You grunt, we pay, we walk in the rain

to the marketplace, dodging pushcarts

piled with ice-packed Styrofoam boxes,

cod and salmon and fish roe and smelt.

You had to see where the fish were unloaded,

so we step into that abattoir,

slip through the aisles on wooden

racks dark with blood,

peering at all the creatures

of the deep hauled up and transported

to a purgatory of ice — octopus,

and puffer fish, squid curled like

pink knuckles, tuna so big it had to

be carved by vertical saw,

the technician squinting through a

cigarette, giving us thumbs-up

after it fell in two,

a split log. Near the exit

a man holds a fugu by its neck, its tail

twitching furiously, but he

doesn’t smash it, stroking its flank gently,

smoothing its perfect skin,

its scales, its green-fine body,

then his blade drawn so fast

across the neck

departure becomes a kindness.

Waiting

Waiting

Days when mind swallows its periscope, I am

all skin, sinew, a walking animal. The light

on St. John’s Square wakes azure blue, a sky-

bound lake. Clouds membrane the sea

like nets. Beneath it a blind, searching crustacean,

caught in its spell, I move carefully, touching

nothing, waiting for a sign to come.

Paris (Bastille Day)

Paris (Bastille Day)

Everybody is watching the doors to paradise, honey pouring bleach into words: this is not a truck, it is a weapon, curvetting, arroyoing. A flood diverting a river finds a dark vacancy in the faces of our morning. This is not a hospital, it is a target. Seven thousand killed on land mines alone. Light can be both a particle and a wave. I feel the boundaries of these stories, like basalt in hand. They leave a trace. The rock submerged in the pond bends water around it, like the relentless, inarticulate underache of anguish that culminates in violence. How we rage to create, to name, to remap the world. It is what the living do, even as the sun we see is less than half the diameter of a dime held at arm’s length. We must turn from glory lest it blind us. Ermine, ocotillo, paloverde, mesquite, sand verbena, camellia, brittlebush, chokecherry, helleborine orchids. Once we poured honey into the names. They were ignored by the cutthroat trout, nesting plovers,

the water ouzel, black tadpoles, squawfish, razorbacks, wolverines, redbreasted mergansers, long-necked pintails, wigeons, and burbot. We live in the dusk lands of language. This is not a guest, this is an alien. This is not a this is

This. Remember the better names of the world. Hear the long, high whistle that sings through the gap between what is and what we call it. Let us not mistake that song for anything but a warning.

Repair

Repair

They’ve torn down walls, ripped up floorboards, pulled out the electrics and

beneath all that Carolina pine discovered

blackened supporting beams so brittle I can pick off chips with my