After Brock-Broido's Radiating Naiveté The moon is mine, and All the craters are mine, A singular litany Said, not a circuit, no Zinc-dusted mirror, no element. Nobody's Autumnal innocent in Valdosta hail. I am glad to see the gold leaves falling Off, the stern shrug of the shed roof, chest- long icicles sunk, licking, in the snow. The searchlights lately going off, dark Is an old correspondence, witness of the mute Mouthing their prayers' clocks. You should have been A coal tender, pigironed cowcatcher head Down and corrupt, heavy and helplessly Down on the canvas with third count on roundhouse, Old Chief. The root cellar will Be filled with bricks & sticks- No Benedictines, no errant moles, No hesitation in the leather-slick strop, Never the sawn-through icebound hole. I'm sloe-eyed as Neil Armstrong when he bent Half-lit in his dark tinny hangar: all My lonely irrational circuses. I am immeasurable, I look Again. Near the stovebox, no better radiance, Nobody's care. No more half- Lived messages, nobody's evening Holler, sloe-eyed As our Miss Dickinson, lit By shelved lies at her hand, Nobody's song, nobody's black- Skirted priest, nobody's whooping crane.All That's Left She wouldn't even look at it. Like it was nothing, or like I was. C'mon, baby, don't you even want to put the ring on? "Charlie," she said, "it's...drab. Y'know? Kinda ho-hum." She patted my hand. Good Christ, I thought, how do I answer that? At least out here in the car it's pitch-black, so dark she can't see my face all folding up. Right away I suck it up, all manly, act like no big deal, like nothing, glad as hell for the car's thick dark. I close my fist around the ring box, snap it shut. Well, there's your answer, Charlie-boy. And damn me if she didn't start to hum a little, Jesus, me shaky with sweat and this hum coming out of her. Some crazy, peppy tune. It's like I'll blow up- it comes to this? What kind of answer is this, some Pepsodent jingle? I don't say nothing. I take her home and in my jacket pocket the ring- my ring-feels like it's gonna burn its way out of the dark velvet box. Once I'm home, I pull out a chair in the dark kitchen, and flick on the fluorescent. The hum helps a little, but my dress-shirt collar's a ring tightening on my throat. Unbuttoned, I lift up the receiver from the wall-hook but dial nothing. Do I really want to know the answer to all this mess? I don't want to hear her answer, not really, but I'm dying over here. I stare out at the dark and it's like I'm being swallowed whole by Nothing. There's just me and this goddamned hum. Enough. Lights out. I get an ashtray and pick up a box of matches. Rattle it. Finger the ring box and dial. Ring. No answer. Ring. I light up, match flaring in the dark. Ring. I hear the line click, then a dull hum, then nothing. Five beers later and I can't stand up so good. I take out the damn ring and look through it into...nothing. Huh. Phone ringing? I don't answer. Doesn't matter. Outside, streetlights cut the dark into icy rings, humming.All That I Am she wrote-him, a hymn knew flying knew she was busy return and letters burned she was busy, she wasn't she was she was at liberty shored up was protected- bang every door bang was she what was she was, knelt ring and all salty water rise rise rise she was busy she was at liberty she was protected and what she said to me was I, sugar I sugar I I I I don't nobody tell I corpulent I I mean, big ol' fat I no I, no how seeing I whose seeing I absolute absolute I not I oh no, not I and over here lies every little I I, simply I me, my, mo, mum stuck in my finger and pulled out an I near I, nearly I dearly and pearly I Because There Will Always Be It wasn't enough to know (so many hands waved at the station) this good boy, this goodbye (we kissed our own fingertips) straining to see all of them (and pressed them to our St. Christophers) the bus pulling away (protect me, and lead me safely to my destiny) their eager, strange faces forgive us our trespasses above the starched camouflage as we forgive those who trespass against us ready for the long ride lead us not, but deliver us and so I lean against the window unfolding our gold star, tearing the paper a little, even though I am being careful not to, my breath fogging the glass until the outline of things vanishes. The Cheese Stands Alone The moon is mine, and all the craters are mine. Ain't no lunical location that don't have my poky fingers all over it. Them lacunae? Mine, sweetheart. And the divoty, dusty crust. We never did talk about divvying, did we? You always was a conniver, sharp to your soles. Well, you can't get none of it 'cause I won't let your easy greasiness oil my snake. Nosirree. Hell, if you'd've only showed me the smallestness of sweetly scented upturned palms, you could've had a potted one to piss in. We could've worked this all out if you hadn't've bumped my jump. Now, I'm not one to get het up over little misgivings, but this here's the tune my squeezebox wheezes: best get your fat turkey in the oven and done in- I'm sure that ol' lift-off will settle your salt. Chips on the rim rough my tongue; harboring every previous lip's tricks. Thick slivers of fingernail heap up on the bus floor as his clippers nick. Trying not to look, but looking and looking- -Want lettuce? I've got lettuce at home. -That there's parsley. I like parsley! -Want some? Lettuce, I mean? Yeah, they don't want to go, y'know. To conserve fuel. So don't go lacquering up your bottle-green rocket yet or you'll have to go back to rock-kicking, slick. When I finally got started I wasn't so nervous. Breakfast on Halloween? If I'm not too drunk, I mean. Pues, nos vemos. Number 4 Limited, limited stops only. Gresham Transit Center. Tengan cuidado cruzan las vias- cuidate, cuidate bien. Cleaver Devil-take-you, quick fuck that lights up as star, star. I wonder how close I'll get before the burn or fiery charm reels me out, drunk fish what prays for hook (bait set)? We stick, numb enough to clutch and lick. Cleave This is the lovely ugliness that pins us. We glisten and shout inside ourselves, suddenly unfolded. We die a little, or else become more alive in our sweat-slick skins. In this curling together we are exposed sweetly, turned insides out with firefly light to glow against each other. We grow bright as tiny stars, our gravity pulling us close and closer still, until no space remains- until, once lax, we tense (with tenderness, though) and begin withdrawal. Distance, this guess of armslengths and handspans wherein we feign no interest...Where we have lain unearthly stars may burn out like fireflies caught in cloudy jars. The Curtain Removed and the Trick Revealed I have no secrets. No secret. You already know all about the goats, the life-rafts, the icy fish (or fishy ice). My astigmatism. Amblyopia. The short and wandering I that keeps some women so distressed, if pressed. I'll confess it; I have wheat-pasted all I know on warehouse walls from here to Kalispell. Here is the curly-haired girl, ah, the done thing. Here is the fire set accidentally and a map of my evidential trail, all push-pinned. Annotated and enervated. These are the winding sheets. I know I told you as much. Such muchness, everything missing, a hollow ring from my mouth's bell, oh gone tooth and all ache aside or astride that nag. This nag, this one, ribs showing and neglected or infected with something you can't put your finger through or it will shiver into glue, fate of all nags, nag of all trades. Me, mistress of none. Of the bread-crumb, or the tick and knit of the thread, all wish and no wait. Fish or cut. Catch it if I throw it or am bucked off, you traitor. I am as advertised, meaning: a thief. Am I? Or thief unthieved, nag's hoof to glue shards together and return the once-looted. No, the absence lingers, and these are the seams. I'm missed or kissed goodbye, but there is no remnant good. Sore and worn from all of this shuck and maddened like a pin-stuck mule. Stubborn? Dear me, I am donkeyed and dank-eared, the opposite of fearless, blinkers fixed so the open gate's swing marks an arc of no leaving. Except that, braying into a speckless sky before my eye catches my own water-trough eye reflected, I remember spring's syringa-smell and waver there- Did Without Like flung river stones, like bruises, like marsh moss. Each tiny siphon that sips and spits with tidal frequency sugars our sand, welling it. I did fall; fell into the swollen feeder creek and was pushed out onto a finger of sand by not no hands, then nail-split. Or spilled like salt from loose-topped shaker, the bad luck of it licked away into someday sweat, hot-railed into marsh arms widening out of not no change, nor spread heaven. Head bare, spare, but not lenient (or charmed by sweet-sanded woodbones or watery bodies). It was a delivery of removes, of not no expectations but of some held holding, of some let go so I- A Difficult Age It's late, and dark out now. Dark in, too. This quiet, this nadir of the swing (and the swing) and its zenith are handed like an heirloomed ransom note from your mom to you to me. Since your divorce, you and I get more and more like her- our family embezzler with burgundy fingernails who's convinced she'll die like the Indians, honey, she stubs out her cigarette in the car's ashtray I'll just wander off into the woods alone she makes a left at the Piggly Wiggly before I let y'all cart me off to a "home." she takes both hands off the steering wheel and makes the rabbit signs and nearly runs over the courtesy clerk who, when he gives her the finger and mouths bitch through the window (so I'm glad she can't see real well), I realize is my best-friend-from-high-school's teenage son because he has a tattoo of a cross on his hand (the one that's flipping us off) and it's all lopsided 'cause he got it in juvie to fit in... but that's when she's on her manic side, not the other one. Later, it's like running full speed downhill into a dark cave full of vampire bats, she says, washing down a lithium pill with scotch, but it's "worth it" and she makes the rabbit signs again, still holding the glass. This last visit to Merciful Sisters is harder than I thought. She calls me by your name, saying from her bed Carol, honey, when are you going to settle down with some nice boy and start a family of your own? Mom, I say, I just don't know if it's "worth it." El Cajon The arroyo is the dust, is the ochre curtaining, the arroyo curtaining, it is the slip of the dust and the cholla cactus, curtaining. The arroyo is a sandstone parting, is a basin, is a dusty basin curtained with sandstone. The parting, the curtaining, the parting, is dust is ochre dust, collapsing into the basin, the basin curtained by sandstone. The parting is the arroyo, the cholla in the arroyo, dust curtaining the cholla. The ochre sandstone is curtained by the wind, the wind curtaining the sandstone, wearing it into dust. The ochre dust in the arroyo is curtaining, wind pulling it back to the sandstone in sheet after sheet. The arroyo sheets out of the basin, curtained by wind. The sheet slips, curtaining, slips from the basin. The arroyo slips. The arroyo slips, curtaining, slips into sheets from the basin. The basin in the sandstone curtains sheets into the arroyo, slipping. The cholla curtain the sandstone, the cholla curtain the basin. The ochre basin, the sandstone basin, parting. The parting of the arroyo is in the basin, cholla curtained with sheet upon sheet of slipping dust. The cholla wear sheets of slipped ochre dust, sandstone wind curtaining the basin-parting arroyo, collapsing. Exocoetidae gilled and flecked cobalt wriggle into rhythm vigor of flash and glint javelin-flex and hurtle trembled arc, wished into became this launch waterbreath before air, wide, fin over fin beginning and slip of end over end all slickly buoyant before final earth-return a near miss of sleeping under the seastars For her cancer, they try every toxin. Even now her gaunt figure still shocks him. She signed her will, and he knows that each tumor still grows. It's her own shadow, daily, she walks in. Held Out Little biscuit, my duckling, lamb whose wooly coat I comb. My own. Nubbin, button, seed of my leaving, my sweet scar. You shine pinkly in the curve of my bowl, meant for my hand to cup. Clean-licked foal, tadpole, you shift and push against my pull a thousand thousand times and still I try to spread my fingers wide enough to let you go I Have Been all these years, a problem of cartilage. Never enough space between condyle and cotyle for the free and easy gait to swing, open. Hands swinging from early to late. The steadiness of tick following blood-gorged tick. Heat and pressure by the epoch until, druped, I am my own stone. Shirk of centerberry this seed of me lignifies. There is no dignity in this, no shovel bent over, all maw-hustle and skin that singes before the slough. New rivulet that's coal crushing down as culm and silt. Unburnable. Refuse. The grit, I tell you, the sheer grit abrading until, dis- jointed, under bright interrogative bulb, subluxation. Pop goes the lovely, which I give up. Anamensis, liturgist my sister of upright humeri, how we flail. In Comp Sci, the ratio is down. From one-third, only one-fourth are found. Is it 'cause the XYs aren't just regular guys, but the type who run women aground? Last Cataract and dacha together push angel to devil. This is not my only trial or sub-urban odyssey. Nor is this where I reveal: below me lies this Atlantic journey. There is something small, and we cannot hold it even with this distant grasp. Not much could make me join you, Could make me leave us. This brook. In providing samovars, the story is my only position. We are alone, in no museum, and I am silent near the women. Through it, unknowing, we feel sameness and sanity. We are only saddened by it, placed wearily in this poem. Like an oily mynah, crow, magpie- gather, gather, gather. An old watch-spring, a bent penknife, shiny blindly gather. Rusted buckle, tin star- badge without enamel, decoder ring, chain link from a swing, a tiny plastic camel. Flattened bone, another smooth stone, nickels warm from sun. Black beak picks picks up six pearl buttons (every one). Black wings beat red dust black feet crow covered with crimson. A tarry flap a caw a slap the scavengers spit jimson. mars poetica Reverie. Seems it always starts that way in sonnets. Someone's always waking up to something. (A)roused subconscious sways and blinks, listens closely to glass breaking. Rise, conveniently catnapping lover, wiping sleepy darkness from half-closed lids- let cupidity bestow such favors as are revealed 'neath sweetly false kisses. And here, delightfully ensnared in lines that skein out-slipped from poet to paper, I likewise awaken. The rhyme is sign or beacon. We consummate our labors dreamily. Errant muse from night's soft stage pressed lips to fingertips laid on the page. Marked I am a hammer with a big, flat head. I am a pickaxe. I am scratching at it, this itch. When you said it would never heal, it didn't. I am a needle trying to sew these nets together, sharp but small. There are no fish. I know exactly what it is I shouldn't be doing. I've done it. I am a high-flyer, baby, so watch out. So catch. You never got me, not the way I wanted you to. Chiseler. I am running my tongue around the gone tooth. I am never speechless. You are still the whitened scar I kiss when I press lip to wrist. Or you are the fish. Want you? The shape of wanting is a ten-penny nail. Missing Snatch a little ketch and hatch a plan or plot of land, and I will curdle it; I will burgle it. Out on the ice I'll chop my pillow, pull the sheets up round my neck, hair a wreck, and I'll drowse. Unhoused. Clasps I've undone, or split or felt: my shift's removed. It is a well to fill with coracles and fingered barnacles My hands, their bitten-back nails small vagrancies. My wait and see, this curvature meant to think in. To sink in. No Sure Thing The magpie is attracted to shiny objects with a stringlike quality, frequently weaving wire and other strips of discarded metal into its nests. I am always looking at my feet, an old habit. I see a scuffed washer the size of a silver dollar or sovereign coin in the crosswalk, scooping it up without stopping. It has lost some of its galvanization, the zinc plate that kept it shiny and rust-free. It has been used, a groove of bare metal showing. Indelicate. Here, the water has blossomed steel into iron oxide, orange coating my prodding fingertip. I could pick up anything, as long as it can be strung. A hole in it. Split lockwashers, knurled rings cut then end bent from the horizontal, still freshly greasy and silvered. Ball chain, most recognizeable as lamp pulls, each sphere neatly flattened into linked almost-discs, the chrome scuffed to reveal brass below. O-rings. Surveyor's tags. I always looked. I always picked up, then kept. Fan belts. Nuts. Of course I would work at a hardware store, later. Could see them before they became rusted or flattened or useless. Magpies, like other corvids, are intelligent birds. They learn quickly and seem to sense danger. They are boisterous and curious, but shy and secretive in the presence of danger. They are gregarious. I had to stop being painfully shy; I knew that. It would hold me back which could mean: keep me safe. Shy did not keep me safe because nothing kept me safe- I learned to like people, to be interested in what interested them. If I listened carefully to what they said, I could uncover the danger early, and fly. Sometimes I am too smart for my own goddamned good. But: I am through my ears. I hear things, really hear them, as in: parts of Odysseus make me cry. As in: I learned to read when I was two, loving the wordsounds. And: I could always tell when my parents were lying to me, saying, we promise to be home by midnight. Or: we love each other. We love our children, seen. Or, heard. If a red light is shone on the magpie's breast while in sight of a mirror, the bird will groom, looking for the source of the injury in the reflection. I'm still such a Good Girl, when I never wanted to be good or a girl, really. Magpies are not swift fliers. But I don't have to be Swift, or Good. Just ready to take cover, or peck at the eyes or the open wounds I lick my rusty fingertip, the flavor a little like blood, and drop the still-warm washer into my pocket, listening to it clink against old pennies. My pencil stub and its metal collar. One in five working adults in this place live in poverty. But in the arms race, we must reign in Iran, mollify Pakistan. Our control must extend into all space. Pass, As Near As Possible it wasn't a bent circulation card, slipped between page and page smudged, my name appearing in pencil beneath many other names and dates due that let me go or a small, cold body tucked inside our moon's orbit asteroid hurtling too near but missing us wasn't my high school graduation present to myself, a four-dollar crewcut followed closely by ditching my boyfriend no this was a fumbling brief near-drop before clutch to chest rebutton, everything recovered and my mother never suspected had no suspicion I passed close enough to touch A Pocket Watch Ticks and there is the cool of the water in the enamel bowl; the flannel for pressing against the split or shot. There is the zinc flaking from behind the oval mirror, its absence poxing the reflected whiskers, untrimmed, the sag in the jawline, the reddened ears, the haircut undertaken with a dulled penknife and borrowed sewing scissors, the dark brown iodine bottle, and purple mercurochrome. All manner of cotton wrappings. Cheap whiskey too, to pour over everything before falling into a catch-basin, then poured in a hole outside, and lit. The sooty oil-lamp, a burnish on the brass wheel where the wick advances so to shear the burnt bit. The twist of the bristle brush in the shaving mug before lather slides fragrantly over chin and throat. There is the faded crazy quilt, the holster and belt which hold the newly blued and freshly oiled Colt hook over one bedpost. The sweat-banded Stetson hangs from the other, swinging. The slickened sound of the razor on the strop covers over the click of key in lock, then stops. Drops of blood from the quickest nick fall first, then pool and bloom in the once-white bowl. There is the embroidered linen pocket-square, tattered and telling, tucked under lathered fingers still pressing against the split, until the sheriff plucks it out to wring then tuck back in his pocket. A P.S. From Veteran's in South Philly After I stood in line at the stadium for a piss and saw Carl Hassen, the pitcher for my stoop ball team in sixth grade, now the bank manager for our closest branch of Bank of America, cough roughly into his grey silk hankie at the sink, I went home three beers later, meeting my wife curled up with a whiskey, drinking in the late summer evening as she sat in the shallow curve worn into our front porch steps, to urge her to a kind of lonely and fierce persistence of hands shuddering against skin, almost conscious of her own cells multiplying 'with abandon' the doctors said as they tried to undo the gleeful freedom in that phrase by talking of surgery and life expectancy, and all the while her reproductive cells continued, continue multiplying into fist-sized absences of children, and afterwards I slipped away to undress both my aged parents who, in their softly declining years, inhabit the cramped space above me and my own family, this physical pressure of their nightly prayers like a firm hand seeing me off to another brick elementary school with tall casement windows whose cranks have long since shattered or stripped under the diligent attention of schoolboys looking to make their first and last escapes and who, thwarted, will turn increasingly cruel. See: Past Tense The barred scar that slithers from wristcuff to palm. Heart line becomes ghost finger. Rows of them, white ex-stitches. My Frankenstein, my albatross necklace caught. A whir that went wrong, hearing it shift from grind to high tight whine of wring and catch. My own, suddenly freed. Freezing. Not in the quick shock of not, but in the dark tar of yes. My lit tunnel, my forked road. We fell, our hard arcs separating. Oh Galileo, you knew we would press the earth at once, in graceful, ungrateful synchronicity. Here is the mark of my hesitance, the absent map of the incident. Here is my own grieftaking. My leavetaking. She folds her collar down pours over heaped sugar on a silver perforated spoon balanced on the lip of a delicate glass. Waits for serpentine milky infusion drinks, slumps, forehead presses into silver beaded pocketbook. Spring Cleaning The rain barrel fills with water after the freeze finally thaws. The fish, twisting up the river like sheets of fiery mica, swim past watery holes, past the rotting shack on the bank, my dad's old fishing shack. He built it right by the water and told me the river snuck through holes in the floor only to freeze solid come winter, icicles and sheets of ice. It made it hard to catch any fish, he said, but you really don't go to the river to fish this late, do you? You go to shack up with Old Man Winter. Stealer of Sheets. Cold as hell by the river, and the water colder yet. Quiet, though. Freeze Tag for Davy Crockett types. He went to these holes alone-didn't tell a soul where to find his holes or the shacks he built. So he and I never did fish together. I see a jay freeze on the bank...he sees me moving in the shack. Over his blue shoulder I see the water rushing. I run a hand over our old sheets, still tucked on the cot. Those floral patterned sheets he swiped from the house, now all fraying holes, faded daisies, and blooms of water stains and mold. I'm sorry about hating to fish. Sorry old brokenback shack. What did he do, freeze out here in the winter, freeze with no one to see? I ball up the sheets and I wish I could take it all back; the shack, the distance, the quiet, the holes that held fish and not fish and fish. I couldn't listen. I was underwater. His shack. My turn to freeze. The water in the rain barrel pulls the sheets below, tugging at the holes. There are no fish. Take It Back Starlings disgorge Hansel's crumbs and no one's lost yet. The waterfall leaps upward towards its source. Hour hands sweep from one to noon and caskets jump from plot back into hearse. Plasma slithers into veins and no one's done yet. The disk harrow disgorges Papa's arm, throws him back up into his seat, then trundles slowly downrow to the barn. Pens inhale inky signatures and no one's willed yet. The choirboys gulp psaltery and hymn out of ornate naves and apses. The colliery's miners are tossed out clean as fresh-wet calves, cords tugging them back into mothers diamonds bloom to anthracite earth seals itself around the plow two cars shrug each other off trees shrink into shrubs shrink into seeds the dead waltz canyons fill and I have done nothing to be forgiven for That night, Little Harry's Ragtime Emporium out on east Bleeker served sixty-odd tipplers. Curly and Sherry had a great vaudeville opener - it turned to burlesque at the drop of a pastie. Then Vonda, who sang like a drunk jilted lover, and cried up on stage just like it was real was followed by chorus girls, (some barely upright after smoking cheap opium in the green room). Next Three-Tooth Charlie, the peg-legged ventriloquist took to the stage and got pelted with ice in a haze of cigar smoke stuck tight to the moth-eaten green velour curtains that hung by the stage. Intermission! And on the floor Harry's Young Ladies of High Class And Distinction totter in on high heels to take down the orders that run up the drink tabs. They dodge 'round Blind Willie who's sweeping the ice and the sawdust, the vomit lost earrings and cufflinks - all go in his dustbin to throw out the back door. Now! The lights dim except for just one greasy spot that swings out over floorboards to stop on the upright. There's Our Harry, his bowler pushed up on his forehead, mops his face with his hanky and leers like Old Nick. He shoves back his bench and starts banging out Joplin - a priest in the back begins crossing himself. Harry looks like the Wild Men shrinking heads in New Guinea flicking ashes and spittle all over the keys. The swells shove their tables and dance stuck together. Behind the bar, Kelly is hiding the glasses... The whole floor shakes and shimmies with knees and with elbows (good thing that payola keeps John Law away). They yell out more numbers and Harry obliges all shiny-eyed, knocking back scotch after scotch like a hurricane passing. It's Harry's big finish - he stops hard, his heel on the keys then he winks... The house lights come up - they eyeball each other - disheveled and panting they gather their furs and their ivory-topped canes, leave the speak like drugged monkeys. They hustle to waiting cabs itchy and spent. Harry slips down the hallway that leads to his office and opens the door with the star painted on. He kisses the eight-by-ten pinned to the back wall and reads the inked message for the millionth time: To Harry- a better friend this girl could never have. Thanks, pal, for everything! -Lilly St. Cyr He takes off his hat, his suit jacket, suspenders, lays down on the davenport and drifts off to sleep... Thermal Inversion It is four a.m. in my Boise basement in the middle of a typical winter, sunlight keeping banker's hours before disappearing into a wooly darkness. Boiseans heat with woodstoves and fireplaces, burn both trash and brush which, smoldering, adds to the sooty haze that's trapped, inverted, as if an old pie plate has settled for good over our depression in these foothills. My old oil furnace coughs with me as we both unbend, our hibernated selves shaking awake into the thick, particulate air. I am dressing in white: pull out white shoes, white socks. A white bra and white underwear, or else they will show underneath my white shirt and pants. My nametag. Under my name, I'm a "part-time temporary kitchen helper," but I'm dressed like a ghost. As I walk across the snowy lawns of the Idaho State Veteran's Home, I get wet up to my knees and am relieved when I see the nursing home's main entrance, see the vets smoking outside, their oxygen tanks lined up neatly in the lobby. This heavy walnut raft floats lazily square as a boxcar through a sea of salty phrases, foolscap lashed to carboned mast and smelling sweetly of cut cedar. Where is the prescient message in its glittering glass mason jar, bobbing up from surrounding inky depths? Where is the diagrammatical map? Lifting a brassy spyglass to a jaundiced eye reveals no such jar but a waxy stub, just below the surface, wickburnt candle in arm's reach, rubbed on recalcitrant walnut that unsticks the stuck, reluctant as mail order brides. At last (O capstan, my capstan) the vessel may be steered, nudged gently through some slyly articulate isthmus. Whittled Once a towering walnut tree, now split into slabs sawn into sticks drilled and nailed screwed and glued and embalmed in yellowing varnish. Dragged over rivers and down alleys. Bouncing in the backs of pickup trucks or moving vans. Money changing hands and another basement or study or den. Kids slaving over fractions. Your college entrance exams. The monthly bill-paying. Where Max was conceived (in one drunken festive episode). I was sitting here, doodling on a notepad I had taken from the top drawer, on the phone with my mom, when she told me Dad shot himself up at our cabin out there in the trees. Later I was glad you hadn't let me turn this into a million million splinters. Wholly i. the pedal cars, the jars of fireflies our circle of tricycles, handlebar bell jingle a tingle under the pier, kisses my first pair of glasses homecoming then one thing, then something, then nothing ii. zero, my hero your open mouth nothing's tunnel naughty not-number the opposite of everything encompassing the longest nighty-night the Oh in slumbered number's shore you are the fastest passage the true to heaven's false iii. rue, phlox scurvy & pox will my ashes burn in rosie's ring? tartar rose that tears at clothes is sweet william one of those what creeps? four o'clocks mean blood's got oxes gloves have foxes surely monks have hoods when tucked in boxes- iv. How many ways to say "couldn't"? Were rugs rolled up? Were shirtsleeves? Did any sign or light leak out into the empty alleyway? The things you'd forgotten already wrapped in newspaper and tightly boxed. Another leaving in morning's smallest hours, the motor running running ran so fast I could never catch up. v. They have slipped outside out up from the underside running first, the bellycrawling- how they shake. Held no more: I have the superstar I have the eastern sparrow I have the wallet full of wrinkled dollar bills. You have a high fine fistful of the newly fallen yellowed circus posters, old vaudevillian spitcurls twirled with let fly vi. Enfascinate, unfasten. Let the tired miners hold and fold them, drilled and brittle and cleft or left for dead, that airless vestibular pause and dependent clause that dangles, unmodified. Diggers try to reach them, each one a churlish (but eager) squirrel in search of some golden cache of seeds, or old 45s of the Bell Sisters, swell singers of dirged harmonical jazz, suitable for the whole family. Listen, those moles down there, blind but not eyeless- my brassed spyglass shows they are losing ground; coal a shoal only so far, & their arms cannot pull themselves from harm's earthy, charmed (and warmed) embrace vii. at last. In the end, dead- ended. Finally final, this sheared bit. My nothing left said. Shiftless and vain, no heroic unfolding of something into not-nothing but something else, which, when added to anything (else) won't change anything so what I want to know is why bother?