If you dig too deep, you may find someone already living there.
PART 1: INSTRUCTION
The Wheel That Spins Stays Upright
Your mother will teach you how four hydrogen nuclei combine
to form one helium atom at fifteen million centigrade
fully one hundred fifty million kilometers away
counteracting gravity to keep the star stable.
I will teach you how the jaguar prowls across Xibalba
each night or gets dressed up as a hummingbird
in his clandestine effort to woo the paler disk to marry,
returning in morning to coax the maize from slumber.
Armed with this data, you might bask on a blanket in the park
enjoying its warmth and the red glow behind your eyelids.
Shoes for Lips
Leave a stack of papers in a wooden box.
It eventually turns to soil that smells like dirt.
As you know, the world is ever eaten by worms.
They crawl throughout and make it all possible
again and again across time inventing the world,
surging forward regardless of metals or plastics,
taking all of the things and turning them into
possibilities again.
The Basin Method
Manuals in hardware stores and PDF drives
Direct us in the work of separating water from light.
STEP ONE: Hold the basin steady.
STEP TWO: Wait for morning to arrive.
STEP THREE: Remove the brightness carefully.
(Remember to breathe.)
(Try not to spill.)
Gen. 1:4 | Matt. 27:24
PART 2: CIVILIZATION
Arabia (See You in Hell)
Our desks announce our ranks,
our lapel pins blaze,
while we shave off flesh to roast.
I send you a message with words
like “congratulations” and “lucrative”,
which is me saying “fuck you” the long way.
You have your goon call me up
to ask for my advice on this and that,
and that’s you saying “fuck you” too.
Both of us sit in our chairs
in the steam of a fire
we tend like Hestian deputies.
As in a play our forebears staged,
one says “meet me in the middle,”
the other replies “I’ll meet you in hell.”
(Dedicated to Andrew, Henry, William, Lawrence, and your mom)
Where At
The body maps the world across time.
Christmas-colored tilapia breading from Whole Foods
before Amazon bought the planet.
Avocado at the kitchen table under my grandfather
ice-fishing walleye in a winter-white photo.
No perch in stores but my girl pours malbec.
Sebastián calls with cane-farm weather.
Street dogs need shots but orchids ship overnight.
A ship the size of Rome slides over a whale in the dark.
So when the Speaker says war, I’m not asking where at—
just hand me a gun and a grocery bag.
Doctrine
My baby’s got the good water pressure.
She’s got the Chemex with the nice filter.
Somebody steps off the bus with a plastic bag
carrying all his earthly possessions.
The deli man hands me a sausage biscuit.
I say hello to the door guys, as usual.
I woke up late in her house,
and find my desk on the twenty-fifth floor.
In the Hadith on what matters, we’re told
He looks at our hearts, not our faces.
Easy to say.
PART 3: DIGESTION
Bear Republic
Crumpled-face man pisses
on the stone-block wall of Citibank,
then slides back into Citibank
and sneezes on a check-cashing slip.
There’s a flag that says Bear Republic.
There’s a proud man in a puffy vest
who swears he’s smitten with Kerouac.
There’s a weather woman in the rain
whose map stops at Tijuana
while it showers in Tijuana too.
Shit, you gonna slink in that suit?
Gonna tuck your hat low in the CVS?
The maw of the world either snaps on you
or scolds you for not dying on time.
Poem for Manufacturers
A middle-aged man who had come from Japan
leaned over and asked me
what do you call that Mountain?
I told him that I didn’t know
which caused a great sadness in his eyes
which caused a sadness in mine.
The blue sun fell on us
and the sidewalk with us
looking far toward the snowy Peak.
Other people walked through the door.
I fondled my pocket lining
and he shifted in his slicker
which fell past his knees
as we gazed at the far-off summit.
How long it stood there
I don’t know how long
we stood there. I don’t know.
Then he raised an open palm
toward a closer Mountain and asked
what is the name of this One?
And this One I know,
this One is famous,
so I told him the name
which he repeats.
The Flatirons, yes—the Flatirons.
They are also very old.
We will be old soon.
They will be old still.
Then we walked inside
where smaller thoughts are kept.
Thirty Pieces
The less wrong thing has a nervous system,
But you still have to kill and eat it.
You have to snap its neck and gut it and skin it.
You have to cry into the place its eyes were.
You aren’t hungry, you just don’t want to be hungry anymore!
You aren’t listening, you just heard a bird hit the window!
The Bellows
You talk big
as a cornstalk,
wide as a note from an accordion
adapting from Sonora
what it adapted from Czechia.
You raise your wide hands
as if to say
“I am the machine
that washes the eggs of our nest
and sends them
to all corners of the nations!
I am the squeeze box
that sings the world
into being!”
Somebody yanks
another breath into you.
You bellow,
the seeds disperse.
Skookum Atlas 