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The plump lemon, the spoon's metal cuts off the shadow, the bursting overflow of pleasure, the dark night of the shriek, a nameless fire in the street, some blackened breadcrumbs...

When Hans Hofmann became a hedgehog somewhere in a Germany that has vanished with its forests and hedgerows Shakespeare would have been a young actor starting out in a country that was only a word to Hans who had learned from those who had painted animals only from hearing tales about them without ever setting eyes on them or from corpses with the lingering light mute and deathly still forever held fast in the fur or the feathers hanging or lying on a table and he had learned from others who had arranged the corpses of animals as though they were still alive in full flight or on their way but this hedgehog was there in the same life as his own looking around at him with his brush of camel hair and his stretched parchment of sheepskin as he turned to each sharp particular quill and every black whisker on the long live snout and those flat clawed feet made only for trundling and for feeling along the dark undersides of stones and as Hans took them in he turned into the Hans that we would see

White-Mexican looks like a Latina, not my label a question from a Guatemalan student who's come undone in my ESL class, doesn't get my kind I try to describe how I grew up in Caucasian corn country surrounded by houses on cul-de-sacs that all looked the same, how we were alone in a town of 5000, one black family, one Indian family, one Asian family, and one household of Mexicans, no two, us and the Renterias to whom we were related by marriage before and after my divorce, and they were mixed; still, it was a good living, happy in our cocooness, our oneness, separated by money one direction color on the other: classes, classes, classes, day and night we took lessons: piano, jazz, tap, ballet, the dance team, trumpet, trombone, tennis, Finishing School, and one awful summer golf; Christened, Confirmed, Cathechismized; it all cut me in several places, molding of head and heart making me ultrasensitive, then and now, an observer of the outside, an outsider among my own kind, my very shade, mysterious aloof black haired beauty who can't speak Spanish, living among blue eyed dyed blond bombshells, who held up her head higher because she's shy not stuck-up, understood, undenied, sacrificed to at any price by my beloved little brown parents who taught me well gave up so much so their daughters could shine and they'd swell with pride at the life they had given us, on Sundays we basked in mutual admiration after mass singing our church songs while making breakfast, according to the unspoken doctrine in our house of: fast first eat later after communion, we intruded with our Mexican music bellowing out the open windows the smell of bacon frying, pancakes baking, coffee and eggs scrambled to order it wafted out on beautiful summer mornings out of our house in Pleasant Hill, Iowa, perched on the highest spot one could reach on the East Side of the street for first and second generation immigrants. January 25, 2001

I certainly know who I am . . . I can get away with being politically incorrect. I am the ambassador to First Nations’ poetic expressions & as Kinsella pompously put it straight “I have the license to do so.” what a magical way to escape tyranny! just like Trudeau & Chrétien hiding beneath cowboy hats nevertheless & back to the point, call me cowboy call me First Nations call me aboriginal call me native call me chug call me skin if you must, but never call me Indian. I call myself that! & if you feel guilty when I say so, this is not about postcolonial rhetoric it is about an identity crisis

I buy a Mana Party T-shirt from AliExpress. $9.99 free shipping via standard post. Estimated arrival 14–31 working days. Tracking unavailable via DSL. Asian size XXL. I wear it as a dress with thigh-high vinyl boots and fishnets. I post a picture to Instagram. Am I navigating correctly? Tell me, which stars were my ancestors looking at? And which ones burnt the black of searching irises and reflected something genuine back? I look to Rihanna and Kim Kardashian shimmering in Swarovski crystals. Make my eyes glow with seeing. I am inhaling, long white clouds and I see rivers of milk running toward orange oceans of sunlit honey. Tell me, am I navigating correctly? I want to spend my money on something bougie, like custom-made pounamu hoop earrings. I want to make them myself but my line doesn’t trace back to the beauties in the south making amulets with elegant fingers. I go back into blackness, I go back and fill in the gaps, searching through archives of advertisements: Welcome to the Wonderland of the South Pacific. Tiki bars, traffic-light cocktails & paper umbrellas. Tell me, am I navigating correctly? Steering through the storm drunk & wet-faced waking up to the taste of hangover, a dry mouth, a strange bed, shirt above my head is the flag fluttering over everything. What were we celebrating? The 6th of February is the anniversary of the greatest failed marriage this nation has ever seen. In America, couples have divorce parties. We always arrive fashionably late. Tell me, am I navigating correctly? The sea our ancestors traversed stretches out farther than the stars.

A psalm of Isaak, amid uncommon darkness O Being both far distant and most near, O Lover embracing all unlovable, O Tender Tether binding us together, and binding, yea and tenderly, Your Person to ourselves, Being both beyond our ken, and kindred, One whose dire energies invest such clay as ours with patent animation, O Secret One secreting life anew into our every tissue moribund, afresh unto our stale and stalling craft, grant in this obscurity a little light.

1 A psalm of Isaak, accompanied by Jew's harp. O God Belovéd if obliquely so, dimly apprehended in the midst of this, the fraught obscuring fog of my insufficiently capacious ken, Ostensible Lover of our kind—while apparently aloof—allow that I might glimpse once more Your shadow in the land, avail for me, a second time, the sense of dire Presence in the pulsing hollow near the heart. Once more, O Lord, from Your enormity incline your Face to shine upon Your servant, shy of immolation, if You will. 2 A psalm of Isaak, accompanied by baying hounds. O Shaper of varicolored clay and cellulose, O Keeper of same, O Subtle Tweaker, Agent of energies both appalling and unobserved, do not allow Your servant's limbs to stiffen or to ossify unduly, do not compel Your servant to go brittle, neither cramping at the heart, nor narrowing his affective sympathies neither of the flesh nor of the alleged soul. Keep me sufficiently limber that I might continue to enjoy my morning run among the lilies and the rowdy waterfowl, that I might delight in this and every evening's intercourse with the woman you have set beside me. Make me to awaken daily with a willingness to roll out readily, accompanied by grateful smirk, a giddy joy, the idiot's undying expectation, despite the evidence. 3 A psalm of Isaak, whispered mid the Philistines, beneath the breath. Master both invisible and notoriously slow to act, should You incline to fix Your generous attentions for the moment to the narrow scene of this our appointed tedium, should You—once our kindly secretary has duly noted which of us is feigning presence, and which excused, which unexcused, You may be entertained to hear how much we find to say about so little. Among these other mediocrities, Your mediocre servant gets a glimpse of how his slow and meager worship might appear from where You endlessly attend our dreariness. Holy One, forgive, forgo and, if You will, fend off from this my heart the sense that I am drowning here amid the motions, the discussions, the several questions endlessly recast, our paper ballots. 4 Isaak's penitential psalm, unaccompanied. Again, and yes again, O Ceaseless Tolerator of our bleaking recurrences, O Forever Forgoing Foregone (sans conclusion), O Inexhaustible, I find my face against the floor, and yet again my plea escapes from unclean lips, and from a heart caked in and constricted by its own soiled residue. You are forever, and forever blessed, and I aspire one day to slip my knot and change things up, to manage at least one late season sinlessly, to bow before you yet one time without chagrin.

An idle lingerer on the wayside's road, He gathers up his work and yawns away; A little longer, ere the tiresome load Shall be reduced to ashes or to clay. No matter if the world has marched along, And scorned his slowness as it quickly passed; No matter, if amid the busy throng, He greets some face, infantile at the last. His mission? Well, there is but one, And if it is a mission he knows it, nay, To be a happy idler, to lounge and sun, And dreaming, pass his long-drawn days away. So dreams he on, his happy life to pass Content, without ambitions painful sighs, Until the sands run down into the glass; He smiles—content—unmoved and dies. And yet, with all the pity that you feel For this poor mothling of that flame, the world; Are you the better for your desperate deal, When you, like him, into infinitude are hurled?

There’s wondering, idle thoughts, thinking over what was last said, some poetry in my head like traffic outside the window. In my forgetful marrow, I consider often lying words, like everything and all. Nothing is another matter. Nothing comes of everything and all. Something comes of nothing. I know the word no means no, yes, yes, except when they mean each other. There’s water, which means water, dishwater, that may mean worthless. It’s often better to say worthless when you mean it. I’ve come to meaning, that can mean reason for or reason to live, words I might say outright without first saying meaning. Then there is a mean man. How did mean come to have two meanings? Take a dictionary of homonyms and tell me how words got to sound alike with different meanings and spellings, a Sea of  Words which is a Chinese dictionary. Language has its ways, its altitude and latitude ... Stanley, baby, quit jerking on and off. I’m simply talking to myself. I am more familiar with the dark night and bright day of the body than the dark night of the soul. Light has an exaggerated reputation. Goethe’s last words were, “Mehr Licht!” Faust was dragged off to hell when he was content. Goethe preferred discontent, which needed light. The seed is contained discontent.

A State which, in the epoch of race poisoning, dedicates itself to the cherishing of its best racial elements, must some day be master of the world. —Mein  Kampf I The veldt men pray Carved wood and stone And tear their flesh To vein and bone. The idols scowl In the brassy sun Unmindful of Appeasement done. Yea, warriors cringe, Whose tauntings dare The regnant brute In regal lair. As tribal gods The brave confound, They bruise their heads Against the ground. Kennings of death Encyst the square, The mourners drool And children scare. Hyena laughs Spear to the stars, Dark bodies fall Like ruptured spars. Witch doctors whine Edicts anew And saint their mugs Of chloral brew. Fear grapples fear, Crinkles the knife: And life is death And death is life. And he who dies Bequeaths the chief His herd and flock, But not his grief. Who dares to mock, Who dares to shove The idols folk Are schooled to love? And graybeards croak One fool alone Reviled the hakims Of wood and stone: And headmen staked The wretch to die From dooms that crawl And dooms that fly. Ages fag out In cyclic nights, But sire and son Repeat the rites. II The rule-or-ruin class, in idols of the tribe, Creates narcissine images of itself; Defend its fetishes from the merest gibe, Like iron captains of the Guelf. The black-veldt god Behold, hair kinked and flat, Against the sun’s needling myriapod A cooling mat. The low wide nostrils ventilate The long head in the incandescent air. Insufferable sunrays cannot penetrate Black tissues as the fair. The python arm with reach to spare Are at the beck of tribal law: The black-veldt god is not aware Of civilizations buried in the jungle’s maw. The yellow god Behold, his mongoloid eye fold, The color of his sod. The cheekbones arched and bold, The broad index of face, The stoic mold Herald the myth of race. Lulled by the incense wisdom of repose, Millenniums of candlelight, The vegetarian god turns up his nose At odors of the carnivorous white. The Nordic god Behold, his blue-gray eyes Far-famed to conquer with a single prod A people mazed in a hinterland of whys. Hairy as the ape, of lip as thin, With Mongol, one in blood, with African, He makes a pseudo-science of his skin And writes his autobiography Superman. Race biases sow Hemlocks to maim and blind, Pile up Sinais of woe, Jettison the freedoms of mind, Breed the hydras of stealth, Set kind razeeing kind, Convert to potter’s fields the commonwealth. Drink, O Fool, the bias of the tribe, Autograph the epitaph of pain, Press to the heart the fangs of the moccasin bribe, Rape beauty’s flesh behind the crib of grain, Let dust bowls blight the soul’s topography, Eat, O Fool, the racist shibboleth— Damn the soul to sodomy! Damn the soul to death! III How many times Does a Southern town Waste white genius To keep the Blacks down? How many times Does progress stop To find the maimed A mythical prop? How many times Do a Führer’s claws Dig up dry bones Of the gray Lost Cause? How many times Does the ermine class Throw scraps of hate To the starved white mass? Five roads, the spokes of a county wheel, Mortise the hub of our Courthouse Square: Our graybeards fable our Daniel Boone, Who brothered the red chiefs where Five dark and bloody frontier paths, Crossbones old as the skull of the moon, Witnessed the sacrament pipe of peace, Grim as the grin of a dead buffoon. Gone are scalping-knives, Gone are red frontiers, Gone are homeborn chiefs, Gone are pioneers. Yet the town Five Points Worships myths of race; Like the veldt men, hates Alien norm and face. Sky the Jim Crow sign, Dam the ghetto’s wrath, Gibbet freedom’s sons— Tell it not in Gath! Out of the burial-crags of night The felon winds hawk down; Their devil claws riprap the roofs That visor the town. The stores on Main Street lean, Tome to mummy tome; The houses squat like smoking hulls Half-convexed on a shoal of foam, And glowworm windows in the deaf-dumb streets Are greeting cards of home. Idols of the tribe Jail the spirit fast. Scorn of lesser breeds Flash and bone outlast. Vandal Z’s of wind, Beggar vale and hill, As the myths of race Loot the people’s will. Upon the courthouse Justice stands, Eyes fated not to see; The town clock christens now the first-born hour Of a day of hate to be. Nor man nor beast prowls in his world, But on the Courthouse Square A statue of the Lost Cause bayonets Contemporary air. The skull and bones Of yesterday Haunts those who travel The American Way. Nobler to grope In the dusk of dawn Than to stumble back In midnight’s spawn. Mein Kampf is not A bible writ With hand of gore And heart of grit. Mein Kampf is lepra That whores the soul, And the brothels of race Nordic bawds control. Yet thunderbolt hells Of chastening rods Smite ever Gomorrahs Of tribal gods!