The Suicide, Jorge Luis Borges

There will remain no star in the night.
There will remain no night.
I will die and along with me the total
intolerable universe.
I will erase the pyramids, the medallions,
the continents, the faces.
I will erase the accumulation of the past.
I will pulverize history, I will pulverize dust.
I am looking at the final westward movement.
I am hearing the last bird.
I leave nothing to no one.

Yard, Jorge Luis Borges

With evening,
the two or three colors of the yard grow tired.
The great frankness of the full moon
no longer inspires its habitual firmament.
Yard, in league with sky.
The yard is the slope
down which the sky pours itself into the house.
Serene,
eternity waits in the stars’ crossways.
How grateful to live in the dark friendship
of a vine, a cistern, and a tumbleweed!

What Keeps Me Young

Smoky.
Will-o-the-wisp-
y. I can’t grasp it, though
it’s right there on the tip of my
pecker.

But it’s
OK. I can
be cool. They say one hard
Bible is enough for a home
wrecker.

The salt
cannot lose its
savor—stiff wind blowing,
all perfume-y and musky, from
landward.

How much
does a person

pay for their wardrobe? Light
gray vest and skirt chosen to match
my beard.

Cupid Was Me

To make Cupid a boy
Was the Cupid girl's mocking plan;
For a boy can't interpret the thing
Till he is become a man. Blake

Love still
pursues me like
a memory lost. They
alight here on my left shoulder
and sing.

Love’s song
is sweet, but more,
I’d say, laborious.
They prick me on to battle, but
I can’t.

How do
they have their way?
Three times the mob shouted,
“Caesar, hail!” Number of my sex
organs.
                . . .
Wearing
a tailed white shirt
like a skirt, arms tied at
my side. Taking selfies in the
mirror.

Loving
myself works out.
Never any trouble
finding a cute body to have
sex with.

My eyes
are kind to my
buttocks, belly, my smooth
gams. Beautiful surely only
to me.

My true 
love comes to me
in sleep. They kiss my lips,
crotch, knees. They handle and stroke my
raised feet.

Final Approach to a Letters-of-the-Alphabet Prompt

OK,
go
with Rimbaud.

A seems black
to me too—a cave
with no flashlight in it.

E seeps
like tears through weeping fingers
endlessly.

I is really
A-E—
a black, tarry sea.

O is a ho-
wling mouth painted red—
Olivier’s Othello.

U is a blue,

without one cloud,
that’ll swallow you!

Watching My Breath (Yo. Cut it.)

Not a whoosh. Surprisingly
fast—why? I shouldn’t
be out of breath.

The breaths come, unformed
by tongue, un-carved by
teeth, each one whistling

in the nose. Combed
into a thousand strands—
harp strings? Locks of hair

hanging over the eyes?
But more like a
sawing, really—vertical grain

of a wood spike
left after the tree
falls. Or just a

wet tree stump. If
there were words, when,
in truth, there are

none, breath would be 

like in that song:
Choking on the splinters.

Two Step

Sauvez mon âme,
Priez pour moi,
Je suis condamné
Aux flammes d’enfer.

Start on left foot, I’m the gent,

four mile portage, hay foot, straw,
me and Lindsey in a groove,
belly bringing feet along,
trembling bowl of jello cubes,
floating in our basket frame,
giving each other our weight.

One and one and two and two
If there were stanzas, how long
would the lines be? Maybe each
the same. A scamper of some
kind. Left sliding out a bit.
Right sliding between her feet.
Can’t remember the pattern.

A lot of the sky has clouds
in it. Unless it’s just foam.
State Fair dress-up—Monique, pink
morning glory trumpet dress.
Me nothing but my fox hat.
There’s the Miracle of Birth,
in the circle of our feet.

Brandy and Tom teach old time
to their high-school students. Each
year, a little older. Now
a brown-haired girl I’ve seen here
for years leads the morning jam.
Walsers are in it: Lolo:
What a fiddler he is, damn!

The instant of this writing,
Tom receiving a tune from
a very accomplished young
woman fiddler. Up-bowing
the open G. Willowy
tracings on the E. Fine ice
inscriptions on window glass.

Fiddle me this! We’ll all be
fantastic fiddlers when the
Crackdown comes. Tom starting the
up-beat to the A-part on
a down stroke. “I think it works
out better if you go up.”
There we go!—Tom’s got it now.

So what do you want to do?
Play that part all the way through?
“Up-down,” says the child who wants
to be swept off the floor. Up
stroke catch the adjacent string.
Loose arm in blue sweater sleeve
out of her black nylon vest.

So many by this time taught
to bow up on the off-beat
(catching the adjacent string)
to prepare the strong down bow.
Evolution happening
before my eyes, perhaps soon
wiped clean away in the Flood.

Everything will have to be
invented over again—
like the light-engendered eye,
evolving full four or more
separate times—no worries
we won’t learn it all again.
Beware the backwards right-hand

star!—most right-hand stars spinning
clockwise, let us say (a left-
hand star spins the other way),
but now you’re called on to spin
clockwise while walking backwards,
a sinister disaster
that will rip the star apart.

Start on right foot, I’m the gal,

four-mile portage, straw foot, hay,
me and Lindsey in a groove,belly bringing feet along,
trembling bowl of jello cubes,
floating in our basket frame,
giving each other our weight.

Villanelle: Nothing Will Ever Be the Same

The rain came and the levee broke.
Our little farm to the landfill!
No one sighed and no one spoke.

A character in an orange cloak
tried to rob an empty till.
Then the rain came and the levee broke.

All would vanish at a stroke—
levee, catfish, corn still—
but no one sighed and no one spoke.

Soon nothing but a busted yoke,
the bar moaned like a windmill
til the rain came and the levee broke.

Then didn’t the whole river shake?
trees, rafts, steamboat, knife-kill—
no one left to sigh or speak.

Just me, Huck, and some other folks,

waiting for the next big drill.
No one sighed and no one spoke
when the rain came and the levee broke.

Some level of anxiety,

leaving phone downstairs.
I’m up in the attic with Quinoa after coffee at Cahoots with Mike.
I don’t want to do my Yoga,
but I will.

Spread my stones,
placed my ceramic barefoot woman—
golden ray extending to infinity
from the peak of her blue cap.
Topaz Buddha on their side looking due East by the red toenail.
Quinoa sniffing my knee.
Brother Orzo, sick from a urethral blockage,
shut in the bedroom because brother Teff
is upset and attacks him.

Oh, well. All four gods
within the compass of her feet—
southward-spreading square, all looking South-East,
except for Amethyst Satva on their back and pointing West;
Feldspar Dhamma westmost but sheer East;
new Rose nosing East southerly:
           exploring.

How can we ever stop exploring?
Old men should be explorers!
T. S. Eliot almost discovered the Mississippi—good Missouri boy,
then and in England.
Whatever may be our fate,
ways to avoid a gruesome, brutal end.
Never stop!
even in the gibbet.

A sense of a lack of response.
At a crossroads—
the next two weeks will determine a lot.

Big connection, then shock of absence.
Don’t panic, she won’t leave you.
None of them will leave you.

The Rebuke

Back from the Disabled march. 
Tall hatchet-faced black man in a hoodie approaching six white men by
     a truck. 

“You don’t do nothing but steal from black people. 

“Done it ever since slavery.

"Shut up!" he said.

"I don’t want to hear from no fuckin' honkies!"

They flinching away from his stride.

“Right on, brotha!” I wanted to say.

Jesus would say to us,

“I know you’re scared,
"but all the power belongs to you.
"See how bravely he speaks to you!"

“Shut up!" he said. "I don’t want to hear from no
fucking white robbers!”