Bitsui - Flood Song

Copper Canyon Press encourages you to calibrate your settings by using the line of characters below, which optimizes the line length and character size: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Pellentesque euismod magna ac diam dignissim condimentum. Proin sed eros nec mi aliq Please take the time to adjust the size of the text on your viewer so that the line of characters above appears on one line, if possible. When this text appears on one line on your device, the resulting settings will most accurately reproduce the layout of the text on the page and the line length intended by the author. Viewing the title at a higher than optimal text size or on a device too small to accommodate the lines in the text will cause the reading experience to be altered considerably; single lines of some poems will be displayed as multiple lines of text. Thank you. Thank you.

We hope you enjoy these poems. This e-book edition was created through a special grant provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. Copper Canyon Press would like to thank Constellation Digital Services for their partnership in making this e-book possible. for my parents, James and Earlene N ho kos, n ho kos, n ho kos REX LEE JIM Table of Contents

ttttttt I bite my eyes shut between these songs. They are the sounds of blackened insect husks folded over elk teeth in a tin can, they are gull wings fattening on cold air flapping in a paper sack on the chlorine-stained floor. They curl in corners, spiked and black-thatched, stomp across the living-room ceiling, pull our hair one strand at a time from electric sockets and paint our stems with sand in the kitchen sink.

They speak a double helix, zigzag a tree trunk, bark the tips of its leaves with cracked amber they plant whispers where shouts incinerate into hisses. Stepping through the drums vibration, I hear gasoline trickle alongside the fenced-in panorama of the reed we climb in from and slide my hands into shoes of ocean water. I step onto the gravel path of swans paved across lake scent, wrap this blank page around the exclamation point slammed between us. The storm lying outside its fetal shell folds back its antelope ears and hears its heart pounding through powdery earth underneath dancers flecking dust from their ankles to thunder into rain. I am unable to pry my fingers from the ax, unable to utter a word without Grandfathers accent rippling around the stone flung into his thinning mattress. Years before, he would have named this season by flattening a field where grasshoppers jumped into black smoke.

A crow snaps beak over and over again: the past is a blurry splotch of red crosshatched with neon light; on the drive south, windows pushed down, you scoop pellets of canned air and ocean across sand dunes, across the waning lick of moonlight on the dashboard to crease the horizon between petals of carved snow. Bluebirds chirp icy rocks from their stomachs and crash, wings caked heavy with the dark mud of a gunmetal sky, to the earths bandages shivering with cold spells and convulsions in the market underneath an avalanche of apples. A redtail hawk scrapes the sandstone wall with its beak. A shower of sparks skate across the morning sky. You think this bottle will open a canyon wall and light a trail trampled by gloved hands as you inhale earth, wind, water, through the gasoline nozzle at trails end, a flint spear driven into the key switch. You think you can return to that place where your mother held her sleeves above the rising tides saying, We are here again on the road covered with television snow; we are here again the song has thudded.

Bison horns twist into the sides of trains winding through the broth-filled eyes of hens squawking from the icebox; shock-coils from the jet engines roar erupt from the memory of splintered eagle-wing bone. Pinned down with icicles on the loosening floor, an alarm clock wails from speaker box to speaker box probing for hornet nests inside the tourmaline seeds of dawn; its scalp scalpeled alongside what is ours; its memory of bone axes x-ed out with chrome engine paint. Flicking off the light switch. Lichen buds the curved creases of a mind pondering the mesquite trees dull ache as it gathers its leaves around clouds of spotted doves calling them in rows of twelve back from their winter sleep. Doves eyes black as nightfall shiver on the foam coast of an arctic dream where whale ribs clasp and fasten you to a language of shifting ice. Seeing into those eyes you uncoil their telephone wires, gather their inaudible lions with plastic forks, tongue their salty ribbons, and untie their weedy stems from your prickly fingers.

You stop to wonder what like sounds like when held under glacier water, how N ho kos feels under the weight of all that loss. I cover my eyes with electrical wires, see yellow dawn eclipse Stop signs, turn green and screech into phosphorescence. Each flickering finger: a memory of a flashing yellow sign, blinks between charcoal sheets of monsoon rain then slices through the thawing of our hunger with the cracked eaves of a shattered house. Its autobiographical muscle stringing trees into a forest, convulses, only to be flattened under its metallic leaves and sold as bricks for its basement of fire. What land have you cast from the blotted-out region of your face?What nation stung by watermarks was filmed out of extinction and brought forth resembling frost?What offspring must jump through the eye of birth to be winked at when covered with brick sweat?What ache piled its planks on the corner pier, now crumbles onto motionless water, sniffed at by forest smoke?What makes this song a string of beads seized by cement cracks when the camera climbs through the basement windowwinter clouds coiling through its speckled lens?What season cannot locate an eye in the dark of the sound of the sun gyrating into red ocher after I thought you noticed my language was half wren, half pigeon and, together, we spoke a wing pattern on the wall that was raised to keep us out, there where calling became culling, distance distanced, in a mere scrape of enamel on yellow teeth?What father woke, turned over his wife, she didnt want to, but he pushed until the baby leapt through, now, now, now, strummed into a chorus of burn marks on ceilings where police sirens fruit magpie skulls on trees of monsoon lightning?What, what, whatis how the song chimed in wilderness. Pinched from sunlights jagged leaf, the singers skin a fingerprint on muddy river water crowns our whispers with sharp talons. His shrill cry scraped down to a thumbnail with television knobs becomes the wailing that returns to the Reservation.

You follow him across sand dunes, warm his hand with your breath and place inside the buckskin satchel: harp strings of reassembled moonlight, thumbprints of ocean water, and a key to the back door of a burning church. He sponges the deck of their leaking boat invisible on the horizon spilling its name on rusted knives to make it stop, sigh, then whisper sleep to animals kicking loose the ovens door. The tick of the clock blotted the exit from the mind hours before the ravens could swirl into this new instinct, this new hue pressing open the wound, a field of gnats foaming from its half smile. I strike a wet match on his wooden mind, stash my invitation behind his waterless eyes, and pencil in the first unmarked box: