IN YOUR HONOR

In your honor, a man presents a sea bass
tied to a black-lacquered dish by green-spun seaweed.

"Ah” is heard throughout the room:
you are unsure what is about to happen.

You might look through a telescope at the full
bright moon against deep black space,

see from the Bay of Dew to the Sea of Nectar,
but, no, this beauty of naming is a subterfuge.

What are the thoughts of hunters driving
home on a Sunday afternoon empty-handed?

Their conception of honor may coincide
with your conception of cruelty? The slant

of light as sun declines is a knife
separating will and act into infinitely thin
	
and lucid slices. You look at the sea bass’s eye,
clear and luminous. The gills appear to move

ever so slightly. The sea bass smells
of dream, but this is no dream. “Ah,

such delicacy” is heard throughout the room,
and the sea bass suddenly flaps. It

bleeds and flaps, bleeds and flaps as
the host slices slice after slice of glistening sashimi.



The Great White Shark

For days he has dumped a trail of tuna blood
into the ocean so that a great white shark

might be lured, so that we might touch its fin.
The power of the primitive is parallactic:

in a museum exhibit, a chacmool appears as elegant
and sophisticated sculpture, as art, but

witness the priest rip the still-beating heart
out of the blue victim’s body and place it

pulsing on a chacmool and we are ready to vomit.
We think the use of a beryllium gyroscope

marks technological superiority, but the urge
of ideologies then and now makes revenge inexorable.
	
The urge to skydive, rappel, white-water kayak
is the urge to release, the urge to die.

Diamond and graphite may be allotropic forms
of carbon, but what are the allotropic forms

of ritual and desire? The moon shining on black water,
yellow forsythia blossoming in the April night,

red maple leaves dropping in silence in October:
the seasons are not yet human forms of desire.



X AND O

Someone flips a lit match off the road
near a cluster of cattails, takes
another swig of beer, presses on the gas;
the match is not specifically aimed
at you: you just happen to be there--
at a stop sign, in a parking lot,
on a ferry, at a terminal; as a lens
narrows sunlight to a point which blackens
into flame, go ahead, zero in, try
to x out a ball of jasmine sprig
that unfurls in boiling water, x out
a red-tailed hawk shifting on a cottonwood
branch at dusk, x out coyotes yipping
as they roam by new moonlight up the road,
x out the dissolving suture threads
in your mouth, x out a dog’s bark,
a baby magpie fallen from a nest
wandering on gravel, x out a flicker
feather in the mud; you can’t x out
diarrhea, x out a barn erupted into flames,
x out firefighters lined up in trucks
along Russian olives, x out the charred
grass and stubs of fence posts, x out
a pang, place of birth or time of death,
x out, at an intersection of abscissa
and ordinate, dark matter that warps
space and time; you can’t x out a cloud,
so make a lens of it the next time
you chop cilantro at a counter, the next
time you push through a turnstile.					



SYZYGY

I notice headlights out the living room window
then catch the bass in a pickup as it drives by.
I am shocked to learn that doctors collected
the urine of menopausal nuns in Italy to extract
gonadotropins. And is that what one draws,
in infinitesimal dose, out of a vial?
I remember a steel wool splinter in my finger
and how difficult it was to discern, extract
under a magnifying glass; yet—blue mold,
apple dropping from branch—it is hard to see
up close when, at the periphery, the unexpected
easily catches the eye. Last Thursday night,
we looked through binoculars at the full moon,
watched it darken and darken until, eclipsed,
it glowed ferrous-red. By firelight, we glowed;
my fingertips flared when I rubbed your shoulders,
softly bit your ear. The mind is a tuning fork
that we strike, and, struck, in the syzygy
of a moment, we find the skewed, tangled
passions of a day begin to straighten, align, hum.



Looking Back on the Muckleshoot Reservation 
from Galisteo Street, Santa Fe

The bow of a Muckleshoot canoe, blessed 
with eagle feather and sprig of yellow cedar, 
is launched into a bay. A girl watches 
her mother fry venison slabs on a skillet—	
drops of blood sizzle, evaporate. Because
a neighbor feeds them, they eat wordlessly;
the silence breaks when she occasionally 
gags, reaches into her throat, pulls out hair.
Gone is the father, riled, arguing with his boss, 
who drove to the shooting range after work;
gone the accountant who embezzled funds, 
displayed a pickup, and proclaimed a winning
flush at the casino. You donate chicken soup
and clothes but never learn if they arrive 
at the south end of the city. Your small 
acts are sandpiper tracks in wet sand.
Newspapers, plastic containers, beer bottles
fill the bins along this sloping one-way street.



Pig’s Heaven Inn

Red chiles in a tilted basket catch sunlight—
we walk past a pile of burning mulberry leaves 
into Xidi village, enter a courtyard, notice
an inkstone, engraved with calligraphy, filled 
with water and cassia petals, smell Ming 
dynasty redwood panels. As a musician lifts 
a small xun to his mouth and blows, I see kiwis 
hanging from branches above a moon doorway:
a grandmother, once the youngest concubine, 
propped in a chair with bandages around 
her knees, complains of incessant pain; 
someone spits in the street. As a second
musician plucks strings on a zither, pomelos 
blacken on branches; a woman peels chestnuts;
two men in a flat-bottomed boat gather 
duckweed out of a river. The notes splash, 
silvery, onto cobblestone, and my fingers 
suddenly ache: during the Cultural Revolution, 
my aunt’s husband leapt out of a third-story 
window; at dawn I mistook the cries of
birds for rain. When the musicians pause, 
Yellow Mountain pines sway near Bright 
Summit Peak; a pig scuffles behind an enclosure; 
someone blows their nose. Traces of the past
are wisps of mulberry smoke rising above 
roof tiles; and before we too vanish, we hike 
to where three trails converge: hundreds 
of people are stopped ahead of us, hundreds 
come up behind: we form  a rivulet of people 
funneling down through a chasm in the granite.