from Hours Near the Crossing by John Peck

from Hours Near the Crossing

Glass breaking and then laughter 

under the open window— 

a rabble of carousers 

drains through the night, blotted 

quickly, although still 

trickles of their abandon 

silver the great cave: 

this is a taste longer 

than echo. And their strength 

is to drink quickly, hear 

only their jangle strike, 

tinkling day into blank— 

the slaves of Tigellinus 

smashing a flagon, young 

fascists, and not so young, 

in brotherly numbness. 

Their bar lies two streets over. 

And dumbly I drift out 

on that sound when I meant 

only to listen further, 

go while my body darkens 

at the cool window, out 

where the night weave tatters through— 

blacker bitch of the crossroads, 

moon in your tooth and hearth 

in the smoky geometry 

of your throat, from a whelp 

we have known you and yet 

only in the weight 

of our having done nothing well 

do you press home. 

                             The men 

vanishing down there, being 

your brats, draw to your pelt 

like iron-filings, smoothing 

to your vast underbelly. 

But I too feel the suction, 

the night is too much yours. 

Closing my eyes I slowly 

bring back the afternoon, 

courtyard and plug stone well 

where a finch without splashing 

dover from one side to slice 

that blue, his font and mine 

in a pact too immediate 

to revoke now. 

And strength not to be claimed, 

strength of the keen forerunners 

unrepeatable, all 

pouted out, itself the air 

burning over burnt hills, 

while the bowl of clear fire 

remains to be walked into. 

At each step remains. 

Little knots of people 

talking cleared ground above 

the city inch through strength 

poured out and trembling and 

unseizable. 

                 It need not 

have been wrong to be strenuous 

though inadequate. 

                            A bald man 

tumbles awake from his roof-chair 

where the heat ripples him, 

disciple gaping up 

at swarms of shape—perhaps now 

he'll hear the command fashioned 

to his one need: Kill and eat! 

It need not have been wrong. 

And one life. Little cracks 

life itself will take care of 

widening. I need no poker 

to find that seam where the ember 

breaks open to burn brighter.

                       *

Pebble into air, 

and the boy's hand cupped upward 

and death not yet mature 

running after. 

                    Birth with sun 

pouring, and in the square 

the common bread lies scattered. 

eaten in urgency, 

stupor, or a blithe 

unconcern for what comes. 

Nocturnals into day, 

a full weave not forgotten 

but not sung through, the whole 

singing not wholly woven. 

Death with us. 

                     And the mongrel 

sure of his rounds trots past 

with his morsel, delegating 

care to the willing. 

                           Listen,

the sound of harpers striking up

in places where the women

draw water. . . .

 

Enemies by Wendell Berry

Enemies

If you are not to become a monster,

you must care what they think.

If you care what they think,

how will you not hate them,

and so become a monster

of the opposite kind? From where then

is love to come—love for your enemy

that is the way of liberty?

From forgiveness. Forgiven, they go

free of you, and you of them;

they are to you as sunlight

on a green branch. You must not

think of them again, except

as monsters like yourself,

pitiable because unforgiving.

 

Consequences of the Laws of Thermodynamics by Samiya Bashir

Consequences of the Laws of Thermodynamics

When Albert Murray said

the second law adds up to

the blues that in other words

ain’t nothing nothing he meant it

not quite the way my pops says

nomads don’t show emotions

but more how my grandmother

warned that men like women

with soft hands blood red

nails like how Mingus meant

truth if  you had time for it

facts if  you got no time that

years pass. Zero

one two three and

the man you used

to flirt with you can

no longer flirt with

thank goodness.

He’s now a man

you can’t wear

your  jaw out on

about weather

news or work

a perfect

strawberry

buried

beneath

a peck.

 

Election Day, November, 1884 by Walt Whitman

Election Day, November, 1884

If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest scene

   and show,

’Twould not be you, Niagara—nor you, ye limitless prairies—nor

   your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado,

Nor you, Yosemite—nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic geyserloops

   ascending to the skies, appearing and disappearing,

Nor Oregon’s white cones—nor Huron’s belt of mighty lakes—nor

   Mississippi’s stream:

This seething hemisphere’s humanity, as now, I’d name—the still small

   voice vibrating—America’s choosing day,

(The heart of it not in the chosen—the act itself the main, the quadrennial

   choosing,)

The stretch of North and South arous’d—sea-board and inland—Texas to

        Maine—the Prairie States—Vermont, Virginia, California,

The final ballot-shower from East to West—the paradox and conflict,

The countless snow-flakes falling— (a swordless conflict,

Yet more than all Rome’s wars of old, or modern Napoleon’s): the

peaceful choice of all,

Or good or ill humanity—welcoming the darker odds, the dross:

—Foams and ferments the wine? it serves to purify—while the heart pants,

      life glows:

These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships,

Swell’d Washington’s, Jefferson’s, Lincoln’s sails.

Campo dei Fiori by Czesław Miłosz

Campo dei Fiori

In Rome on the Campo dei Fiori 

baskets of olives and lemons, 

cobbles spattered with wine 

and the wreckage of flowers. 

Vendors cover the trestles 

with rose-pink fish; 

armfuls of dark grapes 

heaped on peach-down. 

On this same square 

they burned Giordano Bruno. 

Henchmen kindled the pyre 

close-pressed by the mob. 

Before the flames had died 

the taverns were full again, 

baskets of olives and lemons 

again on the vendors' shoulders. 

I thought of the Campo dei Fiori 

in Warsaw by the sky-carousel 

one clear spring evening 

to the strains of a carnival tune. 

The bright melody drowned 

the salvos from the ghetto wall, 

and couples were flying 

high in the cloudless sky. 

At times wind from the burning 

would drift dark kites along 

and riders on the carousel 

caught petals in midair. 

That same hot wind 

blew open the skirts of the girls 

and the crowds were laughing 

on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday. 

Someone will read as moral 

that the people of Rome or Warsaw 

haggle, laugh, make love 

as they pass by the martyrs' pyres. 

Someone else will read 

of the passing of things human, 

of the oblivion 

born before the flames have died. 

But that day I thought only 

of the loneliness of the dying, 

of how, when Giordano 

climbed to his burning 

he could not find 

in any human tongue 

words for mankind, 

mankind who live on. 

Already they were back at their wine 

or peddled their white starfish, 

baskets of olives and lemons 

they had shouldered to the fair, 

and he already distanced 

as if centuries had passed 

while they paused just a moment 

for his flying in the fire. 

Those dying here, the lonely 

forgotten by the world, 

our tongue becomes for them 

the language of an ancient planet. 

Until, when all is legend 

and many years have passed, 

on a new Campo dei Fiori 

rage will kindle at a poet's word. 

Warsaw, 1943

(Translated by Louis Iribarne)

 

Mirror by James Merrill

Mirror

I grow old under an intensity

Of questioning looks. Nonsense,

I try to say, I cannot teach you children

How to live.—If not you, who will?

Cries one of them aloud, grasping my gilded

Frame till the world sways. If not you, who will?

Between their visits the table, its arrangement

Of Bible, fern and Paisley, all past change,

Does very nicely. If ever I feel curious

As to what others endure,

Across the parlor you provide examples,

Wide open, sunny, of everything I am

Not. You embrace a whole world without once caring

To set it in order. That takes thought. Out there

Something is being picked. The red-and-white bandannas

Go to my heart. A fine young man

Rides by on horseback. Now the door shuts. Hester

Confides in me her first unhappiness.

This much, you see, would never have been fitted

Together, but for me. Why then is it

They more and more neglect me? Late one sleepless

Midsummer night I strained to keep

Five tapers from your breathing. No, the widowed

Cousin said, let them go out. I did.

The room brimmed with gray sound, all the instreaming

Muslin of your dream . . .

Years later now, two of the grown grandchildren

Sit with novels face-down on the sill,

Content to muse upon your tall transparence,

Your clouds, brown fields, persimmon far

And cypress near. One speaks. How superficial

Appearances are! Since then, as if a fish

Had broken the perfect silver of my reflectiveness,

I have lapses. I suspect

Looks from behind, where nothing is, cool gazes

Through the blind flaws of my mind. As days,

As decades lengthen, this vision

Spreads and blackens. I do not know whose it is,

But I think it watches for my last silver

To blister, flake, float leaf by life, each milling-

Downward dumb conceit, to a standstill

From which not even you strike any brilliant

Chord in me, and to a faceless will,

Echo of mine, I am amenable.

 

In November by Lisel Mueller

In November

Outside the house the wind is howling 

and the trees are creaking horribly. 

This is an old story 

with its old beginning, 

as I lay me down to sleep. 

But when I wake up, sunlight 

has taken over the room. 

You have already made the coffee 

and the radio brings us music 

from a confident age. In the paper 

bad news is set in distant places. 

Whatever was bound to happen 

in my story did not happen. 

But I know there are rules that cannot be broken. 

Perhaps a name was changed. 

A small mistake. Perhaps 

a woman I do not know 

is facing the day with the heavy heart 

that, by all rights, should have been mine.

First Fight. Then Fiddle by Gwendolyn Brooks

First Fight. Then Fiddle

First fight. Then fiddle. Ply the slipping string

With feathery sorcery; muzzle the note

With hurting love; the music that they wrote

Bewitch, bewilder. Qualify to sing

Threadwise. Devise no salt, no hempen thing

For the dear instrument to bear. Devote

The bow to silks and honey. Be remote

A while from malice and from murdering.

But first to arms, to armor. Carry hate

In front of you and harmony behind.

Be deaf to music and to beauty blind.

Win war. Rise bloody, maybe not too late

For having first to civilize a space

Wherein to play your violin with grace.

Somoza Unveils Somoza’s Statue of Somoza at the Somoza Stadium by Ernesto Cardenal

Somoza Unveils Somoza’s Statue of Somoza at the Somoza Stadium

It’s not that I think the people raised this statue to me,

because I know better than you that I ordered it myself.

Nor that I have any illusions about passing with it into posterity

because I know the people will one day tear it down.

Nor that I wished to erect to myself in life

the monument you’ll not erect to me in death:

I put up this statue just because I know you’ll hate it.

(Translated by Donald Walsh)

 

My Most Recent Position Paper by Bob Hicok

My Most Recent Position Paper

A little bit of hammering

goes a long way toward making

the kind of noise I want my heart

to look up to—or have you ever

gone into a woods and applauded the light

that fights its way to the ground,

and the shadows, and the explosions

of feathers where blue jays

have been ripped into the bright

and hungry future of hawks—

and there’s this—writing an etude

by pushing pianos off a cliff

until one of them howls or whispers

just so—like a vagrant

slipping into a clean bed

or a man lifting a dying child

toward the sun and begging help,

rescue—if my eyes could speak,

they’d be mouths—the tongues

of my fingers ask to be words

against your skin—and when I

was a librarian, I lost my job

for exhorting patrons to sing

“Bye Bye Miss American Pie”—

it’s not what we do here, I was told—

yet I know this is a world

made by volcanoes, and don’t want

to keep this awareness of kaboom

to myself—so have picked up

my zither and begun walking

and strumming like an idiot

who thinks music is all

a body needs to feed itself—

and though I haven’t eaten

in years, I have been fed.

 

For What Binds Us by Jane Hirshfield

For What Binds Us

There are names for what binds us:

strong forces, weak forces.

Look around, you can see them:

the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,

nails rusting into the places they join,

joints dovetailed on their own weight.

The way things stay so solidly

wherever they’ve been set down—

and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back

across a wound, with a great vehemence,

more strong

than the simple, untested surface before.

There’s a name for it on horses,

when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh

is proud of its wounds, wears them

as honors given out after battle,

small triumphs pinned to the chest-

And when two people have loved each other

see how it is like a

scar between their bodies,

stronger, darker, and proud;

how the black cord makes of them a single fabric

that nothing can tear or mend.

Modern Declaration by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Modern Declaration

I, having loved ever since I was a child a few things, never having

       wavered

In these affections; never through shyness in the houses of the rich

       or in the presence of clergymen having denied these loves;

Never when worked upon by cynics like chiropractors having grunted

       or clicked a vertebra to the discredit of these loves;

Never when anxious to land a job having diminished them by a

       conniving smile; or when befuddled by drink

Jeered at them through heartache or lazily fondled the fingers of

      their alert enemies; declare 

That I shall love you always.

No matter what party is in power;

No matter what temporarily expedient combination of allied interests

       wins the war;

Shall love you always.

 

The Performance of Becoming Human by Daniel Borzutzky

The Performance of Becoming Human

On the side of the highway a thousand refugees step off a school bus and into a sun that can only be described as “blazing.”

The rabbi points to the line the refugees step over and says: “That’s where the country begins.”

This reminds me of Uncle Antonio. He would have died had his tortured body not been traded to another country for minerals.

Made that up.

This is a story about diplomatic protections.

The refugees were processed through Austria or Germany or maybe Switzerland.

Somehow they were discovered in some shit village in some shit country by European soldiers and taken to an embassy where they were promptly bathed, injected with vaccines, interrogated, etc.

Their bodies were traded by country A in exchange for some valuable natural resource needed by country B.

There was only one gag, says the rabbi, as he tucks his children into bed. So the soldiers took turns passing the filthy thing back and forth between the mouths of the two prisoners. The mother and son licked each other’s slobber off the dirty rag that had been in who knows how many other mouths.

You love to write about this, don’t you?

I am paid by the word for my transcriptions. Just one more question about the gag.

He wants to know what color the gag was, what it was made of, how many mouths had licked it. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands?

They used their belts to bind them by the waist to the small cage they were trapped in.

Everything reminds me of a story about an ape captured on a boat by a group of European soldiers who showed him how to become human by teaching him how to spit and belch.

Everything is always about the performance of becoming human.

Observing a newly processed refugee, the rabbi says: “I have seen those blue jeans before.”

At times like this, he thinks: I can say just about anything right now.

This is, after all, a bedtime story for the end of the world.

I am moving beneath the ground and not sleeping and trying to cross the border from one sick part of the world to another.

But where is the light and why does it not come in through your bloody fingers?

You hold your bloody fingers before my eyes and there is light in them but I cannot see it.

You say: There are countries in my bloody fingers. I am interested in the borders.

Or: I am interested in the gas chambers in your collapsible little fingers.

You put them to my face and I see your hands open and in them I see a thick wall and a sky and an ocean and ten years pass and it is still nighttime and I am falling and there are bodies on the ground in your bloody hands.

Think about the problem really hard then let it go and when you least expect it a great solution will appear in your mind.

The broken bodies stand by the river and wait for the radiation to trickle out of the houses and into their skin.

They stand under billboards and sniff paint and they know the eyes that watch them own their bodies.

A more generous interpretation might be that their bodies are shared between the earth, the state and the bank.

The sentences are collapsing one by one and the bodies are collapsing in your bloody hands and you stitch me up and pray I will sleep and you tell me of the shattered bus stops where the refugees are waiting for the buses to take them to the mall where they are holding us now and there is a man outside our bodies making comments about perspective and scale and light and there is light once more in your bloody fingers.

All I see is the sea and my mother and father falling into it.

Again? That’s like the most boring image ever.

The water is frozen and we are sleeping on the rocks, watching the cows on the cliff and you tell me they might fall and break open and that sheep and humans and countries will fall out of them and that this will be the start of the bedtime story you will tell me on this our very last night on earth.

Come closer, you say, with your eyes.

Move your bloody face next to mine and rub me with it. We are dying from so many stories. We are not complete in the mind from so many stories of burning houses, missing children, slaughtered animals. Who will put the stories back together and who will restore the bodies? I am working towards the end but first I need a stab, a small slice. The stories they are there but we need a bit more wit. We need something lighter to get us to the end of this story. Did you hear the one about the guy who picked up chicks by quoting the oral testimonies of the illiterate villagers who watched their brothers and sisters get slaughtered?

Or:

Andalé andalé arriba arriba welcome to Tijuana you cannot eat anymore barbecued iguana.

Have you met Speedy Gonzales’ cousin?

His name is Slow Poke Rodrigues.

En español se llama Lento Rodrigues.

He’s a drunk little fucking mouse.

His predator, the lazy cat baking in the sun, thinks he will taste good with chili peppers but there’s something I forgot to tell you. Slow Poke always pack a gun and now he’s going to blow your flabbergasted feline face off.

It was 1987 and my friends from junior high trapped me on the floor and mashed bananas in my face and sang: It’s no fun being an illegal alien!

You know you can die from so many stories.

The puddy cat guards the AJAX cheese factory behind the fence, right across the border.

The wetback mice see the gringo cheese.

They smell the gringo cheese.

Your gringo cheese it smells so good.

They need Speedy Gonzales to get them some ripe, fresh, stinky gringo cheese.

Do you know this Speedy Gonzales, asks one of the starving wetback mice.

I know him, Speedy Gonzales frens with my seester (the mice laugh). Speedy Gonzales frens with everybody’s seester.

Ha ha ha the little border-crossing, sneak-fucking mouses think it’s cute that they’re invading our culture to steal our cheese but it don’t make a difference because you and I (cue the rhythm and blues) we are taking a stroll on the electrified fence of love cause I feel a little Southern Californian transnational romance coming on right about now.

I feel like Daniel from the Karate Kid because I too once had a Southern Californian experience where I wasn’t aware I was learning ancient Japanese secrets when I was waxing on and waxing off.

And I am with you Mr. Miyagi in Reseda.

I am with you Mr. Miyagi in Pasadena.

And I am with you Mr. Miyagi at the All Valley Karate tournament.

And I am with you Mr. Miyagi in Okinawa where you went in Karate Kid II to meet your long lost girlfriend when you discovered she wasn’t married off when she was just a teenager to your fiercest Okinawan rival.

And I am with you Mr. Miyagi in Tijuana where it’s murder and diarrhea and always kinda kinky.

But seriously, friends:

What do you make of this darkness that surrounds us?

They chopped up two dozen bodies last night and today I have to pick up my dry cleaning.

In the morning I need to assess student learning outcomes as part of an important administrative initiative to secure the nation’s future by providing degrees of economic value to the alienated, urban youth.

So for now hasta luego compadres and don’t worry too much about the bucket of murmuring shit that is the unitedstatesian night.

What does it say? What does it say? What do you want it to say?

 

Knees of a Natural Man by Henry Dumas

Knees of a Natural Man

my ole man took me to the fulton fish market

we walk around in the guts and the scales

my ole man show me a dead fish, eyes like throat spit

he say “you hongry boy?” i say “naw, not yet”

my ole man show me how to pick the leavings

he say people throw away fish that not rotten

we scaling on our knees back uptown on lenox

sold five fish, keepin one for the pot

my ole man copped a bottle of wine

he say, “boy, build me a fire out in the lot”

backyard cat climbin up my leg for fish

i make a fire in the ash can

my ole man come when he smell fish

frank williams is with him, they got wine

my ole man say “the boy cotch the big one”

he tell big lie and slap me on the head

i give the guts to the cat and take me some wine

we walk around the sparks like we in hell

my ole man is laughin and coughin up wine

he say “you hongry boy” i say “naw, not yet”

next time i go to fulton fish market

first thing i do is take a long drink of wine

 

Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay

Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude

Friends, will you bear with me today,

for I have awakened

from a dream in which a robin

made with its shabby wings a kind of veil

behind which it shimmied and stomped something from the south

of Spain, its breast aflare,

looking me dead in the eye

from the branch that grew into my window,

coochie-cooing my chin,

the bird shuffling its little talons left, then right,

while the leaves bristled

against the plaster wall, two of them drifting

onto my blanket while the bird

opened and closed its wings like a matador

giving up on murder,

jutting its beak, turning a circle,

and flashing, again,

the ruddy bombast of its breast 

by which I knew upon waking

it was telling me

in no uncertain terms

to bellow forth the tubas and sousaphones,

the whole rusty brass band of gratitude

not quite dormant in my belly—

it said so in a human voice,

“Bellow forth”—

and who among us could ignore such odd

and precise counsel?

Hear ye! hear ye! I am here

to holler that I have hauled tons—by which I don’t mean lots,

I mean tons — of cowshit

and stood ankle deep in swales of maggots

swirling the spent beer grains

the brewery man was good enough to dump off

holding his nose, for they smell very bad,

but make the compost writhe giddy and lick its lips,

twirling dung with my pitchfork

again and again

with hundreds and hundreds of other people,

we dreamt an orchard this way,

furrowing our brows,

and hauling our wheelbarrows,

and sweating through our shirts,

and two years later there was a party

at which trees were sunk into the well-fed earth,

one of which, a liberty apple, after being watered in

was tamped by a baby barefoot

with a bow hanging in her hair

biting her lip in her joyous work

and friends this is the realest place I know,

it makes me squirm like a worm I am so grateful,

you could ride your bike there

or roller skate or catch the bus

there is a fence and a gate twisted by hand,

there is a fig tree taller than you in Indiana,

it will make you gasp.

It might make you want to stay alive even, thank you;

and thank you

for not taking my pal when the engine

of his mind dragged him

to swig fistfuls of Xanax and a bottle or two of booze,

and thank you for taking my father

a few years after his own father went down thank you

mercy, mercy, thank you

for not smoking meth with your mother

oh thank you thank you

for leaving and for coming back,

and thank you for what inside my friends’

love bursts like a throng of roadside goldenrod

gleaming into the world,

likely hauling a shovel with her

like one named Aralee ought,

with hands big as a horse’s,

and who, like one named Aralee ought,

will laugh time to time til the juice

runs from her nose; oh

thank you

for the way a small thing’s wail makes

the milk or what once was milk

in us gather into horses

huckle-buckling across a field;

and thank you, friends, when last spring

the hyacinth bells rang

and the crocuses flaunted

their upturned skirts, and a quiet roved

the beehive which when I entered

were snugged two or three dead

fist-sized clutches of bees between the frames,

almost clinging to one another,

this one’s tiny head pushed

into another’s tiny wing,

one’s forelegs resting on another’s face,

the translucent paper of their wings fluttering

beneath my breath and when

a few dropped to the frames beneath:

honey; and after falling down to cry,

everything’s glacial shine.

And thank you, too. And thanks

for the corduroy couch I have put you on.

Put your feet up. Here’s a light blanket,

a pillow, dear one,

for I can feel this is going to be long.

I can’t stop

my gratitude, which includes, dear reader,

you, for staying here with me,

for moving your lips just so as I speak.

Here is a cup of tea. I have spooned honey into it.

And thank you the tiny bee’s shadow

perusing these words as I write them.

And the way my love talks quietly

when in the hive,

so quietly, in fact, you cannot hear her

but only notice barely her lips moving

in conversation. Thank you what does not scare her

in me, but makes her reach my way. Thank you the love

she is which hurts sometimes. And the time

she misremembered elephants

in one of my poems which, oh, here

they come, garlanded with morning glory and wisteria

blooms, trombones all the way down to the river.

Thank you the quiet

in which the river bends around the elephant’s

solemn trunk, polishing stones, floating

on its gentle back

the flock of geese flying overhead.

And to the quick and gentle flocking

of men to the old lady falling down

on the corner of Fairmount and 18th, holding patiently

with the softest parts of their hands

her cane and purple hat,

gathering for her the contents of her purse

and touching her shoulder and elbow;

thank you the cockeyed court

on which in a half-court 3 vs. 3 we oldheads

made of some runny-nosed kids

a shambles, and the 61-year-old

after flipping a reverse lay-up off a back door cut

from my no-look pass to seal the game

ripped off his shirt and threw punches at the gods

and hollered at the kids to admire the pacemaker’s scar

grinning across his chest; thank you

the glad accordion’s wheeze

in the chest; thank you the bagpipes.

Thank you to the woman barefoot in a gaudy dress

for stopping her car in the middle of the road

and the tractor trailer behind her, and the van behind it,

whisking a turtle off the road.

Thank you god of gaudy.

Thank you paisley panties.

Thank you the organ up my dress.

Thank you the sheer dress you wore kneeling in my dream

at the creek’s edge and the light

swimming through it. The koi kissing

halos into the glassy air.

The room in my mind with the blinds drawn

where we nearly injure each other

crawling into the shawl of the other’s body.

Thank you for saying it plain:

fuck each other dumb.

And you, again, you, for the true kindness

it has been for you to remain awake

with me like this, nodding time to time

and making that noise which I take to mean

yes, or, I understand, or, please go on

but not too long, or, why are you spitting

so much, or, easy Tiger

hands to yourself. I am excitable.

I am sorry. I am grateful.

I just want us to be friends now, forever.

Take this bowl of blackberries from the garden.

The sun has made them warm.

I picked them just for you. I promise

I will try to stay on my side of the couch.

And thank you the baggie of dreadlocks I found in a drawer

while washing and folding the clothes of our murdered friend;

the photo in which his arm slung

around the sign to “the trail of silences”; thank you

the way before he died he held

his hands open to us; for coming back

in a waft of incense or in the shape of a boy

in another city looking

from between his mother’s legs,

or disappearing into the stacks after brushing by;

for moseying back in dreams where,

seeing us lost and scared

he put his hand on our shoulders

and pointed us to the temple across town;

and thank you to the man all night long

hosing a mist on his early-bloomed

peach tree so that the hard frost

not waste the crop, the ice

in his beard and the ghosts

lifting from him when the warming sun

told him sleep now; thank you

the ancestor who loved you

before she knew you

by smuggling seeds into her braid for the long

journey, who loved you

before he knew you by putting

a walnut tree in the ground, who loved you

before she knew you by not slaughtering

the land; thank you

who did not bulldoze the ancient grove

of dates and olives,

who sailed his keys into the ocean

and walked softly home; who did not fire, who did not

plunge the head into the toilet, who said stop,

don’t do that; who lifted some broken

someone up; who volunteered

the way a plant birthed of the reseeding plant

is called a volunteer, like the plum tree

that marched beside the raised bed

in my garden, like the arugula that marched

itself between the blueberries,

nary a bayonet, nary an army, nary a nation,

which usage of the word volunteer

familiar to gardeners the wide world

made my pal shout “Oh!” and dance

and plunge his knuckles

into the lush soil before gobbling two strawberries

and digging a song from his guitar

made of wood from a tree someone planted, thank you;

thank you zinnia, and gooseberry, rudbeckia

and pawpaw, Ashmead’s kernel, cockscomb

and scarlet runner, feverfew and lemonbalm;

thank you knitbone and sweetgrass and sunchoke

and false indigo whose petals stammered apart

by bumblebees good lord please give me a minute...

and moonglow and catkin and crookneck

and painted tongue and seedpod and johnny jump-up;

thank you what in us rackets glad

what gladrackets us;

and thank you, too, this knuckleheaded heart, this pelican heart,

this gap-toothed heart flinging open its gaudy maw

to the sky, oh clumsy, oh bumblefucked,

oh giddy, oh dumbstruck,

oh rickshaw, oh goat twisting

its head at me from my peach tree’s highest branch,

balanced impossibly gobbling the last fruit,

its tongue working like an engine,

a lone sweet drop tumbling by some miracle

into my mouth like the smell of someone I’ve loved;

heart like an elephant screaming

at the bones of its dead;

heart like the lady on the bus

dressed head to toe in gold, the sun

shivering her shiny boots, singing

Erykah Badu to herself

leaning her head against the window;

and thank you the way my father one time came back in a dream

by plucking the two cables beneath my chin

like a bass fiddle’s strings

and played me until I woke singing,

no kidding, singing, smiling,

thank you, thank you,

stumbling into the garden where

the Juneberry’s flowers had burst open

like the bells of French horns, the lily

my mother and I planted oozed into the air,

the bazillion ants labored in their earthen workshops

below, the collard greens waved in the wind

like the sails of ships, and the wasps

swam in the mint bloom’s viscous swill;

and you, again you, for hanging tight, dear friend.

I know I can be long-winded sometimes.

I want so badly to rub the sponge of gratitude

over every last thing, including you, which, yes, awkward,

the suds in your ear and armpit, the little sparkling gems

slipping into your eye. Soon it will be over,

which is precisely what the child in my dream said,

holding my hand, pointing at the roiling sea and the sky

hurtling our way like so many buffalo,

who said it’s much worse than we think,

and sooner; to whom I said

no duh child in my dreams, what do you think

this singing and shuddering is,

what this screaming and reaching and dancing

and crying is, other than loving

what every second goes away?

Goodbye, I mean to say.

And thank you. Every day.