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I told him about the nucleotides, the genetic test, the prognosis. I told him that atrophying of basal ganglia starts years before symptoms present, and that right now—in this car, in this moment—parts of my brain were dying, parts that I didn’t know I needed, but parts that I would never, never be able to get back. I told him that there wasn’t an emotion or an impulse or a stumble that I could completely trust; I told him that one day—if I let it—everything I did and said and thought would be nothing more than the entropic implosion of a condemned building or a dying star.

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—

Coyotes invade. They claim to be the truth.

Black bears nose the bougainvillea, moving

eastward, indiscriminate, original.

Our sinks back up, our toilets will not drain,

our nature disobediently tends toward nature.

I love American newspapers, the way each section

is folded independently and believes it owns

the world. There’s this brief item in the inter-

national pages: the Chinese government has posted

signs in Tiananmen Square; forbidding laughter.

I’m sure the plastic surgeon would approve, he’d say

the Chinese will look young much longer, their faces

unnaturally smooth, but what I see (although

no photograph accompanies the story) is laughter

busting inside them. I go back to the sports section

and a closeup of a rookie in mind-swing, his face

keeping all the wrong emotions in check.

And she then imagines that she sees the flock today because today she is feeling forlorn and abandoned, like a small girl, and doubting and the birds are on a long journey, the journey perhaps of their southern flight for the winter and she also would like to travel, would like some kind of flight, would like an outside of her ideas, the labyrinth of codes and conduct which keeps her close, inside of a closed circuit, and it is only her lover, this carpenter in a Californian city, who had undone the right bands, who has leaked her soul out onto air again, like the small pockets of air beneath the bird-grey wings and lifting them, today, outside of the girl’s window and into the sky.

We unyoke owl pellets from marrow

in desert meadow. His mouth a pigeon eye,

a torch, a womb turned flower. He, still a boy

dug from cactus skull, undresses into bark

beetles. He unlearns how to hold a gist

with my hand.