1.
If that someone who’ s me yet not me yet who judges me is always with me,
as he is, shouldn’ t he have been there when I said so long ago that thing I said?
If he who rakes me with such not trivial shame for minor sins now were there then,
shouldn’ t he have warned me he’ d even now devastate me for my unpardonable affront?
for the eyes of the children,
the last to melt,
the last to vaporize,
for the lingering
eyes of the children, staring,
the eyes of the children of
buchenwald,
of viet nam and johannesburg,
for the eyes of the children
of nagasaki,
for the eyes of the children
of middle passage,
for cherokee eyes, ethiopian eyes,
russian eyes, american eyes,
for all that remains of the children,
their eyes,
staring at us, amazed to see
the extraordinary evil in
“While we’ re alive,” we kept
repeating. Tongues, throats,
roofs of our mouths bone dry,
skeletons we’ d someday
be...
Panicky masks we wore for
effect more than effect,
more real than we’ d admit...
To think I used to be so good at going to pieces
gobbling my way through the cops
and spooking what’ s left of the girls. How’ d I
get so far, sloughing off one knuckle at a time,
jerking my mossy pelt along
ruined streets? Those insistent, dreadful thuds
when we stacked our futile selves
against locked doors. Our mumbles and groans!
Such hungry nights! Staggering through the grit
of looted malls, plastered with tattered
flags of useless currency, I’ d slobbered all over
You love your friend, so you fly across the country to see her.
Your friend is grieving. When you look at her, you see that something’ s missing.
You look again. She seems all there: reading glasses, sarcasm, leather pumps.
What did you expect? Ruins? Demeter without arms in the British Museum?
Your friend says she believes there’ s more pain than beauty in the world.
When Persephone was taken, Demeter damned the world for half the year.
The other half remained warm and bountiful; the Greeks loved symmetry.
was it so I could
never say
across a courtroom
that man, the one
standing there
was it so you could
walk among us again
after
as if you had shed
the body that did
those things
was it because you could
not bear
my pupils so huge
they would have swallowed you
my whites like flayed kneecaps
when you pressed down
to singe them back
into my skull they were softer
than you expected
you had thought them
diamond hard
weapons turned on you
A father tells his son the thing he regrets most about his life is the amount of time he has spent worrying about it.
Worry 1. A dog’ s action of biting and shaking an animal so as to injure or kill it, spec., a hound’ s worrying of its quarry; an instance of this. 2. A state or feeling of mental unease or anxiety regarding or arising from one’ s cares or responsibilities, uncertainty about the future, fear of failure, etc.; anxious concern, anxiety. Also, an instance or cause of this.
I only recognized your hair: short,
neatly combed. Our mother
would’ ve been proud.
In the Sonoran desert
your body became a slaughter-
house where faith and want were stunned,
hung upside down, gutted. We
were taught
to bring roses, to aim for the bush. Remember?
You tried to pork
a girl’ s armpit. In Border Patrol
jargon, the word
The skin of sleep
is thin. It will not hold.
Its contents stumble out.
A nub of bone
lodged in earth
at the bottom of a pit.
A stranger staring
down from the rim.
The skin of sleep is thin.
It cannot hold.
Lost names spill out.
Children engraved
in ash. A sea of blood.
Only you, tenderness,
stillborn, beneath
the skin of sleep.
There is a hornet in the room
and one of us will have to go
out the window into the late
August midafternoon sun. I
won. There is a certain challenge
in being humane to hornets
but not much. A launch draws
two lines of wake behind it
on the bay like a delta
with a melted base. Sandy
