and lay there thinking of the bed,

how much of life happens there.

At the center of everything the piquant transitory joy

and from this even the charred wrecks,

even the dahmers nazis bin ladens all flesh

fleshed out of wild unmanageable Eros

(we’re always a bit dirty with it)

~

In the birth room you couldn’t think,
you were a single moan and tangle,

you were an agony, maybe,

but also had wings like never before.

Welcome to the love bazaar,
let’s dip back into it again, virility!

Pheromonal lure of silk slipping off skin,
excessive again his kiss, her shudder,

as snow petals down a lace of white flowers
and our baby sleeps in her indigo crib.

Such a reckless act, to pop out a human,
with the jaws of the world set to kill.

~

And she arrived before dawn, staring straight—
her job: to eat what exists.

Any caress is precious, exaltation
in the breathing room, a life force—

who knew our brushstrokes had been so precise,
greening darkness with this young vine,

and this new pain, to slow time—
drew more and more from the nub of her

until she was herself,
emerged ready to live her one life

and she seemed friendly,
looking sideways as I swiped her clean.

Honey, here are your limbs,
we are not too late.

~

beyond the edge of field, the border of photograph—

in flux floating attached only to one another

three vanishing figures

a lullaby, though elsewhere famine

elsewhere flame

gleaming they come to us from nothing what now

~

Daughter is a soft target,
in a fuchsia crush she’s come

bare and guileless, fair and free,
funneling forward without a helmet

toward the barest sickest tree—
(keep them from being head-kicked-in,

keep their blood inside, intact,
keep them from shooting sprees,

from X-rays and MRSA,
spiked metal, sadistic men).

Take a self and put her out
in the wood for the struggle.

Invest in armature.

~

In the cut of Mercy she’s in my arms;

in the cut of Cruelty she’s done

a blood slump on the subway floor.

Can we live this way?

I think someone has done grave injury.

I think person or persons—

I think we’re losing by default.

Slaughter happened around the planet;

we stayed in the thicket whipping up love.

~

Yet all this time we have been alive.
The charms of the present
aren’t lost on me, Marcel,

as past the guard into school we walk
through a deafening rainstorm
that has nothing to do with wars.

Did dragons live when the dinosaurs were alive?
Soft asks, her childhood swishing by
in its rapture of plenitude.

All afternoon she lies on her back

staring at the void,

but to her it’s just the sky.

Oh this life for a while so dreamy

we wake eager to be in it

and sleep imperfectly delivers us

to a buttery layer of jam on toast
in this best of all possible worlds
to cultivate in the aftermath our gardens—