17.

A recording plays from somewhere high,

or low, floating up or down through the falling

dust-light.

It is a voice out of time, voice of quickness,

voice of glass—or wind. A melody, almost—of mud.

How it takes a deep blue to tumble wet stones

into a songline. The music any earth makes

when touched and shaped by the original green energy.

The song, if translated, might feel like this:

You have been made in my likeness.

I am inside you—I am you / or you are me.

Let us say to one another: I am yours—

and know finally that we will only ever be

as much as we are willing to save of one another.

4.

The guidebook’s single entry:

There is no guide.

You built this museum.

You have always been

its Muse and Master.

5.

Admission is general and free

except for what the children pay—

and they pay in the kidneys.

99.

From an original rock painting in Topock, Arizona, now digitized on a wall-mounted monitor:

Before this city, the Creator pressed his staff

into the earth, and the earth opened—

it wasn’t a wound, it was joy—joy!—!

Out of this opening leaped earth’s most radical bloom: our people—

we blossoms from the original body: water,

flowering and flowing until it became itself, and we, us:

River. Body.

78.

The first violence against any body of water

is to forget the name its creator first called it.

Worse: forget the bodies who spoke that name.

An American way of forgetting Natives:

Discover them with City. Crumble them by City.

Erase them into Cities named for their bones, until

you are the new Natives of your new Cities.

Let the new faucets run in celebration, in excess.

Who lies beneath streets, universities, art museums?

My people!

I learn to love them from up here, through concrete.

La llorona out on the avenues crying for everyone’s

babies, for all the mothers, including River, grinded

to their knees and dust for the splendid City. Still,

we must sweep the dust, gather our own bodies like

messes of sand and memory. Who will excavate

our clodded bodies from the banks, pick embedded

stones and sticks from the raw scrapes oozing

our backs and thighs? Who will call us back

to the water, wash the dirt from our eyes and hair?

Can anybody uncrush our hands, reshape them

from clay, let us touch one another’s faces again?

Has anyone answered? We’ve been crying out

for 600 years—

Tengo sed.

204.

A dilapidated diorama of the mythical city of Flint, Michigan:

The glue that once held the small-scale balsa wood children

to their places—along the streets, waiting in line at the bus stop,

on top of the slide in a playground, or on the basketball court—

has desiccated and snapped away. Now the children lie flat on

the floor of the diorama, like they are sleeping, open-eyed

to the sight, to what they have seen through their mouths—

hundreds of miniature empty clay cups roll back and forth