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Choppers in the night husk the brilliants of thought Beyond the cities of patina grow caves of thought Coyote Hummingbird Owl are rivers of thought The lumens the pumpkins dance: pits of correspondence over the land Birds the dream tongues warble Iroquois Mojav é Ohlone Market Street of “The Mad Doctor” via the occult centers A gang of fox spirits at the crossroads Bandoleros set between the obliteration of grizzly bears painted by an Arcimboldist and the monstrance of bleeding chains Montezuma’s feathery headdress torn up in the boondocks of the Rosy Cross Coyote girls in myth-time At the central dream of edenic treasures The irrevocable annihilation of christian civilization is taking shape with carnivorous flowers of volcanic thought

Wife two was a stripper. And sweet, as well. He traded her in for me. To people I don't know, I say she was a dancer. I watch them, puzzled, wonder how anyone could not love a ballerina. And you have to question a guy like that: trading in a sweet stripper for me. Not a homemaker. Not home much at all. Not sweet. More like my grandfather, Jimmy Grieco. Mean. My mother likes to describe the blue-sky day when she bought me a helium balloon and I let it go. I was six. I begged for another. She said,okay, but, if you let this one go, I’m really going to be mad. I nodded, took the string in my hand, held tight, and then opened my hand flat so the balloon lifted and its string slipped up and away.You were never sweet, my mother says. *** In Vegas, a few weeks ago, Jimmy and I sorted photographs in his double-wide just off Boulder Highway. My mother stood on the sidelines. She hates how I ask Jimmy for the hard stories. Tell me about the moonshine. Tell me about the dead kids. Tell me how your mother saved the family by burning down the farm. Jimmy’s crooked finger points to a picture of the family. That was Leonard.He was deaf and dumb. Died at twelve. That was Vincent.The baby who fell off the staircase without a rail. Dead at two. Then there's his mother, surrounded by her children.She was tough, he says.Tough. When Chicago’s Black Hand demanded ten thousand dollars, she stuffed five grand in her apron, grabbed my grandfather—then five—and took him to deliver the money.That's all you'll ever get, she said,and don’t touch my kids or I’ll kill you. *** My grandfather never asks about the first or second wife. I don’t have to tell him that ballerina-fable. He knows I’m three and mean. He knows it for his whole life. His first, my grandmother, was like sugar. He burned her, abandoned her in LA, raced to Mexico, paved road turning to dirt; he ate prickly pear, maybe, on the way to his quick divorce. And, though he won’t tell this story, his own father lived, first, with a sweet woman on a wheat farm, far south in Craco, Italy. He boarded a ship, told his wife he’d send for her, and then fled to New York. And in an apartment on Mulberry Street, he met up with the new girlfriend and they disappeared into their new world. She wasn’t pretty.She was tough. She got busted twice for making moonshine. Her sons loved her. She was mean.

Sometimes something like a second washes the base of this street. The father and his two assistants are given permission to go. One of them, a woman, asks, “Why did we come here in the first place, to this citadel of dampness?” Some days are worse than others, even if we can’t believe in them. But that was never a concern of mine, reasoned the patient. Sing, scroll, or never be blasted by us into marmoreal meaning, or the fist for it. Kudos to the prince who journeyed here to negotiate our release, if you can believe it. You’re right. The ballads are retreating back into the atmosphere. They won’t be coming round again. Make your peace.

—Barrio René Cisneros Managua, Nicaragua, June-July 1982 This was the dictator’s land before the revolution. Now the dictator is exiled to necropolis, his army brooding in camps on the border, and the congregation of the landless stipples the earth with a thousand shacks, every weatherbeaten carpenter planting a fistful of nails. Here I dig latrines. I dig because last week I saw a funeral in the streets of Managua, the coffin swaddled in a red and black flag, hoisted by a procession so silent that even their feet seemed to leave no sound on the gravel. He was eighteen, with the border patrol, when a sharpshooter from the dictator’s army took aim at the back of his head. I dig because yesterday I saw four walls of photographs: the faces of volunteers in high school uniforms who taught campesinos to read, bringing an alphabet sandwiched in notebooks to places where the mist never rises from the trees. All dead, by malaria or the greedy river or the dictator’s army swarming the illiterate villages like a sky full of corn-plundering birds. I dig because today, in this barrio without plumbing, I saw a woman wearing a yellow dress climb into a barrel of water to wash herself and the dress at the same time, her cupped hands spilling. I dig because today I stopped digging to drink an orange soda. In a country with no glass, the boy kept the treasured bottle and poured the liquid into a plastic bag full of ice, then poked a hole with a straw. I dig because today my shovel struck a clay bowl centuries old, the art of ancient fingers moist with this same earth, perfect but for one crack in the lip. I dig because I have hauled garbage and pumped gas and cut paper and sold encyclopedias door to door. I dig, digging until the passport in my back pocket saturates with dirt, because here I work for nothing and for everything.

saw hammer drill needle and tongs are there any tools that weren’t from the beginning misused for torture and killing throw away the tools even the nails on your fingers can scratch and about the tongue the chinese have a saying, it can pulverize a person is there not some means that peace can call its own erect a house made of blossom petals and bird down capacious as a dream and no one will live in it all we have is what keeps its form to hold something together you must use force even for peace

Recurrences. Coppery light hesitates again in the small-leaved Japanese plum. Summer and sunset, the peace of the writing desk and the habitual peace of writing, these things form an order I only belong to in the idleness of attention. Last light rims the blue mountain and I almost glimpse what I was born to, not so much in the sunlight or the plum tree as in the pulse that forms these lines.

A canoe made of horse ribs tipped over in the pasture. Prairie flowers took it for a meetinghouse. They grow there with a vengeance. Buck posts float across the flooded swamp Where my father rode in and under. Different horse. He held her head up out of the mud And said how he was sorry Till they came to pull him out. We found the white filly On the only hard ground by the south gate. He said she’d been a ghost from the start and he was right. We covered her with branches. There were things he had the wrong names for Like rose crystals. Though They were about what you’d think from a name like that. He told us somewhere on Sand Creek Pass Was a crystal that spelled our own initials And we should try to find it. We walked through sagebrush and sand currents, looking. He said pasqueflowers and paintbrush Wait till Easter to grow, Then they come up even with snow still on the ground. I thought I’d seen that happen.

Fierce is the conflict—the battle of eyes, Sure and unerring, the wordless replies, Challenges flash from their ambushing caves— Men, by their glances, are masters or slaves.

I cannot move backward or forward. I am caught in the time as measure. What we think of we think of— of no other reason we think than just to think— each for himself.

It wasn’t socks missing from his feet, not elbow cloth unraveled unilaterally, not equal displacement of chin and brow, nor the eye that sat a bit lower on the right, it was his knuckle that made me weep, clove corners gone wayside, like minuscule meat hooks clawed away bits of him each shift he made, invisible a timeliness unfurled. It was his muscle torn through, festering, the prosthetic hand, finger- width dismay all across his attempted grin, left there just like that, for anyone to see—it was his mercy. In the end we’re rarely beautiful, mostly placed away from compromising situations into poses offsetting what has become of us in some gawker’s unnerving eyes. Yet, he was, is, still here in mine, and I’m human because of it. Maybe only. Maybe.