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It's been two thousand years now that, with a wounded leg, the god's amazing loves have dragged along. He has aged. Soon he won't be noticed except from way up in a plane in the markings of wheat that yield the trace of an ancient sanctuary. He solicits a language of caresses, open pasture, available bodies, and the words refuse, and this elsewhere is already in his death except for a slender purple flower under the sun. He can still act the god all around, evening's worn heart. He guesses the flower will slip fragile from one century to the next with its prayer.

It’s going to hurt You know this So you drink tea in the morning instead of an entire carafe of coffee Like a vampire, your skin cells burn on their first sip of the sun The ringing taste of green tea or whatever the fuck kind of tea this is Describe to me in detail this so-called purification ritual I can’t I’ve never done it before My cells are exploding into a wasting lament This is the last time you will ever write yourself through this On the other side of this swamp of dark water, a plane will crash The lone survivor will speak on the radio as you drive down Highway 27 In the middle of Florida in the middle of the night after you step off the plane you see the swamps morph into the mountains of your childhood They raise their heads like giants The Sierras stare; do not go there “Brave soul,” says the radio “Beauty,” says the radio “It had to be like this,” says the radio “Difficult,” says the radio “Now you’re 44 years old?” says the radio “That’s right. 44 years old,” says the radio Continue to drive through hornets and testicular small towns Some flags raised Some flags down The god of the underworld has let you go from his hand into the empire Floridian He says you have a pure heart so pure he cannot destroy it Some people look pure but they are not He says he cannot see you destroy yourself so he has let you go and he will protect you with his anger and melancholy It will hurt You know this All the substances have got to go Substances don’t flow from your body They leave with the violence of an exorcism Spicer says once a ghost leaves your body it never returns “Horrendous,” your sister texts “I’ve been vomiting all night,” she texts “Maybe it will be a Christmas baby,” you say Something with no substance surrounds you

Poem for Sriram Shamasunder And All of Poetry for the People It’s a sunlit morning with jasmine blooming easily and a drove of robin redbreasts diving into the ivy covering what used to be a backyard fence or doves shoving aside the birch tree leaves when a young man walks among the flowers to my doorway where he knocks then stands still brilliant in a clean white shirt He lifts a soft fist to that door and knocks again He’s come to say this was or that was not and what’s anyone of us to do about what’s done what’s past but prickling salt to sting our eyes What’s anyone of us to do about what’s done And 7-month-old Bingo puppy leaps and hits that clean white shirt with muddy paw prints here and here and there And what’s anyone of us to do about what’s done I say I’ll wash the shirt no problem two times through the delicate blue cycle of an old machine the shirt spins in the soapy suds and spins in rinse and spins and spins out dry not clean still marked by accidents by energy of whatever serious or trifling cause the shirt stays dirty from that puppy’s paws I take that fine white shirt from India the threads as soft as baby fingers weaving them together and I wash that shirt between between the knuckles of my own two hands I scrub and rub that shirt to take the dirty markings out At the pocket and around the shoulder seam and on both sleeves the dirt the paw prints tantalize my soap my water my sweat equity invested in the restoration of a clean white shirt And on the eleventh try I see no more no anything unfortunate no dirt I hold the limp fine cloth between the faucet stream of water as transparent as a wish the moon stayed out all day How small it has become! That clean white shirt! How delicate! How slight! How like a soft fist knocking on my door! And now I hang the shirt to dry as slowly as it needs the air to work its way with everything It’s clean. A clean white shirt nobody wanted to spoil or soil that shirt much cleaner now but also not the same as the first before that shirt got hit got hurt not perfect anymore just beautiful a clean white shirt It’s hard to keep a clean shirt clean.

for Peter Parrish Each morning the man rises from bed because the invisible cord leading from his neck to someplace in the dark, the cord that makes him always dissatisfied, has been wound tighter and tighter until he wakes. He greets his family, looking for himself in their eyes, but instead he sees shorter or taller men, men with different degrees of anger or love, the kind of men that people who hardly know him often mistake for him, leaving a movie or running to catch a bus. He has a job that he goes to. It could be at a bank or a library or turning a piece of flat land into a ditch. All day something that refuses to show itself hovers at the corner of his eye, like a name he is trying to remember, like expecting a touch on the shoulder, as if someone were about to embrace him, a woman in a blue dress whom he has never met, would never meet again. And it seems the purpose of each day’s labor is simply to bring this mystery to focus. He can almost describe it, as if it were a figure at the edge of a burning field with smoke swirling around it like white curtains shot full of wind and light. When he returns home, he studies the eyes of his family to see what person he should be that evening. He wants to say: All day I have been listening, all day I have felt I stood on the brink of something amazing. But he says nothing, and his family walks around him as if he were a stick leaning against a wall. Late in the evening the cord around his neck draws him to bed. He is consoled by the coolness of sheets, pressure of blankets. He turns to the wall, and as water drains from a sink so his daily mind slips from him. Then sleep rises before him like a woman in a blue dress, and darkness puts its arms around him, embracing him. Be true to me, it says, each night you belong to me more, until at last I lift you up and wrap you within me.

It’s no use Mother dear, I can’t finish my weaving You may blame Aphrodite soft as she is she has almost killed me with love for that boy

Everyone wants to write about god but no one wants to imagine their god as the finger trembling inside a grenade pin’s ring or the red vine of blood coughed into a child’s palm while they cradle the head of a dying parent. Few things are more dangerous than a man who is capable of dividing himself into several men, each of them with a unique river of desire on their tongues. It is also magic to pray for a daughter and find yourself with an endless march of boys who all have the smile of a motherfucker who wronged you and never apologized. No one wants to imagine their god as the knuckles cracking on a father watching their son picking a good switch from the tree and certainly no one wants to imagine their god as the tree. Enough with the foolishness of hope and how it bruises the walls of a home where two people sit, stubbornly in love with the idea of staying. If one must pray, I imagine it is most worthwhile to pray towards endings. The only difference between sunsets and funerals is whether or not a town mistakes the howls of a crying woman for madness.

It's not that I'm opposed to poison in my lips or pig in my soap— it's not that I'm opposed. It's not that I'm opposed to plastic bottles that won't decompose to malodorous phosphorus flows— it's not that I'm opposed to what you propose— surgery on your imperfect nose favelas blasted with hoses— it's not that I'm opposed to opposing the opposite of anonymous neighbors, the nosy stargazers who discover new celebrity planets about to crash into your car. It's not that I'm opposed that we drive when it's not very far to walk or bike not opposed you're opposed to the subway the stink of the general— train 4, 5, or 6–not opposed to the sex on Craigslist to your pets' special tricks to the organized slaughter of cows by the tenderest machines— not opposed to your dreams to their screams to our hopes not opposed to the hordes with their ropes knives and bombs set in desolate streets slums and thrumming towns not opposed to your proms and baptisms to ongoing Christian schisms most unopposed to fierce Muslims Jews Baha'is and Hindus posed in poses temples now oppose the Kama Sutra too ooh-la-la for the petit-bourgeois members of the BJP —not opposed to a big GDP to a loud ATV not opposed to anything I can see hear or touch to "enough or too much"— It's not that I'm opposed to whatever I should propose opposing, knowing knowing is thinning in the species' extra inning on a world slow spinning on an axis slightly tilting into folly so is it folly to suppose you could oppose proposing something to oppose

It’s raining, it’s pouring, The old man’s snoring. He got into bed And bumped his head And couldn’t get up in the morning.

It's such a shock, I almost screech, When I find a worm inside my peach! But then, what really makes me blue, Is to find a worm who's bit in two!

The silence of night hours is never really silent. You hear the air, even when it doesn’t stir. It’s a memory of the day. Nothing stirs. Memory lags. No traffic hushing up and down tricky hills among the camphor trees. No foghorns, no streetcars’ shrilling phantoms before they emerge from tunnels. These absences keep us alert. No rain or street voices, nobody calling to someone else, Hannah, you walk the dog tonight yet or what?