Two rabbits were chased by a fox, of all the crazy shit in the world, and the fox kept up the chase,
circling the world until the world caught up with them in some broken-down downtown metropolis.
Inside the warren, the rabbits think fast. Pip touches the only other rabbit listening.

Pip: We’re doomed.
Flip: Oh Pip!
Pip: I know where you can hide.
Flip: Are you sure?
Pip: Yes. Here, hide inside me.

This is the story of Pip and Flip, the bunny twins. We say that once there were two and now there is
only one. When the fox sees Pip run past, he won’t know that the one is inside the other. He’ll think
Well, there’s at least one more rabbit in that warren. But no one’s left. You know this and I know this.
Together we trace out the trail away from doom. There isn’t hope, there is a trail. I follow you.

When a rabbit meets a rabbit, one takes the time to tell the other this story. The rabbits then agree
there must be two rabbits, at least two rabbits, and that in turn there is a trace. I am only repeating
what I heard. This is one love. There are many loves but only one war.

Bird 1: This is the same story.
Bird 2: No, this is the rest of the story.

Let me tell you a story about war. A man found his life to be empty. He began to study Latin.
Latin was difficult for the man to understand. I will study Latin, even though it is difficult, said the man. Yes, even
if it is difficult.

Let me tell you a story about war. A man had a dream about a woman and then he met her. The man
had a dream about the woman’s former lover. The former lover was sad, he wanted to fight. The
man said to the woman I will have to comfort your former lover or I will always be fighting him in my dreams. Yes,
said the woman. You will need to comfort him, or we will never be finished with this.

Let me tell you a story about war. A fisherman’s son and his dead brother sat on the shore. That is my
country and this is your country and the line in the sand is the threshold between them, said the dead brother. Yes,
said the fisherman’s son.

You cannot have an opponent if you keep saying yes.

Bird 1: This is the wrong story.
Bird 2: All stories are the wrong story when you are impatient.

Let me tell you a story about war. A man says to another man Can I tell you something? The other man
says No. A man says to another man There is something I have to tell you. No, says the other man. No, you
don’t.

Bird 1: Now we are getting somewhere.
Bird 2: Yes, yes we are.

(ii)

Let me tell you a story about war:

A boy spills a glass of milk and his father picks him up by the back of the shirt and throws him
against the wall. You killed my wife and you can’t even keep a glass on the table. The wife had died of sadness,
by her own hand. The father walks out of the room and the room is almost empty.

The road outside the house lies flat on the ground. The ground surrenders.

The father works late. The dead wife’s hand makes fishsticks while the boy sits in the corner where
he fell. The fish in the fishsticks think to themselves This is not what we meant to be.

Its roots in the ground and its branches in the air, a tree is pulled in two directions.

The wife has a dead hand. This is earlier. She is living and her dead hand feeds her pills that don’t
work. The boy sleeps on the roof or falls out of trees. The father works late. The wife looks out the
window and thinks Not this.

The boy is a bird, bad bird. He falls out of trees.

(iii)

Let me tell you a story about war:

The fisherman’s son serves drinks to sailors. He stands behind the bar. He listens closely for news of
his dead brother. The sailors are thirsty. They drink rum. Tell me a story, says the fisherman’s son.

“There is nothing interesting about the sea. The water is flat, flat and calm, it seems a sheet of glass.
You look at it, the more you look at it the more you feel like you are looking into your own head,
which is a stranger’s head, empty. We listen to the sound with our equipment. I have learned to
understand this sound. When you look there is nothing, with the equipment there is sound. We sit in
rows and listen down the tunnels for the song. The song has red words in it. We write them down on
sheets of paper and pass them along. Sometimes there is noise and sometimes song and often there is
silence, the long tunnel, the sea like glass...

You are a translator, says the fisherman’s son.
Yes, says the sailor.
And the sound is the voice of the enemy.
Yes, yes it is.

(iv)

Let me tell you a story about war:

They went to the museum and wandered the rooms. He saw a painting and stood in front of it for
too long. It was a few minutes before she realized he had gotten stuck. He was stuck looking at a
painting. She stood next to him, looking at his face and then the face in the painting. What do you see?
she asked. I don’t know, he said. He didn’t know. She was disappointed, then bored. He was looking at
a face and she was looking at her watch. This is where everything changed. There was now a distance
between them. He was looking at a face but it might as well have been a cabbage or a sugar beet.
Perhaps it was something about yellow near pink. He didn’t know how to say it. Years later he still
didn’t know how to say it, and she was gone.

(v)

Let me tell you a story about love:

There was a place on the floor where they could lie together, on the floor together, backs pressed to
the carpet, where they could look out the window together and see only the tops of the trees. They
would do this. They would lie on the floor and say things like Now we are in the country! or Oh, what a far
away place this is! Then they would stand up and look out the window the way they usually did, the
houses reappearing in the window frame.

She had a soft voice and strong hands. When she sang she would seem too large for the room and
she would play guitar and sing which would make his chest feel huge. Sometimes he would touch her
knee and smile. Sometimes she would touch his face and close her eyes.

(vi)

Fox rounds the warren but there are no bunnies, jumps up with claws but there are no bunnies,
moves down the road but there are no bunnies. There are no bunnies. He chases a bird instead. All
wars are the same war. The bird flies away.

(vii)

The fisherman’s son knows nothing worth stealing. Perhaps, perhaps.

He once put a cat in a cardboard box but she got out anyway. He once had a brother he lost to the
sea. Brother, dead brother, who speaks to him in dreams. These are a few things worth saying.

He knows that when you snap a mast it’s time to get a set of oars or learn how to breathe
underwater. Rely on one thing too long and when it disappears and you have nothing... well, that’s
just bad planning. It’s embarrassing, to think it could never happen.

A man does work. A machine can, too. Power of agency, agent of what. This is a question we might
ask. An agent is a spy or not. A spy is a promise to God, hidden where only God can find it.

The agents meet at the chain link fence and tell each other stories. A whisper system. To testify
against yourself is an interesting thing, a sacrifice. Some people do it. Some people find money in the
street but you cannot rely on it. The fisherman’s son is at the fence, standing there, waiting to see if
he is useful.

You cannot get in the way of anyone’s path to God. You can, but is does no good. Every agent
knows this. Some say God is where we put our sorrow. God says Which one of you fuckers can get to me
first?

You cannot get in the way of anyone’s path to happiness, it also does no good. The problem is
figuring out which part is the path and which part is the happiness.

It’s a blessing, every day someone shows up at the fence. And when no one shows up, a different
kind of blessing. In the wrong light anyone can look like a darkness.

"War of the Foxes (i)" appeared in State of the Union: Fifty Political Poems (Wave Books, 2008).

"Saying Your Names" is from Crush (Yale University Press, 2005).

"Scheherazade" is from Crush (Yale University Press, 2005).

The eye stretches to the horizon and then must continue up.
Anything past the horizon
is invisible, it can only be imagined. You want to see the future but
you only see the sky. Fluffy clouds.
Look — white fluffy clouds.
Looking back is easy for a while and then looking back gets
murky. There is the road, and there is the story of where the road goes,
and then more road,
the roar of the freeway, the roar of the city sheening across the city.
There should be a place.
At the rest stop, in the restaurant, the overpass, the water’s edge…

2

He was not dead yet, not exactly —
parts of him were dead already, certainly other parts were still only waiting
for something to happen, something grand, but it isn’t
always about me,
he keeps saying, though he’s talking about the only heart he knows —

He could build a city. Has a certain capacity. There’s a niche in his chest
where a heart would fit perfectly
and he thinks if he could just maneuver one into place —
well then, game over.

3

You wonder what he’s thinking when he shivers like that.
What can you tell me, what could you possibly
tell me? Sure, it’s good to feel things, and if it hurts, we’re doing it
to ourselves, or so the saying goes, but there should be
a different music here. There should be just one safe place
in the world, I mean
this world. People get hurt here. People fall down and stay down and I don’t like
the way the song goes.
You, the moon. You, the road. You, the little flowers
by the side of the road. You keep singing along to that song I hate. Stop singing.

"Road Music" is from Crush (Yale University Press, 2005).

"The Problem" appeared in Forklift, Ohio.

There’s plenty that think we’re twins. By 18
we’d both wished secretly that it was true,
& that it wasn’t. Since we were 9

we met here on stealth banks of August,
each year another savior & sweet thanks be
to Jesus for that old row boat.

Remember my instructions when we met?
I’d bent a coffee can into a scoop to hunt
the mud banks for crawfish. “The whole

trick with blue pinchers is getting in behind
without setting off a stir on their tail.” Now
we’re getting to be His age. But apart

from watches and sky dates, you know how to find me
when my head’s full of scuppernong blossoms.
So we cast off past wisteria

& into night silk beyond the river’s edge. Empty skins
of tree snakes, ash vibrissa, draw the canopy.
Tangles of moss wisp past my cheeks,

fall out of a lullaby. No moon. If I spark my lighter,
willows young & old pretend they don’t breathe
in the dark, don’t slip thru nights

in tangos with cypress & Saturn tuned into bent
underwater reeds. Posed. They stand like a big-city
crowd at a bus stop, & just reach

off the bank for elbow room. Come out that white blouse
& upside down, you watch open lilies fall away,
a bird’s eye vision

of your daddy’s parachute into the Mekong Delta.
A back bend arched over the bow, your bare torso slips
thru a summer breeze, cuts

a hush in the cicada din. A pale gash torn past my lips
leaves the night open. Light-plays off my chrome
Zippo. Hersey’s kisses harden

into rose thorns dense as a shut eye’s faith in Tarot.
My name, dry salt on an arch smooth eyebrow,
vanishes into steamed woods and gut-heavy

air like sweat into a prayer for rain. We take on water
in each Decatur Street groan for Mercy. It’s far too late,
slipway a damned sight too steep

for Esperanto or one-eyed jacks. To pull the moon
back with cracked oars curved like tusks, you’d better
mean it. It’s about time for round two.

Oceanus descends with an acetylene tear & dreams
of a blue tip, a cool flame; the other eye’s been gone
for years, blind & lid turned cold side out.

"Masqualéro" is from Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue (Copper Canyon Press, 2001).

Don’t sing it
to me. Or I’ll stay under
here motionless

& blue gilled. I’ll drift
away from the shattered place
of irruption.

Where the summer song
crossed the winter street,
the corner

where we met. & don’t
worry about me,
I’ll stick close

to pockets of air beneath
the surface. Snatch shallow
breaths of marrow

from bends in the death-blue
shoulder blade of the ice patch.
Go on & sing it,

just not to me. Last night,
for a moment at rest
on the keys,

I saw my finger tips melt
chord prints into your frozen
back. & Gershwin’s

limo didn’t come around
to keep us honest. As you
hummed changes

thru the tune the pockets
of touch filled with water.
& scarred

by warmth, they freeze again
into glassy bullet wounds
like transparent

braille domes. My fingers
slip off rounded keys;
singularist

I lose hold of you.
Another song’s gone
off with the pale

figoric voice, alight
with the lilt of Southern
flame.

Am I playing a player-
piano? Behind the stool,
a white veil wafts

as a bowl of tangerine
peels dries on a hissing radiator.
Ancestress to burnt

lips on a scarlet trumpet,
you turn body heat into liquid
distance & back

to ice beneath my hands.
Almost round, a charcoal sketch
of a circle, we

dance underneath the ice,
impaled by bolts of broken
moonlight

& swayed in the tidal pull
of silence. Sing to me now,
rallentando down

to the sine qua non. Sing
to me again and all last night.
& don’t pause

at my fall away thru
scented pillows & cloudless
depths of the

sheets. Confess it
this once, the uncanny
chance.

The whetstone in your pocket
& the unsheathed epée
waved in your

voice. I stayed alert,
but my whole body fell
asleep. Round

about midnight & crescendo
needles hold my limbs.
Sing my forehead

back thru the eye
of the needle or a
millionth

of the mirror. Been under
five minutes now, lungs ache
& clutch, ears

drum a pressure rhythm
to the echo-depth of time.
If you’re down,

stay down. & sing me back
thru last night before I went
touch-deaf

& ear-numb, before I melted
at the edge of your lips
& slipped beneath

the sand. & don’t stop. Quiver-
still, how the hands of a mesmerist
work the future

out of fruit fallen from the Litchi
tree. When you hum
lightning

into Mera’s “Higanbana,”
a blue tree at the river bank burns
orange, blown

in a red wind. Our storm tongues
twist Madame Butterfly
onto her mythic

back & summon a thunder-reaper
with a Cutthroat on his
shoulder. A mirror

image or a sure sign, a raven
wears a ruby necklace,
Amadina fasciata.

Splayed open down to our beating
pit, two well ripened sinners
washed up

onto broken glass & black coral
of the soul’s beach. I’m hanging
on one muted line,

to touch the indigo heave
of nightfall to the windward
surf of cachexy.

If tone is homage to the pressure
of secrets, sing to the numb
spot, the nob

of bone growing behind my ear.
Sing the warm spot that moves
along my hip.

"Isatine Blues" is from Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue (Copper Canyon Press, 2001).

The ceiling moved & woke
you. The night gave none
of the heat away. Beads of sweat
inch & run slopes of skin. You ask yourself,
what about the hard work?

Before you knew what easy
pain becomes, you thought hard
work had to hurt. A stack
of sixteen pound block on the wall
at Jocelyn Steel. Not T-shirts that fell away

as you shoveled grease
from an acid wash on a Thompson
wire line. Impossible. Unthinkably easy.
Finger prints return
& the world steps back

with a few days break
from the brick pile. Breath thru slits
in the beak, death swoops thru ease in the age
of the body. You’ve read about hard times.
Not enough carbon compounds

in the universe to make half a hook worm.
No star is hot enough
til it explodes. Maybe the hard work’s done
for us. “No sweat,” your sister says,
& high-rails her truck thru Red

Oak. Said she knows an ice-cold stream
in the Rockies. Said, if she holds
her breath and dips in at the right spot,
the current braids her hair
& it feels like her head disappeared.

ii

Hard work means elegance,
means it gets done
the way it has to be done,
the way silver people swim the brain
& move thru the pounded song.
Still awake & eyes closed,

this woman’s belly still haunts
the tip of your nose.
A deep breath domes
against your face & you hope
you’ll never cease to love
the way wet skin holds

the scent of smoke from the city.
In the unison of a chorus,
you feel distant millions of them awaken.
A change in tone
more than shade to the eye.
A rush of green light,

windplay, fingers thru tree tops
in a cloud-clean night.
The river’s back arched,
its silent face hidden beneath
our skin. Left
hand holds down the chord, right travels

circles in “Orange was the Color
of Her Dress.” If you did,
you know you’d wish
& they’d sleep, again, in the path
of your touch. So you don’t.
These are ancient & invisible hairs.

"Sweat" is from Labors Lost Left Unfinished (Sheep Meadow Press, 2006).

"Lessons Unlearned" is from Labors Lost Left Unfinished (Sheep Meadow Press, 2006).

if this was a wet blouse
there’d be the shadow of fingers
if a leaf poured from a can
of paint there’d be veins
stiffened by the cold if this
was summer wind there’d be laughter
from across the lake if an
abandoned well it’d smell of broken
stone & you’d look down
in the dark for the loose end
of frayed rope if this was
a rusty nail there’d be a little
boy licking red dust
from his fingers if I was 13
again it’d be a simple matter
of off & on drag the pen
& pain runs down the block
if he was 20 again he’d have cut
himself & gone in after it
fist into brick if the angle was
right it’d move thru the flesh
like a song climbs swole & yellow
up past the elbow if a novel
there’d be a scream’s chance
of meeting again somewhere
unthinkable if it were mine
one of us would miss the other
in an empty street there’d
be the panic of living
again the act like I knew
far more than I did if
these were letters to you
they’d be in the well
if breached inside
there’d be ash on the hips
& rattlesnake tea
when Paul Wittgenstein
returned from the war
the family refused to pay Ravel
for what he wrote to the phantom
right hand often we find
simply from impact reasonable
persons infer decisions
on the part of others
if she’d told me she needed
two things to count on
there’d have been
these at least : if it hadn’t been
for the broken guitar string
her hair’d have blown
left to right across her face
into my mouth & no one would ask
me what I said if
I spoke any louder than this here

"Results of the Polygraph: The Autobiography of What If & When" first appeared in Jubilat, 9.

Year by year step by step you led me up
past the line where trees grow past the line

where shrubs cling to rocks

and you tell south by the lichen. I hesitate

when my lungs begin to ache, lose a full step
for your every two. We pass the line

where grizzlies plunder pine cone stores

of black, cat-eared alpine squirrels.

Empty craters that smell of thin green air.
We’re into the zone of the all too recently disturbed
stones where grizzlies find moths

that blow in off the plains of Kansas
and Nebraska to mate

in the rubble beyond the tree-line.
I don’t want to know any of this, but I do.

You do too but could give a damn.

I’m scared and I can’t breathe. I join the invisible

crowd of all those you’ve left behind and turn
back and you’re bears be damned

on all fours now. I sit on a boulder and gasp
for air and I see you get smaller and smaller

and with each blink I see it flash clear.
You could care about the altitude of the glacier

angel up the slope. I remember how you used to
tell me I made you safe because
when kidnappers came

they’d take me. The youngest. The boy. Now
I’m bigger than you are, so,

here I am, back here in the bell of he curve, Kate,
bait. And there you are,

your liver floating in the numbbright,

curled up like a peach pit

on a hissing radiator, eyes alight
with the flamedarktorch in each pulse.

I’m high enough
that my vision is splotched with black
patches of torn cloth

and there you go, a slow drip of Patrón

and a quick whiff of nicotine

for lunch as you search your way alone out along
the flat forever in the asymptotic line,

search your way up for the line
up beyond which elevation

the lungs change into birds
up high enough and cross the line to where

you can go on living without having to have a body at all.

—for Kate

"Call It In the Air" first appeared in Inertia Magazine.