399 B.C.

First, build a fire.

This will be difficult for you

As you have never built one. 

In fact, you may not have built anything.

But it must be accomplished, 

For that is Step One.

Use the wooden bed of your loved one-

Waste is sinful and she is finished with it.

Besides, if you don’t use it, someone else will.

It is shocking that you allowed her to rest for so long

Undisturbed!

What do you mean, where are the matches?

Where is your flint? Your steel?

Where are your rubbing sticks?

Stop crying and use these bones-

They are clean and smooth and will 

Produce friction if used properly.

Tinder? Of course we have it.

Here is the most Holy Bible Word of God.

We worked backwards 

Through the dragons and the beasts and the sealed gates,

Through the miracles, the laws, the wars, the begats,

So if you see “Word the was beginning the In,” immolate and disappear

Know you won’t be able to try again.

I praise this fire though it cannot warm me

But it will boil water which is plentiful.

Two rivers flow with sewage and the dead

But ice falls from the sky and we catch it

Like desperate children at the last snow of the world.

Don’t let the fire go out!

What are you doing listening to me?

The water is boiling and we are at Step Four.

Take off your shoe, 

And ease it slowly into the water, 

Being vigilant about the boiling.

It is important that it continues

As long as possible

For tannic acid and cow urine 

Are unpleasant for the educated plate.

And leather stains are poisonous.

I cannot keep track of the steps anymore.

All I can tell you is that late into the process, 

Late into the night, the shoe changes shape,

And develops wings

At this point, lift it from the water, 

As we did, in wonderment,

And place it on a silver server from the Czar,

Dollop it with sour cream crowned with

Chives, rosemary and coriander

And eat it, yes, eat your shoe.

And wonder if delusion will enable you to eat

Your children tomorrow.

I lied to you about the silver server, the sour cream,

The chives, the rosemary, the coriander, 

But that is all.

And this is what we did and had to do,

Detochka,

To save this city for you

To walk around in your leisure

Wearing that tangerine shirt of thick brushed silk.

It’s the tv camera of herself

saying to herself,

“Focus. This is

real now. This is really. . “

What is the news again?

Father dead.

Two months later, looking out the window

of the gift shop where she’s working,

a small boy’s walk takes on a temporary halt

as he regains his balance

in the Christmas crowd, and she turns

with recognizing breath and hurries

to the bathroom swallowing and then running 

water over grief.

And now: a tightening in the chest when old men

bend against the hour.

(Those last two years that aged him backwards

to an alien, mute child, when they were over,

she grasped at the final news, squeezing it

for feeling).

It doesn’t matter

                                                      It matters

It doesn’t matter.

I slowed it down

the parade of fuzzy light

from the window

to the oiled floor

its milky tautness held me drowsy

And the little specks of dust

wandering like shoppers

up and down the galaxy.

I slowed it down

until not even the dust moved

And I could not even

clap my hands.

without us

only the sound of the forest building

up and falling back down again falling

down and building back up

again                             an animal starts

in the brush

                                  The morning rain changed everything

and now the mayfly ponds are filled

with winter’s clouds and babies.

Mothers stand nearby and laugh at soggy shoes —

for one day of the year at least we’re charmed.

But everywhere, reminders of the process,

brown phantoms haunting this green picnic,

anachronous as old men at a love in, they scrape

along the tops of tender grasses

and are gathered by the winds to mother’s feet,

now enraptured with her newborn buds.

No matter how quiet I make myself

I cannot disappear in this forest.

There is glowing in the dark—

A low-browed animal in Olduvai Gorge

stares at the eyed night

and blows repeatedly on the spark

of her own name.

Inside her warming brow is exhilaration

as from a particular fever.

                    Suddenly she feels the surface of the earth.

When both of us were twelve

we went to see the silent King of Kings

upon a sheet across the altar

of a nameless church —

the one that gave us half a Bible

with Jesus’ words in red

printed on that thin important paper.

(We held a page to light and read it

back to front at once).

It was directly after that I had my first real change of heart.

Outside, the sky had turned to crimson

and trees began to look like metaphors of greed.

Soon we were walking faster than we realized,

in step with our own breaths.

I turned to find your face to break the spell

but saw a shadow there

and then a nightmare canter caught my body

and I ran with you behind me, running

from the fear’s edge spreading stain.

We flung ourselves upon your mother’s porch,

the sky had dried to brittle black.

We laughed —

like winter’s dying branches crack.

From Oregon, you wrote that you had seen him

nailed across a million living trees.

And still you fled him,

on your knees this time,

his robes dissolving in the greening rain

that blurs this edge of death.

My older heart still wonders,

which is better?

Doomed and silent in his shades of grey

or cut with typeface edge in red

in shapes that look the same

from back to front, held to the light

by secret-seeking children,

scared to death?

The mother being dead, the girl-child coming 

home in dark, to this house, 

A hard lump in the throat of night.

Her father driving, automatic

as his gear box, as his beam light

startles trees

draped in black silk.

                           The night is like a black dress,

                           rhinestones unstrung, falling.

Swallowing the dark, the house sits

like a mourner with the word,

and girl-child goes straight to bed

but lies knot-wise in tree, the blankets tucked

all wrong by father’s

large, lost hands.

                          Sleep, that weeping aunt

                         hugs fast

                         and girl-child sees her mother

                         in a city of stone.

                        There is an errand all

                        dressed up - a bouquet

                        of pale flowers. There 

                         is something of importance 

                         to be done.

                        A dream stick rattles on the fence.

And she awakens truly

silent now, her open mouth is filled

with night’s wet earth.

Her father’s come to put her in his bed -

and girl-child feels the house lay its long gasp to rest

and fill itself with sighs

of emptiness.

Observe: how we grow up and say good-bye,

unwieldy in our rented trucks.

It’s never been more obvious:

the randomness, in spite of offspring, checkbooks,

thickening in the middle.

Was this the promise that kept me alive

when I was a child?

Lord, it’s really neither flesh nor bone,

but involuntary, eddying motion

trickling from a dynamo 

that’s running some far city.

You walk into the lungs of night

coughing like somebody’s father, 

the cab light takes your picture.

In six hours the dawn will find your face 

and lose it, bone by bone,

for me.