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Insects are small, they already know how to fly, and — best of all — they power themselves. — Emily Anthes In an air-conditioned trailer, three geeks barely beyond boyhood fist-bump and high-five at a job well done. With the click of a key a dozen soundless screens flutter. Now in the shallow of a cave near the Khyber Pass, a stack of glow sticks activated in the blast steeps the darkness green: two cans of pineapple; a mangled can of beets bleeding juice; some boy streaked black, his burns wrapped in torn canvas tent flaps. He must hear the cyborg beetle’s brains buzz like a circuit-bent keyboard above his Pashto prayers. But we know enough to leave the live feed low,audio is for the analysts. Our weapon : witnessing — : wired that way. Somewhere in Texas or California or Kentucky Taco Bell is on the table where too the kill list rests quietly satisfied, and so its discord folds inward like an origami acorn nestled sharply in the heart.

Children, when was Napoleon Bonaparte born, asks teacher. A thousand years ago, the children say. A hundred years ago, the children say. Last year, the children say. No one knows. Children, what did Napoleon Bonaparte do, asks teacher. Won a war, the children say. Lost a war, the children say. No one knows. Our butcher had a dog called Napoleon, says Frantisek. The butcher used to beat him and the dog died of hunger a year ago. And all the children are now sorry for Napoleon.

THE MIND IS AN ANCIENT AND FAMOUS CAPITAL The mind is a city like London, Smoky and populous: it is a capital Like Rome, ruined and eternal, Marked by the monuments which no one Now remembers. For the mind, like Rome, contains Catacombs, aqueducts, amphitheatres, palaces, Churches and equestrian statues, fallen, broken or soiled. The mind possesses and is possessed by all the ruins Of every haunted, hunted generation’s celebration. “Call us what you will: we are made such by love.” We are such studs as dreams are made on, and Our little lives are ruled by the gods, by Pan, Piping of all, seeking to grasp or grasping All of the grapes; and by the bow-and-arrow god, Cupid, piercing the heart through, suddenly and forever. Dusk we are, to dusk returning, after the burbing, After the gold fall, the fallen ash, the bronze, Scattered and rotten, after the white null statues which Are winter, sleep, and nothingness: when Will the houselights of the universe Light up and blaze? For it is not the sea Which murmurs in a shell, And it is not only heart, at harp o’clock, It is the dread terror of the uncontrollable Horses of the apocalypse, running in wild dread Toward Arcturus—and returning as suddenly ... THE FEAR AND DREAD OF THE MIND OF THE OTHERS —The others were the despots of despair— The river’s freshness sailed from unknown sources— ... They snickered giggled, laughed aloud at last, They mocked and marvelled at the statue which was A caricature, as strained and stiff, and yet A statue of self-love!—since self-love was To them, truly my true love, how, then, was I a stillness of nervousness So nervous a caricature: did they suppose Self-love was unrequited, or betrayed? They thought I had fallen in love with my own face, And this belief became the night-like obstacle To understanding all my unbroken suffering, My studious self-regard, the pain of hope, The torment of possibility: How then could I have expected them to see me As I saw myself, within my gaze, or see That being thus seemed as a toad, a frog, a wen, a mole. Knowing their certainty that I was only A monument, a monster who had fallen in love With himself alone, how could I have Told them what was in me, within my heart, trembling and passionate Within the labyrinth and caves of my mind, which is Like every mind partly or wholly hidden from itself? The words for what is in my heart and in my mind Do not exist. But I must seek and search to find Amid the vines and orchards of the vivid world of day Approximate images, imaginary parallels For what is my heart and dark within my mind: Comparisons and mere metaphors: for all Of them are substitutes, both counterfeit and vague: They are, at most, deceptive resemblances, False in their very likeness, like the sons Who are alike and kin and more unlike and false Because they seem the father’s very self: but each one is —Although begotten by the same forbears—himself, The unique self, each one is unique, like every other one, And everything, older or younger, nevertheless A passionate nonesuch who has before has been. Do you hear, do you see? Do you understand me now, and how The words for what is my heart do not exist? THE RIVER WAS THE EMBLEM OF ALL BEAUTY:   ALL ... The river was the abundant belly of beauty itself The river was the dream space where I walked, The river was itself and yet it was—flowing and freshening— A self anew, another self, or self renewed At every tick of eternity, and by each glint of light Mounting or sparkling, descending to shade and black —Had I but told them my heart, told how it was Taunted at noon and pacified at dusk, at starfall midnight Strong in hope once more, ever in eagerness Jumping like joy, would they have heard? How could they? How, when what they knew was, like the grass, Simple and certain, known through the truth of touch, another form and fountain of falsehood’s fecundity— Gazing upon their faces as they gazed Could they have seen my faces as whores who are Holy and deified as priestesses of hope —the sacred virgins of futurity— Promising dear divinity precisely because They were disfigured ducks who might become And be, and ever beloved, white swans, noble and beautiful. Could they have seen how my faces were Bonfires of worship and vigil, blazes of adoration and hope —Surely they would have laughed again, renewed their scorn, Giggled and snickered, cruel. Surely have said This is the puerile mania of the obsessed, The living logic of the lunatic: I was the statue of their merriment, Dead and a death, Pharoah and monster forsaken and lost. ... My faces were my apes: my apes became Performers in the Sundays of their parks, Buffoons or clowns in the farce or comedy When they took pleasure in knowing that they were not like me. ... I waited like obsession in solitude: The sun’s white terror tore and roared at me, The moonlight, almond white, at night, Whether awake or sleeping, arrested me And sang, softly, haunted, unlike the sun But as the sun. Withheld from me or took away Despair or peace, making me once more With thought of what had never been before——

Highway of Death — the indifference of snakes. Sky is ripe and everywhere the colors are breaking.¿Quién es el jefe más jefe?

Comes sarcastic November in mummy garb, hauling, same old same old what laid bare what totaled. Sees thru the estimated costs, stench collisions, inanimate dregs, remembers the bruised figures, their numerology as stars.Up up, down down is how she counts as the hunters begin to hunt. This is the plot of erasure, this the lavender bath. Truth be known, the dark won by a landslide. Yet friends in far January await news of the front, cycling up the snow-clad hills. They are to be exhumed from the grail of the keeper, he who heralds what’s here. To them, send dreams that pop open when breathed on and ask them to complete this sentence: If God is in the details, then ... But in the end there was only a chair covered in velvet and the sibling, dark as a forest, turned into words. There were the stamps with monsters and the stamps with flowers, there was a dumpster of old paint. Even the egalitarian whimsy of the gold rush is in partial view: harbor’s sleek hulls, willow disintegrating in drapery and nonce. What others did taking us to task in the field, into archival maps along a bank. What is it they wanted? Among strangers, beyond the stamina of pictures —the dancer on stage, his ruined feet, as they would flail crops when the spring comes, and flood, and tassels rise, as my head—

a poem in twelve rounds 1. My head so big they had to pry me out. I’m sorry Bird (is what I call my mother). Cassius Marcellus Clay, Muhammad Ali; you can say my name in any language, any continent: Ali. 2. Two photographs of Emmett Till, born my year, on my birthday. One, he’s smiling, happy, and the other one is after. His mother did the bold thing, kept the casket open, made the thousands look upon his bulging eyes, his twisted neck, her lynched black boy. I couldn’t sleep for thinking, Emmett Till. One day I went Down to the train tracks, found some iron shoe-shine rests and planted them between the ties and waited for a train to come, and watched the train derail, and ran, and after that I slept at night. 3. I need to train around people, hear them talk, talk back. I need to hear the traffic, see people in the barbershop, people getting shoe shines, talking, hear them talk, talk back. 4. Bottom line: Olympic gold can’t buy a black man a Louisville hamburger in nineteen-sixty. Wasn’t even real gold. I watched the river drag the ribbon down, red, white, and blue. 5. Laying on the bed, praying for a wife, in walk Sonji Roi. Pretty little shape. Do you like chop suey? Can I wash your hair underneath that wig? Lay on the bed, Girl. Lie with me. Shake to the east, to the north, south, west— but remember, remember, I need a Muslim wife. So Quit using lipstick. Quit your boogaloo. Cover up your knees like a Muslim wife, religion, religion, a Muslim wife. Eleven months with Sonji, first woman I loved. 6. There’s not too many days that pass that I don’t think of how it started, but I know no Great White Hope can beat a true black champ. Jerry Quarry could have been a movie star, a millionaire, a senator, a president— he only had to do one thing, is whip me, but he can’t. 7. Dressing-Room Visitor He opened up his shirt: “KKK” cut in his chest. He dropped his trousers: latticed scars where testicles should be, His face bewildered, frozen in the Alabama woods that night in 1966 when they left him for dead, his testicles in a Dixie cup. You a warning, they told him, to smart-mouth, sassy-acting niggers, meaning niggers still alive, meaning any nigger, meaning niggers like me. 8. Training Unsweetened grapefruit juice will melt my stomach down. Don’t drive if you can walk, don’t walk if you can run. I add a mile each day and run in eight-pound boots. My knuckles sometimes burst the glove. I let dead skin build up, and then I peel it, let it scar, so I don’t bleed as much. My bones absorb the shock. I train in three-minute spurts, like rounds: three rounds big bag, three speed bag, three jump rope, one- minute breaks, no more, no less. Am I too old? Eat only kosher meat. Eat cabbage, carrots, beets, and watch the weight come down: two-thirty, two-twenty, two-ten, two-oh-nine. 9. Will I go like Kid Paret, a fractured skull, a ten-day sleep, dreaming alligators, pork chops, saxophones, slow grinds, funk, fishbowls, lightbulbs, bats, typewriters, tuning forks, funk clocks, red rubber ball, what you see in that lifetime knockout minute on the cusp? You could be let go, you could be snatched back. 10. Rumble in the Jungle Ali boma ye, Ali boma ye,

The soaked books lip open in piles. The shelves stoop, slough paint. The doors, their locks sprung, hinge air open to weather, gulp rain. Something here enters the trees. If we believe in ghosts, white pearl shadows the batten and boards. Rust runs on the shelves. The sounds on air wail, a nail in the thumb. Stickers underfoot poke holes. In rafters, wings or the suggestion of wings rend air, whoosh of rubbish, burnt rubber hooks for skeleton elbows. Ash, dry sift through moist fingers in a room where everything's mold.

A narrow Fellow in the Grass Occasionally rides - You may have met him? Did you not His notice instant is - The Grass divides as with a Comb, A spotted Shaft is seen, And then it closes at your Feet And opens further on - He likes a Boggy Acre - A Floor too cool for Corn - But when a Boy and Barefoot I more than once at Noon Have passed I thought a Whip Lash Unbraiding in the Sun When stooping to secure it It wrinkled And was gone - Several of Nature’s People I know, and they know me I feel for them a transport Of Cordiality But never met this Fellow Attended or alone Without a tighter Breathing And Zero at the Bone.

1. Cross-hatchings, palm and rain, clapboard faded to the grain, half-shutters open to old vines and mangroves draining their own shadows; recollecting what the body knows suspended between coral and shifting images of cloud ... After death, after the knowledge of death, his death, his face, unwrapped, already yellowed, papery, recovered with a small white cloth then lowered away and shut to the earth; So pierced, so mute, these words re-opening: Not this. 2. The rain had gone. I swam against the current, harnessed by water till I turned and swung out with the tide, shouldering deep into a rhythm of my own, long strokes pulled under the body and returning past the glinting crease in which I breathed, the sea half-woken like another body bedded into sheer transparency, the outer reaches granular with light. Comebacks. Chains of radiance. Far more than meet the eye. What do they meet then, intimate but otherworldly, mimicking the world? I looked back at the land’s thin edge, pines along the shoreline near a fort where cannons rust, mouths left open among thistleweed around the dozing moat. Far back among fallen needles, pigeons shuffle through shade, their feathers iris underlight, soft flares bob the dark. The land had disappeared. The sun had followed it. From either wrist, half-mingled with my breath into the night, a trail of ungloved phosphor travelled back. 3. Sounds too have their surfaces: within the mortal frame, particles of blood revolve as in a sort of heaven where breath moves through us as an unseen light; but when the marrow bonds are parted they in turn set loose what has been called the soul ...

How do you recognize a lovely place? The rotten anthropology of superheroes hovers above the conference table, exhausted on the idea of dazzling people. A plugged organization of the moon like a turnpike undecorated by barely legal children — true stories end in the moody doctor city but I always say the wrong thing. Away from Las Vegas I spend too much time at the whale facility. I’m bored with awakening into historical X-rays of the NO MOMENT. (What showmanship!) Who does wear a cape underwater? Now Egypt is miniaturized and it may never rain again. Hurling bodies and collapsing lungs used to be honestly scripted activities — the stillness in the dream of important history. From now on your stillness will be happening. In the actual dream remember how the children were modified, the sputtering, Russel Crotty language? Friendly Calliope is no longer remedial in the crisply American landscape. Even snowy Vermont grows opaque, a diminished suggestion in the desert mirror. I feel as if I’m speaking to a dear friend but I’m saying the wrong things.I don’t like cockfights or you’d rather be my daughter, deeply, authentically factualizing our especially Southern roots.