The patient was taken to the operating room
reliving 10th grade,
how they chased warm gin with milk.

He sits beside his wife who takes the wheel.
Clutching coupons, he wanders the aisles
of Stop & Save. There’s no place he must be,
no clock to punch. Sure,
there are bass in the lake, a balsa model
in the garage, the par-three back nine.
But it’s not the same.
Time the enemy then, the enemy now.

Evening, and all my ghosts come back to me
like red banty hens to catalpa limbs
and chicken-wired hutches, clucking, clucking,
and falling, at last, into their head-under-wing sleep.

The body captures the rhythm. A kind
of lilt to the step. Never a tread. You
are looking for ladders to the world.
Hooks. Sometimes it is like holding on
to the strap in a swaying subway.

I come
from a family
that twice names
its own.
One name
for the world.

Gilded, the jaw forgets
fracture at the pointer’s tip
(red jaw, forgotten rings
inadvertent discord, picked up,
thrown into anger). To say
I feel like breaking something

If it be warfare, let it be mistress
and midnight up that slope,
not reticent in a weather
of withdrawal, its salmon-roe tint,
the shabby grass it grazes

he smells like leather and mint and the El that shot
him through the city. Now he slips
his headstrap off, his black patch. But not
for them–the ones who heaved at him and swung
their taunt: Let’s see what’s under there.

is the sound of my loud carrying life a knell
far across your small ocean? Do you share
the secret that the months keep hidden there?

Glossies of Eden? The slim beached curled
Between rocks and the frill of foam–that’s when
There’s thunder of tunnels and the underworld.

You have given me
too much: two pearls, two moons ascending–
luminous, miraculous,
like your two hands as I see them in dreams.

This is what I was afraid of:
This paper   this though   lines
dividing white space     lines dividing
nothing.
This exhaustion     this futility
this game or promise.

She learned the meaning of industry
From Sunday school sermons on
Protestant virtue,
the third little pig,
the spider not the fly,
and the squirrel putting up supplies
for the barren season–

It is the law:
seasons, best selling books and empires
come and go.
Babies are born to die,
bridges are built to one day fall
and shoes wear out.

Amazon of song
valkyrie riding astride blue horses
of chanted mystery
you who assassinate
the killer of your
children’s dreams

Billie sang!     the truth of blooming blood blossoms
the bottomless search-seek for love,
the pitless people, pillaging, plagiarizing,
picking apart

she wants to reclaim her body
change it back to its original shape
like when she danced, you know she use
to dance, in the middle of a drum circle