[ white scraps like beacons ]

Even as we boarded the plane that night, humid summer air condensed in the seams of the aircraft’s wings, collected, and dripped onto the tarmac: a scorched field of parallel lines afloat on the surrounding marshland.

The dog must have run for miles.

Messenger from nowhere.

Fireworks lit up the harbor.

Red linen wings: orange, long, draping the back of shoulders like a raincoat. It is not the dust, not human ashes in vessels heavy with gray teeth and a chip of bone. Bring out the pencils and remake a self.

I

The paperboy brought his baby

brother to watch the concrete liquid

slurry out the truck chute into a wellbore.

Home Depot

your trees are beautiful

in this weak light

spring is so new

it is about to disappear

completely for some

Pronounced “konjing” in chocolate manufacturing.

Warm chocolate blends

in a giant vat—a conche,

large paddles slowly turning.

In Trinidad limber women

danced a path of cocoa beans,

do do petit cacao o

hot sun, red-dust. Bare feet

shook loose debris, turned

I did not run off, but I walked off, believing that to be all right.

A comet was seen over north Florida and southern parts of Georgia

yesterday, reported by a mother-daughter pair driving west in a blue wagon.

“Eyes piercing the upper air like one in a dream”

Dream of an arrow & the palpable world it will make here. “Even that suffering

* * *

I showed you in my dance, let it be called a mystery”

He wasn’t with the police, just an ordinary man, climbing down through

The frame for a large poster reproduction

we stowed in the car, then entered the pub, the waitress

asking about your Reiki book, she too a

practitioner. The journalistic poem

In the old western I’ve just been watching,

at the end when the man has been shot twice

in the back and he’s in the ditch twitching,

we’re watching the sun go down in the distance

1

yes it is early tuesday

and the before dawn darkness

and we are on pilgrimage

world war two vets for washington

march, too, this year was nervy, making all

it could of winter’s costume, flaunting snow

and sleet, slapping our stiffening cheeks cold

and red, wearing white well past when it’s called

for, leaving the tree limbs smooth, the buds stalled

this miracle begins in the middle

lane: night, fallen: rain, snow, sleet, hail, falling

still: a loose crew of commuters crawling

home on the turnpike. now, here’s the riddle:

listen: the people caught near love

canal, in the nevada desert, around

the ukraine city pripyat can tell you

the sounds that precede catastrophe,

—New York Times, August 7, 2010

And one thinks, of course, of the evolution

of whales, how they left the sea by dint

of drift and flow, lived on land for tens

of millions of years, then slipped back

My mother nursed me and carried me to the road. She walked in one direction, then the other, taking in the damage from the previous night.

A woman on a bicycle stopped to tickle my stomach. It was bad enough she did that without my leave, but then she turned to my mother and said, “Thank God she is too young to understand.”

The first thing Sanchez Miller did on his eighteenth birthday was change his name to Constantine. He didn’t want the things his parents had wanted. He kept the Miller, though.

People still swim in the river, but it’s so polluted that when they get out and sit on a towel, their butts leave a grease print. Kids used to skinny-dip in it and have picnics on the banks when my mom was a girl, but now it smells like sewer water and basically, that’s what the river is.