All the shipwrecks sailing within us. I must disembark at every coast inside me. The docks grow open as mouths.

FROM PROTO-GERMANIC *GASTIZ (COGNATES: OLD FRISIAN JEST, DUTCH GAST, GERMAN GAST, GOTHIC GASTS “GUEST,” ORIGINALLY “STRANGER”),

FROM PROTO-INDO-EUROPEAN ROOT *GHOS-TI- “STRANGER, GUEST; HOST” (COGNATES: LATIN HOSTIS “ENEMY,” HOSPES “HOST,”

Hospital. Shelter for the needy.

Metal doors and bars. Tragic panthers inside for your own protection. Head down, animal. Acquaint the glossy side of your face with the cement floor. No competition here, no culling. You’re the last one. You’re the last sterile one.

Under bridges, cardboard castle, trash moat, hate moat. No meds no job no home. Something in your blood is bad. Your brain is in your blood. Drain, salvage, hide, blind.

Eight billion pine boxes today! Long-stemmed roses in a box from Mexico for everyone. There isn’t not room for everyone. Who was here first. Private property the work of God. Discipline and disobedience. My blank body: dim root with a thousand eyes. Splitting into the dark. They finger their way down. Eat dirt, spit dirt, be dirt.

But your body doused with oil; the wrong side of the ground, a sister digging a grave in the air.

Your body all in flames—witch, bleach, blanch, stitch, torch, clutch.

Library of bodies borrowed. Returned. Scholars to the last.

Strange deck of cards, pages in gorgeous disarray, the last book written.

Amnesty.

FROM *HOSTI-POTIS “HOST, GUEST,” ORIGINALLY “LORD OF STRANGERS;” GREEK XENOS “GUEST, HOST, STRANGER;”

OLD CHURCH SLAVONIC GOSTI “GUEST, FRIEND,” GOSPODI “LORD, MASTER”);

Waiting for white rope, become the unbraid. Raveled, ends burned closed, heavy as hair. One day we will all be sea.

Does my day stalk me or do I grow it within me. My first and final masterpiece. Breath, brush, breath, bath, last.

My enemy, my house, my horse, my hound.

Border, brother, bastard. Every eye a sorrow meter, every ear a room of private silence. Clouds of it. Storms moving through.

Feast, fast, guest, host.

Every room of this life; all of us guarding the wrong things.

One country of the living. This port.

Dickinson dared you to see a Soul at the White Heat.

Then, let us crouch within the door.

THE ROOT SENSE, ACCORDING TO WATKINS, PROBABLY IS “SOMEONE WITH WHOM ONE HAS RECIPROCAL DUTIES OF HOSPITALITY,”

REPRESENTING “A MUTUAL EXCHANGE RELATIONSHIP HIGHLY IMPORTANT TO ANCIENT INDO-EUROPEAN SOCIETY.”

Bend your good eyes toward the crashing ceiling of water. Everchanging door. You can’t open it. You are already in it. It is home and tomb. Womb and veil. Wall and wail.

A guest here. My dowry everywhere.

Come to the races. Lucky number. A thousand trousseaux. . .

Flag, gown, and shroud.

Loomed and unloomed. A woman with time in her hands. Bedded, unwedded. Inventory possessions: father, son, missing husband, servants, loom, bed made from an olive tree, drunk suitors, money, land, some beauty. . .