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Yesterday on the dunes he felt
hollow, dark. He drew up
the hand of an old love.
Her fingers were long and brown.
He could make songs with them
in the warm light off the lake.
He used her fingers to sing, call
for rain next day on the dunes.

It will be a Saturday when all the soldiers
drop their guns and knives and wave
the battlefields away, leaving them
to the croaks of birds and creaky leather
and the somewhat confused spirits of the dead
who hear the moon scream at their backs
and the anger of those with nothing better
to do than skin with their thumbnails
the images of men and women in magazines
and dusty books where bad ideas
accumulate like spores on old wallpaper.

The soldiers walk away with all the war
poems ever written and to be written
etched on little stones in their stomachs.

Sunday the leaders land in their ships
to bring reason and their religions here
and to bawl out the generals for making
this chaos of cattle prints in the sand.
Soon the air moves and the sand scratches
their glasses and grits the corners of their eyes.
They drink cool water and check their schedules
and ask the whereabouts of their children.

Monday will hear uncertain sounds in the spaces
between the sprinkle drops as the leaders wonder
at the strange shadows they make in the drying dust
when the clouds break and they thumb through their scripts
in search of phrasings older maybe than Sanskrit
or puppetry or grave digging. That one in a black suit
carves an arc with the tip of a shoe.
Another wipes his pink neck and says he could
eat a hot dog or a puffin or an octopus.

On Tuesday one of them remembers the day of enticement.
He remembers falling on the ice.
He remembers how his mother smiled and danced
through a crack in the door late at night
when he should have been sleeping.
Another wants to run to a boat and fish.
A woman tosses a wand into the circle.
In comes a fish fin, a bottle cap, a tarnished spoon.
A man plucks out his eye and eats it like an egg.
A woman says that’s a pretty good trick.

Wednesday a man crosses the circle and slashes
at a woman’s jaw and the blood that comes
makes everyone crazy for finger painting
and they remember the beauty of open wounds
which is the same feeling in all the languages
of the world. After some time only five remain,
three men and two woman who watch each other
from the perimeter like alligators.

On Thursday a man chips blood from his tongue
and clears his throat and dons the robes of an orator.
He deplores the image of heathens, supporting his concoctions
with words that look like stinkhorn, and then jade stones
and pigeon livers scattered among the flakes
of the moon, and he reads their shapes
as proof of the truth of his positions.
A woman says that’s a pretty good trick.

On Friday they see mammoths crossing the white dunes.
Black birds appear on foot out of the shadows.
The rivers pour slowly into the sea.
One claims his mother’s face in a stone.
Another says he’ll drink his own tears.
Journalists are repeatedly typing one word.

On Saturday the soldiers return to find the five
with their jaws gnawing on ankles and wrists,
as if attempting escape or crude leeching.
Look at them, the soldiers say.
How have we got along without them?
How will we ever learn to paint wonders again?

When his mother died he saw
frogs on the window sill

The smell of old love followed him
through the hallway to a bright door

where a girl stood behind the screen
with day lilies bursting from her hands

His father was with the doctor
asking questions about the speed of light

Years later he passed a cardboard box
filled to the top with snow, the mouth

of a boot sticking out like the hole
of a cannon on a ship emerging

from the cold mists of the north
or someone shouting for the children

to come in for the night who dash like birds
through the gardens in midsummer

His father still calls and in a quiet voice
asks after the light and all that space

it leaves behind on its journey
to the empty edge of sound and touch

Out of dreams now a woman steps into a dawn
where blue shapes cut the sky into outlines
of leaf and branch, yesterday’s whispers
marbling the shadows where they’ll

dry, bake, and disperse with the sunrise.
She had shed names over the years. They fell
away from her like notes spoken into deep places
where echoes return stranger than their
origins, dripping with the liquids of alien
languages, licked by distant tongues.

Her father’s disassembled first, lost letter
by letter and sound by sound through the weave
of pages, or slipping through the grills of storm
drains in streets she found empty and dry

with promises bundled into tumbleweeds
wandering the intersections and crowding
at the feet of buildings where taggers have joined
themselves to the bricks in black and red
and orange, naming otherness with empty
calligraphy and charms shaped like knives.

Out of dreams now she feels the pull
of the sky in the cool light, the gravity
of names, the potency of heat in the west.
She raises a finger and writes (to test) a name

and then another, writing on a canvass shapes
never before spun by human finger or spoken
with human tongue. She caught a spot of the sudden
sun and a few strings of wind to mix the light with,
and the names matured into rings, petals, song,
two new galaxies turning in the air above the world.

What is white but black bursting
over a warm July lake in the eyes of woman

remembering how her mother
hung her sneakers

on the line to dry
in the sun by the laces

The memory is flat until the wings of a swallowtail
turn around the sole and open and close its wings

and then the memory is round and she bends
and touches her fingers to the water

like a butterfly touches its wing tips
to a blue the sky paints with clouds

and watches the black urge white
to life in steady bursts under the ripples

At the gate to What Might Be, the green tiger
knows better than to cross. He’s been followed
by a rat who carries a stick and a bandanna
in which wrapped and tied and hung he keeps
a can of mushrooms, olives, and radish.

The green tiger lays at the threshold. He beads
his eyes south and watches the smoking horizon
of what What Never Should where Squirrel Speaking
English rolls under a rock. The tiger’s whiskers bend
high to Land of Whatever is Possible.

There, where light is like an sleeping eyeball, a herd of red deer
watches upwind as the stars carouse like the bottoms
of celestial fox feet and Now with silver eyes and horns
grins East, West, and sniggers with the memory of Ovid
as he’s moments away from writing Apollo’s lovelessness.

With a huff, the green tiger rises with the flexion
of Yes stung by a bee in his shoulders. The rat thinks,
“I better get back and protect my friend because I know
what the tiger’s thinking. He’ll find her, rip through
to her heart, and out of her chest will grow a stone

round like the Land of Whatever is Possible,
where birds turn red in the heated mist of the sun.”

I know a man who fell through the ice
and was taken downstream a quarter mile
before he found a crack back to the surface.

He told me that as he felt he would die
he watched children play under hot suns,
his hands buffing the slick underside of the cold,

bubbles blubbing about his ears and helpless nose.
He figured their voices would be muffled
underwater. But no, he said, they came to him

clear as High Definition, as if the silver bubbles
contained then released those voices
in airlessness cold and blue and reminiscent.

He saw a wife folding clothes, holding a frog
to the yellow-haired dog, and lifting it out
of reach with a laugh when the dog tried to bite.

He saw fresh lightning strike poles, a brother home
from war. The brother chewed a worm in the back
yard just to show how relieved he was to be alive.

Wearing loafers on dry mornings with the paper,
a father waving goodbye, a cat at a barn door
licking its paw, pausing, passing back into the hay

inside like a brush tip mixing orange with straw.
The funny thing, the icefriend said, was that none
of these things he’d ever before experienced.

He had no brother, no wife who’d held frogs,
and certainly had no love for keeping cats or barns.
So, after chancing out from under the ice, freezing

but alive on the slippery bank under frail clouds,
he no longer knew himself, so he hurried
to town, changed his name, sold his goods,

and set out on a journey to find a wife, a yellow dog,
creeks nearby for the rearing of frogs, playscapes
for children, and friends for the sharing of stories.