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Shunning the British tourist bus, we walk, My child and I, the West Woods where, like dogs Who know their death is due, the wounded took Themselves to give up hope. The horror begs Imagining—the soldiers hauling limbs Hacked off or messmates dead, and everywhere, Mixed with the summer scent of swelling plums, A stench of putrid flesh and burning hair. Here Lee was turned. That night the forest filled With muttered names of loved ones left, and cries From mangled soldiers pleading to be killed. Seeing my distant look, my daughter tries My sleeve: “What is it, what?” she asks, and I Say “nothing, nothing”—though “nothing” is a lie.

By such an all-embalming summer day As sweetens now among the mountain pines Down to the cornland yonder and the vines, To where the sky and sea are mixed in gray, How do all things together take their way Harmonious to the harvest, bringing wines And bread and light and whatsoe’er combines In the large wreath to make it round and gay. To me my troubled life doth now appear Like scarce distinguishable summits hung Around the blue horizon: places where Not even a traveller purposeth to steer,— Whereof a migrant bird in passing sung, And the girl closed her window not to hear.

—for Logan and Renée Jenkins Unlike almost everything Else just surviving here In summer, poison flowers Flourish in this sweltering Heat, tangling like blown Litter in fences around The trailer parks and motel Pools, and turning the islands Pinkish-white between Divided lanes of freeway, Where all day long against The burnished hubbub of U- Haul trucks and automobiles, Off-the-road vehicles and Campers, the oleander shakes Its brightly polished pocket- Knives, as at the motorcade Of some ambassador hurrying Through a village of the poor. And every day by late after- Noon the overwatered lawns Around the shopping mall Still burn off brown, their Pampered opulence upbraided By the palms’ insomniac Vision of one ineffable apoc- Alyptic noon. But the smell Is somehow sweeter than That makes you think, a dry Lemon-sweetness, as if some- Where nearby wild verbena Has been forced to leaf By a match held up to each Bud—and the silo-skyscraper Holiday Inn at the famous Resort “Where the Horizon Ends” could almost be that Match the way the heat Sloughs off it like after- Burn. And yet, because Of the way the sun in- Tensifies everything, one Always has the feeling there Is much less here than meets The eye: the halcyon blink Of a shard of glass, a Lear- Jet wafted into vapor out On the tarmac’s run, the way Common quartzstone gives Off heat which seems to come From inside itself, and not, In fact, from that more- Than-imaginably-nuclear sun Which every morning starts Up so illusionless, and every Evening slow-dissolves On the blue and otherwise Planetary hills, like a Valium Breaking up on the tongue.

There was a fire in the night. Across the street I slept among the others as the ashes snowed upon small pines. I slept owning nothing, a child ignorant of fortune’s blistering story, the playful flash in the dark, the unseen smolder that would leave us revealed, unchanged. I said my prayers for luck but the man trying to live in two houses answers me now, losing neither the old one whose windows burst with weariness, nor the one half-built whose roofless, green timbers he would leave unfinished like a vision. I had climbed there all summer to smoke. Awake, I found him sitting at his stool halfway between the houses where I would go each morning. The story of the sea would be upon his tongue, his hands weaving the wire to a trap, making the careful seams to catch a scuttling crab. Beyond him, his wife already had begun to stretch her wash, indifferent in that early light, and a dog lapped from the ruts of the fire truck. I believed little had been changed by fire, only his toolshed limp as a black sail left in a heap, and a new hole in the landscape. This was an old place where no one came, luckless, desperate, eternal as guilt. In silence I greeted that old one. But now I remember seeing also, as if for the first time, the shocking gray face of the sea. It loomed up human and beautiful as far off the figures of boats crossed, worked, and seemed to sink while they burned in the sullen sun.

1981, &  for three days in Nebraska penny loafers are the talk, the thirties sensation all over again in one-light towns. Three days in Nebraska, &  a hundred calves come out bloody &   new as Wahoo &  Alma &  Dunning hum &  glow, turned liked searchlights into Colorado, where everyone’s already wearing their lucky shoes. It takes just one look at a boy from Ansley— there is love &  there is money &  there is everything in between, touched by both— one look at the packs approaching the drag in Imperial, as first &  second boy say hey & hey to third &  fourth— Three days in Nebraska, &  the bigger the sentiment, the harder it falls, &    all over the dreams of the pretty end somewhere in New York City, but just this one time, just these three days in Nebraska, the boys are clicking their boots &  singing I wish I was here in Nebraska

La luna Sang the miles por los palos de Nebraska You bunch of lights And houses    How did you walk to this place Buffalo Bill Better know him some Spanish Para Horses    ride rubber horseshoes moderno. El café Boiled water/no milk in sight. Homes that will travel interstate 8 o tomorrow in the morning for the next edge of town. The cowgirls/the local rodeo As they galloped by their hair unmoved by 15 miles per hour wind It seems that 25 pounds of hair spray is enough to hold a mountain down Their hair style longer than their faces. Que Pasa? Y los palos do not feel at home any more La luna goes round the star dotted cielo Let’s watch In this part of Mexico Se habla inglish.

She’s got a hundred & two temperature, delivery room nurses said. You’re gonna live, though — long enough to know you’re going to go as quickly as you came, gonna make your mother swear by you, going to shake your Bible with red-tipped nails before you vanish into Chicago South Side skies that bleed — not like watercolor, not like a wound, not like a fat, bitten plum — not necessarily. No, not necessarily. Nothing that precious or predictable.Speak nicely to others & they will nicely speak to you, your mother said. No, not so, you said fairly close to the end. No time to wait for mother’s ride home or for saviors, coming soon.

In through our bedroom window, the full dawn-scape concusses. Difficult to sustain sleep's equilibrium of wordlessness. Naming anything, like stepping barefoot in wet sand up to my ankles. Name after name, sinking me farther beneath waking's buoyancy. House, this morning, is pale with the rush of what night siphoned off. Objects, still emptied of resemblance, hum their chord-less cantos. Bloodless, my knuckles knock on walls without echo, testing singularities. Sun on the cutlery offers an ageless sheen. Though it ages the silver relentlessly. New, but still rudimentary tools to be gleaned from my over-used weaponry.

As I       toss & roll these bones at the 2nd,  3rd & 4th vertebra the curvity of my neck where something of  a       winged   fused bowed   & fossilized merged   kink-bended wrongly & fused  bowed & fossilized    then merged bended   slouched    in a hunchbacked   crooked pain    into   a pinged pang    where   needles & cracks at my side-to-side forced   hanging   sluiced movement   of   ivory scalloped   cervixes  at the nape   & snaps   snaps I rebound   at the fear & instinctively   quake with vanquished surrender in numbness   & wake  then mumble   you’re part of me now   leave   & it slaps its tale then    a V formation following & decelerates   the sea waved source   of   vigor  110  years old.

I forgot forget amnesia was lost to me then a smooth fur-free fruit unnamed for days until I found it ripe on my tongue