shines through the things I make and do and say the way a brooch or scrap of fabric shines from the detritus to catch Leonard’s eye and be of use for costumes, when I am fearless and thorough enough to give it room, all the room there is in ordinary time, which embraces all the people and events and hopes that choke the street tonight and still leaves room for everyone and everything and every other place, the undescribed and indescribable, more various and cacophonous than voice can tell or mind conceive, and for the sky’s vast depths from which they’re all a speck of light.

When we first moved here, pulled the trees in around us, curled our backs to the wind, no one had ever hit the moon—no one. Now our trees are safer than the stars, and only other people's neglect is our precious and abiding shell, pierced by meteors, radar, and the telephone. From our snug place we shout religiously for attention, in order to hide: only silence or evasion will bring dangerous notice, the hovering hawk of the state, or the sudden quiet stare and fatal estimate of an alerted neighbor. This message we smuggle out in its plain cover, to be opened quietly: Friends everywhere— we are alive! Those moon rockets have missed millions of secret places! Best wishes. Burn this.

For my great aunt & Jonathan Hicks my first venture west was in Windows 98 or Independence, Missouri. class in the computer lab & we were supposed to be playing some typing game or another. the one i remember had a haunted theme. ghosts instructing us on the finer points of where to put our fingers. these were the last days before keyboards as appendage, when typing was not nature. i should’ve been letting an apparition coach me through QWERTY but rather i was at the general store deciding between ammo & axles, considering the merits of being a banker or carpenter. too young to know what profession would get me to the Willamette Valley in the space of a 40-minute period. i aimed my rifle with the arrow keys, tapped the space bar with a prayer for meat to haul back to the wagon. this game came difficult as breathing underwater after trying to ford a river. i was no good at survival. somebody always fell ill or out into the river. each new day scurvy or a raid was the fate of a character named for my crush or my baby sister. this loss i know, how to measure what it means to die premature before a school period ends. i can’t understand the game coming to a late end. an elderly daughter grieving her elderly mother. reading the expansive obit in a suburban Detroit church is a confusing newness. when the old do the thing the world expects i retreat into my former self. focus on beating video games I’ve always sucked at, brush up on Chicago Bulls history, re-memorize the Backstreet Boys catalog, push away whatever woman is foolhardy enough to be on any road with me. i pioneer my way away from all the known world. i look at homicide rates & wish we all expired the way i know best. i pray for a senseless, poetic departure. i pray for my family to not be around to miss me while i’m still here. i want a short obituary, a life brief & unfulfilled, the introductory melody before a beat’s crescendo into song, the game over somewhere in the Great Plains. i want to spare my descendants the confusion of watching a flame flicker slow. keep them from being at a funeral thumbing the faded family pictures like worn keys, observing the journey done, the game won, the west conquered.

To my friends Each hair is a poem I gave my son Each hair is my allowance from the universe Each hair is a sunspot on someone's broken heart The secrets that emerge from the psyche have no floor They will get off on any floor when you least expect them to They wear shadows that look like my mother She could stop God but could not make it snow She said the weather was a work of art Like the last streak of wonder In Medea's heart You don't have to watch human Sacrifice on television Shut your window Lock the door Wait for yourself In the corner In the night In the little house That holds your tears There is no piano Just your green velvet And the years you spent in Russia As a little box in your mother's womb With all her curses and her dreams of men When I write poetry I hear voices: KennethKoch rubbing his forehead DavidShapiro swatting words FrankOHara blowing his noise PhilipBryant smiling upon me Neruda drinking red wine Lorca hailing a cab in New York Vallejo walking in Paris RonPadgett calming the world TedBerrigan dignifying wise-guy poetry JoeCeravolo on the radio with Melanoma in the milky sky Are you asleep? No Chopin is asleep on our new sofa He is wasting his life away His health looks like a dirty window His heart has a broken leg His breathing will go to the grave with him I'm not one to part I'm not one to hide my feelings I'm the end of the corridor in your hands This is a song of war Because love is music And its ferocious notes Are oars that pull us apart Death is incredible It is man made We change the names of the dead When we bury them In time they look back at us And see us The living Like old doors in the wind In the beginning there were small islands Floating on poetry These islands belonged to Joe Ceravolo Joe's words are the body parts of poetry Like the little children of the fireflies Who set songs on fire when we cry There is work to do on top of the forest There are too many words on top of the forest They are obscuring our conversation If the trees aren't pruned our words will never reach Their destination: The telephones that hate love And protect the dead from living Will my daughter dress like Venus Wrapped in exaggerated hopes? Will the pill invent love for her? Will her life take place on a Mental and spiritual planet? Yes No My daughter is a seed full of steam Leaving me behind like a bad marriage Helen Helen My Helen of Troy Once I placed a kiss on a spider's web Because there is no evil in nature The spider laughed Now the kiss is as free as an insect And the better part of our love My other marriages were like the four seasons That come and go They have left me small stones That spend their nights on the balcony of life Watching Pathos and Comedy celebrate their wedding Tonight I will write poetry I will pile the world on my pillow Like a paramilitary sous chef Toss an avalanche of flowers With sunlight and olive oil. (David Shapiro) 4.25.94

Through darkness they came, covered in ash, scarred by depths and distance, they bore salt and fire, breath steaming at edges of decks, hands clutching railings, their bodies dizzied by the lurching vessel, trunks pulled by hand,Where are you from? I unwrapped my legacy from cloth, the marble Buddha from my grandfather, ancient as the sea-stained covers of his sutras, the briny odor of carp centuries old.What are you? Not only where they were from but who they were and would become. His strange past and the mystery of my own face,American? this question flawed as we all appeared, my grandfather's birthplace the half of me I lightened, bleaching my black hair to reach my girlfriend Amber's blonde. In her candlelit room, I touched the mission photo of her rubbing ointment on the burns of a hibakusha. Where are water-filled troughs and the horses' manes my grandfather combed. The hay he bundled in twine,you from? Could he have smoothed names engraved in granite, the scars on the woman's skin, targets raised on maps? In a light blast What are a city of nips was erased,you? A blank scape,Go back no trace of his childhood farm in Hiroshima,to where I turned away from the chalkboard scrawled with Enola Gay,you are a button pushed, from a bomb dropped, at Amber's picnic they bowed over grace, and I looked up, didn't say Amen. Everything rises when the ground's skin is broken.

Powder rises from a compact, platters full of peppermints, a bowl of sour pudding. A cup of milk before me tastes of melted almonds. It is the story of the eve of my beginning. Gifts for me: boxes of poppies, pocket knife, an elaborate necklace made of ladybugs. My skirt rushing north There is something round and toothless about my dolls. They have no faith. Their mouths, young muscle to cut me down. Their pupils, miniature bruises. I hear the cries of horses, long faces famished, the night the barn burned. God and ashes everywhere. Burnt pennies, I loved them, I could not catch them in their copper rolling. My mother's cigarette burns amber in a crystal glass. I am in bed imagining great infernos. Ashes skimming my deep lake. The night the animals burned, I kissed the servant with the salty lips. There was a spectacular explosion, a sound that severed the nerves, I was kind to that shaking. The horses, the smell of them, like wet leaves, broken skin. Laughing against a wall, my hair sweeps the windowsill, thighs show themselves. First came my body, my statue's back, then hair electric, matches falling everywhere. Tucked in my pink canopy, I am plastic, worn cheeks grinning. I found my little ones hiding from me, crying into their sleeves. They are really from a breeze, momentarily, white. When we unburied the dolls, red ants were a fantasy feeding on them, nest of veins, shrunken salted corpses. There is mythology planted in my mouth which is like sin. Keep fires inside yourself. My mother once said,When you were a baby, I let you swim in a basin of water until your lungs stopped

Stellar dust has settled. It is green underwater now in the leaves Of the yellow crowfoot. Its vacancies are gathered together Under pine litter as emerging flower of the pink arbutus. It has gained the power to make itself again In the bone-filled egg of osprey and teal. One could say this toothpick grasshopper Is a cloud of decayed nebula congealed and perching On his female mating. The tortoise beetle, Leaving the stripped veins of morning glory vines Like licked bones, is a straw-colored swirl Of clever gases. At this moment there are dead stars seeing Themselves as marsh and forest in the eyes Of muskrat and shrew, disintegrated suns Making songs all night long in the throats Of crawfish frogs, in the rubbings and gratings Of the red-legged locust. There are spirits of orbiting Rock in the shells of pointed winkles And apple snails, ghosts of extinct comets caught In the leap of darting hare and bobcat, revolutions Of rushing stone contained in the sound of these words. The paths of the Pleiades and Coma clusters Have been compelled to mathematics by the mind Contemplating the nature of itself In the motions of stars. The patterns Of any starry summer night might be identical To the summer heavens circling inside the skull. I can feel time speeding now in all directions Deeper and deeper into the black oblivion Of the electrons directly behind my eyes. Flesh of the sky, child of the sky, the mind Has been obligated from the beginning To create an ordered universe As the only possible proof of its own inheritance.

In ancient Greece, for all her heroes, for Medea    ...    water meant death. — Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones i poured a bowl of cereal, threw the empty box in the trash can. granddaddy pulled the box from the trash, poured the crumbs into a bowl, then doused the sand in milk. he looked down at the bowl, murmuring about how he had survived the depression. told a story about asking for hot water at colored diners, how he would pour ketchup in cups to make soup. this was how i first learned i am wasteful. • i would stand in the bathroom with my mother. would ask her why the water in the bowl was red. she would tell me she had eaten beets. i suppose i was too young to learn the truth, milkflowers spill petals red. • in my catholic school of fish, we took a beautifully wrapped box, passed it around the class, unwrapping it piece by piece. afterwards it was cleverly explained that the box is a girl’s virginity the gift we give our husbands. & who wants a toy that has already been opened? half the joy is in untying the string. this is how i was taught that at my very core, i am ungrateful. • i met someone recently, in an irish bar, who told me it’s about knowing what i need. he said later what you need is a wife