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Intercourse with resuscitated wife for particular number of days, superstitious act designed to insure safe operation of household machinery. Electricity mourns the absence of the energy form (wife) within the household’s walls by stalling its flow to the outlets. As such, an improvised friction needs to take the place of electricity, to goad the natural currents back to their proper levels. This is achieved with the dead wife. She must be found, revived, and then penetrated until heat fills the room, until the toaster is shooting bread onto the floor, until she is smiling beneath you with black teeth and grabbing your bottom. Then the vacuum rides by and no one is pushing it, it is on full steam. Days flip past in chunks of fake light, and the intercourse is placed in the back of the mind. But it is always there, that moving into a static-ridden corpse that once spoke familiar messages in the morning when the sun was new.

The street deserted. Nobody,

only you and one last

dirt colored robin,

fastened to its branch

against the wind. It seems

you have arrived

late, the city unfamiliar,

the address lost.

And you made such a serious effort –

pondered the obstacles deeply,

tried to be your own critic.

Yet no one came to listen.

Maybe they came, and then left.

After you traveled so far,

just to be there.

It was a failure, that is what they will say.

I decided the caterpillar was too stupid to live. I put it into the carabid beetle’s container. The caterpillar was much larger, but it had no means of defense. The carabid sliced into it and lapped at its leaking blood. Because the caterpillar was so big, the carabid had to repeat his attack eight or ten times. The caterpillar crawled away frantically for the first few wounds, but it was so slow that its movements hardly inconvenienced the beetle drinking from its bleeding flank. After ten minutes or so the caterpillar lay still. Its jade flesh turned black as the beetle chewed and drained it.

At Bob’s Big Boy, one day in the summer, my mother and I pressed together in the phone booth and emptied her purse out on the metal ledge. There were hundreds of scraps of paper, pencils, leaking pens, scuffed makeup tubes, brushes woven with a fabric of lint and hair, a bra, and finally, my mother’s brown leather address book, with the pages falling out. We wanted to call my father in Las Vegas. It was already over a year since we’d flown there. The number was written, carefully, in brown ink.

“There is an ocean of dreams,” Maryse was explaining, “that our sleeping heads dip back into late at night. The tides go in and out, cleansing the shore. Who we are is whatever silhouettes against that great sea. It is deep and vast and strong, and even in the clearest moment of the brightest day something is leaking in, a permanent trickle in the plumbing. Sometimes, in some of us, things collapse, but now the moment is approaching when the wave will break to carry us all away. This will happen. Consider the signs. Learn how to float.”

“But what’s all this got to do with UFOs?” asked Beale.

“They’re the openings the dreams come through.”

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.