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1 I made myself. Mommy and Daddy were proud, in that order. I didn’t mail myself like a letter some other kids already knew. I learned to use stamps. They stuck to my thumb without any glue. I didn’t have any permission. 2 There was a snowstorm that lasted three days and a cavern of monochrome memory. There were board games, and a pencil-and-paper game where the object was to figure out the object of the game. There was a stack of broad-rule writing paper, and a stapled calendar, and a 64-pack of sparkly rainbow crayons, to make each week look different since they all started out black and white, and all the same. 3 O grapefruit (as color and flavor). O never quite rightly tied laces. O look, up there on the uneven climbing bars, too hot to touch where the sun touches, now that it’s spring, the shadow of a tarp, like a sail between sailors and thin swings that make no decision, like weathervanes. O think of the lost Chuck Taylors. The lost Mary Janes.

1978-1979 for Vincent Woodard It is not just my problem. It belongs to us all. I have been cajoled into coming to the emergency room where everything scares me. Black folk shoot and cut each other until they end here where guards have guns. I refuse to be taken upstairs and locked away. I was trying to think of a poem. It got me to this place. With my mother, I stand against the wall, guards on either side. They have guns, and this is my mother. It is now everybody’s problem. A bird is singing in my hair, more important than Thorazine. My head is a tree stretching its leaves to burn in the sun. They say if I make a treaty to take the medicine, I can leave with my family since my family is crazy. I look at the guns on the hips of the guards and know I must be as still and quiet as death or this will turn into psychosis as sick as nightmares. I am angry that they would have me here with my mother, angry at white doctors. I am in a whale in the ocean. Who can swim out to me? Who can cast a line? If I take out the first guard by breaking his neck, I can protect my mother, but it is more important that we are all now underwater, inside a whale who laughs. Later the therapist they say likes me keeps talking about the appointment. She is doing something subliminal with the word “come,” repeating, repeating. She leans to me when she says it. It bothers me that such people think crazy people are stupid, but it is more important that my head is a tree with a bird singing in it inside a whale in the ocean. The most important thing of all is that this whale that ate us likes to laugh a lot. He has the blues.

I try tearing paper into tiny, perfect squares— they cut my fingers.  Warm milk, perhaps, stirred counter-clockwise in a cast iron pan— but even then there’s burning at the edges, angry foam-hiss.  I’ve been told to put trumpet flowers under my pillow, I do: stamen up, the old crone said. But the pollen stains, and there are bees, I swear, in those long yellow chambers, echoing, the way the house does, mocking, with its longevity— each rib creaking and bending where I’m likely to break— I try floating out along the long O of lone, to where it flattens to loss, and just stay there disconnecting the dots of my night sky as one would take apart a house made of sticks, carefully, last addition to first, like sheep leaping backward into their pens.

Thin are the night-skirts left behind By daybreak hours that onward creep, And thin, alas! the shred of sleep That wavers with the spirit's wind: But in half-dreams that shift and roll And still remember and forget, My soul this hour has drawn your soul A little nearer yet. Our lives, most dear, are never near, Our thoughts are never far apart, Though all that draws us heart to heart Seems fainter now and now more clear. To-night Love claims his full control, And with desire and with regret My soul this hour has drawn your soul A little nearer yet. Is there a home where heavy earth Melts to bright air that breathes no pain, Where water leaves no thirst again And springing fire is Love's new birth? If faith long bound to one true goal May there at length its hope beget, My soul that hour shall draw your soul For ever nearer yet.

Fat bed, lick the black cat in my mouth each morning. Unfasten all the bones that make a head, and let me rest: unknown among the oboe-throated geese gone south to drop their down and sleep beside the out-

One way to erase an island is to invent a second island absolved of all the sounds the first one ever made. We don’t know who concocted this one, where the triggerfish and clowns fade to inky neon dashes under a fisherman’s skiff. A few plastic pontoons knock around makeshift slips. Dusk coaxes from the shore the small, dull chime of a spoon against a pot. And TV voices flash slow across a cliff where two pink lovers in matching swimwear kiss their glasses at the edge of a blue pool built just low enough into the hill so the couple can gaze into the sea and think of infinity. Many, many years ago, a great emperor wiggled his finger and commanded his army to corral all the lepers in his domain then pack them into a sailing ship to be delivered to the missions on this cluster of verdant volcanic rock. The emperor’s orders to his captain were clear: if the monks refused the ship’s freight, the skipper was to simply dump the whole sick cargo far from any shore. Other incurables followed in lots over time, or trickled in, hiding from nearby tribes, or banished from other lands to live among these lush slopes of mahogany, papaya, and weeds. Two women, Filomena and Josefa, arrived within days of one another. By then, each had lost most their toes, though they had ten full fingers between them, each woman with one hand still intact. No one is sure how it began, but once a week the pair would knock on the door of the scowling Madre Clementina to borrow the hospital’s only guitar, carved from jackfruit and cracked pretty bad along the back. To these women — no big deal, for Filomena once transcribed the early moonlight serenades of the horny friars in the Royal South for the brats of an Andalusian duke. Josefa was the daughter of a carpenter, a maker of tables to be exact. She learned to play a harana’s tremulous melodies on her mother’s bandurria at the age of three. The pair of outcasts would stifle laughs, thrilled to earn the crusty nun’s grudging Yes, then amble out to low tide and find a flat rock to share so they could prop the old guitar on both their laps, the one bad wrist of each woman unwrapped to their stumps, pulled for now behind their backs as they looked past the bay toward the violent waters that first carried them here. And they jammed. Filomena with the five deft hammers of her left and Josefa with her right, thick-muscled — both blue-veined and furious, scrubbing from the instrument all those wicked rhythms from Castile to Nowhere on a fragile scrap of furniture that could barely hold its tune. They sat shoulder to shoulder and thigh to thigh, their good hands brushing from time to time. What they couldn’t remember, they made up, and everything they made up disappeared over the lagoon and over the ocean, every note in every run, every lie and desire, every nick and crack in the jackfruit, the fat harmonics plucked from the old nun’s grunts, six taut strands of gut whose chords skimmed the water like night locusts in bursts of low clouds and which bore everything in front of them and behind, the brine of the women’s necks mixed with the salt of the lagoon, the cliffs, the spoons, the bright nimbus of the West dipping like a noose, the future of pontoons and fake tits, the history of nifty crowns pried loose of their jewels, the jiggle of a little finger gone still. One way to erase an island is to invent the waters that surround it. You can name the waters that will turn all the sounds the island makes into salt. It will teach you to listen to everything you love disappear    ...    or you can invent a song so big it will hold the entire ocean. Josefa and Filomena rocked in the dark, hip to hip, joined by that third body of wood, which made sure there was nothing left in the unbroken world to possibly make them whole.

Hot hot hot, you are hot, Sun, Glaring all over my east window Burning, beaming, yellowing The room. Uninterested in me Because I'm not Mayakovsky Although I feel you insisting I wake, that I produce right now Or perish as my uncle used to say. Brave Mayakovsky, doomed Mayakovsky, He could sass you, and later O'Hara (Before they turned forty, both gone) Sassed you and sassed Mayakovsky, too— But when I try I know it's just another Instance of me whistling in the dark, Me not blazing, me not burning out.

Falling off a triangle. Putting two fighting fish in one bowl. Talking yourself into a headcold. Falling off a rectangle. Putting insects in ice cubes. Talking yourself out of doorways. Falling off a parallelogram. Talking into a microphone. Falling off a footstool. Putting earplugs in acorns. Looking into a teacup for trouble. Talking yourself out of breathing. Taking a nap on a drum set. Eating a peach with an air filter. Wearing a dress made of hand grenades. Talking a mudslide back up a mountain. Lighting a camp fire in a taxi stand. Launching a boat on a horse trail. Hiking in an elevator. Falling into an envelope. Discussing smuggling with customs officers. Taking a cat to a dog show. Falling in love with a toothache, Questioning your thumbprint. Looking for milk in a gas tank. Kissing hydraulic acid. Blindfolding a parking meter. Falling over a water tower. Reasoning with a baby.

I got a letter through the post decreeing my sainthood. Beatified, I sat down, because this was big news for me. Bless the television, bless this chair of four wooden legs. I felt like calling my parents, but thought, in a saintly way, to do so would be immodest, so instead I opened the curtains. Rain was washing everything that seemed in need of washing. A bird landed on a bush and shook water from its wings and I closed my eyes briefly, acknowledging its small, hardworking soul, like a microchip destined for heaven. The cat came in, little devil, and I forgave her, touching under her chin, sweet child. We watched the news together and reflected that this was how the world churns its butter of beginnings and endings in front of the sun. What good, I wondered laterally, might befall an ancient tree today? Perhaps merely nothing much. Perhaps a tree will carry on just as it was. What minerals will develop unseen in the earth, deep beneath a human tragedy? Some minerals. Some salty, bright minerals in the dark. I spent that morning cutting white paper into triangles. I spent that afternoon staring at my bits, enamored. I spent that evening clapping loudly in the garden, and come bedtime I was ready to write my long email to the President of the United States of America.

A mother possum crawled down the chimney the spring Donny came to us because both sets of his parents had kicked him out, the same April after your dad and I divorced when you kicked a hole in the dining room wall. The possum was swollen with young she would later carry, half-grown, on her back or hanging from her thick, hairless tail. “An oversized rat with maternal instincts,” your dad once said. Instead of one angry son, I now had two– fifteen and seventeen– two forged signatures on absence excuses, two discipline committee meetings, two conferences with the principal. While I worked, you shared contraband beer, as well as the basement bedroom with its fieldstone fireplace in which you found the possum one cool evening. Laughing and cheering, you teamed up to cage her with a trash can, carry her to the alley out back and dump her. The possum squeezed back down the chimney twice more. The third time you threw her out on Troost Avenue, screaming for a car to smash her beneath its tires. She must have been near her time, desperate for a nest, to crawl back down after that. The noise woke me after midnight. Donny had clubbed her with his nunchuks. You both kicked and stomped her head as she lurched, stumbled between your feet. Halfway down the basement steps I stopped, seeing your faces. The possum fell limp. I backed slowly up the stairs. In the morning, you couldn’t meet my eyes. I just made you clean up the mess.