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The ward beds float like ghost ships in the darkness, the nightlight above my bed I pretend is a lighthouse with a little man inside who wears a sailor cap and tells good old stories of the sea. The little man is me. Perhaps I have a dog called Old Salt who laps my hand and runs endlessly down the circular stairs. Perhaps he bites like sin. I dream of ships smashing the reefs, their bottoms gutting out, the crews’ disembodied voices screaming Help us help us help somebody please and there is no one there at all not even me. I wake up nervous, Old Salt gnawing my flesh. I wake up nervous, canvas bedstraps cutting my groin. The night nurse, making the rounds, says I bellow in sleep like a foghorn. * Nothing moves at night except small animals kept caged downstairs for experiments, going bullshit, and the Creole janitor’s broom whisking closer by inches. In the ward, we all have room for errors and elbows to flail at excitement. We’re right above the morgue; the iceboxes make our floor cold. The animals seem to know when someone, bored with holding on, gives out: they beat their heads and teeth against the chicken wire doors, scream and claw The janitor also knows. He props his heavy broom against his belt, makes a sign over himself learned from a Cajun, leaves us shaking in our bedstraps to drag the still warm and nervous body down from Isolation. * I have a garden in my brain shaped like a maze I lose myself in, it seems. They only look for me sometimes. I don’t like my dreams. The nurses quarrel over where I am hiding. I hear from inside a bush. One is crisp and cuts; one pinches. I’d like to push them each somewhere. They both think it’s funny here. The laughter sounds like diesels. I won’t come out because I’m lazy. You start to like the needles. You start to want to crazy.

I In April we will pierce his body. It is March. Snow is dust over the branches. A pony hunches in the orchard. I stand at the frozen mouth of the river, Thinking of you. In the house where you live Frost glitters on the windows Like uncounted pieces of silver. Already they are preparing the wine and the bread. II The field is banked with purple asters And a spill of mustard flowers. The earth has taken on terrible proportions. Out in an unused meadow The wildflowers have already covered The delicate bones of an Indian. Bees are flying across the meadow To a hive under the rafters of the barn. Someone is leading a horse with crippled bones Into the spikes of clover. III Alexander died this morning, Leaving his worldly possessions To the strongest. I watched an empire fade across his lips. They propped him in the sun a while, And then three women came to scour his body Like a continent. I am afraid of what the world will do. Only this afternoon I heard two worms conversing In the shadow of his breastbone. I slipped out of the palace And entered a vein of gillyflowers On the edge of potter’s field. I will not be missed. No one even noticed. IV I have been thinking of the son I would like to have. The leaves have all gone yellow Overnight, wrinkling like hands In the updraught. I drove my car by the creek Because I had nowhere else to go. The milkweed’s delicate closet had been fractured, Filling the air with rumors. Despite all I could do, the sumac Had taken on the color of a mouth. Tonight, I perceive the young girls In my mother’s blood Letting their seed pass by unnoticed, A red nativity. V Last night they dragged the canal For an old man’s body. Now he is singing for a hook Just below water level. A branch of ice is splitting open Across each window, And snow is dismantling the weeds Like the breakable furniture of a boudoir. I have been rereading your letters. It is too cold for a virgin birth to occur Even in the frosty suburbs Of a wildflower. VI I have learned to camouflage myself in church, Masking my body With the body of a saint. Last night frost glazed the face of Mary Magdalene, And snow rode up to the altar windows. Before morning, the sparrows came down To the body of Saint Francis. Now he is upholstered in oak leaves Like a living room chair. This morning we are preparing a crucifixion. I am thinking of you now. With the velvet at my knees And the silverware shining on the altar And the stained glass moving out of focus And the cross veiled in black, I am present for the news of an enormous death. I take the bread on my tongue Like one of Christ’s fingers, And the wine rides through my breast Like a dark hearse. All the while I am thinking of you. An avalanche of white carnations Is drifting across your voice As it drifts across the voices of confession. But the snow keeps whispering of you over and over.

For Yogita and Anish “Ah neva seen this before in all ma years.” Testify, Sis. How we grew accustomed, Spoiled almost, by decorum, now try Mosquito larvae cultivating at speed In standing bodies of water. Pigeons Flock rooftops, twist, launch, shout As one, spin sky, turn skulls porous. Car repair shop drills sing industry. Tires feel out parking, meters freed. First horn blare triggers this chorus. Step up pistons, fire motor mouths, Say our only worry is our worst fears Come true. Mosquito straw proboscis Drinks from my arm, bam! Adios asterisk. • But, really, am I eyeballing an armored truck? Says one dung beetle to half earthworm, Who replies, as Gloucester, I see it feelingly. Who gave those uniforms permission to storm School car parks, automatics drawn? Finches ask Robins, who, channeling Auden, whistle — Bang! WTF! Bang, bang, Lulu, Lulu gone... The calypso worked its juju On my digital radio. Flags at half-mast for this Union. Taps on trumpets dawn till dusk. Guides, Scouts, look out for rainbows Projected on a disused warehouse in LA County. Clocks throughout the land tell one contiguous time. Rain and shine stop dead in tracks on borderlines. • Cat asks me if dogs can ever be cool. After two of my kind pin down one of his On a front porch until chased off by our rulers. I open my mouth to spit some piety about Lions lying down with lambs but only bark What my genes say I should, ears pulled back. Do you remember Judas Iscariot? Thirty silver Pieces and a certain last supper just for this. A taser for every problem warns the bee With an empty bonnet, sting for emphasis, About why one plus one never makes two, After voting from sea to oil-slicked sea. Look at her, look at him, hold, kiss babies In photo ops, all gaga, minus bathtub Never mind water, in this national soap, This wait for the next sentence whose weight “Illegals” carry on shoulders they look over Nonstop, even in sleep, one eye open, Breath held when police cruise by, Car backfire skin jump heartbeat skip, Day in, day out, glory hallelujah, do I have A witness as empire zips into bonfire. For what? To dip wrists in fresh water From an inverted fountain in a square. • Black lives matter but blue lives matter more. Duh. Veins, blue, blood, plus or minus, B this or A that. Epicurus, I find your coin staring up at me From the bottom of my beer mug, too late For Troy, for Trayvon. I need a flotation device, A buoy, Woolf’s lighthouse and single room Garvey’s Star Line to beam me up Scotty. Where is yesteryear’s full moon that silvered Towers and made a midnight lake of the city Where lovers strolled, hand in hand, one black, One white, with no mind for anyone and no two Minds in their business? Gone the way of drones Whose shadows crossed the moon without trace On GPS to sow grief in the name of cod, liver, oil. Spell it out or risk talk stuck in ecofriendly caves. Black and blue, both, why can’t we, intoned, Rodney (not Walter), get along? Because, Because, because (fill in the dots) with your Trotsky (or Brodsky) and your Marx (Groucho). Laugh therapy narrows eyes, blocks ears, Hurts jaws, ribs, merrily, merrily, cha-cha. Cha. • Eek-A-Mouse blasts my buds, as I read The instruction manual, which says One thing but leads to another When I piece it together, finally. It being the thing I refuse to name. My nerves, porous as that strainer I hold over a tilted pot full of spaghetti In hot water. Pavarotti in the shower, Malcolm before a cracked mirror, Gaga at each news item competing For part Fool. Ornate, abandoned nest Left in place, in my suburban rafter, Squirreled from without a note, Unless feathers could ever be a sign Of things to come, of what once was. • Face Beckett’s door, imperceptibly ajar. His stage direction, for how things Turn out here if this show goes on. Sir Ian, why reserve your last check For your flies, before you take the stage? Because all eyes alight there first. Mr. Spock, where is the logic in this? I marvel at comics from my youth In 4K, LED.Captain, put me ashore. By which I mean at sea with sirens, Ears unwaxed, sternum lashed to bow. What is your name? Kunta. Whip. Am I not a ... asked Sizwe in Fugard. You are trans, on loan from genes, Dust, waves, particles, here, today. • Go-go in la-la land whines craft for art’s saké. See that chrysalis hanging like a mural. Should it stop unfolding, hold back Dues, suspend when wings peel gloves, Snake free, take flight, remind the greed In our chi, Che, cha, what turns without Turning? If you must know, but first, Shush, write milk in lemon juice on foolscap, Read by passing over Bunsen. Mercurial Chemists, we were all Curie. Cooked crack Ready to pay any price, to find out if love Could ever be a portion, all you would need, To spin Mercator a tad faster on whiteout Poles, match our heart, tap, rat-a-tat burst. • 1.  Hummingbird feeder needs refill 2.  Peel sticker, off window, that says glass 3.  Buy T-shirt with directive, mind the gap 4.  Sip tea from mug, of civil rights dead 5.  Breathe in, sure, but really exhale 6.  Note how breeze lifts a whole branch 7.  Whose green skirt shows white undies • I mean certain legends about flight that grow up with right minds to help them come to terms with change that may be out of their control. Lone branch ranges from a curved palm 90 feet over LA’s 1914 craftsman in historic Adams. How flayed branch cruises broadcasts a specific gravity geared to flight of the right kind, slow, bracing, reluctant, noncommittal, inevitable, and resigned to its fate. Through double-glazing I hear, so I believe, that swoosh of storied capital decline, swish perhaps, almost a whistle, as you wish, much like us as kids with a clasped blade of grass held to our pursed lips for that didgeridoo that was elevator music to us atonal types. But how can a branch sing if made to move on by wind and rain from where it began, and thought it would end, even if a philosophy spread among shoots of a final sail set for another dimension? As word of government raids spread through town and university we forwarded emails, Instagrams, and stopped with neighbors in streets to exchange the latest. Is this time for emergency measures or are we too blind to know what we can feel coming a mile away, where someone who knows someone we know stops for bread, milk, eggs and is grabbed, handcuffed, and carted off to detention? Imagine us as branches dislodged in a sea change helped by soft water. We cling, not to give up on all we know. What for? That fall, we must accept as fate. • Juggernaut ancestors shape-shift cumulus, March across dull blue grass to bagpipes. Change bandages on Grandmother. Amputated right hand she says she feels Rainy days in Georgetown as a firm handshake That rattles all 27 phantom bones, makes her shiver. Grandfather never averts his bifurcated lens From his Golden Treasury, unless his hanky readies To catch eyewater at the blurred sight of her. In a time of airships, of toothpicks operated Behind hand cover. Whoever you vote for, (Runs the calypso) the government gets in, Ting-a-ling-a-ling. Doan tek serious thing Mek joke, bannoh. WTF. Twin towers got us Here. Nah, Reagan. Nope, slavery. Try again. Irony, that republic of deferred action. Hummingbird smashes into that glass door, My mother walks absently into it too. I glance just in time, brake and catch a face That I look through to my final destination. • K Street in South London? Now? How? One morning at 6:30 I crossed Blackheath Hill. On my paper round Met a scrawny fox halfway Uphill, down, not sure. We paused, inhaled each Other, fox-trotted away, In a slight panic, Me thinking tabloid Headlines, rabid animal Chases paper kid On delivery route. Follow as I buzz myself Into a tower, Board elevator, a man In a suit exits, With the merest nod. Climb 8 floors, carry That fox, and just as I plunge The folded Mirror Into letter box, Door, ajar, flies open, wham! A very pregnant Woman, naked, swollen breasts Blazing redhead, small Burning bush at crotch, Fills doorframe, scrambles my head. She takes one moment To compute I am Not her partner, slams door, smack, In my wide-eyed face. That moment, as she Processes me and I her, Stretches out enough For me to see her Shoulder-length, red, flaming curls And inverted red Triangle tuft at her crotch, Bright stretched skin at her Distended navel, An outie, as though I crashed at high speed and could Recall the lead up Frame by stark frame for Posterity, mine and hers, Her child near its term. The rest of my round I peer left, right, near distance, Round bends, for said fox. I conjure woman, Pregnant, framed by her threshold, Here, now, with only Me, you, these measures, This emergency, all three, To foster, connect all. • Lap up 70s Airy Hall, Guyana. One road in and one road out, One of everything village, Caiman, donkey, peacock, And mad expat Englishman Footloose and fancy-free Who we stone with red sand That crumbles on contact Grabbed from the roadside That acts as giant bow, Strung with two-story house, Whose Greenheart frame, Tensed, held all this time. English pelted for saying, Down his big burnt nose, That he was sent here To rule us half-clad children That he in his better days Seeing better times before Guyana’s famous red rum Got the better of him, Helped sow high and low, And everything between Our town and country. • Maestro, we played shoots Planted in one place Sprouts in disorderly rows, Up whole feet if you look away For a spell, all loaded In one hammock strung Between rafters in a back room Empty until harvest Stuffed paddy from roof To pillar to post. Rice husk smell for days. Rocking chair song and dance On full moons, donkey-bray At midday, peacock-scream Various most afternoons. • Now help bring barefoot Pale instep, cracked heel, stamping Englishman back, not to curse, Stone or ridicule, but to hear How he would remedy this now So out of sync with then. • Once more help us • Parse wheat from chaff, • Quantify this voting • Result that tests our gall. • Stepped-on alligator, Uncle • Takes for a log bridge • Until it lifts, shakes, yawns. • Velocity of legs cycling air, Caiman, not alligator, Lassoed between two poles, Fetched back to the house, Cut loose in a fenced field For sport for that day, Lost to me every day since. I bring it back, steady Its shine, against this time, • Where I am told one past Counts most, all others Must be put down to what That alligator, jaws open, Head reared, presents, Ready to lash with tail, Charge at anyone Who takes it for a log. • X marks the spot where Englishman walks in half Circles, pumps his bent Arms as if to fly, cackles Like a peacock, only to get The real thing started, The two in a quarrel thrice Removed from that magic Flower duet from Lakmé By Léo Delibes. Peacock, Donkey, caiman, village fool, Be my ally, bring it all, Cow, moon, dish, spoon. • Yo-Yo Ma follows Eek On democracy’s Shuffle Play. • Zebra asks me in Queen’s English peppered with Esperanto If he be black whiff white stripes Or white wid black stripes. I wake with this atonal pair On the edge of my edginess: “I do not care, I do not care, If the Don has on underwear.” “But don’t you think or worry some, That his nudity is zero sum?” “I cannot see for the life of me, Why that should concern anybody.” “I fret when all’s said and done, We leave him be, he has his fun.”

I I hear you are whispering there O stars of heaven, O suns—O grass of graves. . . If you do not say anything how can I say anything?

Tell the truth of experience they say they also say you must let go learn to let go let your children go and they go and you stay letting them go because you are obedient and respect everyone’s freedom to go and you stay and you want to tell the truth because you are yours truly its obedient servant but you can’t because you’re feeling what you’re not supposed to feel you have let them go and go and you can’t say what you feel because they might read this poem and feel guilty and some post-modern hack will back them up and make you feel guilty and stop feeling which is post-modern and what you’re meant to feel so you don’t write a poem you line up words in prose inside a journal trapped like a scorpion in a locked drawer to be opened by your children let go after lived life and all the time a great wave bursting howls and rears and you have to let go or you’re gone you’re gone gasping you let go till the next wave towers crumbles shreds you to lace— When you wake your spine is twisted like a sea-bird inspecting the sky, stripped by lightning.

1 Sometimes I feel like Jonah fleeing Nineveh. Who wants to hear what is evil? Every day we make this earth less alive, various or legal. What is this diminishment but sin against god which is a program to generate complexity? I should go to Nineveh and cry against wickedness which halts love which wants the other’s different self to stay itself. 2 They say if you’re fair or moneyed or live on a mountain you won the lottery, everyone else, apologies — storms aren’t going away so play the game nicely. Lots are cast, blame allotted, men tossed to the ocean’s torsion, seaweed’s cage, foreclosing depths and then the blue whale’s curdled belly digesting everything we’ve done. 3 I visited a branch of Sea Life in an ex-county hall. Mops in corridors, half-empty vending machines. They took photos of us pretending to look scared in front of green screens. Rays took titbits from stinking cups. The sharks were gilled glide, ravenous for outside. We were vomited onto dry land by the Coca-Cola London Eye. 4 I must warn Nineveh. But who wants to hear me say what is evil? It is dominion. It is the law that makes goodness impossible, fasting in sackcloth the only option. But god will not say must only relent or sorrow as the whale does when her calf is taken — a harrowed sound that does not bear description.

Love of air and water Joined in apprehension, Perhaps you know what's there By way of fear, for while Living in pursuit of And going always forth Toward something that trembles. Its knowledge is your mind. What do you think about The great ocean's sullen Aristocrats—these small Headaches and dark affairs That bathe themselves in your Staging grounds, where you go To contemplate how what You want became your mind? The black oblivion Offers no reprieve for You, hunter—in its keep Your ears have grown too sharp, So sharp you almost hear Your own heartbeat over The subtle whispers of Water’s dismal gardens. Everything about you Is overblown, even Your mouth is uniquely Talented at its tasks, Gathering for slaughter Animals in their sleep, Speaking without a sound. Noah had seven laws, You have only one—eat To build life out of death, Survive above all things. The fatalistic moon Filtered down upon you Seems an imitation Of lives you will not live. Would you be its hero? Would you call out against The morning’s weaving light That shames the night before The passing of its cool? Would you be at the beach When the invisible Becomes a glow, to surprise? Inland, workers dreaming Of unitarian Proposals lose no sleep To fear about your mouth. It is their wayward friends, Who wandered too far west Into fevered chaos, That wake up with your name As screams exploding dreams. The inland ether holds Clouds in your dismal shape. Lucky are those who know Nothing, who cannot see Hell outlined in vapor. Somewhere a piano Plays a sorrowful song Half-written by the hate That a grieving loved one Would stick into your heart. Such are the arts of men. Beware. Your time is near. Someone has learned lessons You didn’t mean to teach. A crowd is gathering. Your skull is their kingdom.

Truth also is the pursuit of it: Like happiness, and it will not stand. Even the verse begins to eat away In the acid. Pursuit, pursuit; A wind moves a little, Moving in a circle, very cold. How shall we say? In ordinary discourse— We must talk now. I am no longer sure of the words, The clockwork of the world. What is inexplicable Is the ‘preponderance of objects.’ The sky lights Daily with that predominance And we have become the present. We must talk now. Fear Is fear. But we abandon one another.

In a hut far from the village Li Hua bends over his canvas like an insect. He is so deliberate, each stroke is a spider's legs fighting the current. There is a war in his veins, a battle of desires. He is jealous of Li Po whose pictures glide like the moon over dark water. I do not wish to disturb him as he tries to make art in this time of death, so I will wait, like a fly on the tip of a stick, until he is finished.

What brings me alive is less than simplicity, is a company of soldiers in shiny blue jackets boiling chickens in the shade by the Erasmus Gate, is the fact that my grandfather died begging for mercy in a hotel in Atlanta, and that my grandmother, in 1910, mourned because her breasts were small. I know four men who paddled the length of the Mississippi in a dugout they hacked and burned out of a beech tree. When anyone mentioned rivers they would look at each other and their eyes would soften with the memory of mists and sand bars, of the grave black brows of river barges. I come from a country as large as Brazil, but all I remember are the wet silver webs of golden jungle spiders netted in the cane. I wake up thinking of my brother, who, on a July morning in 1954, killed a boy without meaning to. And I can tell you that this isn’t true, that my brother didn’t, as he swept back a four iron on the lawn of our house in Sea Island, crack the temple of a boy we had only met the night before. I can say Yes I am lying again, about the boy, about Sea Island, but as you get up to fix another drink I will tell you a story about sleeping in a hay barn in Turkey and of waking in the night, as, one by one, the farm hands stood out of the rank straw to greet us. I want you to know that my life is a ritual lie and that I deserve to be loved anyway. I want you to smile when I tell of the purple hyacinths caught in the gears of the raised bridge over the Chickopee River, I want you to pretend you were there. My sister’s hips were two ax handles wide, she wept that no one would love her, my sister, who waded among yellow poppies and wondered if she were really alive—I want you to wish you had married her, I want you to say Please, why did she leave me, Get her back, O my God, how can I live without her. I’m not even amazed that I want you to say this. Listen, I came downstairs this morning and somebody had filled the house with flowers.