wonder if she ever wanted
them to speak back, looked into
their wide wonderful eyes and
whispered, Name me, name me.
ANCESTORS
I’ve come here from the rocks, the bone-like chert,
obsidian, lava rock. I’ve come here from the trees—
chestnut, bay laurel, toyon, acacia, redwood, cedar,
one thousand oaks
that bend with moss and old-man’s beard.
I was born on a green couch on Carriger Road between
the vineyards and the horse pasture.
I don’t remember what I first saw, the brick of light
that unhinged me from the beginning. I don’t remember
my brother’s face, my mother, my father.
Later, I remember leaves, through car windows,
through bedroom windows, through the classroom window,
the way they shaded and patterned the ground, all that
power from roots. Imagine you must survive
without running? I’ve come from the lacing patterns of leaves,
I do not know where else I belong.
HOW MOST OF THE DREAMS GO
First, it’s a fawn dog, and then
it’s a baby. I’m helping him
to swim in a thermal pool,
the water is black as coffee,
the cement edges are steep
so to sink would be easy
and final. I ask the dog
(that is also the child),
Is it okay that I want
you to be my best friend?
And the child nods.
(And the dog nods.)
Sometimes, he drowns.
Sometimes, we drown together.
THE LEASH
After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear,
the frantic automatic weapons unleashed,
the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands,
that brute sky opening in a slate-metal maw
that swallows only the unsayable in each of us, what’s
left? Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned
orange and acidic by a coal mine. How can
you not fear humanity, want to lick the creek
bottom dry, to suck the deadly water up into
your own lungs, like venom? Reader, I want to
say: Don’t die. Even when silvery fish after fish
comes back belly up, and the country plummets
into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still
something singing? The truth is: I don’t know.
But sometimes I swear I hear it, the wound closing
like a rusted-over garage door, and I can still move
my living limbs into the world without too much
pain, can still marvel at how the dog runs straight
toward the pickup trucks breaknecking down
the road, because she thinks she loves them,
because she’s sure, without a doubt, that the loud
roaring things will love her back, her soft small self
alive with desire to share her goddamn enthusiasm,
until I yank the leash back to save her because
I want her to survive forever. Don’t die, I say,
and we decide to walk for a bit longer, starlings
high and fevered above us, winter coming to lay
her cold corpse down upon this little plot of earth.
Perhaps we are always hurtling our bodies toward
the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love
from the speeding passage of time, and so maybe,
like the dog obedient at my heels, we can walk together
peacefully, at least until the next truck comes.
ALMOST FORTY
The birds were being so bizarre today,
we stood static and listened to them insane
in their winter shock of sweet gum and ash.
We swallow what we won’t say: Maybe
it’s a warning. Maybe they’re screaming
for us to take cover. Inside, your father
seems angry, and the soup’s grown cold
on the stove. I’ve never been someone
to wish for too much, but now I say,
I want to live a long time. You look up
from your work and nod. Yes, but
in good health. We turn up the stove
again and eat what we’ve made together,
each
