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In the cold I will rise, I will bathe In waters of ice; myself Will shiver, and shrive myself, Alone in the dawn, and anoint Forehead and feet and hands; I will shutter the windows from light, I will place in their sockets the four Tall candles and set them a-flame In the grey of the dawn; and myself Will lay myself straight in my bed, And draw the sheet under my chin.

years of  practice for a soft landing in the slaughter we looked far off to a flag sewn into flesh dear enemy come down the hill I have taken a title out of  the love for you jumping down the clear shaft of  your eye you would not know how long I paused when writing this unless I said so in the poem half an hour staring at the pencil having written of  my enemy with love and fight to maintain the ascension voices from a room no one exits we pry genocide out of  the museum but meant to remove the museum from genocide

for Daniel “Chappie” James, General USAF and for the 332d Fighter Group Being black in America was the Original Catch, so no one was surprised by 22: The segregated airstrips, separate camps. They did the jobs they’d been trained to do. Black ground crews kept them in the air; black flight surgeons kept them alive; the whole Group removed their headgear when another pilot died. They were known by their names: “Ace” and “Lucky,” “Sky-hawk Johnny,” “Mr. Death.” And by their positions and planes. Red Leader to Yellow Wing-man, do you copy? If you could find a fresh egg you bought it and hid it in your dopp-kit or your boot until you could eat it alone. On the night before a mission you gave a buddy your hiding-places as solemnly as a man dictating his will. There’s a chocolate bar in my Bible; my whiskey bottle is inside my bedroll. In beat-up Flying Tigers that had seen action in Burma, they shot down three German jets. They were the only outfit in the American Air Corps to sink a destroyer with fighter planes. Fighter planes with names like “By Request.” Sometimes the radios didn’t even work. They called themselves “Hell from Heaven.” This Spookwaffe. My father’s old friends. It was always maximum effort: A whole squadron of brother-men raced across the tarmac and mounted their planes. My tent-mate was a guy named Starks. The funny thing about me and Starks was that my air mattress leaked, and Starks’ didn’t. Every time we went up, I gave my mattress to Starks and put his on my cot. One day we were strafing a train. Strafing’s bad news: you have to fly so low and slow you’re a pretty clear target. My other wing-man and I exhausted our ammunition and got out. I recognized Starks by his red tail and his rudder’s trim-tabs. He couldn’t pull up his nose. He dived into the train and bought the farm. I found his chocolate, three eggs, and a full fifth of his hoarded-up whiskey. I used his mattress for the rest of my tour. It still bothers me, sometimes: I was sleeping on his breath.

Up, up, slender As an eel’s Child, weaving Through water, our lonely Pipefish seeks out his dinner, Scanty at best; he blinks Cut-diamond eyes—snap—he Grabs morsels so small Only a lens pinpoints them, But he ranges all over That plastic preserve—dorsal Fin tremulous—snap—and Another çedilla Of brine shrimp’s gone ... We talk on of poetry, of love, Of grammar; he looks At a living comma— Snap—sizzling about In his two-gallon Caribbean And grazes on umlauts for breakfast. His pug nosed, yellow Mate, aproned in gloom, Fed rarely, slumped, Went deadwhite, as we argued on; That rudder fin, round as a Pizza cutter, at the End of his two inch Fluent stick self, lets his eyes Pilot his mouth—snap... Does his kind remember? Can our kind forget?

The door-latch is always stubborn beyond it dozes a beast tinged by the fire they know who is walking the curve of the road by their footsteps alone glance at the fancy lamp hanging from the sooty ceiling a green and speckled plant withers a child who has wandered cries beneath a long low sky and at last the snow comes on.

In the America of the dream the first rise of the moon swings free of the ocean, and she reigns in her shining flesh over a good, great valley of plumped, untrampled grasses and beasts with solemn eyes, of lovers infallibly pitched in their ascendant phase. In this America, death is virginal also, roaming the good, great valley in his huge boots, his shadow steady and lean, his pistol silver, his greeting clear and courteous as a stranger’s who looks for another, a mind to share his peaceable evenings. Dreaming, we are another race than the one which wakes in the cold sweat of fear, fires wild shots at death., builds slippery towers of glass to head him off, waylays him with alcohol traps, rides him down in canyons of sex, and hides in teetering ghost towns. Dreaming, we are the mad who swear by the blood of trees and speak with the tongues of streams through props of steel and sawdust, a colony of souls ravaged by visions, bound to some wild, secret cove not yet possessed, a place still innocent of us.

Long ago I heard footsteps come to the door, and a man knocking. We’ve had an accident up on the road, can you help he pled at the unanswered door, and kept knocking. He might have been a thief but soon enough a woman’s howl lit up the night, and I put a knife in my belt. Around dawn I figured their fortunes might be worth change.

The reception's not bad, across 50 years, though his voice has lost its boot-camp timbre. He's in his 80's now and, in a recent photo, looks it, so bald and pale and hard to see behind the tallowing of flesh. Posing with friends, he's the only one who has to sit—the man three of us couldn't pin. "The Hugger," they christened him before my class arrived— for his bearlike shape and his first name, Hugh. He fostered even us, the lowly track squad. "Mr. Morrison," I still call him. "You were the speedster on the team, a flash," he recalls with a chuckle. That's where his memory of me fades. And what have I retained of him beyond the nickname, voice, and burly shape? The rest could be invention: memory and desire's sleight-of-hand as we call up those we think we've known, to chat about the old days and the weather, bum hips and cholesterol, our small talk numbing as a dial tone, serious as prayer.

Madness “hath builded her house in the high places of the city.” — Guy Debord Men are hanging themselves unaccompanied by sound in the dark hours before the bottle shop opens Rope snaking a branch of pepper tree at the lodging house Empty tenement. Dark windows bruised by sky lighting rookeries of collapse and fire crumbling out until the whole street is vacant and mud caked In ragged brown of summer verticordia I peed near a midden of fleshy arils heaped at an anthill entrance watched them drag seed deep instilling acacia in dirt Withering of certainty spits hisses The swamps filling with drillholes guarded by adders Air churned with a fierce screaming warra! Warra. Dumbbell of yield and sequence Through years of discipline I learned containment or vice versa as natural as speechlike Upward spiral of spell A nested equivalence this woundedness Pinned fury petering in honeyeater as a falcon plucks its way to the warm core, feathers wafting down to soft eremophila Sentences in the Bible begin with And God As if starting was difficult and well populated An excess of tangle and downcast in need of name The roof rats went quietly once the python escaped to ceiling rafters of my father’s house its coagulation of coils echoing shapes of a nearby bogong moth

You would have thought it foolish to speak to the dead, but I have lived two decades longer now than you and all this time I have carried you in my head so I think I have the right to question what you said, dear teacher. My religious upbringing’s residue, you would have thought it foolish. To speak to the dead, however, is sometimes necessary, especially haunted by all the things I know you hoped I’d do with all this time that I have carried you in my head. In a dream last night I followed where you led until you asked me in a loud voice what I knew. (You would have thought it foolish to speak to the dead, but I was dreaming and could not refuse.) I said that you were wrong, that I could see your bitter view (since all this time I have carried you in my head) for what it was, and you for who you were. Instead of dreaming your reply I woke as you withdrew. You would have thought it foolish to speak to the dead but all this time I have carried you in my head.