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I like Rosh Hashonah late, when the leaves are half burnt umber and scarlet, when sunset marks the horizon with slow fire and the black silhouettes of migrating birds perch on the wires davening. I like Rosh Hashonah late when all living are counting their days toward death or sleep or the putting by of what will sustain them— when the cold whose tendrils translucent as a jellyfish and with a hidden sting just brush our faces at twilight. The threat of frost, a premonition a warning, a whisper whose words we cannot yet decipher but will. I repent better in the waning season when the blood runs swiftly and all creatures look keenly about them for quickening danger. Then I study the rockface of my life, its granite pitted and pocked and pickaxed eroded, discolored by sun and wind and rain— my rock emerging from the veil of greenery to be mapped, to be examined, to be judged.

( can pickers ) i am a twentieth-century welfare recipient moonlighting in the sun as a latero a job invented by national and state laws designed to re-cycle aluminum cans to return to consumer acid laden gastric inflammation pituitary glands coca diet rite low-cal godsons of artificially flavored malignant indigestions somewhere down the line of a cancerous cell i collect from garbage cans in outdoor facilities congested with putrid residues my hands shelving themselves opening plastic bags never knowing what to encounter several times a day i touch evil rituals slit throats of chickens tongues of poisoned rats salivating on my index finger smells of month old rotten food next to pamper's diarrhea dry blood infectious diseases hypodermic needles tissued with heroine water drops pilfered in slimy grease blood hazardous waste materials but i cannot use rubber gloves they undermine my daily profit i am a twentieth-century welfare recipient moonlighting during the day as a latero making it big in america someday i might become experienced enough to offer technical assistance to other lateros i am thinking of publishing my own guide to latero collecting and founding a latero's union to offer medical dental benefits i am a twentieth-century welfare recipient moonlighting at night as a latero i am considered some kind of expert at collecting cans during fifth avenue parades i can now hire workers at twenty five cents an hour guaranteed salary and fifty per cent of two and one half cents profit on each can collected i am a twentieth-century welfare recipient moonlighting at midnight as a latero i am becoming an entrepreneur an american success story i have hired bag ladies to keep peddlers from my territories i have read in some guide to success that in order to get rich to make it big i have to sacrifice myself moonlighting until dawn by digging deeper into the extra can margin of profit i am on my way up the opportunistic ladder of success in ten years i will quit welfare to become a legitimate businessman i'll soon become a latero executive with corporate conglomerate intents god bless america.

Wood strips, cross-purposed into lattice, made this nursery of interstices—a place that softened, then admitted, sun with shade, baffled the wind and rain, broke open space. It’s now more skeletal, a ghostly room the garden seemed to grow, in disrepair, long empty and well past its final bloom. Less lumbered, though, it cultivates the air by shedding cedar slats for open sky. As if, designed to never seem quite finished, it had a choice to seal and stultify or take its weather straight and undiminished, grow larger but be less precisely here, break with its elements, and disappear.

If I am not Ulysses, I am his dear, ruthless half brother. Strap me to the mast so I may endure night sirens singing my birth when water broke into a thousand blossoms in a landlocked town of the South, before my name was heard in the womb-shaped world of deep sonorous waters. Storms ran my ship to the brink, & I wasn't myself in a kingdom of unnamed animals & totem trees, but never wished to unsay my vows. From the salt-crusted timbers I could only raise a battering ram or cross, where I learned God is rhythm & spores. If I am Ulysses, made of his words & deeds, I swam with sea cows & mermaids in a lost season, ate oysters & poison berries to approach the idea of death tangled in the lifeline's slack on that rolling barrel of a ship, then come home to more than just the smell of apples, the heavy oars creaking the same music as our bed.

At dusk, the grandmother sits alone in the light of the long pale pool and speaks to the frog who is waiting by the electric gate of the clubhouse. It will be all right, she says, leaning out from her chair. Her voice is churning, and old, and wet with advice. Her newly red hair purples under the bug light.It will be all right, she says, again, and again the sky rolls in and out on its journey across the peninsula, rattling the palms.

These words of two, three years ago returned. — Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, tr. by Will Petersen one day, Coyote sees Duck walking her ducklings, Coyote asks her how she keeps them in a straight line, Duck says she sews them together with white horsetail hair every morning and tugs on the line gently, until the horsehair disappears, that is how she keeps her ducklings in a row as usual, Coyote leaves smiling, she sees a white horse grazing in a nearby field, she plucks a few strands of tail hair and returns to her burrow the next morning, one by one she begins to sew her pups together when she finishes, she gently tugs on the horsehair and drags their little bodies along the ground, Coyote tilts her head in dismay and becomes distraught, she realizes she has killed her little pups

From over the wall I could hear the laughter of women in a foreign tongue, in the sun-rinsed air of the city. They sat (so I thought) perfumed in their hats and their silks, in chairs on the grass amid flowers glowing and swaying. One spoke and the others rang like bells, oh so witty, like bells till the sound filled up the garden and lifted like bubbles spilling over the bricks that enclosed them, their happiness holding them, even if just for the moment. Although I did not understand a word they were saying, their sound surrounded me, fell on my shoulders and hair, and burst on my cheeks like kisses, and continued to fall, holding me there where I stood on the sidewalk listening. As I could not move, I had to hear them grow silent, and adjust myself to the clouds and the cooling air. The mumble of thunder rumbled out of the wall and the smacking of drops as the rain fell everywhere.

Given over to love, she un-balls the socks, lets fall debris of days, leaf litter, sand grain, slub of some sticky substance, picks it all for the sake of the stainless tub of the gleaming new front loader. Given over to love long ago, when her own exasperated moan bounced off the quaint speckled enamel of the top loader vowing: she'd do this always and well. She fell in love then, she fell in line— in a march of millions, you pair them, two by two, you marry the socks.

Not even the cops who can do anything could do this— work on Sunday picking up dirty and delivering clean laundry in Philadelphia. Rambling with my father, get this, in a truck that wasn’t even our own, part ambulance, part bullet, there wasn’t anything we couldn’t do. Sheets of stigmata, macula of love, vomit and shit and the stains of pissing another week’s salary away, we picked up and drove to the stick men in shirt sleeves, the thin Bolshevik Jews who laughed out the sheets like the empty speech in cartoons. They smelled better than sin, better than decadent capitalism. And oh, we could deliver, couldn’t we, the lawless bags through the city that said in his yawn, get money, get money, get money.

In the clear light that confuses everything Only you, dark laurel, Shadow my house, Lifting your arms in the anguish Of nature at the stake. And at night, quivering with tears, You are like the tree called Tasso’s. Crippled, and hooped with iron, It stands on Peter’s hill. When the lovers prop their bicycles And sit on the high benches That look across to eternity, That tree makes their own torsion Seem natural. And so, they’re comforted. 2 One of the local philosophers ... He says, “In California We have the old anarchist tradition.” What can he mean? Is there an anarchist tradition? And why would an anarchist want one? O California, Is there a tree without opinions? Come, let me clasp you! Let me feel the idea breathing. I too cry O for a life of sensations Rather than thoughts— “The sayling Pine, the Cedar proud and tall.” Like the girls in our neighborhood, They’re beautiful and silent. 3 As I was digging in the back yard I thought of a man in China. A lifetime, it seemed, we gazed at each other. I could see and hear his heartbeats Like a spade hurling clods. He pointed behind him, and I saw That the hills were covered with armed men, And they were all on the other side Of the life that I held dear. He said, “We are as various As the twigs of a tree, But now the tree moves as one man. It walks. And the earth trembles When a race of slaves is leaving.” 4 I said, “Yet, all these people Will fall down as one man When the entrails of a bomb are breathing. When we came down from Chosin Carrying the guns in dainty snow-wear And all the dead we had to, It was a time of forgetfulness, Like a plucked string. It was a river of darkness. Was it not so on your side, when you came To the sea that was covered with ships? Let us speak to each other, Let the word rise, making dark strokes in the air. That bird flies over the heads of the armed men.” 5 One part of the tree grows outward. The other I saw when, with a light, I explored the cellar—shattering roots. They had broken through the wall, As though there were something in my rubbish That life would have at last. I must be patient with shapes Of automobile fenders and ketchup bottles. These things are the beginning Of things not visible to the naked eye. It was so in the time of Tobit— The dish glowed when the angel held it. It is so that spiritual messengers Deliver their meaning.