the intricate work of live

oak trees in sunlight, one

hard-edged shade after another,

Wednesday morning—it’s

Miles again, this time

in Texas, the Gulf clouds

for Garin and Shadla

I dreamed I saw

Ray Brown last night,

the fingers of his right

it is two a.m. mewling

son cribbed next to mama

three older brothers

Well, here it is, the Oscar race has started

and there isn’t a single movie

I’m dying to see.

For years now, we’ve been crisscrossing

this same largesse of valley.

It has provided for us, plenty. You’ve been

my homoerotic sidekick, Bryan.

Excuse me. Ryan. There. You see?

There was a better couch

in his convertible couch. He revealed it

the day a fly kept flying into my face.

It was trying to commit suicide, he explained.

The better couch had a better couch

The moon gets a glass of milk

before sleep. A PBJ

for the woods I own according to the state

but not the Navajo. When these offerings

are gone in the morning, ants

Lovers who say “you are everything to me”
aren’t thinking puss electroshock you are
caravan puss electroshock deaf dog
contrail the orange November leaves
of pear trees instant butterscotch

The Archaeology of Archangels

This is the first in a series of stanzas that

Ordinarily would be sleeping if we (the

Archangels) hadn’t woken up in swimsuits.

A pad is something you can write in, as in sheets of paper bound together. It is also what you bleed on when you first start. When I grew older, a pad was someone’s house. My college roommate and I had, according to many persons who traipsed in and out of our campus apartment during our senior year, a cool pad, a “budget” pad.

i.

It rides high in its saddle.

It shifts and plummets—swoops—drifts.

It is still: stiller than a held breath, stiller than water frozen in the birdbath, stiller than the color white.

It is wing-shaped, solemn, more silent than midnight.

I met Marcus one night when I was out with my supervisor at the biker bar on the east side of town. The bar had one fluorescent stick for light and was filled with men whose tattoos looked homemade. After midnight, this was the only place open in town, and I saw the same faces in there night after night, but I hadn’t noticed Marcus before.

Little Village—La Villita, as it’s also known—is on Chicago’s southwest side, a cluster of bungalows with trimmed lawns and the occasional yearlong crèche or Virgin of Guadalupe standing just off the stoop. It’s south of the BNSF railroad tracks, north of the Chicago River, and just east of the westernmost city limits.

Don’t look back, Satchel Paige is supposed to have said, someone may be gaining on you. Don’t look back, Orpheus was advised, you may find your earlier poems better than the ones you will write tomorrow. Lot’s wife looked back at Sodom and was so shaken by the sight of the Red Sea swallowing the city that she became salt.

The Cast

Johnny — a forty-five-year-old man

Janice — a forty-five-year-old woman; Johnny’s wife

Valerie Dooble — in her thirties, an officer of the Maine State Police

A hand

Setting: The interior two service bays in the rear of an old gas station located near an off-ramp of Interstate 95 in northern Maine.

The Tilted Building

As everyone knows, the streets of New York are hollow; their paving is the shell of a dark egg. When you walk along them, you hear your steps echo in the city’s smoky inner cavity, where fires that eat up the evidence of unsolved crimes are kept burning by workers who’ve grown allergic to sunlight and slightly translucent over the years.

Late one Saturday afternoon, a muffled blast of thunder shook Helene’s Beauty Nook. It rattled my young head, which was soon to be layered with some caustic potion, as well as the windowpanes frosted by the clear bleeding sweetness of the November rain. Our lights winked and glowed brighter as darkness consumed the blurry world outside the crowded little storefront salon owned by my grown-up cousin Claude.

THE RAT STORY

There was a story he liked to tell about a rat who wandered into a Japanese teriyaki fast-food restaurant. This was no mouse, he’d say. This was—and here he’d pause to measure a length with his hands—as big as a newborn: a giant Norwegian rat.

Around dusk, Dad and I were crossing the Kansas plains in his borrowed 1953 Pontiac, windows open, shirts flapping, on our way to check out a ghost town high in the Colorado mountains where he said the sun shone 320 days of the year.

Dad tapped his fingers on the steering wheel, loudly singing a sailor ditty with words like “titty” and “bum” that made me laugh.