how many inhalations, how much weight.

can you mend the barren,

Done

Rump simple

at the root of your tongue

it is there

a thing folded neatly on an altar:

the lie.

Flint-neat, likea thief thieving

heart, pitched

Say you throw the actout—

for the fragrant idea of

would be percolated sex

or factless wanting

for erased hands

the torpid fuckery

for the space between give and lack

for the surrealistic two-car garages

or 29th floor walk-ups or

cubist DNA

for the bottom part of years

sucked unquiet

the soporific mouth

for the body turned over

mummy, soldier, infant.

Say you miss thereticulated liar–

chiefed out on some concrete

historical dreaming?

you could do worse.

Box of Bone

I am wrong as a cup.

unmoving, inelegant, ripe

with burden

in your cave

trees sleep

remembering their roots

the undone cries—

rock empty curve of despair

our the mood is ungodly

we moor want to want

unmake the box of bone

walking zero inches

nearer to it.

Language me

from geography

Dear___________

Myfountain

Gone

Sailboats race on the river outside the ICU. Wind likebreath through a hose blows 50 square yards of sailcloth into bladder-shapedyokes, sliding arabesques across the water’s tense surface. The daughter breatheswarm steam clouds against the window panes. It is coolin these early morning hours.

One is awake and the others are in a thin sleep halfmile away when the phone rings. Children—adults drunk with fatigue—scatteredin their mother’s apartment. The boy—the brother—answers the phone. Itsits on a low shelf across the living room from the couch where he reclines.Made in Shop Class when he was a kid, the crude pine shelf holds photo albumslabeled by decade. The phone plugs into the plaster wall, its chord long,coiled, and brown.

Earlier, the motherslept like the dead from too much morphine. A daughter lay on the bed next tohers watching her chest rise and fall for 12 hours. Head on forearm, one eyefollowing the shifting slope of sheet on her body. Like watching an oceanswell and dip around its horizon line while lying on a beach, ear cupped bypalm of warm sand.

The mother apologizesfor it taking so long—her dying. For 2 weeks in other countries andstates, her children leave lives and families, eight pets, threebusinesses, gymnastic meets, parties, grant deadlines, meetings.They convince her there is no where else for them to be,nothing else to do but be there.

The last timethe mother wakes she looks 20 years younger than when she went to sleep. Buddhistssay death is an unwinding, so the children figure they are watching her unwind,get more relaxed. She is luminous and full of strange power and a far-awaygaze that startles—at once withdrawn and arresting—the room feelspregnant with the stillness before a hurricane.

Roses stand in aplastic pitcher next to small yogurt spoons they use to feed her ice. AnL-shaped tray on wheels hovers over her lap. They take turns holding hands, newintimacy, at first awkward, or backward—who is holding whom?—then a matter of fact. Hands seek hands, after adrink, a stick, or pulse check. Skin soft like Chinese silk.

A catheter bagdangles from the side rail, turns colors like a mood ring. One woman whochanges mother’s bag is listening carefully to the stories she won’t tell herkids. She has a sudden, great strength and holds the nurse’sarm, talks in a girlish high pitch about a guy at a diner by the beach onenight named Reggie. He’s big andhandsome and black and she wanted to go home with him.

Then turning tolook at her daughter instead of the wall, the mother says she has stars in her eyes,and struggles to push up off the mattress, off the tubes, leaning intotake-off. Ready to rocket away. Ecstatic.