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Not for that city of the level sun, Its golden streets and glittering gates ablaze— The shadeless, sleepless city of white days, White nights, or nights and days that are as one— We weary, when all is said , all thought, all done. We strain our eyes beyond this dusk to see What, from the threshold of eternity We shall step into. No, I think we shun The splendour of that everlasting glare, The clamour of that never-ending song. And if for anything we greatly long, It is for some remote and quiet stair Which winds to silence and a space for sleep Too sound for waking and for dreams too deep.

Because a little reprieve, a little hope (even for those whom I love) would exculpate the world of  its actions, I hold to logic steadfast. Belief, without knowledge, dislodges perception of all the empirical world — (even for you, mom and dad). Know that if, for you, on some filthy lie I could wish for the mind’s persistence after death, I would say no.

I love the way the black ants use their dead. They carry them off like warriors on their steel backs. They spend hours struggling, lifting, dragging (it is not grisly as it would be for us, to carry them back to be eaten), so that every part will be of service. I think of my husband at his father’s grave— the grass had closed over the headstone, and the name had disappeared. He took out his pocket knife and cut the grass away, he swept it with his handkerchief to make it clear. “Is this the way we’ll be forgotten?” And he bent down over the grave and wept.

The days are dog-eared, the edges torn, ragged—like those pages I ripped once out of library books, for their photos of Vallejo and bootless Robert Johnson. A fine needs paying now it’s true, but not by me. I am no more guilty than that thrush is who sits there stripping moss off the wet bark of a tree. A red fleck, like his, glows at the back of my head—a beauty mark, left by the brain’s after-jets. I would not wish for the three brains Robert required to double-clutch his guitar and chase those sounds he had to know led down and into a troubled dusky river, always. Three brains did Johnson no earthly good, neither his nor Vallejo’s 4 & 1/2 worked right exactly—O bunglers, O banged-up pans of disaster! Crying for days, said Cesar, & singing for months. How can I be so strong some times, at others weak? I wish to be free, but free to do what? To leave myself behind? To switch channels remotely? Better to sing. Not like the bird, but as they sang, Cesar & Robert— with the shocked & seeded sweetness of an apple split open by a meat cleaver.

Searching for pillowcases trimmed with lace that my mother-in-law once made, I open the chest of drawers upstairs to find that mice have chewed the blue and white linen dishtowels to make their nest, and bedded themselves among embroidered dresser scarves and fingertip towels. Tufts of fibers, droppings like black caraway seeds, and the stains of birth and afterbirth give off the strong unforgettable attar of mouse that permeates an old farmhouse on humid summer days. A couple of hickory nuts roll around as I lift out the linens, while a hail of black sunflower shells falls on the pillowcases, yellow with age, but intact. I’ll bleach them and hang them in the sun to dry. There’s almost no one left who knows how to crochet lace.... The bright-eyed squatters are not here. They’ve scuttled out to the fields for summer, as they scuttled in for winter—along the wall, from chair to skirted chair, making themselves flat and scarce while the cat dozed with her paws in the air, and we read the mail or evening paper, unaware.

At the earliest ending of winter, In March, a scrawny cry from outside Seemed like a sound in his mind. He knew that he heard it, A bird’s cry, at daylight or before, In the early March wind. The sun was rising at six, No longer a battered panache above snow . . . It would have been outside. It was not from the vast ventriloquism Of sleep’s faded papier-mâché . . . The sun was coming from outside. That scrawny cry—it was A chorister whose c preceded the choir. It was part of the colossal sun, Surrounded by its choral rings, Still far away. It was like A new knowledge of reality.

A river killed a man I loved, And I love that river still —María Meléndez 1. Thousands of fish killed after Pemex spill in el Río Salado and everyone runs out to buy more bottled water. Here, our river kills more crossers than the sun, than the singular heat of Arizona, than the ranchlands near the Falfurrias checkpoint. It's hard to imagine an endangered river with that much water, especially in summer and with the Falcon Reservoir in drought, though it only takes inches to drown. Sometimes, further west, there's too little river to paddle in Boquillas Canyon where there are no steel-column walls except the limestone canyon's drop and where a puma might push-wade across, or in El Paso, where double-fenced muros sparkle and blind with bullfight ring lights, the ring the concrete river mold, and above a Juárez mountain urges La Biblia es La Verdad—Leela. 2. Today at the vigil, the native singer said we are all connected by water, la sangre de vida. Today, our vigil signs proclaimed McAllen is not Murrieta. #iamborderless. Derechos Inmigrantes=Derechos Humanos. Bienvenidos niños. We stand with refugee children. We are all human. Bienvenidos a los Estados Unidos. And the songs we sang the copal that burned and the rose petals spread en los cuatro puntos were for the children and women and men. Songs for the Guatemalan boy with an Elvis belt buckle and Angry Birds jeans with zippers on back pockets who was found shirtless in La Joya, one mile from the river. The worn jeans that helped identify his body in the news more times than a photo of him while alive. (I never knew why the birds are angry. My mother said someone stole their eggs.) The Tejas sun took a boy I do not know, a young man who wanted to reach Chicago, his brother's number etched in his belt, his mother's pleas not to leave in white rosary beads he carried. The sun in Tejas stopped a boy the river held. Detention centers filled, churches offer showers and fresh clothes. Water and a covered porch may have waited at a stranger's house or in a patrol truck had his body not collapsed. Half of our bodies are made of water, and we can't sponge rivers through skin and release them again like rain clouds. Today at the vigil the native singer sang we are all connected by water, la sangre de vida.

In sympathy with Gaspara Stampa By woman so touched, so pressed, detachment being thought achievable at all is boggling in itself. Its being thought achievable by love—but love for only all (not someone’s single) sentience— appears the precept of too cold a form of flame. How much of a hand in things relinquishes the hold of things-at-hand? What kiss might such a mind reclaim? A swirl of dust in Buddhist schools, perhaps. A view of several solar systems from above. Not love. The thought appeals as it appals: Slow learners, we must spurn the selving sensualities, to feel for feelers of this kind, unfasten passion’s burner to identify what’s under it— in short, must court dispassion just to be compassionate.

Who needs a scary movie when there’s scary life. Icy days pile up like empty pill bottles. One craves hot soup and bear sex. I can’t hibernate above the Kum & Go when there’s Smokey lights all night. It isn’t easy making change for a twenty on a Tuesday night, when they’re filling the tanks beneath the pumps and the manager’s on break. All underage kids must come here. And go here? The world rhymes with itself. Earth is earth and row is row, whether to pull a set of oars and scull or a line of cornstalks completing the farmer’s math. Up above the Kum & Go I’m reading Maya Angelou And there’s a head shop open 24 hrs they do not sell head but you might think it the way the patrons come and go all night all fall all night all fall. I lived behind a sex club called The Power Exchange. All words have been charged with electric bodies ever since I wandered into my first poem. It was surely the Road Not Taken. Or maybe The Body Electric ... I’m easily mistaken. An alder is reptilian in its body, lithe leaves at night and such vocal things. It is a sexy tongue the world speaks. So many licks to get to the polished moon. Tell me a story then. How did you come to be trampled or new or high where the warblers land and recklessly shit where they eat. The universe I fear to be crashing. No painkillers for Doug. Ugh. It’s just autumn come. Electrical storms. The brave fire of the leaves and everything. The pawpaw, along with the huckleberry, the chokecherry, cranberry, Concord grape, and persimmon is one of the indigenous fruits. I usually only get it here, and only this time of year. Fear is real. Especially that most unholy fear that we will be forgotten. Fruit, when it’s rotten, opens a door to memory from other lives. Is it wrong to wish for another life? My hand can barely write the thought. My eye can barely see, my soul, translate the fire into autumn’s sweet flush, persimmons taste like semen, pawpaw tastes like flesh, large hard seeds like date pits I spit off the balcony in summer into the parking lot below where none are sure to be hit nor anything grow. A spider would not lower himself to touch such concrete ground. I would not live to see a tree grow to fruition, and yet each year I’d like to try. Well, Midwest, here I am. It’s pumpkin time. The cicadas have stopped singing. It’s just the crickets now along the river. But above the Kum & Go, it’s wind and machinery. Why do they all take the same path, and why do these undergrads shout against the fall wind. The rebel angels’ cries are but the check-in cries of birds, “hey Mike, hey Mike.” It must be hard to be Mike, your name reduced in the ears of others to a syllable of grief. And then it seems that Mike is gone. Relief.

homage to William Empson It is the sense, it is the sense, controls, Landing every poem like a fish. Unhuman forms must not assert their roles. Glittering scales require the deadly tolls Of net and knife. Scales fall to relish. It is the sense, it is the sense, controls. Yet languages are apt to miss on souls If reason only guts them. Applying the wish, Unhuman forms must not assert their roles, Ignores the fact that poems have two poles That must be opposite. Hard then to finish It is the sense, it is the sense, controls, Without a sense of lining up for doles From other kitchens that give us the garnish: Unhuman forms must not assert their roles. And this (forgive me) is like carrying coals To Sheffield. Irrelevance betrays a formal anguish. It is the sense, it is the sense, controls, “Unhuman forms must not assert their roles”.