The kid playing harmonica on the bridge.
Collecting tips in his shoe.

He’s got about
three five dollar bills.

A man about five paces
west.

Rough
all over his jaw

so bad you can see the clock on his face
about to strike midnight.

No man is a forest unto himself
when every mile marker a gravestone
is bolted to the ground.

Even our childhoods are pocked
with pulpits awaiting sermons.
& there are never doves inserted

into the verses you’d expect them to be.
So I will not attempt to include them here
beneath the linden tree that pulses with confetti.

Where only 24 hours prior men sympathetic
to my enslavers marched along the trail called Freedom.
But you should not worry about that.

I am in no hurry to call down fire.
Instead I steady the rocks in their place
upon the tombstones until they steeple

into a kind of church.

All was in doubt
as the windstorm approached.

Cars were stranded on the thruway.

A mug was flung from a sill.

Everything depended
on the Prime Minister’s suit:
its bold cut, its stylish pockets.

Its refusal to capitulate.

The litany reached everywhere.
Through the loop of the mug’s
handle, into the dusky corners

of the raucous bistro,
between the lithograph
& the glass protecting it—

among the begonia’s blossoms.

The lozenge didn’t know
it was dissolving, but it was.
The suit was paid for with tax dollars.

The lithograph was not a fake.

The tome explained our fate

when read from the proper angle.
Lilies love to float. The windstorm
did not destroy

the city. But there will be
a next time. Nothing you do
will ensure your safety.

You must chronicle both terror & joy.

The novella cannot be
easily summarized, but
it’s not about nothing.

You’ll find yourself in a cottage

near a cliff. Its roof won’t protect you.

The oleander is for you.

Nothing can be stolen
as you possess nothing.

The spotlight drifts to the margin.

Cherries

So she turns her back to me & I go out
to the porch to send the dogs in / while I help
myself to her dying brother’s / Red 100s
& let myself be dipped in the hot forge of night /
By the window / I hear his worn cough /
the groan of the twin-bed as he shifts / his weight
from left to right / It makes me think of those pews
at seminary school / the slow creak as I rose
from the kneelers & never got back down again /
& the Vulgate & those two birds in Leviticus
with the cedar wood & the hyssop / & one bird
being lowered into the claypot / we started together on Reds
me at thirteen & her at nineteen / our happy heads swaying
like thuribles / later switched onto cloves / listening /
for the soft crackles / said to come from fiberglass /
disproven as myth / though inevitably altered the market /
for Kretek cigarettes / Months passed / & we couldn’t find them /
anymore / When asked about it / She says /
she doesn’t remember their taste / & now the dogs are barking
at something / behind the row / of blooming indian figs /
& I go to them / & crouch low / & find the body
of their derision / the last cinder in the wild dark /
& hold it with a closed hand to the moonlight /
& wonder how the priests in their time decided /
when it was right / for one animal to release the other

Semiconductors

Having sidestepped the canopies of blue tarp
& walked down a river of graffiti
& fixed my eyes so intently to the phone’s display
that body and algorithm have fused as one—
it has become easy, almost necessary,
to dismiss everything. The barking dogs, the smell
of damp trash lingering on my skin—the energy
of this village. I can see it, like a clenched fist
& the emergency lights that wrap their colors
around each bruised knuckle. Two days prior
to obtaining this job—one that I had prayed to La Virgen for—
they had me fill out a questionnaire. I bubbled
“permanent resident,” though if you cut me open
I would ooze the same baba as nopal. Sobrino,
promise me, in the books you read, there is still somewhere
else to go. Where there is nothing but wild grass
dotting the white hills. My son lives in an online casino
& your father is the ore they make semiconductors with.
The last Red Line gathers me to work, so the machines
may greet me with their copper kiss. On break, I lather
my hands with orange pumice industrial grade soap
& watch time swirl its ink-grime in a steel basin.
One moment the jagged earth was underneath me.
Then my eyes opened to the walls of a polyjohn.
Promise me everything will be fine. In this place,
where our houses never touch & every home is a panic room—

We were once two dead girls
wandering the cemetery behind your childhood

home. We’d already shed our bright
clothes, baby fat, the warm dashes

of hope from our faces. Bare branches above
netted our bad dreams, we crushed

frost under our boots. We were dead girls walking
until we heard whistles & honks from passing

cars. Then we were alive & young enough to mistake danger
as proof of desire. Sometimes I can still hear us

whisper in clothes snapping on laundry lines.
Sometimes your memory falls over me

like a white sheet. I could look at you through the clouds
of your breath & see myself. We saw our reflections distort

in the engraved marble rising from the frozen earth
& wondered aloud who might remember us

after we were gone. We were young enough to mistake ourselves
for the only people on earth who found peace

in a cemetery. As if we were the only ones
who heard the disembodied voice that followed us

with the fervor of a man twice our age.
Even though it was impossible,

I swore to you I’d remember every name
on every headstone. Someone had to.

I swore to myself I’d remember you just as you were
then, stifling your warm laughter

to show respect for those underneath us.
You were not a girl, but something that appeared

to float. A ghost, a snake
cutting through grass. A kind of hope that held me

at knifepoint.

record of his mouth

he throws me bones, piles and piles
of bones until the residue on the carpet
is bone and my own eye becomes
bone. shifting to autumn, i topple
around on stilts, being made of bones,
and he will not carry me. if i speak
in the language of bones, he asks: what about
my white sail tearing in half, what about
the woman standing like a scarecrow
at the back of my throat, what about
my own need to sleep without hands in my hair?
so i wallow at the refrigerator door,
near the cold meats. so he keeps begging me
to be one thing. so he keeps flinging me further
and further away, into piles of leaves,
and i never grow fur.

after & aboard

easy to be meticulous and still ignore the iron
in the water the wool in patches in the grass

or how i simply had no head about it you understand
amiss with waves crackling stern-side

oddly straining to upheave what was caught
on a clear line

i made you out of a marigold root & decay
offering used towels a dryer folding in on itself

i made you from bamboo reeds i slew slender
at dusk a bed of them

we were together and yet you drew up
the image of another tongue

what was a tongue a hilt the waves
gripping my teeth

wasn’t it easier you know to be floating
away from land and afire

Quicksand, the worst possible way to die.
It terrified me as a kid. Worse than
piranhas or red ants swarming, the more
you thrashed, the faster quicksand
gobbled you up. My mom’s button jar,
touch and touch and touch, also my dad’s
beard, ah sensation, fingers greedy
for one more pass. Ghosts, I pictured
them licking graves, slithering out
of broken windows, up and up
they went. Also the opposite, gravity:
how it pulled the helpless world down.
Like the time my foot slipped climbing
our maple and I woke in the hospital,
with two busted wrists. Birds defied
gravity, also smoke and helicopters.
And if one day I died in a car crash
like my uncle, I would defy gravity too,
my spirit drifting like a blue balloon.
Pomegranates, we only got them at
Christmas. Slowly, that’s how I ate
mine, bead by bead, as if taking red
secrets into my body. My mother’s spit,
how she licked her thumb, scrubbing
at a stain on my face till God shrugged
and declared me clean enough for now.

Carrying a fortune-telling fish
and an unborn child,
a fourteen-year-old girl
hauls herself
through an Indiana bus terminal.
She steals five dollars
from the mini mart tip jar
and continues her argument
with God. Did the Father see
her father, beneath the paisley sheets?
His green eyes pilfered
her nightlight’s glow. He left
chocolate eggs wrapped in foil,
an eye shadow palette,
and a fortune-telling fish
that wriggles and flips in her palm,
as if to free itself from a line.

Maybe fields burn because they have
no other way to become sky. Maybe you
burned because you had to

prove you were made of the same stuff
as the sun. And maybe the message was
your way of staying, of speaking

last and lasting. (We never asked
you to show us how to star. We never
stopped begging you to take

a seat beside us.) Now you are played
sometimes when we get weepy in seedy
bars at last call—a voice with no body.

Timelines

By moving to the woods, we saved our daughter
from TV and traffic and instead
gave her a forest and its mountain. So we said.

I wanted us to gather around slow-rising bread,
but trees kept falling over and the river rose
from beneath the floorboards. Then the bear

showed up at the edge of our yard
and watched us like we were a slow, beautiful film
about how to savor food. We had to call in the neighbor

who was angry about his one bad eye
because it wouldn’t let him be a sniper
for the good of our country.

In a world where you can be anything,
his bumper sticker said, be a motherfucker.
There was so much silence up there.

It was like snow, but personal and not beautiful.
And the larger world was dying. Our neighbor
was one eye short of being a terrific killer. Years later

my marriage and all my dogs from that time
died. I sometimes write to things that won’t
write back:

to stars, to the bear who sniffed the air
when I returned home from work, inhaling as if I, I,
would star as the most important cells of its next hibernation.

The failed sniper who cleaned bears
out of people’s lives wheeled in a giant length of culvert
made into a trap. He filled it

with sheet cakes and a holy maple bar, and the bear went in.
What happens next is I miss
my daughter before she even grows up.

I keep saying to her: look at the sky.
It’s what we’ll always have together.

The Clarity

My husband, fresh back from a walk among the blossoms,
he sees me and shares that on this summer day
he loves me, more than he knew possible,
and he can’t wait to collaborate, with me,
on a divorce. This idea came to him: the clarity,

while on his walk, while he talked with Bob,
the city planner whose eyes kept trying to explode,
and so Bob had valves implanted in them. Valves
that must be pressed to relieve the pressure.
It’s like magic: just press an eye, and the pain—gone.

Bob thinks collaborative divorce is best
because it’s something my husband and I can do
together, and Bob knows how much I love together.
My daughter just left for college, so I already know
what it feels like to be peeled to the dermis

and left in the rain. My husband produces a brochure
about how the collaboration works. Then his parents
send me an email to remind me of all they have
done for me and of what I need to do to make sure
their son’s life will not be made

uncomfortable by what he wants. A faraway friend
sends a photo of her gleaming table: set for two.
She says one of the places is always for me.
The only thing that could make it perfect
for the heart I have now is to set that room on fire.

Anything That Looks Like an Opening

Unforgivable, how good the windows are
at pitching their sale to the birds:
More air here. Come in.
We cut apart our shirts and made ropes
to hang over the glass: warn the birds.
Then we cut apart more of our clothes
to make face masks so we could have even more
distance from each other. Now
everything I wear has a future in protecting
the world from the world. Did you know
you can paint a collar gold
if you want your head to become a flower?
You can redden your cuffs if you want to show
where your hands will be when they have nothing
to hold. Inside, some of us are clouds
and some of us are windows who need a bird
to fly through. That’s how lonely we are.

Wheat Body

Walking is a form of rhythm, so the Holy Saint People
of Never-to-Dance are unsure of how to cross
the morning field. Song of Roots. Song of Pulled Grass.

The one whose body
is made of wheat steps into the ringing.

The cowbell that is almost music warms where it rests
against the cow’s body. The ringing requires distance
from the body. It also requires the body.

If religion shall take away the dance, then breath
becomes dancing.

In the classroom children wash their feet.
Single file, they wait for the world to spin them
into their lives.

You can learn to breathe by letting go of your stomach.

When Danny hesitated before kissing me
I could feel the pulse in his neck.
The rush inside of him was made of beyond-him.
It was good, that walking-through.

The children may sing as they walk. They are allowed to do so
as long as the song does not enter the body as dancing.

Though the lungs are bellows. The chest,
expansion. This is rhythm. The children of sky bodies
and April. Next year, my arms will try again
to hold this world, and fail.

Months: months,
experts say it’ll take
to replenish this lack

of rain the barges stuck,
Army Corp dredging,

muddy cracks in the riverbed,
a teenage girl mudlarking

for Ray-Bans beneath
what used to be a dock

under the Hernando de Soto bridge
near old Fort Pickering,

the river pulling away
from its banks

half-telling secrets: submerged
boats, trash, Civil War
bullets and belt buckles.

Nothing ever gets carried away
just buried in sediment.

I don’t know what’s worse—
imagining what’s submerged
or seeing it exposed,

like the woman
walking last month along
the banks who found

human ribs a jawbone.

Parts of the Platte tributary
have disappeared—

satellite imagery shows
a half-song of something
a narrative full of holes

nineteenth-century shipwreck,
pottery and glass, nails, bolts.

How many new oxbows
are forming? And where
did the fish go?

It took me half a lifetime to see
the river as a body
not a landmark—

on a map
the Mississippi Drainage Basin
mimics arteries

the way blood vessels branch
and combine—

as levels drop,
two feet more by next month,

worry is also tributary,
its confluence of small deluges, news reports.

I used to fear drowning strong currents,
now it’s quicksand, warnings

to carry a pistol on sandbars
to ward off wild hogs.

I’d like to dip my feet in again
the way I waded in the scale model
of the river—

its length, width, and depths—
at the now-defunct Mudd Island Museum

at the end of a long summer. This spine of water spent,
overwrought outdone

Poem by Chen Poyu, translated from the Taiwanese Mandarin by Nicholas Wong

for Simone Weil

She lived here, she would have walked on these coals,
the soles of her boots coming unstitched from the uppers.
The slate roofs must have shuddered
as she passed below, an avalanche of doves.
She was living in Morningside Heights with her mother
and father, a few blocks north of the church.
It would have been summer, late July or August.
Now it's summer again and the herbs
in the cloister garden are flourishing—
pennyroyal, fleur-de-lis, sour orange, meadowsweet.
I think she had a secret. She was studying to become
a nurse. She wanted the Allies to parachute a battalion
of white-clad girls into the center of combat
to be martyred. She wanted to be the first.
I don't know whether she was a saint
or just supremely narcissistic. Is there a difference?
Whether you spread outward until you fill the world,
or hollow yourself out to let the world in.
At any rate, she didn't die of starvation,
she was eating by the end—a forkful of potatoes,
an egg yolk swimming in sherry. Her letters to André
were buoyant. He was still in Bethlehem with Eveline,
working on finite fields and holomorphic functions,
theorems so abstract they could have fallen
from the sky. But everything exists
that exists in the mind. There is no death.
Only this: the walls of the self grow thin
and you hear voices on the other side—muffled
at first, then clearer. You can hear people's thoughts,
what they're dreaming.