Thousand: Eight Hundred Fifty-Seven

under the kleig lights, below the box seats. The flies don’t buzz. The butterflies don’t flutter. The snakes don’t slither. The bodies don’t lie. If I had a hammer for all the blows. If I had a bell for all the rings. If I had a song to pull out of the throat and spread across an absorbent cloth. Let us go there together, angels. Let us get together our things, pack them into the hollows in our dreams, and carry them on our upright skulls to the land beyond beyond, the world past hope and change. Oh angels, aren’t

Thousand: Eight Hundred Fifty-Six

a body to eat? Give me hand after hand under several skies above. Body doubles. Oh body, triple! The bachelor’s kneepad, the spinster’s nosegay, the beggar’s parts lined up along an ox path. Brilliant anniversary fireworks in a night full of ear hairs and unbroken strands of mucus. Walking on fingertips over embers, indulging the nostalgia of the flaccid buttocks, the roving eye in the bow of the whaler, another factory of testicles, the blue vein bending prettily toward justice, a light uterus among grave candles. The fanbase of the elbow roominghouse. Fat bodies, yellow and glistening, their farewell tour

Thousand: Eight Hundred Fifty-Five

ax end tax one fun unmatched by the brash text, a pass protected. A new next done west full to ticks patched unpatterned. Your solid winter rented but recanted, a new uncentering of the bruised beast. Whence. The new dance sentenced to the last. I take I take I tenderize mine. I thou he a wheedled fever compare to seed. Suck. Nervous works. A side while minor sneaks up barter forth gingerly wits compere luts whulk num estung shen dinster puc. Tiss. Hold my hand. A body lies over the ocean. What head rolls alone over the tundra, looking for

Thousand: Eight Hundred Fifty-Four

and the cars, giant monsters, rumble and growl, their two great eyes white and violent, one continuous plume pouring white out of each ass, watching you pass before them, pass crying, pass living, pass and leave them without looking back. A hand. A broken record. Three sheaves. A leaf of the long pattern. Two friends. A mild winter again recorded and dissected in two oblations, the fine motor skills of the vengeance preparation. A news. Compacted entrance. Two thieves, a fine weather captured and carried over. Thunks I would I’d had a had hide a bat a bat a badger

Thousand: Eight Hundred Fifty-Three

feeling the drone deep in your head. There are many of you. There is but one. There are people packing a house, waiting to surprise you. There is a surveyed plot and eternal care reserved for it. There is an empty city, its people having fled from you. The ground is coming up to meet you. The winds tip the mast and you hurry to swing the ship around. Night has filled your cup and you will drink it to the dregs. A woman takes your hand and leads you under a light red as the apple A is for,

Thousand: Eight Hundred Fifty-Two

park under a medlar tree. You are standing in a field of corn. You are standing on a road of cracked clay beside a saguaro. You are standing in a dim hall, an open door pouring light onto the worn linoleum of the hall. You are standing before a pyramid. You are standing deep in a crater. You are standing on the grass of a center divider, cars whooshing by in both directions. You are standing on the skull of an elephant. You are standing on the polished marble of a monument. You are standing under a swarm of bees,

Thousand: Eight Hundred Fifty-One

lay deep in darkness, your new friend found you anyway. Remember to breathe. You open your eyes, having not noticed they were closed, for all the time your eyes were closed you saw, you saw so much. I see, you say, amused at recognizing this amazing power. The world is empty, is silent, the city having crept away while your eyes looked elsewhere, the bodies having raised themselves and returned to the proper business of bodies, going up and down and moving in and out. Your flower cart, too, has sung itself to another place. You are standing in a

Thousand: Eight Hundred Fifty

to hole up, seeking to know how deep you go, and finding there the metaphorical apple on its ultimate branch, the apple no one got to, the apple no one could get to, despite wanting to reach it, despite reaching for it, wanting to smell, wanting to hold it to the mouth, wanting to bite and eat. You open your mouth and your body lets out this ghost, so familiar and new, this fellow traveler, best friend. First friend waiting for you in the world you were squeezed out to. If the room was burning with lamps, if the room

Thousand: Eight Hundred Forty-Nine

ruffler of breast feathers, in dust dancing, over pond skimming, through keyhole whistling, and lazily among sweating grapes lolling and heavy. Ah, air redolent of history, despite battles and burning houses, how persistent is the innocence of lilacs, of the infant’s downy nape, how honest the stink of grease under your lover’s nails after the motorcycle broke down on a back road between Barstow and Ensenada and she took it apart and put it back together and when it started up it purred. You hold onto this breath, hold it as deep inside your body as it has allowed itself

Thousand: Eight Hundred Forty-Eight

gives way to what’s really best. Et voila! You’ve talked it out. Relief! Can’t you feel it? The world is grateful already. Yet you’ve not even gone to the phone. That time will come. That time will come and then. Then! You fire up your butane lighter and apply the well-shaped flame to the far end of the cigarette, and the grace of breath once again comes through for you, a long path it’s taken and in all sorts of uncertain atmospheres, the winds and the whirlwinds, chinook and santa ana, Caesar’s last words and Mary’s first, filler of sail,

Thousand: Eight Hundred Forty-Seven

laid out in lovely geometric patterns that, at the interstices, would provide the solutions to all the world’s simplest problems, the world’s simplest problems being, of course, the world’s most difficult and intractable problems as, when two simple problems cross paths, they knot, and, though each was individually ever so simple to fix, that knot is an unapproachable tangle that captures and magnifies fear and despair. Best not to look at it. However, come the simple equations that, when solved so that the solution of one releases the tension of the next, the snarl relaxes, thread releases thread and knots

Thousand: Eight Hundred Forty-Six

really know what you’re talking about! I will see to it right away. You know, now that you lay out the argument against them, it seems to me those awful sirens have never been much use. It’s like those car alarms that go off whenever there’s a change in humidity. You get so you hope someone really is stealing that darn thing, you’re so sick of the noise. At least then it would stop. Right? Yeah, yeah, you say, happy to be agreeing. You and the lady share a good laugh. Why, I bet there are arguments that could be

Thousand: Eight Hundred Forty-Five

You could. You could maybe. You could maybe talk to them, these idiots sprawled every which way. You could maybe talk them into getting out of the path. You feel all giddy at this sociable, reasonable thought. After you deal with the bodies, you’ll have to put in a call to the civil defense obsessives who are cranking those air raid sirens. C’mon now, you imagine yourself saying. Everybody knows you’re excited. Everybody knows what you’re excited about. The noise is just a piling on. Could you cool it? In your imagination the lady who answers the phone says, You

Thought: Eight Hundred Forty-Four

enough and everything enough is also sufficient and complete. Not a bad feeling. You wonder if it might present an obstacle to pushing daisies, roses, phlox, and poppies. They are singing quite nicely now. The people flopped about on the streets are groaning, mumbling, and making a nuisance of themselves about the way they were when you found them more irritating. Sure you’ve achieved a fine equanimity but there’s still the grunt work of shoving the cart over the bodies, and that’s going to have your muscles sore before you’re half down the block. Then you have a crazy thought.

Thousand: Eight Hundred Forty-Three

Into the body it comes, wiggling breathy fingers, hand under hand down the tree of your lungs, perching on a thousand tiny twigs at once, shivering to the rhythm of the waters, shaking, shaking from its fists the particulates it bore in from that cigarette, from that torch. Are you feeling lightened? Enlightened? Raised like a leaf before the sun? Feeling the bird in your cage, singing all the loneliness of the world away? Feeling bikini’d love’s come kicking into the dark shallows of some old despond? Like there are worlds enough and time enough and shoes enough and bees

Thousand: Eight Hundred Forty-Two

a soda named after a common fruit but which is spelled out on the can in letters from another planet. Gawd! Zombies! As if! Next I’ll be attacked by vampires, you say to yourself. Or aliens. Aren’t we done with all that shit? You tap ash off the end of your amazing extra-sensory cigarette and put it once more to your mouth. Through the cigarette your breath seeks you out. It carries several dimensions wound like strings around trembling, searching fingers. These dimensions indicate things that are so important your breath hopes to forestall their disappearance into the memory hole.

Thousand: Eight Hundred Forty-One

bar of your pushcart than your flowers would lose their rhythm and require a good rap from a baton, a stern shake of the head, a demonstrative clapping of hands to get them back in sync, to get their leaves clapping like hands only really quiet; then you had to make a snacks and juice run. Things could have gotten off to a better start. And now? Alarms are going off all over the city, pigeons are dropping like bombs, butterflies are shooting through the air like shrapnel, popcorn is falling into the mouths of zombies, and. You pop open

Thousand: Eight Hundred Forty

got you the combustibles swore by their action, said they made him horny, warped his reality, tripped him up and left him for the godhead, entered by his doors of perception and blew out the windows of his soul, and now, two tokes in, you’re still sure he was basically full of shit. But whatever. Nice buzz, you know. It softens the screaming of the bodies strewn all about their streets, makes their nerve-wracking howls less nervy and more wacky. I mean, who knew you were going to go to work today and no sooner would you get behind the

Thousand: Eight Hundred Thirty-Nine

of silver berries. In her dim house she chops and strips, presses and knots, mashes and folds her gatherings, hanging some out to dry from the rafters of the porch, bundling some to mold in ceramic pots in the cellar, laying some on racks to smoke at the hearth, boiling some in a black kettle hung by a hook over the coals, wearing some for several days under her clothes, masticating a few and spitting those into brass bowls for weeks of fermentation. Stuff like that. It’s all very involved. You don’t know what you’re smoking. Anyway, the friend who

Thousand: Eight Hundred Thirty-Eight

can be combed and cared for and set free in its turn. You light a cigarette. There might be some tobacco in it; if so, it’s low in the mix. What else could there be? The expert crafter of aromatic reality-warping herbs lives just down the less used fork in the road to the sacred mountain. She wanders the woods each morning, the sun’s rays just beginning to tickle the mists, and plucks new buds from the dew-drenched bush, seed pods from a scrawny shrub, fleshy fruiting bodies from the black leaf litter and from the strangling vines the tiniest

Thousand: Eight Hundred Thirty-Seven

are all standing up, belting out show tunes, every one in fine voice. They’re not all singing the same song but what they do goes together well enough. Like the dawn chorus in a rain forest. It’s loud but everybody’s singing tones you can hear if you listen, not one completely erasing another, even the smallest of the pipes needling through, drawing its own color along, discrete stitches in a dizzyingly wrought tapestry. There, if you let yourself really look. Let the ear open, let what falls in be combed and cared for and set free, so what comes next

Thousand: Eight Hundred Thirty-Six

groaning, their mouths working, their arms trembling. You try to get your pushcart through, have to bump over some limbs. “Watch the head!” somebody cries and, grimly, you lower your head and put your weight into the bar. “Whoops!” “Ow!” Then the scream and more screams. You get through that patch and sit down to fan yourself. Should you check the tires for bone fragments? Teeth? Such a thought! You check the tires. No bone fragments, no teeth. No blood. You’ve gotten through this before. It’s all a game, then, isn’t it? You check your cargo of flowers. The blossoms

Thousand: Eight Hundred Thirty-Five

deep is your knock? Fox knocks the box of clocks off its blocks. He took a knock, he took another knock, the knocks kept coming, and he kept putting them away. What are you going to do? Knock all night? Knock out the knight? Sleep under a rain of blows? Knock off early, all the while humming blues riffs, the fog gathering under street lamps like homeless auras? Nobody knows, nobody knows the trouble I’ve knocked over and left stunned in the street. Then there are the bodies volunteering as detritus, tangled and tumbled on the walk, some mumbling, some

Thousand: Eight Hundred Thirty-Four

sincere reaction. There’s a knock at the door. This knock could be the one that changes everything. Knock knock. Who’s there? Knock knock. Who’s there? Knock knock. Who the fuck is there already! Knocks? Us! Help me, help me, help me, he said, knocking at my door. A representative from the School, the School of Hard Knocks, of course. Knock softly and carry the big knockers. He who knocks worst knocks weinerest! We who are about to knock, salute you! Knocked up, knocked down, knocked around town, and for what? All for love. All for ever-luvin’ LOVE! Knock knock. How

Thousand: Eight Hundred Thirty-Three

the boat and knocks me out of the boat. And what did my dearest beloved sister do? Let me drown? Hahaha ho ho! Not this fine specimen of amazing wonderfulness. Without a thought for herself Emily the Great the Amazing flung her body into the icy water and dragged me kicking and spluttering, blue and shivering from that cold cold water which would have been my grave.” Emily takes a long drink from her glass, puts it down and flashes her sister a gummy grin. Eula reaches for her own glass, fills her mouth, and displays her involuntary but wholly

Thousand: Eight Hundred Thirty-Two

goes on, “and then you’ll say, That’s Emily, the greatest sister ever, did you hear how she saved me from drowning? She jumped in the water, ice cold water, it was just beside the glacier, you know how they drop big chunks in the sea, and I was so stupid like usual, leaning over the railing of the sightseeing boat, leaning way out, going Wow! and Emily, everything’s so big and white! And tall! And cold! when a big chunk breaks off the glacier and POW! the big wave from when the ice hits the water goes spwoosh! all over

Thousand: Eight Hundred Thirty-One

like nice people do, even if they don't care because if you don't it's like you're just mean." Emily dips a spoon into the sugar and one, two, three, four, five heaping measures drop into the bottom of a tall glass. She pours the lemonade to the rim and stirs, the silver spoon clinking against the sides, the lemonade slopping a little over the top. Eula hisses and pulls her journal away. "Who says you're not mean." Emily keeps stirring and the lemonade drips down the side of the glass. "One day I'll save you from drowning or something," Emily

Thousand: Eight Hundred Thirty

say Yes Yes, I am so proud of her, she paid for every flying lesson all by herself, I didn't contribute a cent because I am very poor. And the lady will pat Mother on the arm and say, Oh you poor dear, but what an amazing daughter you have! She is a real credit to you." "Writing in your diary again?" Emily asks, coming into the kitchen and going right for the sugar bowl. Eula puts her hand over the page. "What do you care?" "I didn't say I cared," Emily returns. "I was just making conversation. You know,

Thousand: Eight Hundred Twenty-Nine

want it sweet and Emily always puts in five heaping teaspoons. Yuck!” Eula takes another sip, puckers up, puts the glass down and glares at it. “Mother says if I want flying lessons I will have to get a job and pay for them myself. See if I let her in my F-16! She can come to the air show, though. I’ll waggle my wings over head and she’ll say, There’s my girl! and she’ll nudge the lady next to her and say, That’s my Eula! and the lady will say, Oh you must be so proud! and Mother will

Thousand: Eight Hundred Twenty-Eight

first thing she writes is the date. She looks up at the calendar hanging by the refrigerator, squints. “I guess that’s right,” she says. “Not that it matters.” She writes alongside the date the word sigh and by that a circle, filling the circle in with the most basic face, two dots for eyes, a straight line for an indifferent mouth. “I am drinking the most terrible lemonade,” Eula writes and fills in the O of lemonade with two dots and a squiggly line, the mouth clearly expressing (at best) mixed emotions. “Mother says there’s the sugar jar if you

Thousand: Eight Hundred Twenty-Seven

grades on tests, snits with supposed friends, crushes (mostly faked), complaints about her sister and mother, and other stuff she can’t believe she thought could ever be interesting to anybody, even her ancient self pining for those glory days of yore. Eula bites the pen which, truthfully, exhibits evidence of having so been used before. This time it’s just a holding action, as though the pen would mosey on in no particular direction if not gently but firmly restrained. She puts down the pen and sips the lemonade, makes a face, picks up the pen and. And. She writes. The