There are the trash eaters: there are the diamond eaters. The diamond eaters are biblical; the trash eaters only so much in that they are lepers. I am on the side of the trash eaters, though I have eaten so many diamonds they are now poking through my skin. Everyone tries to figure out how to overcome the embarrassment of existing.

I will soon write a long, sad book called A Woman Shopping. It will be a book about what we are required to do and also a book about what we are hated for doing. It will be a book about envy and a book about barely visible things. This book would be a book also about the history of literature and literature’s uses against women, also against literature and for it, also against shopping and for it. The flâneur is a poet is an agent free of purses, but a woman is not a woman without a strap over her shoulder or a clutch in her hand.

The back matter of the book will only say this: If a woman has no purse, we will imagine one for her.

I thought to want regard was to want scorpions in your shower. I thought to speak was to ask for a muzzle. I thought to feel or to show you feel was to ask a sadist to make you flail. I thought to have a name was to have oneself abstracted and abstracted again into many bodies, some actual and corporeal or some ghostly or whiffs or some so strange, so far from you, they might as well be astral. I thought to have a name was to become an object. I thought I was a charlatan. I was mistaken. I was not a charlatan, I was a search term.

I don't trust nobody

             but the land I said

I don't mean

present company

of course

you understand the grasses

hear me too always

present the grasses

confident grasses polite

command to shhhhh

shhh listen

However a light may come

through vaporative

glass pane or dry dermis

of hand winter bent

I follow that light

capacity that I have

cup-sized capture

snap-like seizure I

remember small

is less to forget

less to carry

tiny gears mini-

armature I gun

the spark light

I blink eye blink

at me to look

at me in

light eye

look twice

and I eye

alight

again.

I am this

salivating

mouth without

hands with-

out arms

bent down

shameless

face to plate to

some original

hunger aware

that I'm alone

and I alone am

the one -> pushing

the head

to eat

What you type and submit appears to you attributed to You. What he replies and enters comes from Partner. There is, as it turns out, a lot to say while watching Partner look at you watching. He is, to begin with, in a room of some kind, particular, contingent, “real.” With art and clocks and books and pillows and cigarettes and mail and daylight, or lamplight, with a bed or desk or basement sofa, with doors you can ask him to open, bags he may or may not empty, of content you may deduce about. The bottoms of his socks are dirty. You give it to him that his socks are dirty, that his door is ajar, that his grin is telling. “Partner: Are you for real?”

“That’s mighty white of you,” my mother might say to my father when he offered to stack his plate and saucer but not to take them to the sink or wash them. Subtending familial relationships in Southern white households then with narrow perspectives, weakened heritage, and no initiative beyond economic betterment was the master-servant template, demanding allegiance and compliance, expecting parry and subterfuge, and rehearsing moreover Old South subject positions, casually racist in their ventriloquism and chilling anachronism.

As the bristles gave resistance, I stood and stepped on the top of the brush, and then the earth accepted the whole thing rather easily, snugly. Only the brown wood button top of the brush was at last visible. To bury it entirely seemed wrong somehow. Uncovered, it has a touch of authorship, this penny-sized honey brown button above grade; and perhaps the organic, even potentially nutritive essence of Frank’s hair is aerated a bit this way.

A far cry. Epistrophy. A refusal.

A nightingale is recorded in a field

where finally we meet to touch and sleep.

A nightingale attests

as bombers buzz and whir

overhead enroute to raid.

We meet undercover of brush and dust.

We meet to revise what we heard.

The year I can’t tell you. The past restages

the future. Palindrome we can’t resolve.

But the coded trill a fever ascending,

a Markov chain, discrete equation,

generative pulse, sweet arrest,

bronchial junction, harmonic jam.

You are the wren scavenging for the husks of beetles.

I am the trout poking through river rocks,

the head of a copperhead slipping past,

the shadow of what you asked for turning to husk.

I am an open parachute, breeze billowing through. 

You are the wren scavenging for the husks of beetles,

Now, I am flotsam poking through river rocks,

the detached head of a copperhead, snagged on rocks.

During recess, I remember, the parachute in my hands,      

an open shadow, breeze billowing through.

When everyone pulled the chute upward to run beneath,

I was flotsam poking through river rocks,

the undulating lead blue shadows.

The parachute, faded indigo, was sweaty in my hands;  

tucked beneath, one might feel whole

when everyone pulled the chute upward to run beneath.

It’s also true that some whitetails never lose their velvet.

Hunters raise their eyebrows calling them atypical,

antlered does, cactus bucks, monsters, shirkers,

ghosts, raggedy-horn freaks, because they lead

long solitary lives, unweathered

by the rutting season, because their antlers

are covered permanently in a skin

that most bucks shed in late summer,

because their velvet horns spike and slope

backwards, never hardening to pure bone,

growing ever more askew. A recent one slayed

at thirty points was described as having

 stickers, kickers, and a whole lot of extra junk

 full of blood, hot to the human touch.