I Know Your Kind. William Brewer D.
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our hearts—it’s only now
that our survival is an issue.
Pin oaks arm wrestle over the house
as barrel fires spark like stars in the valley.
Day closes its jaws.
I can hear my brother explaining
how when Jonah woke inside the whale,
he didn’t know where he was.
I’m not saying this ends with a leviathan,
but I’m not saying it doesn’t.
Here it comes, rising through the floor,
the voice that tells me I’m tired
of the world, that pulls me down
to its pale kingdom. Should
someone find me, they’ll scream
stay with me as they fish
my tongue from my throat.
Should I wake, they’ll ask me
if I can tell them where I am.
ICARUS IN OXYANA
Talk to yourself. Console.
Invoke an image of progress,
failed. Two Vs of geese colliding.
An X, exploding. Pretend
not to worry about your father,
or that he no longer worries for you. Something
about angels, levitation, waking up
with a belt around your arm,
some blood. Tell yourself to listen,
something about your mother,
how she’s the best part of you.
A memory of childhood
equated to a bomb. It worries you.
Which worries you. Think again
about the geese. You have migrated through today
through sleep. Someone on the porch
who’s lost both his arms
chain-smokes. Something about angels.
Or geese. Or wings. He warns you
about flying too high. Then helps.
Something about chances, not knowing
it was your second till your third
never shows. Summer air. People
blowing up things and celebrating.
Something about pain
as a private choir moving through you.
A movement. A movement. A movement
helps you up. To the porch. To the armless full
of smoke. Where do you want to go?
Nowhere? We have just enough
to get there. And then some.
And then, something. The geese
piercing the sky. They rise, and then, they rise.
HALFWAY HOUSE DIARY
Somewhere at the bottom of the world a whale sings to itself,
running through its temple of otherlight and salt.
I have decided water has a god and its name is gravity.
When it’s my turn to fix the gutters, I call myself
Master of the Aqueducts.
When on some mornings, as with this one,
I wake to my roommate bent over my bed,
wrapped in his sheets, whispering,
You’re only half-here,
I pretend it doesn’t wreck me,
that I don’t wonder all day where the other half went.
In the sun’s mouth, where for years I pissed heaven?
In the arithmetic of things I was never able to say?
What’s the point?
What’s lost isn’t dead until it’s found.
The river ice is breaking up,
smokewhite glass washing over the voiceless stones,
and I can’t help but take it personally.
Some nights, a whale song.
I’m halfway here and it’s almost too much.
CLEAN DAYS IN OXYANA
You ask what facts I remember from the last five years,
but facts have nothing to do with memory.
When I do think back, I always see the five
buck heads over Crockett’s bar, their racks
like the hands of saints upturned and open
to receive the next havoc—how calm
they’re made to look after terror, fur still
as infants’ sleep. I always thought
one of them must have wanted it, if only
a little, the end—an orange star blooming
between the elms, sound too slow to hear,
unsurprised at the wound’s speed,
its determination, like gravity—and the buck running
with the others, not from, but toward, or
into something I have almost seen. It couldn’t,
wouldn’t have looked away, as it can’t now,
its eyes the key to its lifelikeness, what you see
as black glass, I see as the absence of flesh
begetting the absence of light.
FOR KC AFTER LOSING HIS BROTHER
after Eduardo C. Corral
Before the rain the grass
stands straight like an ancient army.
Maybe a cat guts a rat
on the porch.
Listen.
The leaves turn themselves over to be beaten.
A split tree trunk
could be an escape
from the prison of growth
but a broken bone is never
the source of light we think it is.
Listen.
The valley sounds like it’s incinerating.
Hay bales
the silent heads of giants.
Choose.
The facts or the memory?
A sheet of rain
cuts over the hill.
A