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All we know of history we learn from scenes in the mosaic of bone on the Senate floor: The Flood makes graves of the fields, and the angels harvest enough suffering to live for another thousand years. Moses pulls off his beard and lights a cigarette, I’m tired of pretending. He pushes his box of spare commandments under his bed, and as he drifts to sleep, his eyes, like caves, fill with paintings of woolly rhinos. Sailing ships forest a small island. One light shines from a caravel — captain’s quarters. It’s Christopher Columbus. All night he’s been sewing shrouds as arrival gifts for the natives. Little Chris presses his bleeding fingers to his mouth and cries quietly,No one appreciates me. God and the devil tuck him into bed. It’ll get better, they say. Together they complete the shrouds for him, while he dreams of golden nipples. As it was, it is now. Spring translates the earth into hope — tongues of grass taste the sea salt on the west wind and the blood on soldiers’ boots. This morning, one of the old poets — unkillable cockroach — cycled past me, yelling, You have the brightest light in America! Ha ha! On my dresser, a spider makes a web along the contours of my bra. We lie on the bed together; I run my hand up the muscles of your leg and feel its eons of evolution, now outlawed by the Senate.

From the point of view of all time, these recent changes signal more a return to nature than a departure, than degradation. In the beginning, after all, there was boiling rock. Then waters arranging their bodies around an era of softer forms: lichen, grassland, swaying treetops. Then creatures, movingly fleshed, treading pathways that hardened. Then pavement hardening and cities, monumental. Soon mostly rock again, and radiant. More and more like moon. Soon, sooner than is being thought, there will be even more light. The creatures will have stopped being able to move or be moved. And the rock will boil.

Child, when you’re sad put on your blue shoes. You know that Mama loves you lollipops and Daddy still has a job to lose. So put on a party hat. We’ll play the kazoos loud and louder from the mountaintop. Child, when you’re sad put on your blue shoes and dance the polka with pink kangaroos, dolphin choirs singing “flip-flop, flip-flop.” Hey, Daddy still has a job to lose — don’t be afraid. Close your eyes, snooze, because today our suns have flared and dropped. Tomorrow when you wake, put on your blue shoes. Eat a good breakfast. Be good in school. Good boys go to college goody gumdrops so someday too you’ll have a job to lose. Waste trucks clatter by as the gray bird coos. Flames pour forth when the faucet’s unstopped. Child, when you’re sad put on your blue shoes. For now, Daddy still has a job to lose.

Sing lullaby, as women do, Wherewith they bring their babes to rest, And lullaby can I sing too As womanly as can the best. With lullaby they still the child, And if I be not much beguiled, Full many wanton babes have I Which must be stilled with lullaby. First lullaby my youthful years; It is now time to go to bed, For crooked age and hoary hairs Have won the haven within my head. With lullaby, then, youth be still; With lullaby content thy will; Since courage quails and comes behind, Go sleep, and so beguile thy mind. Next, lullaby my gazing eyes, Which wonted were to glance apace. For every glass may now suffice To show the furrows in my face; With lullaby then wink awhile, With lullaby your looks beguile; Let no fair face nor beauty bright Entice you eft with vain delight. And lullaby, my wanton will; Let reason's rule now reign thy thought, Since all too late I find by skill How dear I have thy fancies bought; With lullaby now take thine ease, With lullaby thy doubts appease. For trust to this: if thou be still, My body shall obey thy will. Eke lullaby, my loving boy, My little Robin, take thy rest; Since age is cold and nothing coy, Keep close thy coin, for so is best; With lullaby be thou content, With lullaby thy lusts relent, Let others pay which hath mo pence; Thou art too poor for such expense. Thus lullaby, my youth, mine eyes, My will, my ware, and all that was. I can no mo delays devise, But welcome pain, let pleasure pass; With lullaby now take your leave, With lullaby your dreams deceive; And when you rise with waking eye, Remember then this lullaby.

Holy Trinity Airship billows a chrys- elephantine cave Louis Sullivan, Arch- itect, lord master, conceived of in the hollow of power. He swells. I am his balloonist balancing an azimuth as earth-apse I orbit, robed in hot gas & leather fastened by a yolk-stalk of gravity to gold- end onions nozzling heavens whose suns are stomachs with churches in their navels. Each we are priests as aeronauts at the vestibules, & enter the cavity: space, self, organ; celest- ial nave bellies stars sailors name saints and adore— their egress is bitter weeping, their praise pure Russian form: a cathedral, my inner orrery.

lunatuna fluttering below belly pasiones swooping down deep gathering storms treasuring rainergías pacíficas marítimas, montañescas abotona tu vientre, maja easles b ready to capture flight entre tus aguas claras allow flow …reflect… clama la milpa eye your center cherish thigh hug torso b one with duende within discover sun risa raza roja

No eye that sees could fail to remark you: like any leaf the rain leaves fixed to and flat against the barn’s gray shingle. But what leaf, this time of year, is so pale, the pale of leaves when they’ve lost just enough green to become the green that means loss and more loss, approaching? Give up the flesh enough times, and whatever is lost gets forgotten: that was the thought that I woke to, those words in my head. I rose, I did not dress, I left no particular body sleeping and, stepping into the hour, I saw you, strange sign, at once transparent and impossible to entirely see through. and how still: the still of being unmoved, and then the still of no longer being able to be moved. If I think of a heart, his, as I’ve found it.... If I think of, increasingly, my own.... If I look at you now, as from above, and see the diva when she is caught in mid- triumph, arms half-raised, the body as if set at last free of the green sheath that has— how many nights?—held her, it is not without remembering another I once saw: like you, except that something, a bird, some wild and necessary hunger, had gotten to it; and like the diva, but now broken, splayed and torn, the green torn piecemeal from her. I remember the hands, and—how small they seemed, bringing the small ripped thing to me.

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations A silver Lucifer Lunar Baedeker...Lucifer A Baedeker is a series name of popular guidebooks. Another modern poem with “Baedeker” in the title is T. S. Eliot’s “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar” (1919). Lucifer is the former angel name for Satan, which has been used to name the morning star, that is the planet Venus serves cocaine in cornucopia To some somnambulists of adolescent thighs draped in satirical draperies Peris Peris “In Persian myth, an elf or fairy, male or female, represented as a descendant of fallen angels, excluded from Paradise till their penance is accomplished” (Century Dictionary) in livery in livery Dressed for their job prepare Lethe Lethe River of forgetfulness in Hades for posthumous parvenues parvenues Those who have recently come into wealth Delirious Avenues lit with the chandelier souls of infusoria infusoria Class of protozoa; “so called because found in infusions of decaying animal or vegetable matter” (OED) from Pharoah’s tombstones lead to mercurial doomsdays doomsdays The end of the world or Judgment Day, usually in the singular Odious oasis in furrowed phosphorous phosphorous “Phosphorous” (with a capital “P”) is Venus, the morning star, archaically referred to as Lucifer, mentioned in the first line of this poem. the eye-white sky-light white-light district white-light district Possible alternative to red-light district. The term appears in Theodore Dreiser's book A Hoosier Holiday(1916). of lunar lusts Stellectric Stellectric A word formed from “stellar” (star) and “electric” signs “Wing shows on Starway” “Zodiac carrousel” Cyclones of ecstatic dust and ashes whirl crusaders from hallucinatory citadels of shattered glass into evacuate craters A flock of dreams browse on Necropolis Necropolis Literally: a city of corpses From the shores of oval oceans in the oxidized Orient Onyx-eyed Odalisques Odalisques “Female slaves or concubines in an Eastern harem” (OED) and ornithologists observe the flight of Eros Eros God of Love in Greek mythology; also, the name of an asteroid, discovered in 1898 obsolete And “Immortality” mildews ... in the museums of the moon “Nocturnal cyclops” “Crystal concubine” Pocked with personification the fossil virgin of the skies waxes and wanes

I came into the world a young man Then I broke me off Still the sea and clouds are Pegasus colors My heart is Pegasus colors but to get there I must go back Back to the time before I was a woman Before I broke me off to make a flattened lap And placed thereon a young man Where I myself could have dangled And how I begged him enter there My broken young man parts And how I let the mystery collapse With rugged young man puncture And how I begged him turn me Pegasus colors And please to put a sunset there And gone forever was my feeling snake And in its place dark letters And me the softest of all And me so skinless I could no longer be naked And me I had to de-banshee And me I dressed myself I made a poison suit I darned it out of myths Some of the myths were beautiful Some turned ugly in the making The myth of the slender girl The myth of the fat one The myth of rescue The myth of young men The myth of the hair in their eyes The myth of how beauty would save them The myth of me and who I must become The myth of what I am not And the horses who are no myth How they do not need to turn Pegasus They are winged in their un-myth They holy up the ground I must holy up the ground I sanctify the ground and say fuck it I say fuck it in a way that does not invite death I say fuck it and fall down no new holes And I ride an unwinged horse And I unbecome myself And I strip my poison suit And wear my crown of fuck its

Inside my lunch to my surprise a perfect heart-shaped love note lies. The outside says, “Will you be mine?” and, “Will you be my valentine?” I take it out and wonder who would want to tell me “I love you.” Perhaps a girl who’s much too shy to hand it to me eye to eye. Or maybe it was sweetly penned in private by a secret friend Who found my lunchbox sitting by and slid the note in on the sly. Oh, I’d be thrilled if it were Jo, the cute one in the second row. Or could it be from Jennifer? Has she found out I’m sweet on her? My mind’s abuzz, my shoulders tense. I need no more of this suspense. My stomach lurching in my throat, I open up my little note. Then wham! as if it were a bomb, inside it reads, “I love you—Mom.”