Nature

Lamps have begun to light as evening,
alluvial, fills every crevice in the courtyard,

fills Devon House, alone with its marble columns,
its verandas and esplanades empty,

the plantation gone, and the fields,
the courtyard a tourist attraction now:

glass ashtrays etched with boys
too large to be clambering coconut trees,

Beyond the strings of water
clinging to the windowpane,

there were no cranes, just rain,
a sky blurred by wet glass,

a pond corrugated by raindrops,
and, inside, the smell of naphthalene bars,

a Victrola with a broken arm,
a spotty daguerreotype, a dusty crinoline —

O mildewed, seersucker suits
draped over vacant chairs.

~

[our] nightmare : no
birdsong —
the jungle was riven emptied
of [i sihek] bright blue green turquoise red gold
feathers — everywhere : brown
tree snakes avian
silence —

the snakes entered
without words when [we] saw them it was too late —
they were at [our] doors sliding along
the passages of [i sihek]
empire — then

He is for a long time bleating the embassy collection:
(water-resistant cot,
a resurgent stretch of storefronts to dive into,
compadre, col legno, funding the new permits, pleasing
room, murderous rain.

Near-spring night, stars on flat blackboards, essay estate
questions passed person to person.
The lottery window
I turn red past,
hyacinth-lanced dawn.

In green tree talk
the transcriber dons a dark robe, a mirror.

What god will catch me
when I’ m down, when I’ ve taken
sufficient drink to reveal
myself, when my words are little
more than a blurring
of consonant and vowel?

I’ m drunk on spring:
branches of waxy leaves that
greet me at my driveway,
a family clutching
trays of sweets.
How can I sing of this?

If I cannot sing, then
make me mute. Or lend me
words, send me
the taste of another’ s prayer,
cool as a coin
newly minted on the tongue.

Dark thing,
make a myth of yourself:

all women turn into lilacs,

all men grow sick of their errant scent.
You could learn

to build a window, to change flesh
into isinglass, nothing

but a brittle river, a love of bone.

You could snap like a branch — No,

this way, he says, and the fence
releases the forest,

and every blue insect finds an inch of skin.
He loves low voices, diffidence

on the invented trail,

the stones you fuck him on. Yes
to sweat’ s souvenir, yes to his fist

1. X-Ray

I woke. A tiny knot of skin on a silver table
Set in the birth-theater, blinking in the glare
Of electric lights and a strange arranged

Passel of faces: huge as gods in their council.
I was the actor who forgets his lines and enters
On stage suddenly wanting to say, I am.

I was almost all eye: they weighed me down,
Two lump-big brown-sugar bags in a face
Which did not yet know struggle, burden;

The clockwork saguaros sprout extra faces like planaria stroked by
a razor. Chug

say the sparrows, emitting fluffs of steam. Chug chug say the piston-powered
ground squirrels.

The tumbleweeds circle on retrofitted tracks, but the blue pasteboard welkin
is much dented by little winds.

The yuccas pulse softly under the grow-light sconces.

Here is the door he will paint on the rock.

Here is the glass floor of the cliff.

Then one day she noticed the forest had begun to bleed into her waking life.

There were curved metal plates on the trees to see around corners.

She thought to brush her hand against his thigh.

She thought to trace the seam of his jeans with her thumbnail.

The supersaturated blues were beginning to pixillate around the edges, to
become a kind of grammar.

She placed a saucer of water under her lamp and counted mosquitoes as
they drowned.