Midwestern

This must happen just after I die: At sunrise
I bend over my grandparents' empty house in Hazelwood
and pull it out of the soft cindered earth by the Mon River.
Copper tubing and electric lines hang down like hairs.
The house is the size of a matchbox. I sprinkle bits
of broken pallets, seeded grass, fingernails, and tamarack
needles in the open door of the porch. I scratch a Blue Tip
and blow vowels of fire through the living room,
the tunneled hallway. Flames run up the wooden stairs.
I put my ear beside the hot kitchen window

Flowering sietecueros trees:
How easily we married ourselves
to the idea of that bruised light
outside the window,
capillary
fibers of the linen,
stained wood of the door frame.
Deepening hallway.
Beyond
the stucco portal,
crushed purple.

At night, tinnitus
we thought,
the ringing after an explosion,
a frenzied inner ear axle squeal,
until I placed my stethoscope's bell
on the purpled ceiling:

After it lifts the army-green, stuffed
dumpster over its head and the trash
falls to the receptacle, it hulks
backward with a cadenced beep as if
to say, get out the fucking way, please.

At once this dragnet of cousins
Whips its way into your presence saying
None of them among us. They are
Oracles on the court of midnight,
The tight filigree of a mind or your
Splashing around in, your pandemonium
Of copper graffiti inexpertly put up.
They make weapons of furled hands.
“We will walk, but our bones will carry
Ribbons of lead, or we will, like
Acrobats mill-headed in 3s (3 blades,
3 hips, 3 tongues), answer to what comes
Before, what comes before?” Eleousa,
Master of Dark Eyelids, eye opening

grown to give this gun
to you that sings
around another metal grip
inside the stall that goes
against the marker that has cuts
and calculates their known
deception, something ran
instead around the parked
encircles disks. wagon, tent
was all that heard, no mouths
were twice together found
or borrowed in the ceiling of
another torso promising this
twice together head, this push
through veins that gives your
death another word, another
his, another whipping rain
with any arm and any end

¿ are you
on the other side
waiting
for alarms
in a desert
of sleepless
evaporations?

¿ are you
beside yourself
in the aisles
that distance
makes shorter

than light waves
in the daylight
that pounds
a lead slab
in the soup
that the winter
dissolves?

i make signs everywhere, with sticks, stones and leaves
for those in the clouds from below the line to arrive

i don’ t have a language to speak to you with, my tongues are all fish

i know that a one is a circle, and that nothing is round,
except every corner i saw by the hearts
lined up on the spine

i know that the winter will finally be here again, and that the summer
will die and be born with its ice

There is so much sweetness in children’ s voices,
And so much discontent at the end of day,
And so much satisfaction when a train goes by.

I don’ t know why the rooster keeps crying,
Nor why elephants keep raising their trunks,
Nor why Hawthorne kept hearing trains at night.

A handsome child is a gift from God,
And a friend is a vein in the back of the hand,
And a wound is an inheritance from the wind.