Stained with grass and goose shit,
a baseball is a perfect thing.
If you ever felt the difference
between the ball in a bare grip
and the numb wing of the glove
you understand the game.
This pale pill,
stitched skin, Frankenstein monster
wrapping wool, a motley
redeemed by weight,
falls homing in the hand.
Even a statue wants
to make it move,
deliver from its scars
a quiet arc.
Young, I used to throw the ball,
a thing they hit.
Now I throw my love for it.
On a canyon road
among the piñon pines
we slowed to pass a cow just hit.
She lay on the shoulder,
the globe of her one eye swallowing wild.
Don’t look, Bella, said my mum,
but the massive tongue,
lopsided, licking road,
and the schoolless night,
still warm with crickets,
said look look look.
That isn’t to say, I know,
there is necessarily
beauty in the dimming light:
the sun sets equally on the fetid swamp
and the flatirons
and there is always dumb calm
in letting go
of pushcarts, or people, or hope.
But if the world is our oyster,
wear the pearl — please,
but eat the oyster too,
that too,
because what is it to love
if you cannot love it raw?
and like Rubens,
that fat intensity,
adore Helena for all her farts
and dimpled knees.
In the photograph from the wildlife camera
she appears at dusk, side-on,
her full tail in the air:
the big ginger cat
from the farm next door.
She is one of those puzzles you find
in newsprint books at the tobacconists
— which one of these doesn’t belong? —
because before and after her on the camera
are a mountain lion and a red fox.
I thought of the two bobcats who came
to the picture window on St. Stephen’s Day
at three o’clock in the morning
looking intently in,
and the man in Finland whose dog got out:
the wolves at the forest fringe
were calling it to come and play.
There was no blood, he said.
The dog just disappeared into their jaws.
Still, she comes around:
again this morning on the deer trail
where she sat gazing up,
the jays and the blackbirds with new hatchlings
diving, exploding into the air,
and her
wearing their worry and disapproval
— even, you think,
their appetites and their hatred,
like a bright blessing,
the urgent chatter of the birds
an electric hum
almost to the horizon.
We found cool,
creeping in the pine and eucalyptus,
stealing through hidden spaces
when the weekdays dragged,
and summer staked a place
on every bleached
beach towel.
I remember following her foot
on fecund earth
like still-damp coffee grounds.
A welt of outstretched limbs,
the taste of shade and sweat
on our noses and our tongues,
and sun and devils in our faces.
Alison was California,
like the copses,
a vein sprung
from subterranean lines
that pushed up trees
and pushed out beaches
into their matrimonial air.
I remember winding by
the Spanish tower
in the bloom of geraniums
always dying.
I remember her smile
after school, a wink
and a disclaimer:
a mushroom invitation,
California sweet and scarlet.
The bees’ nest was a stump,
an old oak, rotted and sealed
and smelling of resin.
Friday morning, off from summer school,
we heaped mud and leaves
to stop the migration of the bees.
Then Alison with a stick
and the rich swarm
that burst from the wood like fluid,
while she cried and cried
and ran with her insect headdress,
pushing me away and crying “Help me!”
I put out my hand to help,
but she was too concerned
with punishment.
We shared the sidewalk,
and he, too old for lemonade stands,
his head, so resolute it shook,
his fingers,
wrapped around the plastic gun,
his voice, too guttural
for ten years old,
shouted “Pow!”
and the arm recoiled
as I walked on past his house.
I wanted to say,
that isn’t the way it is at all.
You hear the footsteps first,
the voice is soft:
“Stop or you’re dead.”
The gun seems far too small,
winking in the streetlight.
The ring comes off too slowly,
and the boy is nervous
when he whispers
keep walking.
New married, they lived one summer
by an apple tree,
and watched the fruit
turn green, then oxblood red.
And watched the sun
and watched the shingled sea.
August came
untended in the long grass.
At picking time
he found a bright pot
and shook the apples down,
his hands around the branches.
He was awkward in his wedding ring:
the smallest finger rubbed it,
like a tongue with a new tooth,
where it blazed against
the thick gray boughs.
Where apples fell,
they stewed in pockets
of unclipped grass,
in earthen cider smells,
in a garden quick
with snakes and sowbugs.
He stood among them
in a fine independence,
satisfied to not be
mad with growing,
while Sara watched him
from the kitchen.
She must have seen him as he was:
not simple and apart,
but a kind of metamorphosis,
some mythic thing —
legs, wrapped and rooted
to the earth by snakes,
his arms in apples,
and all his skyward fingers, leaves.
I keep meaning to put my pants on
but I don’t.
I keep meaning to put my pants on
but I forget.
I’m trying to drink more milk like you said.
I’m trying to drink more milk
but it soured.
You say I’m still stinky and I get it.
You say I’m still stinky
but at least I showered.
Walk me to the end of the block.
That was how our vow went, was it not?
You walk me to the end of the block
but I stop.
I keep meaning to put on makeup
but it’s gone.
I keep meaning to put on makeup
but it gets in my beard.
I’m trying to catch the bus to work but —
no, I’m trying to catch the bus to work
but it leaves across the street,
to the little butter building
by the legion hall.
You say to ask for help if I need it.
You say to ask for help, but there’s just
the scratch of spiders when I call.
There’s just the sound of water in the pot.
That is how the mouth works, is it not?
Open, push air out.
Of the five rivers
most know two of the others,
my sisters.
You’ve never met them?
Sure, we run into each other.
Lethe and Styx
get the spotlight,
but I want to talk about
tonight.
You have five shots
on the bar.
I’m the last one, right?
Mr. Springer, who resides
at the dingy bungalow
on Constance Court
that we can see from the wooden deck
of our wooden house,
and who last Saturday started the fire
that burned a thousand acres of grass
due south along the lake —
that Mr. Springer,
who the neighbors,
shortly after, bilious,
suggested should go to prison
for the rest of his too-long life,
was just connecting
an electric fence.
Sparks flew.
They do
at high school dances and in fields
and sometimes catch fire
and run for all our panic water.
But now, across the road,
through the window of his living room,
I watch him watching television,
his generator in the driveway,
and around the place, the black grass
spread the way it did / not away
the way it did,
but sharp-tongued prairie now
licking up,
darkly, acidly
against the flickering wall
of his flickering house.
At first, she sat in the corner sulking.
There was still a powder of stone on her skin.
Her shoulder, soft as a cat’s,
turned hard rounded in the palm,
but I was used to that.
After all, wasn’t that the idea?
To find a melting point for marble,
to have the crest of her hip push back,
flutter of breath
from the small cave of her mouth.
I just wasn’t ready for the opposite:
my want making her soft,
her hate reversing the charm:
petrifaction of love.
After four days I prayed
some god would take her back.
She wasn’t eating.
She drew caricatures of me
on the studio floor with a stick, saying,
Can’t I go outside? What are you looking at?
Don’t you have any friends?
Then nasty, knowing my weakness:
Can’t you make me a mate —
someone good-looking, younger, sexier?
When she stopped moving
I would pause
in the doorway from the garden,
crunching an apple, a sculptor again,
remaking her with my eyes,
smaller like a child.
They said we had a son,
but what do those liars know.
I took out my chisel.
The boy rose smiling
in the gravel of his mother’s arms.
Too bleak and beautiful 