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.

I am a cowry girl, a marine biologist to be exact. The 8-hour move-

ment started in the United States in 1884. Feeling more and more.

Gave birth. Took up the question. 8 hours shall be the norm. Marx:

Slavery disfigured a part of the republic. Labor with a white skin

cannot emancipate itself where labor with a black skin is branded.

The time named. Endorse the same. Half of the same. More pro-

foundly. Therefore be considered a synonym.

Dear Emily,

For poetry—I have you. One need not be a House—One need not be a

Nation or a Master for that matter. Delicate and beautiful, common

in rich mossy woods, in pairs, we live.  We are crimson-pink, partic-

ularly in the mountains. The rough terrain is not visible to many, but

somewhat green and fatigued, demilitarized! A nod from far away is

hollow. True men—How shall I greet them? Nation building is kind

and generous. It is common to decline it. Emily, Shall I – bloom?

Yours, Twin Flower   

Your message to me:

Forgetting is lovely and Father’s well is bottomless. Freud says: the

way in which national tradition and the individual’s childhood mem-

ories are formed might turn out to be entirely analogous.

Indeed, a higher authority can shift the aim of the resistance to

memory. Madness may be a form of resistance. Forgetting is lovely

and Father’s well is bottomless. In order to remember an incident

painful to national feeling, a lower psychic agency must resist the

higher authority. However, it is against the Law. Tea and false mem-

ories. Which is lovelier? Colony or neocolony? The shift in the aim is

minor. Forget something then remember something else. The loveli-

est of all is the unconscious—it is lively. In defense of nation’s par-

amnesia, tea must be served at all times. Migration, my nation! 

Come the marrow-hours when he couldn’t sleep,

the boy river-brinked and chorded.

Mud-bedded himself here in the root-mesh; bided.

Sieved our alluvial sounds—

Always the story-man lights lard-lamps in a circle and tells.

A boy scrapes and ever-graves for likeness with a stick.

Two girls croodle corn-songs cane-songs back and forth unbroken.

Once-bent bodies leap (in chorus) leg and whirl.

Hadn’t he come to us out from County Home

cleaved to a caul-swaddle

cloth (of coarse croker-sack weave)

he all the time plucked and wrung?

I plugged my poem into a manhole cover
That flamed into the first guitar,
Jarred the asphalt and tar to ash,
And made from where there once was
Ground a sound to stand on.

I stared out into the darkness
For some sign of the cold consoler,
That perched spinning
Night nurse who tends

To the sleeping sun
Destined to rise irresponsibly
Over the counties
Of Kings and Queens.

The same motion used
To make angels in the snow,
When standing
Is a signal of distress:
A frantic wave of the shipwrecked
To a distant, passing savior.