I live brokenly and assemble together

Weakly – from long bone of the arm, hip

Rollicking in its socket, and the jaw,

Its brux. From the lip of a wooden

Bowl carved from the knot of a limb

Drifted, my name was given on water

And laid down like hail upon my tongue.

It’s become a bewilderment of white –

It snows. It does snow. It is snowing.

Yellow-lit beneath stretched

Skins, we play at bones,

Dig for ocher from clayey soil

To stain puffin bills for dance mitts.

They redly shake the sound of rain.

Downriver, cords of light hum,

Tobacco-smoked and hung

With salmon. Intervals of storm

Wash logs along the red-sanded

Shore before the tailing:

These you cut and steam,

Bend for frames.

Black birds luster in sleep above a rough

Sea, and he is all suspension from a length

Of rope before descending to snap ten

Long necks, one after another. Cormorants

In death are just lustrous: swollen from a day’s

Plunging, distended with fish. He wants

To own his weighty bounty upwards,

But she in cunning cuts his cord and turns

To the other in her husband’s falling.

Implausible travels from a scar of rock,

And a return that needs no telling.

Is it her failing: the cormorants hunter’s wife

Feels no ill will all winter until the spring,

When, in a glutton’s plumpness with her black

Hair lustered, he buries her beneath a sum of stones

And himself plunges with the downdrafts under.

           And the sky!

Nooned with the steadfast blue enthusiasm

Of an empty nursery.

Crooked lizards grassed in yellow shade.

The grass was lizarding,

Green and on a rampage.

Shade tenacious in the crook of a bent stem.

Noon. This noon –

Skyed, blue and full of hum, full of bloom.

The grass was lizarding

How high and white the moon!

And vampired—.

            Like the light a child

Sinking sees.

A child pushed by its mother

Through the hole in the ice.

                                                         The banyan trees

Are empty; great flocks of peach-faced lovebirds once

Roosted in them, allopreening and eating those berries

Swollen by the moist, August heat to an almost sexual

Bursting.

____________________________________________

With nothing left to eat them, the berries fall and ripen

And split, spilling blood-colored pulp in thick, reeking

Streams that seep into the stump-holes where the palm

Trees used to be.

There are no limits to our verbs, our forms:

                                                                        think of the knife

that slits an orange or bundled iris stems, the one strapped

to the rooster’s varnished spur. The dagger, poniard, dirk.

Edge that snips the line, whittles an owl, juliennes, traces a lip.

A cut, an incision, a gouge. In Sudan, the story goes, when the slogan

of reform was The Future’s in Your Hands, men scavenged the streets

waving machetes, hacking off hands above the wrist, asking

How will you hold the future now? The stiletto, the skean, the scythe,

The choosing, the mark, the tool. Beneath a concrete bridge,

shirtless & drunk, a boy works his way through the swallows’ nests,

slashing until each mud cone-shape drops into the river, dissolves.

Yet to say so is hardly enough. To say pigsticker’s, bayonet, shiv.

That my body, Lord, might rise too, resurrected reluctantly from earth,

given the rainwater, the dawn begun, grave walls pitched into ooze,

given that the scheme to bury me deeper in my own grave’s dirt will fail

because of schnapps & mud & Lord, let the breath of those who deliver me

that night be sweetened by cherry-tipped cigars. Allow what will lift me

fumbling the first March of my death to be not only a shovel, the grace of rope,

a mechanic’s coat trussed to brass handles, but also the plan for a paid-for garage,

paved cement floors, a procession of wrenches in a drawer. Grant me

morning light in a pickup bed, lying within earshot of Bulgarian songs that rhyme

thigh with smoke & permit me, Lord, once hangovers wane, to be stashed

at the far edge of a field, close to the rocks of a fishing spot where a thief will always—

or for more than a week—watch me, conceal me, keep me in spring heat, devour

a plum & suck its pit clean, dream of cash he half knows won’t come. Let my reward,

Lord, be crow wings, furrows, bits of last year’s stalks, three threadbare burlap sacks. 

                                                                                   Odd,

how in the watercolors for The Birds of America, we’re missing

the engraver’s final work: the river is just a few light-blue strokes

& instead of an intricate tangle of grass, a merganser soars

through an empty page. Aesacus,

                                      for a while, isn’t finished either,

though he will be soon. Even as he thrashes in his rage & grief, 

not quite bird or man, he can feel it, the lure of it beginning

in his beginning-to-be-hollow bones. What else can he do

but unburden himself, give himself over to the body’s suppleness,

its impossible glistening, the grace afforded after all? 

And we divorced in the survives            and O

It was a comedy            and first you ever slept with me

And marry me and marry me and O

How fat I used to be

Grew up in Texas the only one in school

The only mule                        in Round Rock not in Round Rock

As much in Austin as in Round Rock but

Not in between the            only mule at school

Across the street but there was one black girl

And one black boy much            older boy forgot

Him but the girl            called me a nigger let

The white boys touch the breasts she didn’t have

Grandmother O my mother

Will lose her house in the spring

She doesn’t want another

House                        but she wants your things

To stay in the family

She can’t say what they are

Grandmother                        O a stray

Cat and some furniture

I draw the curtains.     The room darkens, but

the mirror still reflects          a crescent moon.

I pull        the crescent out,          a rigid curve

that softens                    into a length of cloth.

I wrap the cloth around                     my eyes,

and I’m peering    through a crack in the wall

revealing                        a landscape of snow.

Sapo & I wait for the cool of night under mesquite.

Three days in the desert & we’re still too close to Mexico,

still so far from God. Sapo’s lips so dry he swabs the pus leaking

from the ampollas on his toes across his mouth. I flip a peso.

Heads: we continue. Tails: we walk toward the highway,

thumb our way back to Nogales. The peso disappears into a nest

but the hard-on in Sapo’s jeans, slightly curved, points west.

I catch a cascabel & strip off its meat. Sapo mutters, No que no guey.

On a bench, beneath a candle-lit window

whose sheer curtains resemble honey

sliding down a jar, Kahlo lifts her skirts.

A brown monkey chews a tobacco leaf

between her legs, tail brushing her thigh.

A skirt falls; the hem splashes on the floor

like urine. A ruby ring on her forefinger.

No, the tip of a cigarette. Smoke rising.

The long hair of an old woman drowning.