since world appears
as light
through drapes
and other thresholds
mirror-quickened
they pour it all into a dish
like milk
and unawares
the door ajar
a clean-cut
sensibility slips in

since doors and windows
hinge in logic
back-latched
and secure
they build a house
of playful aberration
they write in pencil
pass between them
cards and paper

Each day the boy spends more time in the land of ants.
He says that when he's grown he wants to be an engineer
with real trucks and bulldozers.
"If you work like the ants, you could raise pyramids
like those in Egypt," his father tells him.
On their pathways, all the ants care about
is winter catching up to them.
Sometimes, the boy causes them setbacks, centuries of work.

Translated by James Kimbrell and Rebecca Morgan

The room where we dance.
The room with pool cues
and eight-balls, lights that last
a brown-out, lights we stole
from the runway. The room
with posts we swing from.
The culture we designed
bends tonight, we shake our hips at it.
There are people touching
for the first time who love
each other. Women dragging boys
on the floor when the music settles
to an even beat, a bass-laid trance.
Women shotgunning Red Horse
who tomorrow will meet their husbands
on the road. Anyone can come here

We wrestle on couches, wrestle on carpets,
wrestle in cars, crash flesh into flesh,
wrestle in chairs, wrestle to music,
make up new moves, we wrestle and cry,
wrestle ourselves, wrestle in sleep,
wrestle like counterpoint
sung in a church,
wrestle to eat, wrestle to praise,
wrestle to talk, to pray, to drink, we wrestle
for money, wrestle with books,
wrestle in mall fountains, banks,
we scuff up the clean floors of hospitals,
wrestle with breath, wrestle like trains
across states, away from the chest,

I walked to town to sell my mother’s poems.
She spun a rag for me, coiled it

and set a basketful of poems on my head.

On the way I stopped to drink pond water.
I threw away her poems. They were heavy.

*

The town was filled with itchy commas.
I was walking home when a comma bit me under my t-shirt.

Nobody knew where the commas came from.

I yelled and threw out my arms. Prak!
went my mother’s poems.

I ground her poems to powder using rocks.
I tore a banana leaf and made tiny packets.

I knew a woman who spent hours in front
of her magnifying mirror, chasing split hairs
like a huntress. She’d enter the intricacy of
parallel lines, watch forking tips grow into
reeds, swelling into bamboo shoots painted in
Chinese ink over transparent rice paper through
which she saw her son falling from a cliff, light
as a clipping, he lies at the bottom of the dark
ravine, his foot severed, tshuk tshuk tshuk
crisscross, cuts the slightest twist, he’s being
raised with pullies, in a fog she wanders in

***