Aria

Here is where
You can get nowhere
Faster than ever
As you go under
Deeper and deeper

In the fertile smother
Of another acre
Like any other
You can’t peer over
And then another

And everywhere
You veer or hare
There you are
Farther and farther
Afield than before

But on you blunder
In...

Hush thee and sleep, little one, 
     The feathers on thy board sway to and fro; 
The shadows reach far downward in the water 
     The great old owl is waking, day will go. 

Rest thee and fear not, little one, 
     Flitting fireflies come to light you on your way 
To the fair land of dreams, while in the grasses 
     The happy cricket chirps his merry lay. 

Tsa-du-meh watches always o’er her little one, 
     The great owl cannot harm you, slumber on 
’Till the pale light comes shooting from the eastward, 
     And the twitter of the birds says night has gone.

I can remember my father bringing home spruce gum.
He worked in the woods and filled his pockets
with golden chunks of pitch.
For his children
he provided this special sacrament
and we’d gather at this feet, around his legs,
bumping his lunchbox, and his empty thermos rattled inside.
Our skin would stick to Daddy's gluey clothing
and we’d smell like Mumma's Pine Sol.
We had no money for store bought gum
but that’s all right.
The spruce gum
was so close to chewing amber
as though in our mouths we held the eyes of Coyote
and how many other children had fathers
that placed on their innocent, anxious tongue
the blood of tree?

Her skin never wrinkled
And I used to wonder why

Her skin never wrinkled
As every year passed by

Look at Grandma's hands my mom would say
I bet you'd never think of how they stay that way

As she grew older
Her skin remained smooth and...

My doll had an exoskeleton
one could remove like a dress.

Inside, a baby with a ponytail and bow.

That doll had a thorax, it was easy.
You removed half of her,
a kind of leaf,

and there a bodied thing inside,
still in the process of...

The place has carved out my sleep. I walk it every night.

On moving here, there were old sounds,
sputtering meter at the end of a cab ride,

or the back of the ferry, its engine like the
low-end keys of a baby grand,

like...

Between Hanoi and Sapa there are clean slabs of rice fields
and no two brick houses in a row.

I mean, no three—
See, counting’s hard in half-sleep, and the rain pulls a sheet

over the sugar palms and their untroubled leaves.
Hours ago, I...

There’s a slim enough chance
we’re edging our last century.
On its brink I sit or I think it.
Snow, white itself, whites itself
out and us along the way.
Words of no gravity kept floating
into water where a future perched
a comma between brackets
of waves:...

Every door stands an open door:
our human settlements all temporary.

We share together the incidental shore
and teach the young to tend the lamp's wick,

weary of anyone small enough to bar our entry.