Some people declined, having formed convincing theories,
but the best among us ate quietly our share
and prayed to be forgiven of the hunger. 

this of course
allows the mountain to sound the sunrise
and uncovers what tangled each of them in the first place

the constellations are full
of dead women, he says. he says
my dress is the coat of a great lion.
i turn like the blood inside
a rose.

he asks my girlfriend not if she is white
since even in this light
what we are is obvious
but instead the sheriff offers some western
philosophy: ma’am    he asks
are you here of your own free will

hot to the touch, always sweating
oil from some fruit or nut, conducting
electricity clockwise, 3D printing
my signature over & over again
in new cursive 

it just so happens that i am hiding
weapons in my hair, just like the blonde
TSA lady expected. when she stuck her rubber
glove fingers in the thicket, a poem
jumped out and bit off her eyelashes.

Half a day is dead already–
a lady with a baby in the shady graveyard
promenade not quite the idea
but the first idea to be impressed
so firmly– Grace to be born

He died before we could honor
him correctly. Candied
impulse through the brain.
Your will subverted

The Lake gets its official name from a misinterpretation of a
Native American word for “edge of the lake,”
but when I see the signs while driving over the mountains
toward its shores, I think of my east coast grandmother,
with pale New England skin
and how she would pronounce it with all her refinement:
“t’HO.”

The dialect of the scrub in the dry season
withers the flow of English. Things burn for days
without translation, with the heat
of the scorched pastures and their skeletal cows.

Then all the nations of birds lifted together
the huge net of the shadows of this earth
in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues,
stitching and crossing it. They lifted up
the shadows of long pines down trackless slopes,
the shadows of glass-faced towers down evening streets,
the shadow of a frail plant on a city sill–

Sun-sliding morning. The doors of the world stand open,
The one up and the one down.
Twice-blessed by their golden handles,
We try them both, but they don’t open, not yet, they don’t open.

Ancient of Days, old friend, no one believes you’ll come back.
No one believes in his own life anymore.
The moon, like a dead heart, cold and unstartable, hangs by a thread
At the earth’s edge,
Unfaithful at last, splotching the ferns and the pink shrubs.

We speak of Heaven who have not yet accomplished
even this, the holiness of things
precisely as they are, and never will

Say I had no choice, this weightless finger touched my tongue and told me to, it taught
me; when kinder and more subtle methods failed, it put a gun to my head, a zero
seared coldly in one temple, electrode glued chill to the other