My absence was God:

His absence grows in me.

If I was not in play, how

Would that go for me?

I understand, Maggie—I, too, expected

Barnabas would break into my bedroom

in the middle of the night. My jugular

was yours in close-up, moist bite marks

Did you know turtles can store dried sperm for five years before using it to fertilize an egg?

Guess what I’ve been doing for more years than that.

Translated from Chinese by Ye Chun, Melissa Tuckey, and Fiona Sze-Lorrain

No one knows, whose ashes

float in the air

entering our eyes,

inhaled as dust into our nostrils and mouths.

The stop-watched tick. The seconds enough

to reckon, to weigh. The pill a pillow pressed to –

Just a swine flu of the mind, just a little touch, I

confess to a waiting room of lips masked clean shut.

Show me the fireball of desire, the scarlet carpet of untamed horses,

the roar of stone lions. Present the evidence! he says,

troubled by

news reports

about what Obama’s

candidacy means,

his sleight

A) Housewife-and-I-want-for-nothing-but-still-want-more white B) Yeehaw-I’m-never-leaving-my-hometown-let’s-BBQ white C) Alpha-male-I-never-ask-for-directions-so-now-I’m-lost white

The tickets in your breast pocket rest on

a pair of tickets and they’ve been punched

already. There is no train. That’s your flickering smile

The ghost wants to walk through

your bedroom wall. When do you sleep?

The ghost wants to know. It wants to turn

the faucet on for your morning shower.

you are terrified

we are also terrified, terrific

there, the smell of wildfires

there, the smell of well water

In all its humming but this time the cringe, the invention

of forethought of portent—the uncomfortable discipline necessary

to bolster prediction but look up—there are cities in small rooms

of houses, there’s travel for pleasure or pleasantly; this all boils

down then to bargaining—once after

A storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Walter Benjamin on Angelus Novus

Once a year, for a minute, I let myself

go back, to the summer rental, the stairs

down into the earth, I let myself descend them

and turn, and pass the washing machine, and go

Before first light, there was something on the wall

like a pane — a presence, oblique, as if,

outside, there was a stone standing on the air,

exuding light. The full moon,

A week later, when it takes me only

a couple of minutes to get out of bed,

when I can sit up in the living room

with my partner, and watch the Knicks win,