Amy Beeder

Port-au-Prince Girl on a heap of street sweepings high as a pyre, laid on snarled wire & dented rim. Girl set down among the wrung-out hides. A girl who was coming from church. It is late Sunday afternoon.Was it a seizure? Is it destiny or bad luck we should fear? Weak heart or swerving taxi? In Tet Bef by the dirty ocean thousands crush past her without pausing at the shrine of her spayed limbs; brilliance like the flesh of lilies sprouting from the pummeled cane. Is it possible to be lighthearted, hours later? Days? To forget the yellow dress? I am waiting for her mother to find her, still wearing one white spotless glove (where is the other?), my idle taxi level with her unbruised arm, her fingers just curling like petals of a fallen flower and how did it end? Let someone have gathered her up before the stars assembled coldly overhead: her dress brighter than gold, crocus, the yolk of an egg her face covered like the bride of a god; let them have found her & borne her though the traffic's clamor veiled with a stranger's handkerchief.

It burns up all the grass too, and breaks the stones, so tremendous is its noxious influence. — Pliny the Elder, “Natural History” On a blood- or honey-colored moon at midnight & no 60-watt abuzz. With Sirius ascendant. From a dunghill’s punk egg hatched By toad or serpent. From cold gland & pillaged crib, from ruined sluice, Bible comics & potshots at swallows. From the Ring of Fire, the Zipper, The Nighthawk with her victims taloned upside down. From pistis to gnosis To the midway where they draw a bead on cardboard sheikhs. From no harvest. From no temperate father. From years borne down tainted water & all we failed to mark in frequencies cranked up, from How laughing we cast our own forfeit. O well — It’s cinch your boots up now, it’s shoulder to the wheel, it’s soldier on To lay coins on the fang marks & stand already spent, Condemned for what we wrongly thought exhaustion. Comes now the bright arrival, comes the pageant rain of ashes: The seal torn & tablets fixed but still impossible to read.

After Thomas Hardy The milkmaids say Pray for their speech is reserved, fixed here in circles of opalized light. Presenting themselves without fancy or choice chapped hands on the full udder’s verge, y’know — cream-skinned, gathering toad spume on skirts relentlessly cracking the snails underfoot — a century later & more their compeers bow heads to these luminous fields made of ether, of blue & extravagant air, calling up with the same nimble fingers their ciphered familiars, girl-souls at large in a nonhuman hour. Speaking their argot & screen-practiced moue. Not to you, with your paper, your man-heavy shoes, untouched by the mulch of the digital yard! They only gaze rapt at threshold, milk spilled. No purchase for you here,Sir, & no clue —

The Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia holds the world’s largest lithium reserves. “As remote and unlikely a place as can be imagined for the world to seek its salvation.”—Matthew Power Once, volcanoes walked & talked like humans. Married. Quarreled & gave birth. When the beautiful Tunupa’s husband ran away & took their only child she mourned: she cried & stormed, her full breasts spilled until she made this sunken bed, a dry & ragged ice-white sea. Tears & milk. Salt. Silver liquor of the spirits, the winter tuber’s pulp. ≈ Buzz Aldrin spied a plain from space: twice Rhode Island-sized, not a glacier but this vast evaporation, a place so flat we use its plane to calibrate the altitude of satellites, measure the retreat of polar ice. A dry lagoon of element. Energy.Winking like a coin in a well. ≈ In bare Salar the tourists bottle sand & salt: mug & pirouette across this lithic sink of drought, empty leagues of sky & light, slight mist of silt. We dream our dreams of clean—or cleaner— means to drive and speak—o Li, atomic number three, be our Miracle element! Prehistoric smelt, simmered & distilled in Altiplano climes, your samite matter known to quiet, after all, the manic brain, the urge to suicide; proven to dispel the voice that whispers fire from the gods is never free— Lithium chloride & plain table salt under ancient ocean crust; fossils & algae; a bird so bright & blackly drowned, pickled in the salt brine pool: the desert is generous. The desert is a pot boiled dry. This road will turn to dirt and then to salt, to the workers in jumpsuits, veiled & covered from the brutal sun; but we’re not here, not here— what matters are the distant cities: Chongquing, Phoenix, Quebec, Lagos, far & star-chalked: splitting at the seams. Now ≈ the shrouded workers wait for sunset. The desert is patient. They see the bed plowed under: slapdash trenches in the legend, in the hasty furrows raked. With eyes narrowed from the endless light. See Litio. Wages in the veins laid open; see paid the lush reduction of her ditches’ spill. This new abyss to feed our traffic.

I have hidden your lost teeth in the net of all my famous hair And with foresight promised your umbilicus To several minor gods. I paid your fee in fawn skin & the lightest fringe of tissue, all the quiet noons assembled, In yard stars & the light of phosphorescent pens, The dioramas that it takes to fill lacunae, in ancestral knots That tell the story of our humble people: watchmakers, Mainly, ventriloquists & scholars of quintessence, Amateur lifeguards I meant to surpass. How I loved My green & distant futures! But I love you more From late Holocene out to the farthest buoy, unto Blackmail & a verb that means renouncing Christ Or else describes the path of sap before it’s amber, Before it dimples, just a little, to collect —

Would you rather hear the louche pun drawn from glory hole, lip wrap or fingering or hear a tiny hammer striking wire? Would you rather see the molten birthing glass? Seat Eros next to Kronos, for the banter.I heardshe’s yet unplowed — I heard your quiver dangled down — I heard you dwell in borrowed forms — love’s nothingbut glimmer-to-wither, dawn’s fireflies expired. In this place we sift & bounce the words like dice thrice dip a pipe into the magma,o my stars. Lear & Gloucester walk into a bar debating again the color of bluffs or moors or cormorants:like craquelure     like damp tea leafdriftwood    no, peat steam    no, brined sand-apple ink Were all your letters in fact suns? Forgotten, after all that trouble — Are those bellows blowing some? A field of broken bottles, fragments blue. A tune invented to divert a girl.

True, my office is a gold Camino nineteen eighty-two & front-work’s on a laptop, but there are older tricks: this knack I have to spy a sham address: figures pried off siding or the silhouette that’s left when eight is changed to three; my talent to discern the perp who hides behind the car or ducks among the bins or sidles, slams the screen & tries for silence then behind his gutted door. Some will wave a gun or summon dogs. Once a rooster. Once an alderman who menaced with a mallet (croquet) when his trucking company was sued & there’s still this lucent bruise on my right heel— long story: swan shot, tree house, veteran. Though no one wants this dachshund’s weight of paper compiled by some paralegal underpaid in Phoenix, I assure you I will always serve. I am the envoy (a ball cap hides my third eye). Put me in swift shoes or wings, at some cosmic door with only sky behind— black-clad, the Prophet of Xerox, steadfast bearer of a clerk court’s smeared truncated seal. I know these streets: the houses boarded up, the other heralds driving slow on fractured blacktop; the sidewalks’ glass & fenders scattered; vacant quarter acres returning now to palm & pampas, trees of heaven. I am waiting at the crossroads, here at your broken gate where barbed acacias stoop to shade my trespass.

Offer your usual posy of goatheads. Proffer sharp garlands of thistle & Incas’ thin down; of squash bugs strung on blighted stems; send back necklaced every reeking pearl I crushed, each egg cluster that I scraped away with knife or twig or thumbnail. Wake me sweat-laced from a dream of hidden stables: the gentle foals atremble, stem-legged, long-neglected. Dear drought our summer’s corn was overrun again with weed & cheat; the bitter zinnias fell to bits. Dear yearlings our harvest is lattice & husk.

Bewildered Saint of the curse, bulbous

I see you shuffle up Washington Street whenever I am driving much too fast: you, chub & bug-eyed, jaw like a loaf hands in your pockets, a smoke dangling slack from the slit of your pumpkin mouth, humped over like the eel-man or geek, the dummy paid to sweep out gutters, drown the cats. Where are you going now? Though someday you'll turn your gaze upon my shadow in this tinted glass I know for now you only look ahead at sidewalks cracked & paved with trash but what are you slouching toward—knee-locked, hippity, a hitch in your zombie walk, Bighead?