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O you gods, you long-limbed animals, you astride the sea and you unhammocked in the cyprus grove and you with your hair full of horses, please. My thoughts have turned from the savor of plums to the merits of pity—touch and interrupt me, chasten me with waking, humble me for wonder again. Seed god and husk god, god of the open palm, you know me, you know my mettle. See, my wrists are small. O you, with glass-colored wind at your call and you, whose voice is soft as a turned page, whose voice unrolls paper, whose voice returns air to its forms, send me a word for faith that also means his thrum,his coax and surge and her soft hollow, please—friend gods, lend me a word that means what I would ask him for so when he says: You give it all away, I can say: I am not sorry. I sing.

Tom, will you let me love you in your restaurant? I will let you make me a sandwich of your invention and I will eat it and call it a carolyn sandwich. Then you will kiss my lips and taste the mayonnaise and that is how you shall love me in my restaurant Tom, will you come to my empty beige apartment and help me set up my daybed? Yes, and I will put the screws in loosely so that when we move on it, later, it will rock like a cradle and then you will know you are my baby Tom, I am sitting on my dirt bike on the deck. Will you come out from the kitchen and watch the people with me? Yes, and then we will race to your bedroom. I will win and we will tangle up on your comforter while the sweat rains from our stomachs and foreheads Tom, the stars are sitting in tonight like gumball gems in a little girl’s jewelry box. Later can we walk to the duck pond? Yes, and we can even go the long way past the jungle gym. I will push you on the swing, but promise me you’ll hold tight. If you fall I might disappear Tom, can we make a baby together? I want to be a big pregnant woman with a loved face and give you a squalling red daughter. No, but I will come inside you and you will be my daughter Tom, will you stay the night with me and sleep so close that we are one person? No, but I will lie down on your sheets and taste you. There will be feathers of you on my tongue and then I will never forget you Tom, when we are in line at the convenience store can I put my hands in your back pockets and my lips and nose in your baseball shirt and feel the crook of your shoulder blade? No, but later you can lie against me and almost touch me and when I go I will leave my shirt for you to sleep in so that always at night you will be pressed up against the thought of me Tom, if I weep and want to wait until you need me will you promise that someday you will need me? No, but I will sit in silence while you rage, you can knock the chairs down any mountain. I will always be the same and you will always wait Tom, will you climb on top of the dumpster and steal the sun for me? It’s just hanging there and I want it. No, it will burn my fingers. No one can have the sun: it’s on loan from God. But I will draw a picture of it and send it to you from Richmond and then you can smooth out the paper and you will have a piece of me as well as the sun Tom, it’s so hot here, and I think I’m being born. Will you come back from Richmond and baptise me with sex and cool water? I will come back from Richmond. I will smooth the damp spiky hairs from the back of your neck and then I will lick the salt off it. Then I will leave Tom, Richmond is so far away. How will I know how you love me? I have left you. That is how you will know

For those of us who live at the shoreline standing upon the constant edges of decision crucial and alone for those of us who cannot indulge the passing dreams of choice who love in doorways coming and going in the hours between dawns looking inward and outward at once before and after seeking a now that can breed futures like bread in our children’s mouths so their dreams will not reflect the death of ours; For those of us who were imprinted with fear like a faint line in the center of our foreheads learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk for by this weapon this illusion of some safety to be found the heavy-footed hoped to silence us For all of us this instant and this triumph We were never meant to survive. And when the sun rises we are afraid it might not remain when the sun sets we are afraid it might not rise in the morning when our stomachs are full we are afraid of indigestion when our stomachs are empty we are afraid we may never eat again when we are loved we are afraid love will vanish when we are alone we are afraid love will never return and when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed but when we are silent we are still afraid So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive.

Anything can be a bird if you’re not careful. I should say something nice about the weather. I should be in awe of the living, but the world dulls when I step into it. The squirrels scatter, the branches lift. Sure, I’ve hurt the ones I’ve loved by not paying attention.Not alone — never alone is a lesson I need to understand. It was you who said that. It’s you still. You who says,Look! You who points to the sky. You who tilts my chin toward the heron, who cups the minnow in your hands, who spots the deer miles ahead, who dulls the world with your absence. You who says,Look! & when I look, you are gone, replaced by the whitetail’s hind legs, fading into the bush.

Every morning the maple leaves. Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out You will be alone always and then you will die. So maybe I wanted to give you something more than a catalog of non-definitive acts, something other than the desperation. Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I couldn’t come to your party. Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I came to your party and seduced you and left you bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing. You want a better story. Who wouldn’t? A forest, then. Beautiful trees. And a lady singing. Love on the water, love underwater, love, love and so on. What a sweet lady. Sing lady, sing! Of course, she wakes the dragon. Love always wakes the dragon and suddenly flames everywhere. I can tell already you think I’m the dragon, that would be so like me, but I’m not. I’m not the dragon. I’m not the princess either. Who am I? I’m just a writer. I write things down. I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure, I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow glass, but that comes later. And the part where I push you flush against the wall and every part of your body rubs against the bricks, shut up I’m getting to it. For a while I thought I was the dragon. I guess I can tell you that now. And, for a while, I thought I was the princess, cotton candy pink, sitting there in my room, in the tower of the castle, young and beautiful and in love and waiting for you with confidence but the princess looks into her mirror and only sees the princess, while I’m out here, slogging through the mud, breathing fire, and getting stabbed to death. Okay, so I’m the dragon. Big deal. You still get to be the hero. You get magic gloves! A fish that talks! You get eyes like flashlights! What more do you want? I make you pancakes, I take you hunting, I talk to you as if you’re really there. Are you there, sweetheart? Do you know me? Is this microphone live? Let me do it right for once, for the record, let me make a thing of cream and stars that becomes, you know the story, simply heaven. Inside your head you hear a phone ringing and when you open your eyes only a clearing with deer in it. Hello deer. Inside your head the sound of glass, a car crash sound as the trucks roll over and explode in slow motion. Hello darling, sorry about that. Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud. Especially that, but I should have known. You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together to make a creature that will do what I say or love me back. I’m not really sure why I do it, but in this version you are not feeding yourself to a bad man against a black sky prickled with small lights. I take it back. The wooden halls like caskets. These terms from the lower depths. I take them back. Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed. Crossed out. Clumsy hands in a dark room. Crossed out. There is something underneath the floorboards. Crossed out. And here is the tabernacle reconstructed. Here is the part where everyone was happy all the time and we were all forgiven, even though we didn’t deserve it. Inside your head you hear a phone ringing, and when you open your eyes you’re washing up in a stranger’s bathroom, standing by the window in a yellow towel, only twenty minutes away from the dirtiest thing you know. All the rooms of the castle except this one, says someone, and suddenly darkness, suddenly only darkness. In the living room, in the broken yard, in the back of the car as the lights go by. In the airport bathroom’s gurgle and flush, bathed in a pharmacy of unnatural light, my hands looking weird, my face weird, my feet too far away. And then the airplane, the window seat over the wing with a view of the wing and a little foil bag of peanuts. I arrived in the city and you met me at the station, smiling in a way that made me frightened. Down the alley, around the arcade, up the stairs of the building to the little room with the broken faucets, your drawings, all your things, I looked out the window and said This doesn’t look that much different from home, because it didn’t, but then I noticed the black sky and all those lights. We walked through the house to the elevated train. All these buildings, all that glass and the shiny beautiful mechanical wind. We were inside the train car when I started to cry. You were crying too, smiling and crying in a way that made me even more hysterical. You said I could have anything I wanted, but I just couldn’t say it out loud. Actually, you said Love, for you, is larger than the usual romantic love. It’s like a religion. It’s terrifying. No one will ever want to sleep with you.

I sing of simple people and the hardier virtues, by Associated Stuffed Shirts & Company, Incorporated, 358 West 42d Street, New York, brochure enclosed of Christ on the Cross, by a visitor to Calvary, first class art deals with eternal, not current verities, revised from last week's Sunday supplement guess what we mean, in The Literary System, and a thousand noble answers to a thousand empty questions, by a patriot who needs the dough. And so it goes. Books are the key to magic portals. Knowledge is power. Give the people light. Writing must be such a nice profession. Fill in the coupon. How do you know? Maybe you can be a writer, too.

I remember them saying, these poems, their something for someone at sometime for me too, at one time. That got in the way; so I sent them away back into history— just temporarily. They won’t come back now. I can’t remember how the words spoke, or what they said, except: We are all dead

The Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia holds the world’s largest lithium reserves. “As remote and unlikely a place as can be imagined for the world to seek its salvation.”—Matthew Power Once, volcanoes walked & talked like humans. Married. Quarreled & gave birth. When the beautiful Tunupa’s husband ran away & took their only child she mourned: she cried & stormed, her full breasts spilled until she made this sunken bed, a dry & ragged ice-white sea. Tears & milk. Salt. Silver liquor of the spirits, the winter tuber’s pulp. ≈ Buzz Aldrin spied a plain from space: twice Rhode Island-sized, not a glacier but this vast evaporation, a place so flat we use its plane to calibrate the altitude of satellites, measure the retreat of polar ice. A dry lagoon of element. Energy.Winking like a coin in a well. ≈ In bare Salar the tourists bottle sand & salt: mug & pirouette across this lithic sink of drought, empty leagues of sky & light, slight mist of silt. We dream our dreams of clean—or cleaner— means to drive and speak—o Li, atomic number three, be our Miracle element! Prehistoric smelt, simmered & distilled in Altiplano climes, your samite matter known to quiet, after all, the manic brain, the urge to suicide; proven to dispel the voice that whispers fire from the gods is never free— Lithium chloride & plain table salt under ancient ocean crust; fossils & algae; a bird so bright & blackly drowned, pickled in the salt brine pool: the desert is generous. The desert is a pot boiled dry. This road will turn to dirt and then to salt, to the workers in jumpsuits, veiled & covered from the brutal sun; but we’re not here, not here— what matters are the distant cities: Chongquing, Phoenix, Quebec, Lagos, far & star-chalked: splitting at the seams. Now ≈ the shrouded workers wait for sunset. The desert is patient. They see the bed plowed under: slapdash trenches in the legend, in the hasty furrows raked. With eyes narrowed from the endless light. See Litio. Wages in the veins laid open; see paid the lush reduction of her ditches’ spill. This new abyss to feed our traffic.

That sparrow on the iron railing, not worth a farthing, purchases a realm its shrill cries measure, trading dying for being. It's up to no good, out to overturn a kingdom just by swooping into the right kitchen, or upsetting somebody's aim. For my pleasure, I'll call it Good News, or Little Egypt. For my delight, I'll think of it as needle and thread. Or a breathing remnant restored to a living cloth. Or scissors trimming lament to allow for everything I don't know. For my happiness, I'll call it Pocket Dictionary Full of Words in Another Language. For my gladness, Feathered Interval, The Deciding Gram, Geronimo. For nothing, Monument to the Nano.

A drowned drayman was hoisted on to the slab. Someone had jammed a lavender aster between his teeth. As I made the incision up from the chest with a long knife under the skin to cut out tongue and gums, I must have nudged it because it slipped into the brain lying adjacent. I packed it into the thoracic cavity with the excelsior when he was sewn up. Drink your fill in your vase! Rest easy, little aster!