she can barely shut her mouth, may have been inherited

from her father before he ran away. She told me, “If a strange man

ever appears at your door, kick him in his grin, Baby.

Kick him even if he begins to sing to you about me.”

CHAPTER XII. COMMENDATION AND ENCOURAGEMENT

Let’s praise everything that spurs the spirit to creativity.

The tin cup my father rattles until its poison spills,

how easily a mouth erupts with belief. Let’s praise

how much we love without loving, how little we sing while singing.

CHAPTER XIII. FAULTS OF IMMATURITY

We can try to praise the light-blue powder of family

because it is not made of stone, it is not mist. You can’t hold it

long, but this is true of many things. Somewhere

in this brain is also my father’s misery. And whether it is better

to forgive or let yourself be forgiven eventually.

CHAPTER XIV. THE ACTIVITY OF CHILDREN

My child with no one to teach her how to skin a Bolivian goat

or make a necklace of Tanzanian wolf teeth, my kindergartners

in Madagascar and Cuba, my daughter whose stepfather

will die in a Kenyan coal mine, my daughter whose boots will fail

to warm her in the Ukrainian snow: their lives will be better without me.

CHAPTER XV. THE IMAGINATION IN CHILDREN

This is a wish for the child sleeping in grass that has wilted

a little, for the child lazing in the pool of a beachside hotel.

This is for the child who overhears his mother cry

into the phone: “Don’t you put the bad mouth on me!”

CHAPTER XVI. TRUTH AND FALSEHOOD

Sometimes my prayers begin, “Darkness, is that you

at my skull?” Because that’s one version of pain,

I’m always like “Angel, leave me the fuck alone.” I’m like

“Blame the devil of longing.” I have said I am in love with beauty,

but my heart is so mangled, it spills blood on everything.

CHAPTER XVII. JUDGMENT AND REASONING

In the high schools where the janitors speak French,

in Swaziland and Switzerland, on the small islands

where nuns show their knees, in places the word for “Father”

means nothing to me: their lives will be better without me.

CHAPTER XVIII. WISHES AND REQUESTS

I would like to leave you to the moody cruelty and nurture

of your mothers, Children, to the complex rites and rituals

of your countries, to God gazing like a cop on a bike, to cocoa

and buzzards and crap inventions and the gospel of possibility.

CHAPTER XIX. CORPORAL PUNISHMENT

The bald-headed mother dreaming through cancer of the sprawl

of highways and the wide-open wilder Wilderness, the fluid

holy light she can put her hand through, the rain beating

“I am” “I am” all over her body: it’s got nothing to do with me.

CHAPTER XX. CHILDREN’S QUESTIONS

At each door I want to slip on my shoes and say to each woman,

“Do what you do, Mother Goose.” And should one of you find me,