and you don’t want / your daughter learning
to shoot a rifle / with the other kids
who aim at a silhouette / of someone’s son
Little tillers. Ploughs of night-
writhe and gizzard. Eyeless, they grind
To hang from birth
In a window of an old shop
she had to be open
twenty-four/seven
How you imagine him is how you enter things.
He is kneeling. Or he is weeping. Or he is turning
all monikered & mouthfed
you are so infinitely betty
Perhaps it was a trade, a bargain not fully realized,
like the arrowhead accepted by the flesh.
The fastest way to circumnavigate is to fold
the quiet black between stars.
To then put on one’s coat and to walk out the door, alive.
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From Crossing Bedford Avenue
Hate
is the only way to comprehend some things
Words travel through pitch-dark centuries
to touch my recalcitrant body.
Weather several ice age age.
Hunt them ibex. Fish them bream.
Pencil hiss hour. // Hour of crinkled paper.
I thought of what closely followed,
what had left me at its door.
My language is a Bedouin thief, /
delighting in foreign sands;
how to liberate (my skull) the devil
would be king (deposed)
Fig. 28: A grey ball of roads
The imagination is the only thing worth a damn.
I pass my goggle-eyed father on the streets.
A shore of eyebrows, you said,
or eyebrow shore.
As we talk we hold the dark—
me curled on this side