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That hour-glass-backed, orchard-legged, heavy-headed will, paper-folded, wedge-contorted, savage—dense to kill— pulls back on backward-moving, arching high legs still, lowered through a deep, knees-reaching, feathered down green will, antenna-honest, thread-descending, carpeted as if with skill, a focus-changing, sober-reaching, tracing, killing will.

In those days I thought their endless thrum was the great wheel that turned the days, the nights. In the throats of hibiscus and oleander I’d see them clustered yellow, blue, their shells enameled hard as the sky before the rain. All that summer, my second, from city to city my young father drove the black coupe through humid mornings I’d wake to like fever parceled between luggage and sample goods. Afternoons, showers drummed the roof, my parents silent for hours. Even then I knew something of love was cruel, was distant. Mother leaned over the seat to me, the orchid Father’d pinned in her hair shriveled to a purple fist. A necklace of shells coiled her throat, moving a little as she murmured of alligators that float the rivers able to swallow a child whole, of mosquitoes whose bite would make you sleep a thousand years. And always the trance of blacktop shimmering through swamps with names like incantations— Okeefenokee, where Father held my hand and pointed to an egret’s flight unfolding white above swamp reeds that sang with insects until I was lost, until I was part of the singing, their thousand wings gauze on my body, tattooing my skin. Father rocked me later by the water, the motel balcony, singing calypso with the Jamaican radio. The lyrics a net over the sea, its lesson of desire and repetition. Lizards flashed over his shoes, over the rail where the citronella burned merging our shadows—Father’s face floating over mine in the black changing sound of night, the enormous Florida night, metallic with cicadas, musical and dangerous as the human heart.

I Happy are men who yet before they are killed Can let their veins run cold. Whom no compassion fleers Or makes their feet Sore on the alleys cobbled with their brothers. The front line withers. But they are troops who fade, not flowers, For poets’ tearful fooling: Men, gaps for filling: Losses, who might have fought Longer; but no one bothers. II And some cease feeling Even themselves or for themselves. Dullness best solves The tease and doubt of shelling, And Chance’s strange arithmetic Comes simpler than the reckoning of their shilling. They keep no check on armies’ decimation. III Happy are these who lose imagination: They have enough to carry with ammunition. Their spirit drags no pack. Their old wounds, save with cold, can not more ache. Having seen all things red, Their eyes are rid Of the hurt of the colour of blood for ever. And terror’s first constriction over, Their hearts remain small-drawn. Their senses in some scorching cautery of battle Now long since ironed, Can laugh among the dying, unconcerned. IV Happy the soldier home, with not a notion How somewhere, every dawn, some men attack, And many sighs are drained. Happy the lad whose mind was never trained: His days are worth forgetting more than not. He sings along the march Which we march taciturn, because of dusk, The long, forlorn, relentless trend From larger day to huger night. V We wise, who with a thought besmirch Blood over all our soul, How should we see our task But through his blunt and lashless eyes? Alive, he is not vital overmuch; Dying, not mortal overmuch; Nor sad, nor proud, Nor curious at all. He cannot tell Old men’s placidity from his. VI But cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns, That they should be as stones. Wretched are they, and mean With paucity that never was simplicity. By choice they made themselves immune To pity and whatever moans in man Before the last sea and the hapless stars; Whatever mourns when many leave these shores; Whatever shares The eternal reciprocity of tears.

I don’t know when it slipped into my speech that soft word meaning, “if God wills it.” Insha’Allah I will see you next summer. The baby will come in spring, insha’Allah. Insha’Allah this year we will have enough rain. So many plans I’ve laid have unraveled easily as braids beneath my mother’s quick fingers. Every language must have a word for this. A word our grandmothers uttered under their breath as they pinned the whites, soaked in lemon, hung them to dry in the sun, or peeled potatoes, dropping the discarded skins into a bowl. Our sons will return next month, insha’Allah. Insha’Allah this war will end, soon. Insha’Allah the rice will be enough to last through winter. How lightly we learn to hold hope, as if it were an animal that could turn around and bite your hand. And still we carry it the way a mother would, carefully, from one day to the next.

In the field is a house of wood. A window of the house contains the field. You can't see far with a sun in the sky, with a living-room lamp at night. Locality is all you light, and you, as single as a bed. But there's no end to dark. The bed is in the clearing and the clearing's in the wind; the world is a world among others. Now your cell-stars split.

How something is made flesh no one can say. The buffalo soup becomes a woman who sings every day to her horses or summons another to her private body saying come, touch, this is how it begins, the path of a newly born who, salvaged from other lives and worlds, will grow to become a woman, a man, with a heart that never rests, and the gathered berries, the wild grapes enter the body, human wine which can love, where nothing created is wasted; the swallowed grain takes you through the dreams of another night, the deer meat becomes hands strong enough to work. But I love most the white-haired creature eating green leaves; the sun shines there swallowed, showing in her face taking in all the light, and in the end when the shadow from the ground enters the body and remains, in the end, you might say, This is myself still unknown, still a mystery.

inside my head Inside my head a common room, a common place, a common tune, a common wealth, a common doom inside my head. I close my eyes. The horses run. Vast are the skies, and blue my passing thoughts’ surprise inside my head. What is this space here found to be, what is this place if only me? Inside my head, whose face? the tools First there, it proves to be still here. Distant as seen, it comes then to be near. I found it here and there unclear. What if my hand had only been extension of an outside reaching in to work with common means to change me then? All things are matter, yet these seem caught in the impatience of a dream, locked in the awkwardness they mean. the swan Peculiar that swan should mean a sound? I’d thought of gods and power, and wounds. But here in the curious quiet this one has settled down. All day the barking dogs were kept at bay. Better than dogs, a single swan, they say, will keep all such malignant force away and so preserve a calm, make pond a swelling lake— sound through the silent grove a shattering spate of resonances, jarring the mind awake. the rose Into one’s self come in again, here as if ever now to once again begin with beauty’s old, old problem never-ending— Go, lovely rose ... So was that story told in some extraordinary place then,once upon a time so old it seems an echo now as it again unfolds. I point to me to look out at the world. I see the white, white petals of this rose unfold. I know such beauty in the world grows cold. the skull “Come closer. Now there is nothing left either inside or out to gainsay death,” the skull that keeps its secrets saith. The ways one went, the forms that were empty as wind and yet they stirred the heart to its passion, all is passed over. Lighten the load. Close the eyes. Let the mind loosen, the body die, the bird fly off to the opening sky. the star Such space it comes again to be, a room of such vast possibility, a depth so great, a way so free. Life and its person, thinking to find a company wherewith to keep the time a peaceful passage, a constant rhyme, stumble perforce, must lose their way, know that they go too far to stay stars in the sky, children at play.

Tax not the royal Saint with vain expense, With ill-matched aims the Architect who planned— Albeit labouring for a scanty band Of white-robed Scholars only—this immense And glorious Work of fine intelligence! Give all thou canst; high Heaven rejects the lore Of nicely-calculated less or more; So deemed the man who fashioned for the sense These lofty pillars, spread that branching roof Self-poised, and scooped into ten thousand cells, Where light and shade repose, where music dwells Lingering—and wandering on as loth to die; Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof That they were born for immortality.

I walk the purple carpet into your eye carrying the silver butter server but a truck rumbles by, leaving its black tire prints on my foot and old images          the sound of banging screen doors on hot afternoons and a fly buzzing over the Kool-Aid spilled on the sink flicker, as reflections on the metal surface. Come in, you said, inside your paintings, inside the blood factory, inside the old songs that line your hands, inside eyes that change like a snowflake every second, inside spinach leaves holding that one piece of gravel, inside the whiskers of a cat, inside your old hat, and most of all inside your mouth where you grind the pigments with your teeth, painting with a broken bottle on the floor, and painting with an ostrich feather on the moon that rolls out of my mouth. You cannot let me walk inside you too long inside the veins where my small feet touch bottom. You must reach inside and pull me like a silver bullet from your arm.

The Inside Out Mermaid is fine with letting it all hang out–veins, muscles, the bits of fat at her belly, her small gray spleen. At first her lover loves it–with her organs on the outside, she's the ultimate open book. He can pump her lungs like two bellows and make her gasp; ask her difficult questions and study the synapses firing in her brain as she answers to see if she's lying; poke a pleasure center in the frontal lobe and watch her squirm. No need for bouquets or sad stories about his childhood. He just plucks a pulmonary vein and watches the left ventricle flounder. But before long, she starts to sense that her lover, like all the others before him, is getting restless. This is when she starts showing them her collections–the basket of keys from all over the world, the box of zippers with teeth of every imaginable size–all chosen to convey a sense of openness. As a last resort, she’ll even read out loud the entries from her diary about him to him. But eventually he’ll become convinced she’s hiding things from him and she is. Her perfect skin. Her long black hair. Her red mouth, never chapped from exposure to sun or wind, how she secretly loves that he can’t touch her here or here.