Sing until throat and lung rebel,

hum the skreaky wheeze of rusty hinge,

of grandma’s unlatched, six-over-six,

ill-fit window sash yowling in night winds.

Keep the clashing melody, groove

against the steel bars, the reverb

of the clanging door of fear, razz until

it dances, jigs to your chosen overtone,

shoos dissonance over sill, hearth and jamb;

up the chimney, down the crapper,

out the cat-door’s flapping hatch.

On the sixth appointment (your third) I rat-

tled off the plot of Washington Square,

gleaned from all five of seven cd’s decked

in our car in the grim subterranean lot

down there, your hand on my knee (your

reach strained—I don’t know why

we didn’t simply scoot you close), down-

town sun lightening lab-yellow blinds

and when I couldn’t look at you I spoke

to the baby squatting naked in a white

porcelain bowl on the wall, all squidge

and a stupid smile and hair sparse

as an old man’s (when we were shown

in, we laughed at the sight of him)

and when I couldn’t look at the baby

I spoke to the replica of certain a-

natomy (purple plastic for the womb,

barn-door-red for the cervix, pink

for It, etc.), the piece you joked

lonely bachelors might like to display

in their lonely living rooms and when I spoke

to you again the sun had your eyes,

hoarding their godly-green

and the room spun

and I sat back and you rose

as the doctor entered

in high platform sandals,

pleasant skirt beneath

the pale coat and the two

of you shared a small laugh before

she whipped open her magic

chart, divined the unseen,

lifted my new blouse,

squirted on the goop,

pressed the thing home

and you heard (for the first time)

the tiny, persistent galloping.

And nobody laughed

then except for me, because I’d for-

gotten (even after all these fucking visits):

miracles breathe.

The memory

of a moment untethered—

in scorched yellow grasses

between tracks, amongst weeds.

No one could see us there,

passing the bottle—

the kid whose mother was a preacher,

another guy I didn’t know from school.

It was July, and my forearms

stuck to my knees.

Steps away from the church

where I sat between my parents

under whirring fans each Sunday,

above the old train station,

where my grandmother, boarding the train,

met my grandfather, who studied

at the police academy next door.

My lips touched the same wet spot

as the boys’ lips, I tasted the tastes of them.

Smells of all of us on the bottle: sweat, skin,

cigarettes stale, and the sweet taste

of the one just lit.

The smooth mouth of the bottle warm.

There was the sound of amber liquid

splashing softly, slowly, as we passed the bottle,

and the trees that smell like semen

were in full flower,

as they are that time in summer,

and down the embankment, a pair of shorts

had tumbled from a paper sack.

A rusty knife blade stuck in the soil.

And every so often, a warm breeze came

as a car drove under the bridge.

We sat like that, the three of us,

until we finished the bottle,

and I looked up at the trees,

at their still leaves,

and wondered

what might happen

if I came here

again.

Some physicists say death frees our bodily atoms

to fathom new space—uncharted places—to

rearrange themselves into new forms of matter

that scatter and dance into the cosmos, the body

not God’s design—His creations eternal.

The physical does not exist, they say. Only

the mind is real. When the body, ego, illusions

take leave, we live forever.

The great horned owl that flew into my plane

three weeks before my death knew my name—

I was just thirty-four: mother of two;

respiratory therapist; animal lover.

From the Navajo Bitter Water Clan

(half Navajo, half San Carlos Apache),

I knew how to converse with sheep and horses,

roosters and people in pain. I went back

to my childhood haunts.

They say women from my clan are headstrong.

I was bent on flying—Mama said I was wrong

to go against my father’s wishes. But now he says

I couldn’t have died in a better spot: the plane

went down among four feet of snow,

ponderosa pines, and those intermediaries

of the deities who live on Flagstaff’s peaks.

Still in their winter sleep, they had not yet left

for the Bear Dance ceremonies marking

February’s false spring.

He prays every day now for such a perfect death

as he imagines me communing with Crow Mother,

singing with Red Beard, dancing with Humming Bird

and Road Runner. Father, you dance too,

I urge him. Dance to the music of the living

and the dead, and you will find your way home,

my Lakota friend once said.

This morning I mourned you as I have not done

these few days weeks months this dawn

this morning with raindrops bending the light

the birds burnt black against the sky

that roost on the cold wires

swinging silent from bare pole

to bare pole

glitter-eyed dreams feathered dreams

perched on the sharp edge of daylight

ready to betray

or to be betrayed;

I kicked the night off its hinges

the sound of my footsteps in the morning

a Morse code self-portrait: iambic "I am"s:

--a man a man his mouth a gash his head

full of ash he wants he wants he wants he wants

to hold the dead past in his hands to see

to hear to touch to smell to taste he wants

the universe in which at precisely

the right moment with precisely the right

intonation he asked her to stay and she did;

but between dark building and dark building now

real time unfolds with the sunrise now

and all around New York now

covers are folded back and a mouth now

opens and another mouth now closes another

with itself now oh now now eight million yawns

five hundred thousand kisses two million curses

and the daily flood of words begins anew

now;

and on the corner of 22nd and 7th a manhole cover trembles

releasing steam and in the Village a woman trembles

awake and reaches for her lover now a needle trembles

home in a vein in an arm in a room on Prince Street now

and in Brooklyn the hipsters are stumbling home bleary now

and fish stalls open on Canal Street now

and slow lightning trembles in cold

shadowless rooms deep under Wall Street

weaving now the world through circuit boards weaving

and unraveling

on,

off,

on on off,

on again again again;

and all of this I want to hold inside me

in my lungs in my blood

I want to breathe it

in

            in

                         in

I want to hold our city in that breath

and live inside it.

—But the city that you left is always leaving.

Well, I have had practice, throwing breath away;

I have measured my time with cigarettes

and I burn twenty five hours a day;

but it seems to me that no matter how long

I stay awake it’s never enough, it’s not quite

not nearly enough to make friends with the night

though I have walked these streets from dawn to dusk

to dawn through turn and turn and turn;

I have begun to dream of crumbling walls;

of a word to carry through cracks in stone

of a sound to stir brick dust in red clouds.

a great shout punctuated by death

at both beginning and end,

and it seems to me that it is a gift

that you have given me

by taking the gift of you away;

—it seems to me that it is what I’ve always wanted.

Often she speaks of a mysterious They.

“When are They coming?” Where are They?” Do They all

do that, wear that, eat that?” “Must we pay Them?”

Then she forgets everything in a matter of minutes: rooms,

news, rules of a favorite card game. And she forgets

she forgets. Objects, once familiar, disappear. They surface again

in surprising places: scotch tape in the medicine cabinet, jewelry

under the sink, cash in the refrigerator drawer. Still, she wants

to help me in the kitchen. Sets the table, folded wax paper

and sheets of aluminum foil for napkins. She pours red wine

into mugs. But when we sit down and sip, she complains

“the coffee is cold.” Apple juice with ice is scotch on the rocks.

She scoops garlic salt for instant ice-tea, sneaks chocolate

pudding for breakfast, tries to glue the broken statue

with cold cream. On TV she watches cartoons

or the Spanish soaps. Her hair, which she always

wore in a neat French knot, is now loose, sparse,

over her shoulders. Her eyes grow small and dim

in a thinning face, although, some vanity is there, intact.

She applies mascara to her eyebrows, powders wrinkles flat,

blushes her nose, then adds accessories, oddly loops a scarf

in a buttonhole, clutches an evening bag to her bathrobe.

Old friends no longer call. Her daughters have her sisters’ names.

Each night she strings different words into a chain

and repeats them 150 times. Sometimes there’s a question

she means to ask but she can’t find a sentence. Sparks

and sputters instead. She wants to go home when

she is home. And when she’s angry with me,

my mother hisses I hope you live this long.