There is a dead language buried in English.

There is a word no one remembers

for a temple

with a bowl of millet sealed

in each brick.

When you are buried, the word

will grow a ssa sound.

Its meaning will change

to specify you as the builder.

No one can speak the language you will rewrite.

I know this isn’t the heaven we wanted.

What ever is?

And soon I’ll join you

amid the terms

for tiny bottles of defunct potions

and no longer understood passions

and together we’ll bury

our own particular I love you.

I wouldn’t mind its being sealed off with us, in our brick of earth.

Hi, Melissa

HI, MELISSA

I have spoken to you of heaven—

I simply meant the eyes are suns that see.

Seeing is the faces’ nervous delicious Lord.

Listening to you makes me naked.

When I kiss your ankle I am silencing an oracle.

The oracle speaks from the hill of your ankle.

Poem to My Litter

POEM TO MY LITTER

My genes are in mice, and not in the banal way

that Man’s old genes are in the Beasts.

My doctors split my tumors up and scattered them

into the bones of twelve mice. We give

the mice poisons I might, in the future, want

for myself. We watch each mouse like a crystal ball.

I wish it was perfect, but sometimes the death we see

doesn’t happen when we try it again in my body.

My tumors are old, older than mice can be.

They first grew in my flank a decade ago.

Then they went to my lungs, and down my femurs,

and into the hives in my throat that hatch white cells.

The mice only have a tumor each, in the leg.

Their tumors have never grown up. Uprooted

and moved. Learned to sleep in any bed

the vast body turns down. Before the tumors can spread

they bust open the legs of the mice. Who bleed to death.

Next time the doctors plan to cut off the legs

in the nick of time so the tumors will spread.

But I still have both my legs. To complicate things further,

mouse bodies fight off my tumors. We have to give

the mice AIDS so they’ll harbor my genes peacefully.

I want my mice to be just like me. I don’t have any children.

I named them all Max. First they were Max 1, Max 2,

but now they’re all just Max. No playing favorites.

They don’t know they’re named, of course.

They’re like children you’ve traumatized

and tortured so they won’t let you visit.

I hope, Maxes, some good in you is of me.

Even my suffering is good, in part. Sure I swell

with rage, fear—the stuff that makes you see your tail

as a bar on the cage. But then the feelings pass.