Buffalo surge over the plains at night like foam
At the edge of a wave. Nighthawks boom far above.
By dawn, the grass is scored from a thousand meteors.

St. Luke believed that true faith, like true healing,
Leaves a scar. The word is a cicatrix, torn into being,
The pain that knits itself into a shield against harm.

By now, Ishmael has grown tired of talk about archangels
And the whiteness of hell. Closing his eyes to the wind,
He dreams of a home far beyond the grieving waves.

To forget its past, the soul crosses Lethe before rebirth.
Each one of us was a prizefighter, barmaid, pope, and slave.
Come, take my hand, let’s cross this low stretch of river.

Whales don’t lament the vast latitudes they travel.
Their songs are no more about sorrow than bliss,
But are maps leading the singers across a dark trench.

It’s never clear if we’re going on a journey or into exile.
If there’s an end, it’s hidden as a wound beneath a scar.
If there’s an end, it’s endless as the plains we cross.




The Candied Body of Felix Gonzales-Torres

He left every ounce of his flesh in candy for us to eat,
Left the weight of his lover, gobbled by AIDS, the weight
Of the two of them huddled and crying on a couch.

How strange that beauty comes to the sorrowful
When they most need it, when it least avails them.
He draped strings of muted lights from a ceiling,

Called them Leaves of Grass. He understood Whitman
Better than whole universities of scholars
And sleeps chest to chest with him on a bed of stars.

He stacked black-and-white posters of clouds,
Wanting us to take one for ourselves,
Like peeling back the museum roof to expose

The endless possibilities of the heavens.
He worked with nothing you couldn’t buy at Rite-Aid.
Cheap, disposable gifts the dying give the dying.

Candy melts to nothingness, humming tungsten breaks,
The poster is lost in an attic of cardboard boxes,
And over the world’s body the clouds go, nevertheless.

                            For Jonathan VanDyke

Floating books tapped my hip like a dog’s nose the night
father spat on the library and the whole thing flooded.
I would have drowned. I would have sunk like a flashlight
left wandering in the water but brother yanked my hand

before the surge's lips sucked me in. No use convincing
the water: something larger than Louisiana, larger than
Belle Chasse, larger than the row of churches left wincing
after the first surge, larger than the life-vests in my hand

that father gave me, told me not to lose and that I was stupid
when I had lost them, refused to look at me, talk to me,
wouldn’t even spit on me. Even when I begged, pleaded
for that bullet tasting just as sweet as fresh wildflower honey.

Then came his hand. And anyone who survived it knows
it was God I dangled under, his skinny-kid elbows.




Heart Ghazal

A whitetail deer stared, eyes weighting the heart
the night a truck swerved, fear striating the heart.

First brush with death: the freight truck crash;
God showed me his way of negating the heart.

Just nine years old when the doctors diagnosed my
Father’s rheumatic fever, a sore throat fating the heart.

Some folks wash their hands clean where they drink.
They shake water white, ripples reverberating the heart.

I jogged down the dusty path, body desperate to fly,
but fell gasping. My chest pounded, gating the heart.

They pounded on his chest in the waiting room
where he collapsed, gloved fists berating the heart.

When they called my mother, she knew he was gone.
But the doctor dangled slightest chance, baiting the heart.

I have come home on a train coursing tracks
old wood and iron, each horn blare translating the heart.

Just two lines Geoffrey, just two lines. Get them out,
they’re doing nothing, but—write it!—medicating the heart.

When I think nothing
will bring back the green
rush of spring in my chest,
I think of the African thumb
pianos in the French Market,
little note cool and full
as a drop of water, peeling slow
down the back of my neck, and if

that note were the last drop
of water I’d ever taste, and therefore
not enough to save me,

I would stick out my tongue,
I would drink it all the same.




The Magic Words

I want someone
far older than I am
to call me to his bedside
at the hazy edges of spring,

to sit me down in an old
porch chair, my hands folded,
precise as origami cranes
in my lap, to tell me

a story filled with mud,
bad liquor, tiny rooms,
rough forest, bugs stinging
his back, roots twisting

his ankles, the lack
of someone’s face
blanking his mind
of everything, even sleep,

heat turning his skin
from soft human skin
to a raw hide of stink,
drops of blood so tiny

at a knife’s rough cut
on his wrist it seemed even
his body could not give
him enough of anything—

and then, something happens
to make it the now,
tidy room, soft sheets,
paintings bright on walls,

clock ticking neat
as my throat gulping water
after a long cry, a bad dream.
I don’t care what form

the story takes, nor if
what he wanted
matches what I miss.
I only want someone

who longed for something
to grab the bare skin
of my arm in his hand,
and, eyes bright as dimes,

tell me, Listen.
Let me tell you
about the day
everything changed.

It is lunch time. Beside the road
lies a carcass of what was once a dog.
On the corner a man sells roses.
Below the overpass there are men
fishing in the Chattahoochee.

In this river dead bodies
have been found. Behind picnic tables
teenagers lose their virginity. Broken
glass beneath soft banks.

In the middle of a song
I hear him say I am indifferent.
I remember when we were younger
tubing down the river.
I didn’t wear makeup that day.
Somewhere there is a picture.




Sea Gypsies

You said you spent 5 minutes of your life
today looking for a staple remover.
Something to do with your job.
You edit, and sometimes
there is a need to pull things

apart. There are mountains
between us, and then a river.
The land swells with seeds
that fall from your pockets,
sewing the distance with deep
breaths, an entire city
in your smile.

I tell you about the Mokens,
gypsies of the Andaman Sea.
How they knew to flee the tsunami
before the first wave tore trees
from their roots, husbands from wives.
When the sky turns to salt, sometimes
there is a thirst. In their language

there is no word for want,
only an understanding
of give and take. You said
I took away your need
and you want

to share water with me.
The ground presses its pregnant
belly against my feet. I am
distracted by squirrels
in the trees. Wind.
When.

She waited, driftwood body stung by wasp,
her folded hand like a knife. She was irritable, too
lifeless to wait any longer. The radio rattled and she
remembered her stroke in the stream. She turned like a top,
in, and then once out, she was bright as golden hair. The
trees bristled in the open air. She looked back, the orange
of her dress like an unpredictable peach. Her thumbs held to
her shoulders; it was twelve o’clock. She worried about
something other than her hands. They had helped her,
she knew, in the brassiest and smallest way. The breeze died
down around her smooth head.




Motet: Five Voices

It’s not for you
to recognize as you wander up
the path, a fury of bees
making its way into your shirt collar.

If what you already know
is remembered, in an instant,
is fixed on the brain, then you will
take instructions: Play now the violin, wand on string.

Note how the counting of time
and the door of the hand give you reason
to keep going. How in the birth of these
voices the slow breath keeps breathing.

The fire around the bend holds its heat.

When, over the hill, a tree trunk takes
a dog-head shape visible, your legs stop
before you do. You think you have folded up
on your bed, but you have gone out, into the shadows.

Each brown egg, a breakfast orb flecked with shit and straw.
On Sunday mornings Uncle Tommy appeared with an ax,
Hanging loosely at his side. The gregarious hens hid
When they heard his door slam two cabins down.

One hen each week startled by conjunction of ax and block.
Bloody heads rotted in the wire grass, the eyes gone by noon.
In Rob’s dreams poultry still careens, small brown storms,
Through his front yard swept clean by his young mama.

When the woman’s husband took sick
the dog showed up in her backyard.
It gulped old butter beans dumped
in the field at the corner of the fence.

Visitors filled the house but the beagle
shied from touch. She got biscuits, ham,
slept in the ditch across the road. A bowl
was filled with water, weighted with a rock.

Dry dog food was sprinkled in the grass.
When the woman walked to the mailbox
she listened for the claw-tick on the road,
felt that living thing’s breath at her heels.

2.

The teenage girl down the street
lingers near a boy, his polished car
parked quickly, in the wrong direction.
He leans forward, thrums the steering wheel,

door flung into her parents’ light-heaped yard.
Music floats between them. The muffled bass
kicks. She bends one arm, holds an elbow
from behind her back. He’s inches from the curb.

Birds peck through the grass near the house.
He’s one step from her lean arms, tanned legs.
Her toes curl the rough curb while her soles
—creamy—flash like halves of the moon.

3.

They’re gone now, the old couple. Him,
Parkinson’s. Her, a fallen bladder, a split knee.
The neighbor took up mowing. He weeded
around the stoop and the silent white urns.

The geraniums went stemmy, stained
red wherever petals fell. In the newspaper
there’s a picture—a woman who disappeared
thirty years ago. Her eyes will always be green.

When the weathered birdhouse fell
it didn’t crack apart but lay on its side.
The neighbor lifted it, leaving a mark
where it had been like a wound undressed.

4.

Every year it was the smell of cedar.
The black cat, back arched in screech
on the picture-window. The pumpkin-man,
elbows pinned to the front door, hands limp.

Until October all the dark paper things
that opened into tissue pumpkins, or moons
lined the chest in my mother’s room. Once,
I returned a scarecrow, its body halved like wings,

and I saw my parents’ letters bundled with string.
I pinched one loose, slipped it under my shirt.
Then the red-jet airmail stamp, my mother’s name,
the empty pocket I found beneath an already cut seam.

pools at my ankles—socks full of mud. How
can I keep walking, talking, skinning a bagel,

sniffing the yeast? I dangle my head and arms
over the bed-cliff to warm them. My face is torn,

my hair looks dead. The small hot birds sound closer
than ever. I stop breathing, experimentally.

Just a habit, painless to break. The world
pulled in, the world pushed out, molecules

unchanged. Since my heart stopped, rot begins.
To move is to haul meat. A sour scent, blush

of green along the fat. Will I wither
snug along my bones or loosen, peel

away? Since my heart stopped, questions fester
like microscopic eggs. I never knew

that the fire in me could cool and still a walking,
talking engine would conduct the business

of my will. That I was less a working
body than a mind’s routine, a rhythm.

I took it in; it was a reflection.
A man in a corner took it in too.
The hat was similar to itself.

In each reflection, the reflection of a prior life.
History is miracle.
How do any of us survive it?

Pattern recognizes silhouette.
Silhouette recognizes pattern (breeze).
All these thoughts of sexuation.

Is that really a word? the man should ask.
The girl he loves is lost in it.
Do they come from the mirror function too?

II

In Paris the fires were raging.
In the magasins, in the car lots.
I pressed my body straightway.

I mean, I pressed my bodies straightway.
The profile their reproduction.
The profile’s where we insert it.

In utopia the children ate candy.
Now I’m content with myself.
It’s the kind of content that makes one board trains.

History memory theory.
I won’t sculpt it; it will not occur.
The silhouettes are ghosts and the people gone.