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Note to the Reader 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 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. If this occurs, the turn of the line will be marked with a shallow indent. 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.

Contents

from We Must Make a Kingdom of It (1986)
and
New & Selected Poems (1988)

Heart

Its hinges rustless, restless; opening and shutting on trust. We guard it; it guides us.

Gods lack it. Vacant their gaze. Doctors listen to its cryptic lisp. From sacred to scared a few beats skipped, a letter slipped. Cavity and spasm; a spark can start it; parting stop it. Such a radiant husk to hive our dust!

Here

Heres green, heres the tree of being showing the world renews itself: these leaves are proof.

Heres the abyss waiting with its kiss of shiver and bliss. This is the picnic under the stars; this is the portrait of grief: what we are.

(Trauma) Storm

Hunkered down, nerve-numb, in the carnal hut, the cave of self, while outside a storm rages. Huddled there, rubbing together white sticks of your own ribs, praying for sparks in that dark where tinder is heart, where tender is not.

Screaming Out Loud

Before, you curled inward around hurts and scars; braille of battles seldom won; fissures and wristroads a razor made. Stutter from tongue-stump unable to utter its woe.

Still, your body was mostly intact, and you told yourself: Im a lucky husk. And now, youre shattered, hurtled outward: shrapnel of stars and a weird music: bone in the winds throat.

Tin Cup

Heres a tin cup furred with rust. Heres a bad heart Ive lugged this far. Begging? No. Hauling with me all a mortal has.

You think Im grim and thin, wizened as a dry stick. You think Ive come to bore you with a long story of torment. And yet I swear I love this earth that scars and scalds, that burns my feet. And even hell is holy.

Bolt from the Blue

1. BOLT FROM THE BLUE Gash in the azure fabric Lightning crack of ravish.

Whats touched is trashed ash and blast. To rip the sky then vanish. Tatterflag I raise shredded blue above dazed battlements. 2. STRUCK To die and yet live after how hide that shatter? what mask of bold or blank to wear? 3. NEITHER Zigzag nerve zap harsh torch-touch that scorched like a skim of frost, turned bones to smokeit scarred the heart most.

Cant halt what starts from that marring jarred into knowledge of gist and pith, crux and thrust, it keeps a tight grip; neither weaker nor stronger, but wiser, harder. 4. ELEMENTAL SCAR First choice to nurse or spurn the hurt? Second, how live with all the soft parts burned away? Bare tree branded on the heart dry twigs and wizening. Neither sun nor rain assists to grow at all is to grow slowly: to force the petals, to will the buds to leaf. 5. THE DANCE That lightning stroke a rainbow bolt tore right through you and is already speeding past the stars.

All this you see dance of dazzle and debrisis aftermath.

What Im Saying

What Im saying isnt exactly news and to say it bluntly is no big deal: once you decide to live, you have to lose. But what if you could simply refuse by claiming that life itself isnt real? What Im saying isnt exactly news the Buddhists think this world, hooked on adieus, is just red dust. If thats true, why feel that having to live you also have to lose? Well, because were bodies, bodies whose mortal bruise is times kiss and times seal. What Im saying isnt exactly news. The luckiest among us live in twos.

Yet love has tied them to a burning wheel once they decide to live. They have to lose because times only tempo is the blues. Its what were born to, what our prayers conceal. What Im saying isnt exactly news once you decide to live, you have to lose.

The River

I felt both pleasure and a shiver as we undressed on the slippery bank and then plunged into the wild river. I waded in; she entered as a diver.

Watching her pale flanks slice the dark I felt both pleasure and a shiver. Was this a source of the lake we sought, giver of itself to that vast, blue expanse? Wed learn by plunging into the wild river and letting the current take us wherever it willed. I had that yielding to thank for how I felt both pleasure and a shiver. But what she felt and saw Ill never know: separate bodies taking the same risk by plunging together into the wild river. Later, past the rapids, we paused to consider if chance or destiny had brought us here; whether it was more than pleasure and a shiver wed found by plunging into the wild river.

Paradise

Life is random as a rolled pair of dice.

What those thrown cubes will show no one can know, yet everyone thinks he wants paradise. By which she means cool drinks, the largest slice of all the pies. Money, too. All the dough. Yet lifes random as a rolled pair of dice: seldom the same number will come up twice in a row. Still, Show me the rainbow! everyone thinks.

He wants a paradise where everything is calm, sexy, and precise. Some setting thats removed the risk and woe of lifes randomness, so the pair of dice (one a burning coal, the other a lump of ice) cancel each others extremes. The glow of what everyone thinks she wants: paradise, is what ensues: something lukewarm, something nice. A world in which volcanoes never blow isnt my idea of paradise. Love lifes randomness: the rolled pair of dice.

Some Part of the Lyric

Some part of the lyric wants to exclude the world with all its chaos and grief and so conceives shapes (a tear, a globe of dew) whose cool symmetries create a mood of security.

Which is something all need and so, the lyrics urge to exclude what hurts us isnt simply a crude defense, but an embracing of a few essential shapes: a tear, a globe of dew. But to what end? Are there clues in these forms to deeper mysteries that no good poem should exclude? What can a stripped art reveal? Is a nude more naked than the eye can see? Can a tear freed of salt be a globe of dew? And most of allis it something we can use? Yes, but only as long as its beauty, like that of a tear or a globe of dew, reflects the world it meant to exclude.

Some Notes on Shadows

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