[11]

It’s napalm, rigor mortis.  You chop the onion to live.  Salud es vida: a little flame for a second filmed black & white / spend a littletime with me away from doctrination / radiation meters for children / I’malways thinking about that / the hills yellow-rubbed as dawn we can’t see theother side of or beyond with the force of a cattle prod leading to crime.  Somebody should’ve told me this when Iwas fourteen / dare I run through the thicket barely visible in the growingdark looking for the cat, Thomas Jefferson inconsolable, this solid thinkingbetween a gun & a bird at the top of my fear list.  I am not here for her / I am unforgivingthe hardness of your body, what awaited resistance / body, the simplest thingtoting about makes limp. 

What will I wear? I could have told you long ago this would happen / these nights remindyou of your youth, barefooted to the barn for Hontas & the old mare, rakethe aisle I’ve never found anywhere so noiseless, country on the dusty radiopropped up on a cinder block.  Suchharshness grows within you I presume / it leads to foodstands in Europe &every little hooker in a Red Light District, you cry bad mama / cannot hold fordear life, manhood, with eyes half-shut. What I did my invictus self is let him take up too much / & all themen too ready to say doll baby, slip room numbers under a highball /—& now the ice cream truck starts its belling down the avenue justgiven up on childhood / up on the rooftop, click, click, click, fingers grownworn a little weary playing on our faces—a flare for dramatics in someFrench novel where girls are ter-rib-le / so much for sex.  He carves out his address on the bartop with a knife, premature aggity / after all that bends outwards; womenforget themselves til they are nothing, perfect faces leonine / a tad bit huskyas in she has known a wolfhound, the wall punched out for watching, watchyourself.  In the still ofremonstrance, we forget our face lines / a girlhood that rages still pastsenior citizenship: cheap date brasse, strut musketeering / her girlparts.  Give me all you havebetween me cleaning the house & doing my God all the things errant to getmy feet a splendid come see:  youbest stay on course.  Novena / mybody, my home mourning, caught in a night blooming seedfruit / quiet as hislegs rushed his horse’s back lurching moonward the shedrow, wholed over for onemore desert year violent in the front yard, every tapestry skirt / fodder onevery redbrick porch the noon, their faces.  Why women wait so, dozens of us in front our doors, handfulsof milagros for their lapels.

[4]

In this modernity of warfare a man needn’t necessarily

button hishelmet strap below his chin.  Inwhen the music starts

the town is invaded.  This is old glory, our boys giving theopposition hell. 

His mama worries, his pops worries back home.  When back home,

the town sits down on hischest making breathing trifling. One man

on a rooftop feigningnothing in I will jump.  Bus linesrun

like regular.  This is well-deserved PTSD pensionUncle.  Being pretty

he becomes the mosthappening thing about this town. 

From all the bottles & shots, his belly swells.  I know nothing,

name everything, tap thebookshelf, each book lives— 

has there never been a timewe’ve not grieved?  You driving upthe mountain

from this valley of desertcould happen.  Every truck on thestreet is

a white Ram, at everystoplight the truck hauling who knows,

each sticker on the trucksays Terror War Veteran, thus every station rips

the metal.  Look it’s Dio doing Holy Diver.  In dreams you

throw your body from themountainside, hurling back to the desert

ground soyou don’t have to think.  Videogames plot

extinction ofopposing forces but that shit’s gaming, no biggie.

Rest your elbows on the bartop you are safe from here onout.  I cannot

think when the phone issilent, I name yard things new ones—perlocution

because Isay so.  If he should fall I wouldupend him a lion;

that’s whathe would want me to do. 

[20]

Little boy blue I will not tend you

when your mother neverdid.  There are no

endings,just a straightline

whale rider, no shore, noteven a trigger will find his feet

the sand, body uncurledinto that of a man’s or

some far off myth to stopthe sea line from ascending.  Ihope

that it is as blue as it hasbeen in my dreams. 

Warfare in the morning, he flails

side-to-side in this sweatsummer, virtuoso sweat

that makes God so handy;tender of light, wrath, better you

follow thetradewinds, yourself & mercy. Relief

to know you are still ofthe living—

some channel wind that drugyou far off from your task of get your ass

back on the land.  Rush onward heavy-shouldered pioneers

the frogs’ endless duckingsound mating from under

every banyan & bananaripened subtropic showdown.  Ithink

of you, the neck thatquickheld me under, cut the cord

unto the water; there arevarious ways of forgetting: 

strap the babies in the car& go.  Mothers need notfeckless sons

or heat lightning, wenever could grow older now.  Comein there are three storms

at once, the bridegroomfilled up from such waiting,

freckles thetip of my nose, the newness. 

Put on that body so often lain down,

every news caption readsanother one of our men of blue has gone to Jesus. 

Incandescent, every sharpshooter on the street corner is amother.  Each

derrick hasled you homeward righteously perfumed as in a strawberry’s sweetness. 

Psalm 3:  deep coversman under. 

Deliver his body grown under the grooves of a whale’s belly,my marine’s

best rifle, the pool which Itread my own legs so forceful from making home.