Vol. 8, No. 2 Contents

We were driving along the road from Treguier to Kervanda. We passed at a smart trot between the hedges topping an earth wall on each side of the road; then at the foot of the steep ascent before Ploumar the horse dropped into a walk, and the driver jumped down heavily from the box. He flicked his whip and climbed the incline, stepping clumsily uphill by the side of the carriage, one hand on the footboard, his eyes on the ground. After a while he lifted his head, pointed up the road with the end of the whip, and said—

"The idiot!"

Pointer lay on the couch, fifty-eight pounds of eleven-year-old black lab mix with curly hair. She lay with her chin between her paws just like when she was sleeping, but I knew right away she wasn't sleeping.

"Hey, Pointer, kiddo," I said anyway. "Too hot to get up this morning?"

Pointer weighed seventy pounds just a couple of months earlier, but pancreatic cancer pared her down pretty fast. I hadn't really thought she'd be gone this soon, though. I picked her up off the couch and she didn't feel like Pointer, just like a big heavy sack of cooked oatmeal. I laid her down on the rag rug next to the coffee table.

Other mothers swim in the pool with their children, many of the mothers older. The sun puts a glisten on the ends of their hair. Their bodies underwater look unearthly. The woman in the lane next to me has wide shoulders like my grandmother.

We wrap our children in towels the same way: so that their bodies are swallowed warm with them. We hector them about sunscreen.

When I swim and I am entirely alone with my thoughts, my children only pass through my mind as topics.

I think today when my daughter and son lay together on the bed sleeping. His lanky body next to her curve. Is that not a poem?

Suppose the night tasted like sugar and the streetlamps chimed the hour, would Flemish and French slang still matter? I was a little in love with you. The man scouring the Sunday market for vintage postcards. The child wailing after a drifting balloon. You made me forget how to count. But we danced flawlessly, our shadows spreading on the Belgian cobbles where tiny grasses grow in between.

Dear Jalapeno,

Dear Skeleton,

Dear Delight,

Dear Landslide—

This is the price

of a punch card

culture. Rip a few

mascots for the

bus ride over.

Dear Jalapeno,

Dear Vagrant,

The trees are making

fools of themselves.

I'm making faces

at the greedy river.

The sky spits

at us in our tiny

white hats.

Dear Outlet,

Dear Honored Guest,

Mounded inside

in fits and starts.

Dear Plaque,

Dear Meatball,

Dear Attack—

The deer come out in the evening.

God bless them for not judging me,

I'm drunk. I stand on the porch in my bathrobe

and make strange noises at them—

                        language,

if language can be a kind of crying.

Here's what I'm trying to say: The deer coming toward us through the dark

      and we're unable to see them

The car passing over the bridge into the maw of the city like a willing moth

      suddenly wrapped in fire

what keeps you up all night

listening to the neighbor

call his cats in: oh the animals

we might choose to save, put them

on a polystyrene ark to Mars: what

we start that finishes us: the seventy-

four degree day in December: …

Your own body, broken into so many times, became a clear lake

for her to bathe in. Remember pulling the one tiny, suckering

leech from below her neck, the pale collarbone Braille it left.

The poem about the sea

      speaks in braille

blue translated twice.

Sun wet light salt waves etc.

Last week, as you rode your bike home in rain

after cheating with a girl with hair the colors of hell,

you texted you'd been hit by spiritual lightning.

I want to be hit by spiritual lightning!

All evening I stood out on yellowed lawn

chanting in trimeter, holding a matched set of forks.

Which one did you lose? Point to the black

cavern, sucked empty by the cell in need

of bones. And what else

did she thieve of skin stretched like loose

linen, and blood

turned water?

When I come, called, to the smallish

skylight, where a hornet huddles

in a cedar corner, trapped

by a metal sieve, wind entering

and leaving him, it is

a rough courtship.

Mine, as whom washed from spot of childbed taint

  Purification in the Old Law did save,

  And such as yet once more I trust to have

Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint,

Came vested all in white, pure as her mind.

I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs

   By the known rules of ancient liberty,

   When straight a barbarous noise environs me

   Of owls and cuckoos, asses, apes, and dogs …

Cyriack, this three years' day these eyes, though clear,

   To outward view, of blemish or of spot,

   Bereft of light, their seeing have forgot;

   Nor to their idle orbs doth sight appear

Of sun, or moon, or star, throughout the year,

   Or man, or woman.

When I consider how my light is spent,

  Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,

  And that one talent which is death to hide

Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent

To serve therewith my Maker, and present

  My true account, lest He returning chide;