When they ask you if you’d hurt yourself or someone else

You say no. It’s what you say.

So when I went out from the clinic to kill myself

I drove very carefully.

Wet sage from thunderstorms.

Hard light crying off the moon.

Almost makes you want to stay here

Until you get to thinking.

There were horses near the highway

Outside of Toas

And I always liked horses

So I was holding

This dun cheek in my tar covered hand

And then I couldn’t see too well

So I sat down against a fence post.

The road home was still all wet

Along the grass line

And the greenness was

As suffocating lovely

As tallness or speaking just inches

From her ear.

There were dogs and coyotes arguing

And skunk musk a long way off.

My god, the moon crying so hard.

I drank two more so I could sleep

And took off my boots

Thinking of the tall, pretty one

I never kissed,

And I tell you that was the end of it.

Like everyone else does,

you said, you go around bumping into people

until one of them sticks to you.

I’ve only been bumping into you, she said.

You were leaving the bathroom shirtless.

She was looking for a toothbrush.

Later that night

you made curled prints in the carpet.

A swath of the weave

washed in one direction then the other.

You dreamt of decay, small red worms

twisting on the carpet next to the bed.

You dreamt of manatees flensed,

nude and still moving,

cowboys hieing them through water.

When you woke to watch her chest rise and fall,

you thought of rising or falling as something else.

You remembered the taut skin over her ribs

and the smoke taste her mouth gave you.

Your shoulder thumped back

and darkened from the doorjamb

at the foot of the stairs as you noticed

yourself leaving.

The daphne had just blossomed

under the dogwood and the stars

and the shapes too big to be stars.

You had to unweave your way

loose from her rising chest.

even as the slow curls

of smoke and legs and arms

still stuck to yours.

On her southbound bus line,

the girl witnessed a crocus sprouting

from an old woman’s lap.

The woman’s face was a flat gray plate

tired of being gray.

Tired of life on the head of this woman

who was tired of her life.

But it had no choice.

A boy slept next to the girl some nights

to hoard the sweetness that even cats

climbed morning covers

to gather from her cheeks.

Lines grew from the corners of her eyes

as he wondered how to love her.

He ought to have known better.

Each morning, lying next to her,

he would feel the cold growth

in his chest,

wish for death, roll over—

but then she would wake up

and look at him

as though she would

always have enough in her small cheeks

for everyone.

It was not springtime,

but the crocuses came up early,

And the lines grew more beautiful

on the girl’s face

as the boy stole as much

sweetness as he could.

She should have known better.

In my dream I saw a stiff creased mountain

And grass plains spreading out around it—

Small tomatoes popping their skin

In beef and pork broth and red wine.

You, my wild haired girl crawling

Over horse heads to ride bareback—

Your stark wildness sprouting like feathers,

Your running patterned

As oak, sequoia, madrone.

Charley the Catahoula churning circles

Through the shadowed grass lit only by stars—

Horses cropping that grass, one sorrel, one blood bay,

Peering in windows, sniffing brace posts.

My own blood fearful of the ever widening gaze

That must briefly forfeit the earth to the shape of a promise

Too full not to burst.

Damn those eyes.

I love you so much already.

The aluminum roof sighed

Under a moon seeming to shake

From side to side

Like the great god flinching.

Feathers bloomed around the yard

As though each hen had blown apart

And left its own story about it.

Coyote bellies swayed

Swollen along the sand trails

As clouds roiled over fleshy mountains

Still the warm and seeming to breathe.

At sunrise, the morning after the party,

I hear our white rhinoceros

Stumbling through the rosemary bed.

Hoary lawn. Light pissing in

Over the eastern rooftops.

From my bed on the second floor,

I hear the familiar fizz of the poachers’ tires.

Same Toyota, tightening its circles.

There’s a square of green lawn

In my backyard the size of two bodies.

It’s the only patch I still water.

Good for lying back to look up at the overcast sky

Lit white by the city.

Our rhinoceros sniffs in the low grass

For some old smoldering

Gone cold a long time now.

His dreams rush over the arctic surfaces

Behind the bones of his skull, behind his eyes.

He hardly fits in my front yard.

You can’t call it cruelty

Because he chooses to stay.

Still, I know he’s just too lonely to go.

When he was smaller,

He’d stomp at the feet of smokers

Over for a beer or barbeque.

Now he can’t be allowed near the guests.

He’s drawn masochistically to fires.

He must weigh five thousand pounds.

The moment I saw him

I knew he wouldn’t last in the city.

But he stayed—below my kitchen window,

Thumping heavily through the garden,

Observing all the bits of eyes and skin.

He was watching us that night

Through the tangle of chain link

And butternut squash vines

When you kissed the white underbelly of my right forearm.

He knows about grazing,

About taking what comes, and how to go on living

Despite the value of his death.

I know about the tangled shape your hair takes

After all the pins and clips come out.

I know that you cry for your husband sometimes.

In the evenings, when I know it’s worst for him,

I take his face in my hands—

Buttock-sized jowls, bottle-sized olfactory passages full of my scent,

Hair sprouting from his ears as they flick

And listen in different directions.

It’s a wonder he keeps all the sounds

Straight in his head,

Their sources and meanings.

My cheek touches his horns

And he knows that I love him,

But it only makes him sadder—

That he can’t make me any happier,

Or any less lonely,

That I can do neither for him.

I know that you plan to leave this city,

And it may not matter whether or not I water

That square of lawn. But I remember

The white gasp of your neck

The first time I heard my fingers touching it,

Our rhinoceros watching us through the fence

As buds turned sharp and burst.

Forgive me.

I wasn’t really listening.

It’s just her chin

And mouth poking stoic

From under the pillow

At first light.

What she dreams is

Still hidden.

Primate infants suckling,

Wide spiders cover the ceiling,

Ants swarming in orgies over water,

The light we all secretly know

Is not there.

Morning bucked and seared

And the clouds gloved over

So we took the dogs across the river

To the dry creek bed:

One hound, one ferret-like, one shaped

And sorrow-eyed as a seal.

Stream crossed

Scrabbling up the wash

Wet boots and all

Twisting the ticks out of the soft

Of the dogs’ legs

We found it.

The heavy malamute at the cottage

Didn’t know any better.

The Catahoula does and does.

He can smell all the savage

Hope of the world.

Soft stone or hard.

Squalid disfigured tangle.

He knows better. 

There is more underneath.

Thick tackle of sagebrush;

Singing prattle of water through rocks.

Soda dam.

Everything streaming from the girl’s little heart

Lives out here.

At first I couldn’t see it

Though it swaddled me like fog.

The girl and the dogs found it.

I just followed them in.

It didn’t matter that he was still speaking.

His cheeks puffed and sank.

He could have spat or thrown a bottle,

rent a novella into a flurry of leaves.

He could have left,

having already said everything.

But he didn’t. He stayed incumbent

on the stoop, looking down the path

at the leftmost of the two pits near the garden gate

where the rosebushes had been. He remembered

the loppers you used to reduce

the foliage to two thorny crowns,

the way the handle of the shovel

had split then splintered

as you pried loose the tangle

of roots from the soil.

He took off your ring.

You’re choosing him over me, he said.

Blood-colored leaves swarmed with the wind.

Your sinking chin bloomed white. You looked at him.

You noticed your cigarette

burning the soft of your finger.

You thought of crying,

showing him the wound,

then decided against it,

although your lips had already begun to swell—

your own persistent allergy to salt or sadness.

The mist pinched minutely at your face.

You moved your good left hand out to touch him.

He was holding his left hand in his right.

Blood moved out, away from his heart.

He didn’t say anything.

It’s early spring.

There’s cold sunlight

knifing through the trees.

I’ve been sawing off

the lower limbs of rhododendrons

all morning and my chest aches.

The firs seem weepy.

You know, little brother,

next morning you could do anything.

You could practice diving

like Johnny does.

You could move to India.

Feed house sparrows every morning

until they wait for you.

You could do anything, Joseph,

and I’d be so proud of you.

But one day you might wake up

feeling so tired

that you do nothing.

If you decide to do nothing,

how could I keep you

from the frowzy hell I’ve lived in too?

To think, it might be fall already.

The house sparrows might be watching,

the lower limbs might be growing back,

and you might feel

the ache of cold sunlight

knifing through the trees

at just the wrong moment.

It’s still spring now, brother.

Be careful when our mother feels weepy,

and the sunlight isn’t knifing,

and when you are moving through the branches

the sly way you do, sweet Joseph,

because you’re so much more graceful

than I am, and you’ll never have

to saw the branches off.

1.

It was afternoon near a lake.

You were there, of course.

I think I need a little space, I said,

and that we had nothing else to say to one another but goodbye,

good luck, and, would you please consume me

now, please, before the water takes me?

The failing light was the color of a young pine fire.

The air coming up from the water smelled of new cantaloupe.

I thought I saw a very small walrus

on an ice block in the distance.

The grass we were lying on sloped toward the lake.

The air coming down the slope smelled of rotting maple leaves.

I had read in the newspaper that

the congressman wears stick pin collars.

He wears French cuffs. The congressman said,

“We’re going to give them the devil.”

2.

—You have made me impossibly happy,

you said to me.

You failed to look me in the eye.

—You know the eighteen parts of my clitoral network

and their functions, you said.

You were not looking at me,

but at the temporary voting booth

that you, too, perceived as a very small walrus

atop an ice block—or a snow cone stand.

—You gave me books of poetry and I read them, you said.

You had given me books, too, which I placed in my pile.

—You make my face feel hot and a little sweaty, you said.

You were surprised that ice was still purveyed in block form,

and even as you re-described the form and function

of your clitoris’s eighteen (sometimes nineteen) parts,

I could see disappointment streak your irises

upon recognizing that the temporary voting booth

was not a walrus.

—You should go for some red popsicles, you said.

3.

The congressman is quite good, off-the-cuff.

He looks a body in the eye.

I had been following closely the media coverage.

I said to the congressman:

The oftener I think of dying,

the fewer mean things I say to people.

4.

The rain began and fell like shaved ice.

Still, there were boys running shirtless.

We tried together to think of the word

for fresh rain smell on mixed surfaces.

We made a list of the current surfaces:

Dead, straw colored grass;

Live blue fescue grass, (bluish);

Your stomach, (soft, white,

hard to keep from blowing on);

The water of the flashing and bursting lake;

The burbling water of the fountain near the lake;

(You dropped three olives—

one nicoise, one oil-cured, one royal—

into the short glass of potato vodka I was holding.

I thanked you with one of my feet for

leading me to an understanding

of the three party system.

I began for the first time to really drink

the short glass of potato vodka I was holding.)

Potato vodka and olives;

Agapanthus leaves (someone had cut the flowers);

The backs and shoulders of the boys running shirtless;

Cotinus leaves and their wispy plumes (I could smell smoke.)

(My chest and face felt warm

from the potato vodka and I tried to kiss you.

You turned your left temple into mine

and held it there, preventing full facial contact,

until I gave up.)

5.

A pack of cigarettes made from a kind of tobacco

used to make cigars;

Vitis labrusca leaves;

Grapes, not quite ready, too tart,

may have actually been currants;

The umbrella mounted over the temporary voting booth;

Shore pine needles and limbs;

(We tried holding hands.

The positions of our bodies made it feel overly formal,

like shaking hands.)

The top of my right hand;

The cuticles and nails of your right hand;

Potato leaves and dangling purple flowers.

Picnic tables the color of driftwood,

fried chicken grease worked into the grain;

ducks.

(I wanted to start over.)

6.

The congressman winked at me.

7.

The ducks began to make love violently.

I began to hope that one of the boys jogging shirtless

would make an attempt on my life so that you could save me

and I would belong to you always.

Sex is such a tired ending for me, I thought.

Death is worse, I thought.

There were ducks in the fountain near the lake.

I remember that. I said to the congressman:

When I’m dead I’ll have plenty of space.