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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

Between the train's long slide and the sun
ricocheting off the sea, anyone
would have fallen silent in those words,
the language of age in her face, the birds
cawing over the broken earth, gathering near its stones
and chapel doors. In the marina, the sea and its bones
have grown smaller. Though the tide is out,
it is not the tide nor the feathers nor the cat
that jumps into the street, the dust
lifting with each wing and disappearing. The rust-
colored sheets that wrap the sails of ships,

We thought nothing of it, he says,
though some came so close to where we slept.

I try to see him as a boy,
back in the Philippines, waking

to the sound of machine guns.
His family would spend their morning

spreading a paste over the sores
of the house’ s thick walls.

He tells how he touched
points where bullets entered,

his fingers, he says, disappeared into the holes,

as if inside there existed a space
where everything from this world could vanish.

In the harsh glare of an easily
reprehensible life. The channel changer is lost
in the crack of an infinite sofa.
Everything falls apart, everything breaks
down, torn into a million
fragments, Jericho everyday.

I want to be the blameless
victim in this canceled puppet show,
the marionette every mother loves, the one
souvenirs are modeled from.

1. X-Ray

Light a match. Watch the blue part

flare like a shocked piñata

from the beating
into the sky,

watch how fast thin

wood burns & turns toward the skin,

the olive-orange skin of your thumb

1.

I have no idea what priests
dream of on Christmas Eve, what prayer

a crippled dog might whine before the shotgun.
I have no more sense of what is sacred

than a monk might have, sweeping the temple
floor, slow gestures of honor to the left,

the right. Maybe the leaf of grass tells us
what is worthwhile. Maybe it tells us nothing.

Perhaps a sacred moment is a photograph
you look at over and over again, the one

of you and her, hands lightly clasped like you
did before prayer became necessary, the one

A stick of carrot is equal to a gillyflower.
A gillyflower is equal to a drum of gasoline.
A drum of gasoline is equal to a stick of carrot.
“For the sake of my offspring, I think I’ ll marry an outsider.”

Tamerlane has been sighted in Northern Italy.
Jesus has broken out in Inner Mongolia.
They like to kiss outside and piss inside.
We like to kiss inside and piss outside.

Mudman in earth cafeteria,
I eat aardwolf. I eat ant bear.
I eat mimosa, platypus, ermine.

“White meat is tasteless, dark meat stinks.”
(The other white meat is pork, triple X.)

Rice people vs. bread people.
White bread vs. wheat bread.
White rice vs. brown rice.
Manhattan vs. New England.
Kosher sub-gum vs. knuckle kabob.

“What is patriotism but love of the foods one had as a child?”*

To eat stinky food
is a sign of savagery, humility,
identification with the earth.