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The shambles of the gods stretches for miles,

a salvage yard where the smell of hot chrome rises,

where finned bodies lie beached and rusting,

and their names recall great chiefs

and tribes and the empowering animals.

Thunderbird, Winnebago, Mustang, Pontiac –

you must say these names out loud. You must

strip the radios in which the myths survive.

Repeat: Wi-Yuh returns to abolish the custom of killing

the beasts for their names. Leave the road maps

on the dashboards. Learn the song of spawning fish.

He did it deliberately &

so when the police tracked him down he was

able to explain it so

clearly they had to

agree. Still, they hadn’t done it.

Anyway, he’d checked it out &

it was what they’d suspected,

women! – women just

opened & spilled, there was

nothing special in there after all.

A bobwhite sounds through larks

and jays, the wringing-wet shade,

as in the first world, before Adam

understood their sharp iambs,

when the refrain could’ve been

anything’s: plant or animal, or light

so pure it sang. Even now

how absolute, how wondrously

primitive the singularity rings –

shouting its name, its name,

its name… till from elsewhere

an echo swells through April-thick wings

as if addressing some question

on the presence of parallels.

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?”

In this wet season my gone mother

climbs back again

and everything here smells gutted—

bloodtide, sea grapes in thick bloom,

our smashed plates and teacups. Dismantling

this grey shoreline for some kind of home, scared

orphans out bleating with the mongrels,

                                    all of us starved

for something reclaimable. What chases them,

her barefoot rain, stains my unopened petunia,

shined church shoes, our black words, our hands.

I’ll catch the day creep in, her dirt marking my father’s

neck, oil-dreck steeped dark to every collar,

her tar this same fish odor I am washing.

I know I am one of them. The emptied.