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You can take it away, as far as I'm concerned—I'd rather spend the afternoon with a nice dog. I'm not kidding. Dogs have what a lot of poems lack: excitements and responses, a sense of play the ability to impart warmth, elation . . . . Howard Moss Dogs will also lick your face if you let them. Their bodies will shiver with happiness. A simple walk in the park is just about the height of contentment for them, followed by a bowl of food, a bowl of water, a place to curl up and sleep. Someone to scratch them where they can't reach and smooth their foreheads and talk to them. Dogs also have a natural dislike of mailmen and other bringers of bad news and will bite them on your behalf. Dogs can smell fear and also love with perfect accuracy. There is no use pretending with them. Nor do they pretend. If a dog is happy or sad or nervous or bored or ashamed or sunk in contemplation, everybody knows it. They make no secret of themselves. You can even tell what they're dreaming about by the way their legs jerk and try to run on the slippery ground of sleep. Nor are they given to pretentious self-importance. They don't try to impress you with how serious or sensitive they are. They just feel everything full blast. Everything is off the charts with them. More than once I've seen a dog waiting for its owner outside a café practically implode with worry. “Oh, God, what if she doesn't come back this time? What will I do? Who will take care of me? I loved her so much and now she's gone and I'm tied to a post surrounded by people who don't look or smell or sound like her at all.” And when she does come, what a flurry of commotion, what a chorus of yelping and cooing and leaps straight up into the air! It's almost unbearable, this sudden fullness after such total loss, to see the world made whole again by a hand on the shoulder and a voice like no other.

(With apologies to Mr. Rudyard Kipling) If you can dress to make yourself attractive, Yet not make puffs and curls your chief delight; If you can swim and row, be strong and active, But of the gentler graces lose not sight; If you can dance without a craze for dancing, Play without giving play too strong a hold, Enjoy the love of friends without romancing, Care for the weak, the friendless and the old; If you can master French and Greek and Latin, And not acquire, as well, a priggish mien, If you can feel the touch of silk and satin Without despising calico and jean; If you can ply a saw and use a hammer, Can do a man’s work when the need occurs, Can sing when asked, without excuse or stammer, Can rise above unfriendly snubs and slurs; If you can make good bread as well as fudges, Can sew with skill and have an eye for dust, If you can be a friend and hold no grudges, A girl whom all will love because they must; If sometime you should meet and love another And make a home with faith and peace enshrined, And you its soul—a loyal wife and mother— You’ll work out pretty nearly to my mind The plan that’s been developed through the ages, And win the best that life can have in store, You’ll be, my girl, the model for the sages— A woman whom the world will bow before.

After Alejandra Pizarnik, after Fernando Pessoa i Comic screen to change what came to notice           Even though sky at first was the same blank slate     So literal. The value of  it You make your own lion’s teeth sink in, slowly ii The insects claim you don’t belong here then bite & bite Virtue the undulant yards as penance iii Hordes of animals without teeth crash the window in a dream & it means you are not hungry enough iv The capuchin stays silent in the void You feel the sun of  unknown experiments v Once a choice comes to full & the act carries the joy of struggle                       The winter mother severs only a chance at restarting. Could you sorrow the one unchosen thing infinitely so it feels occasional, the act is itself vi If  I write a texture I could make it stucco like childhood Aloe or cactus spines                      To cut is to heal the rough of a cut             All dark blue against good skin like leather vii Imagine the root of oppositional archetypes Next to me chrysanthemums the rust of  blood when it dries but in front of me So much blue & a broken white I can’t see myself on purpose viii What rocks itself  out of  time on a wingbeat Is not a name or a silence As in sanity’s meager gestures. Downriver, the unruly sound turned C-shaped / Real secrets as fragrant and familiar as what’s under the smoke ix I stand next to the rocks Where you choose to return without choosing / Some black, some silver The lines of ash & passage A neon swig of enlightenment x Don’t be exceptional in this false. All fluent in nothing, hiding where your debt grows Be aggressive or do not mind, you say I feel like a chicken after boiling Or like you do now — smooth from the pain (I love how you love promises because they are lies) (I love the honesty of cheap rings) Like a ripened plum or two, pitted — Now a flat middle ground, now another interior to hold the ruin xi Your hair grows in eighths on alternate days but you pretend not to count What rains in it What grandiose adornment hasn’t happened but will happen Also a lie — in color xii The grunting you hear on the other side of the wall might be music Or the disaster of a concrete floor The western cities, the eastern cities / that inscrutable skin I chose The high ground of resurrection Discursive — falling soft / I witness the guilt planted for others I practice by moving my legs I am a bracket You are the conquering seawall Nothing earth about you except what clean is visible Also your hands

If I had known Two years ago how drear this life should be, And crowd upon itself allstrangely sad, Mayhap another song would burst from out my lips, Overflowing with the happiness of future hopes; Mayhap another throb than that of joy. Have stirred my soul into its inmost depths, If I had known. If I had known, Two years ago the impotence of love, The vainness of a kiss, how barren a caress, Mayhap my soul to higher things have soarn, Nor clung to earthly loves and tender dreams, But ever up aloft into the blue empyrean, And there to master all the world of mind, If I had known.

That old guy with the muskrat soup slurps it loudly from the ladle Hoowah, pretty good stuff! You shift your weight on the stool raise the bad leg just enough and retrieve the red bandana hankie. Talk still spills like sunshine over the knife-marred counter as slowly you wipe the can push the cloth back in your pocket and cough down the grape pop glancing at the bobbing black head where it surfaced in the pot. The burned farm. That hungry year. The long walk from Strawberry Mountain warmed now with the weight of fresh butchered wiiyaas in your pack. Mum’s baking soda biscuits mixed and cut lined waiting in the tin pan like our little kids’ faces at the window. Sure took the wrinkle out of our bellies that night. One opening day when those two old fishermen ended up drunk clinging to the canoe. The hunt for diamond willow, beaver camp on Easter weekend, the whitefish feeding on wax worms, the string of crappies slipped from your hand, the missing outhouse floor, training waaboose, feeding the least weasel, tales from working on the ships, from boiling sap, planting trees, pounding, carving, and then the cigar box memories of those old time Indians who could really tell stories

I will hear his sleep in and through my own, my sleep will be bathed in his as if we slept in one same fluid My sleep floats within a listening so deep that the separating spaces of air become as pliant and full as snowfall, its singing silence as profound My ears and his throat — the sensation of anticipated hearing close inside the ear and the incipient murmur or cry forming at the end of his sleep — borne like birds and thrumming on the air of rooms between us My own sleep will be his clock, safely keeping time, his sleep tunes my dreams to listen, our sleep binds the hour, heavy and warm, into a blanket of air and sound

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If I were another on the road, I would not have looked back, I would have said what one traveler said to another: Stranger! awaken the guitar more! Delay our tomorrow so our road may extend and space may widen for us, and we may get rescued from our story together: you are so much yourself ... and I am so much other than myself right here before you! If I were another I would have belonged to the road, neither you nor I would return. Awaken the guitar and we might sense the unknown and the route that tempts the traveler to test gravity. I am only my steps, and you are both my compass and my chasm. If I were another on the road, I would have hidden my emotions in the suitcase, so my poem would be of water, diaphanous, white, abstract, and lightweight ... stronger than memory, and weaker than dewdrops, and I would have said: My identity is this expanse! If I were another on the road, I would have said to the guitar: Teach me an extra string! Because the house is farther, and the road to it prettier— that’s what my new song would say. Whenever the road lengthens the meaning renews, and I become two on this road: I ... and another!

Hmong Hunter Charged with 6 Murders Is Said to Be a Shaman — new york times If a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound? If a rifle fires a shot in the woods, whose body first hits the ground? If a group of angry hunters surrounds, curses at, and accosts you for wandering onto their land If you apologize for being lost, inform you saw no posted signs, swallow their chinks this and gooks taking over that; are walking away over mud and fallen leaves when a loud crack far behind you kicks up black earth If your father was conscripted to fight on the side of the United States for the cia during the war in Vietnam If he, your mother, you—the oldest son— and all your younger siblings were later abandoned in the hills of Laos as targets for genocide by the Viet Cong If after five years in a Thai refugee camp, you come to this land as a teen, a casualty of history and time, then receive three years of training to become a sharpshooter in the u.s. military If you spent your adolescence watching blacks, Asians, Latinos, and whites watching one another watch each other for weakness and flaws If, after this first blast, you wheel around in a bright orange vest; glimpse in that split second an angry, possibly inebriated man lowering or resighting his rifle If, in that icy moment, you recall the Native friend you used to collect cans with; once watched his three-hundred-pound father unload himself from a Chevy Impala and chase the boy down University with a ball-peen hammer If, of your own children, your quietest son lately lacks the wherewithal at school to defend himself; and your oldest daughter has always been for some inexplicable reason ashamed of you If hunting for you is not just a sport; never a time to drink beers with friends in a cabin, but rather is a factor in considering your family's winter protein consumption If you believe in God, but not the good in everyone If you hate to think about this shit, because why the fuck is it always on you to preprove your loyalty and innocence? If—frightened for your life and the livelihood of your immediate and extended family—in that split second, you reel and train your own gun back at the far face of that vapory barrel now aiming at your own If, yes, you are sometimes angry and so look forward to escaping your truck driver's life on certain designated dates, on certain designated lands, not always clearly demarcated, but always clearly stolen from the ancestors of fat drunk red men so confused they chase their own firey songs in the form of their sons Stolen from generations of skewed black backs, hunched your whole life on street corners laughing and picking their bones Stolen from the paychecks of your brown coworker social security ghosts Stolen like your own people from mountains in one land only to be resettled and resented here in projects and tenements If you barely finished high school, but you know from all you've ever seen of this system Might Makes Right, and excuses, treaties, and cover-ups appear the only true code inscribed on most white men's souls If, after such slurs, pushes, and threats in these woods it is now also on you to assess if that far rifle still locked on your face just issued a mistake, a warning shot, or murderous attempt— and the answer is: your military muscle fibers act If you then spot three four five six seven? other hunters now scattering for their atv s and, of course—if a gook, don't be a dumb one— scattering now also for their weapons If you are alone in this land, on foot, in miles of coming snow, wind, and branches and don't even know in which direction you'd run If from birth you've seen what men with guns, knives, and bombs are capable of doing for reasons you never wanted to understand If in this very same county's court of all-white witnesses, counsel, judge, and jurors it will forever be your word against theirs because there was no forensic testimony over who shot first If, yes, sometimes you can hear voices, not because you're insane, but in your culture you are a shaman, a spiritual healer, though in this very different land of goods and fears, your only true worth seems to be as a delivery man and soldier If, upon that first fateful exchange in these woods, your instinct, pushing pin to balloon, were to tell you it's now either you and your fatherless family of fourteen, or all of them Would you set your rifle down; hope the right, the decent, the fair thing on this buried American soil will happen? Or would you stay low, one knee cold, and do precisely as your whole life and history have trained? And if you did, would anyone even care what really happened that afternoon eight bodies plummeted to earth like deer?

And we are all there together time will wave as willows do and adios will be truly, yes, laughing at what is forgotten and talking of what's new admiring the roses you brought. How sad. You didn't know you were at the end thought it was your bright pear the earth, yes another affair to have been kept and gazed back on when you had slept to have been stored as a squirrel will a nut, and half forgotten, there were so many, many from the newly fallen.