Fortune Teller Miracle Fish

Yesterday there was a white plastic envelope

on the dresser. It said: “Fortune Teller Miracle Fish”.
It’s from Taiwan.  I was to put the foil-thin red
plastic fish in the palm of my hand, and the

“movements indicate your fortune.”  My disbelief
is a shored and tufted sand wall by the ocean breakers—
but there are also two lottery tickets in my pocket.
I placed the fish in my left hand.  

The head and tail moved together.  
This means In Love.  Then, it turned
completely over.  False.
And again, again, again.

False, false, false.
It was an accusation.
It’s as if I am Dreyfus, and this fish
will haul me away across the waters.

Portentous fish are not to be trusted.
Not the whale that ate Jonah,
not the sirens in the rocky channels.
Fish survived the flood.

They never rode the ark.
Salvation is foreign to them.
They’re smug, these fish.
Bad luck is a net tossed

into the sea, aiming for one
quarry, but indiscriminate.
I consulted the fish again today,
this time in my right hand.

It jumped into my left,
it really did. Then it curled
up completely. Passionate.
I think of Dreyfus, alone in his cell,

listening to the sirens in the wind.

Black Dogs and Evangelines

 Lying on her back
beneath the old magnolia
that had never grown large,

in view of the eucalyptus flowers
that looked like the dry flies
her father had shown her how
to tie, she seeps into the earth
like warm honey

as sleepy as that

like the last rain of August,
too tired to storm,
mistily lading the air
with sultry resistance;

as sleepy as the old hive
in the corner of the barn
right by the eucalyptus blooms.  

Those are some lazy bees,
she recalled Sam saying.  
She smiled, watching
a bee walk right from the hive

to the nectar,
clumsily tightroping
the red quiver of stamens,
returning home seconds later.  

Never even had to raise a wing.  

Her thoughts rode
the buzzing of those bees,
let its monotone carry her
clear across the yard,
and back to the afternoon

when Sam was digging the garden,
when her father was tying
Royal Coachmen and Green Drakes,
Black Dogs and Evangelines,

their artificial wings
made from tweezed feathers—
beautiful and bent,
bound and still.

Grand Canyon

She wants to visit the Grand Canyon.

From the Colorado, the walls

fold over me. The air becomes 

thick. It turns to stone.

I want to visit Yellowstone, feel

the Earth’s heat press against my feet,

as though I had stopped falling.

She climbs into bed. Open 

the window, she says. I like

to feel the cold air falling over me.

I open the window. The sound

of traffic is like the glowing eyes

of coyotes prying into a meadow 

from the edge of the woods.

I come to bed.

Nothing ever has to die,

I say. I don’t know if she

understands; but before I fall

to sleep, she takes my hand.

Calendar

 There is a clock of birds in New Guinea. 

One song it is time to leave; another,

time to return. There are times of vigilance, 

a clock of terror, a midmorning of some 

catastrophe. The time-keepers have thrown

a rope around the sun. It is evening 

in the tropics. The birds say it is evening, 

as do the calendars of flowers and clocks 

of scent. It is summer because a hammock 

swings like a pendulum: up, interstice—

down and over, interstice (hold, on the brink).

At the brink is the clock of tides, anemones 

on the rocks by Schoolhouse Beach, 

open at these hours, closed at these.

A volcano erupts, and that becomes a calendar. 

I think of Vesuvius and have an image, I know 

this is wrong, of people falling like rain, like 

drunkards who lost track while counting the stars. 

Bouquet

 Eventually it seems right to love the word, little silk-wrapped package 

of this-is-what-this-means-to-me; or pressed between the pages, 

like Aconite or Wild Sweet William, something from the crest 

of the Sierra, something from the crest of your spine, I mean, pressed, 

as I said, between the pale green linen sheets, soft peridot green.  

In the pre-dawn what is crucial is the smoothness of your side, 

the ascending gradients of hip and shoulder.  So many languages: 

the one of flowers, the one of love, the one of dreams; the language 

of row after row of chairs, abundant, shining, empty; the excess 

of trees just outside.   Every word an approximation, little package, 

small blue river pressed between canyon walls.  Flowers, 

I was saying they are like flowers. 

Each vanilla bud in a floral racene opens only once, then falls,  

like god after retiring god before another line springs up.  

Which of these is Eros?  His flower is rose, his mischief, thorn.  

It seems right to love the word, which is a draught 

from the bowl of source, a small song, an absence.  

Say a thing, or be a thing.  This is why the flowers fall one by one, 

each blossoming a transient awakening.  The Old Testament 

god doesn’t know his own name: I am what I am, he says, 

when pressed.  Between us, our daughter (Sweet Dianthus, Busy 

Lizzie, Impatiens), will show at dawn, creating space where there 

was none, and filling it.  You worry that she is late to speak—

but every day she learns three new words,  takes them into her 

little hands and wraps them in the silk of meaning, dismantling 

the thing we have told her is world, one name at a time.

Charleston, 2015

 

The Senator says he can’t imagine 

it was anything but an attack on religion. 

In the way that a shooting in a park 

is an attack against the trees, a shooting 

in the street is rage against pavement 

and passage. Put a starling in a ballet 

slipper, and it will protest the slipper, 

the dance, the port de bras and jetes. 

For the life of me, can anyone imagine 

the translucent reality of the fallen?

It’s so hot the safflower curves, 

angry at the sun. There is a bee 

in the hallway. It tells me the hive 

is dead because God hates honey. 

There is a whirlwind in the marsh. 

The reeds and blackbirds are enemies. 

Bodies are lowered into the ground. 

There must be hatred of the very Earth.

A Slow Promise of Return

The concern is with beginnings, 

as your face has become expanse 

and the zodiacal light is Cheshire 

in its hover, settle, and unapproachability.  

And the cantilever of your ankle, 

close to earth and discretely of its elements.  

I should follow the halo of the rain.  

A drop that parts your face

travels like the memory 

of a lover slowly unzipping 

the unspoken meridian dunes 

of your late August body.  

Your Perseid calls over the midnight canyon;  

the river Eridanus gathers.  

Bow and open  and touch.  

Damp and whisper.  

Riverside trees shudder and conceive.  

The dawn is ice. Daylight falls 

like clouds cut by red-ribboned 

scissors, into a feathering of snow, 

here and there, indiscriminate.   

A freckled scatter.  

A slow promise of return.  

A story told just before sleep.