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When I brood on Germany in the night No hope for sleep. I know I'll lie Awake with my eyes wide open while Tears scald my cheeks. The years are a blur of past and future: A good twelve of them have passed since I last Laid eyes on my mother—which may be why I'm in such a frenzy to see her. And I am desperate with desire. I am under the old mutter's spell. She circles my mind like a ring of fire. I hope to god she is alive and well. She loves me to pieces, the old woman, And when in her letters her script breaks down, I know she's shaken to her depths, I know When the mother in her's shocked by her role. My mother never leaves my mental space Free of time past, the twelve long years, Twelve! —that vanished without a trace Since our last satisfying hug and kiss. Don't worry about Germany: it's the picture Of health. It will outlast us. All and all. I'll know its borders again by the flare Of its barbarous oaks and lime-trees' salute. I wouldn't waste a moment thinking on Germany were it not for my mother...; Fatherland-is-forever; but the old Woman, being mortal, may soon grow...cold. Since I left the country death has taken Many I loved. And now the unbreathing Impinge too much upon my sympathy. Numbering the dead does me in. And yet I feel compelled to count and each Body added to the tally has a say In how my mourning grows: hordes of corpses Crush my chest. What—relief—when they...give way. Praise the lord. And the lighter light of France That through this window breaks as my wife, well- Tempered, radiant as dawn, dispels My German burden with her lovely smile. after Heinrich Heine

I. I like to travel to L.A. by myself My trips to the crowded smoggy polluted by brown indigenous and immigrant haze are healing. I travel from one pollution to another. Being urban I return to where I came from My mother survives in L.A. Now for over forty years. I drive to L.A. in the darkness of the day on the road before CHP one with the dark driving my black truck invisible on my journey home. The dark roads take me back to my childhood riding in the camper of daddy’s truck headed home. My brother, sister and I would be put to sleep in the camper and sometime in the darkness of the day daddy would clime into the cab with mom carrying a thermos full of coffee and some Pendleton blankets And they would pray before daddy started the truck for journey mercies. Often I’d rise from my lullaby sleep and stare into the darkness of the road the long darkness empty of cars Glowy from daddy’s headlights and lonesome from Hank Williams’ deep and twangy voice singing of cold nights and cheatin’ hearts. About an hour from Flagstaff the sun would greet us and the harsh light would break the darkness and we’d be hungry from travel and for being almost home. II. I know the darkness of the roads endless into the glowy path before me lit by the moon high above and the heat rising from my truck’s engine. The humming from tires whisper mile after mile endless alongside roadside of fields shadowy from glow. I know the darkness of the roads It swims through my veins dark like my skin and silenced like a battered wife. I know the darkness of the roads It floods my liver pollutes my breath yet I still witness the white dawning.

You're dreaming of Cratoids, Armpullers, the Blownose Dragon. Who knows what Anna Brichtova dreamed about, the girl who comes looking for us tonight with her mosaic of colored paper: her house with its red roof, some trees on a green lawn, the sky—outside, the concentration camp. This is the real gift I brought back from Prague without telling you. It was with me on the train the morning I thought I was living in hell: Stuttgart, or south of there, amid a drone of people working—they don't know at what or for whom, but they're working, pressing keys, sending messages to unknown persons through the air. Nothing but eyes and fingers, nothing but one day after the next, interminable passage of a time that doesn't vary, that belongs forever to others, to something outside themselves, and the fear, the hatred of one pariah for another, this brawl of lost souls, of new slaves. The Great Drinker of Beer, the Woman Staring into Space, Mazinger Z: these were my traveling companions. Who knows what Anna Brichtova dreamed about, or what you're dreaming now, or how you children see the world. Will you find, among your games, the game that saves us? It's what we all are hoping as we watch you sleep.

Chico whines, no reason why. Just now walked, dinner gobbled, head and ears well scratched. And yet he whines, looking up at me as if confused at my just sitting here, typing away, while darkness is stalking the back yard. How can I be so blind, he wants to know, how sad, how tragic, how I won’t listen before it is too late. His whines are refugees from a brain where time and loss have small dominion, but where the tyranny of now is absolute. I get up and throw open the kitchen door, and he disappears down the cement steps, barking deeper and darker than I remember. I follow to find him perfectly still in the empty yard— the two of us in the twilight, standing guard.

Was it like lifting a veil And was the grass treacherous, the green grass Did you think of your own mother Was it like a virus Did the software flicker And was this the beginning Was it like that Was there gas station food and was it a long trip And is there sun there or drones or punishment or growth Was it a blackout And did you still create me And what was I like on the first day of my life Were we two from the start And was our time an entrance or an ending Did we stand in the heated room Did we look at the painting Did the snow appear cold Were our feet red with it, with the wet snow And then what were our names Did you love me or did I misunderstand Is it terrible Do you intend to come back Do you hear the world’s keening Will you stay the night

All summer, the city engine's low roar capsizes our bodies into sleep, groans, evacuation— Lost to a watery anamnesis so warm it requires a raft thatched from death's flotsam to necklace its shore I swim on, calling your name In my dreams, something is always deserting But tonight, no fast shadows of birds No oceanic flowers disrobing butterflies or bright beach of child's porridge and bones— Instead, someone weaving a net from fallen hair in and around our bed to catch the breath, blood, and ritual motions that oiled us as one candle in a cave In your dreams, someone is always resisting being saved My teethare on fire, you say I said Don't fly for the labyrinth, once I thought you were admonishing me to go away I don't remember most others, a thousand seasons phonographed in through a wounded window Everyone can't have a cactus Just o.k. empty all the rice from my legs

The nightingale, as soon as April bringeth Unto her rested sense a perfect waking, While late bare earth, proud of new clothing, springeth, Sings out her woes, a thorn her song-book making, And mournfully bewailing, Her throat in tunes expresseth What grief her breast oppresseth For Tereus’ force on her chaste will prevailing. O Philomela fair, O take some gladness, That here is juster cause of plaintful sadness: Thine earth now springs, mine fadeth; Thy thorn without, my thorn my heart invadeth. Alas, she hath no other cause of anguish But Tereus’ love, on her by strong hand wroken, Wherein she suffering, all her spirits languish; Full womanlike complains her will was broken. But I, who daily craving, Cannot have to content me, Have more cause to lament me, Since wanting is more woe than too much having. O Philomela fair, O take some gladness, That here is juster cause of plaintful sadness: Thine earth now springs, mine fadeth; Thy thorn without, my thorn my heart invadeth.

Your TV cable’s on the fritz. Your Xbox is corroded. Your iPod sits in useless bits. Your Game Boy just imploded. Your cell phone? Static’s off the scale. Your land line? Disconnected. You’ve got no mail—E, junk or snail. Your hard drive is infected. So here you idle, dumb and blue, with children, spouse and mother— and wish you knew what people do to entertain each other.

I place these numbed wrists to the pane watching white uniforms whisk over him in the tube-kept prison fear what they will do in experiment watch my gloved stickshifting gasolined hands breathe boxcar-information-please infirmary tubes distrusting white-pink mending paperthin silkened end hairs, distrusting tubes shrunk in his trunk-skincapped shaven head, in thighs distrusting-white-hands-picking-baboon-light on his son who will not make his second night of this wardstrewn intensive airpocket where his father's asthmatic hymns of night-train, train done gone his mother can only know that he has flown up into essential calm unseen corridor going boxscarred home,mamaborn, sweetsonchild gonedowntown into researchtestingwarehousebatteryacid mama-son-done-gone/me telling her 'nother train tonight, no music, no breathstroked heartbeat in my infinite distrust of them: and of my distrusting self white-doctor-who-breathed-for-him-all-night say it for two sons gone, say nightmare, say it loud panebreaking heartmadness: nightmare begins responsibility.

in my house. Days we’re ordinary, affectionate, a close, happy couple, but nights require a passport and serious immunizations, warnings about security and guerilla attacks. You are a foreign ruler, quite possibly benevolent in intention – but we know how these things always play out, don’t we? – with needs alien to and hostile to your citizenry, me, without power except to say, “No more,” and hope to survive the fallout from the battles in the streets. Days, we’re the peaceful, devoted pair all our friends envy. Nights are always tense around the DMZ that is our bed with occasional forays into the bush where the enemy is always lying in wait. Sleep is hard, fearful and troubled. I dream us going down in flames.