Normal, north
of Hell’s mouth

closed until June, I have seen
no earth this red.

Why isn’t grace the intensely
seen rather than impending?

I continue to abort more
utterances than the names

of animals can endure,
our language lacking

richness for our abundant
boredom. The presence

of curtained light above
farm fields is still too young

to explain away, too far
from us to fail yet.

Best to know what a warbler
does while a man yodels

If you touch your heart
it will be too late to go blind

but in the fissures of the curtains
even the blind feel daylight

Pressure when the mind
makes something happen that is already happening

Two Christians having sex
will discover at the core of a thing not present

they have not discovered anything
I stab my eyes out

Without paying for the pleasure I touch myself
in the broken spot at the bottom

How precious things
like the yodel in the fabric where the warbler’s gone

No imagination but in your tiny, ruptured eyes
which may as well see no thing,
before a brain which cannot count,

behind the inverted cradle of my hands,
which in a moment or two
will dispatch what I forget.

to scare off the boogies.
I’ll try not to say, “Passivity
and abstraction got us here;

language and materialism
probably won’t save us,”
as I bury my head more

deeply in that knocking,
but I probably will say it, or less.
What difference does it take?

studied astronomy but became a teacher
at Roberto Clemente Middle School in Harlem.

One morning he found a rat
dead a few feet from the school’s front steps.

He continues to lack the company
of sympathetic chess partners.

Tonight I have the dream where I tie the tow rope
to the branch of a tree I climb, rope tied to wrist.

I will climb the tree again when I need to climb.