Saw a world was the straw-bale house
I spent

my life building

& caved in on herself
once a shift

whenever my auger brace

finished her

was to be

(& the god in the herringbone
hard hat

decreed this)

the legacy of the legacy

of my legacy’s

legacy’s legacy

God said, your name is mud
and the thing about mud is you
got to throw it down
repeatedly
to remove the air
and sometimes cut it
and rejoin it with another part.
If stars are made of dust,
it’s not the same stuff,
God said;
you can’t make a hut out of it,
only heaven,
and when I said dust to dust,
that’s not what I meant.

My mother kept cans till they exploded.
Better to let the beans curdle to oil
poison swelling the tins like blisters
than have nothing to show.

Say yes
so I let him run me to the limits

in a pickup though I know better
than to expect

the chaparral
to grow much through trauma

except in order to withstand
instinction

though it appears
under the smog

supernatural.

–

CUT TO: he shoves my face
into the flatbed then punts me

when he’s filled me.
Walk home and I do,

scrub for miles
the darkest day of the year moving in

and out of comprehension
but I am glad

(hear me? I am glad)
because now it can be over.

Everything wants to live, not
even Robocop. The difference
between human, employee
hired hand & the ocean—
simply the road gets blocked, so
Carnegie built a library
sixteen hours of work each
shift your life is mined
by one way & another
bake a cake between the days,
workers, dynamite, dripping
things you don’t want to forget

headlamp, feed dog tied to post.
A history of methane
explodes one thousand feet
in your face is a ceiling
coming down? burns ninety
percent of the woman’s
disaster porn at Big Branch
coal mine, twenty-nine Do Not
Resuscitates, Mr. Blank
Blankenship throw down a rope
I’ve got my head but three years
of citation brings the whole
sputtering to today, the
rules, or all Americans
deserve to? The company
Tina pulled levers for
without meaning to,
everything the Titanic
pushes toward, Freud there are
no accidents, whatever
kept us going pegged our pants
& didn’t ask how does it feel
to be the Terminator
open fire to open
like a flower on evening
television? To watch
bandaged heads vanish into
parked here forever, soldier
hold your breath you’re not crying
right? Good intentions come &
go run up the street with some
adults in need of a bath
tub to slip in, piece of cake
to fall out of a chair
in five, four is how I learn
Americans have rallied
round the image of the oil

coated bird but browsers
undirected keep opening
corners of the human package:
seagull, swallow the regulations
the gauzy wings, eye
where security guards feed
dolphins full of tear gas
how do you feel? Purchase
the words for a season
of fishing equipment under
water, clean-up crews have no
time to correxit. “Let’s Go”
Shell says, who poisoned Ogoni
land with more oil than BP
pipelines of dead fish, charred
mangrove whisper the secret
every corporation ends
with decisive moments, then drowning
like the wrong number dialed
your ears fill with water then
the stadium applauds
decades of oil, torture, murder
now the people are hacking
into the pipeline
don’t click that window
subcutaneous cellulitis
aka beat hand, beat elbow,
beat knee syndrome you are what
they eat. Falling out teeth
dreams say it, together
who did nothing wrong

When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla
you must count yourself lucky.
You must offer her what’s left
of your dinner, the book you were trying to finish
you must put aside,
and make her a place to sit at the foot of your bed,
her eyes moving from the clock
to the television and back again.
I am not afraid. She has been here before
and now I can recognize her gait
as she approaches the house.
Some nights, when I know she’s coming,
I unlock the door, lie down on my back,
and count her steps
from the street to the porch.
Tonight she brings a pencil and a ream of paper,
tells me to write down
everyone I have ever known,
and we separate them between the living and the dead
so she can pick each name at random.
I play her favorite Willie Nelson album
because she misses Texas
but I don’t ask why.
She hums a little,
the way my brother does when he gardens.
We sit for an hour
while she tells me how unreasonable I’ve been,
crying in the checkout line,
refusing to eat, refusing to shower,
all the smoking and all the drinking.
Eventually she puts one of her heavy
purple arms around me, leans
her head against mine,
and all of a sudden things are feeling romantic.
So I tell her,
things are feeling romantic.
She pulls another name, this time
from the dead,
and turns to me in that way that parents do
so you feel embarrassed or ashamed of something.
Romantic? she says,
reading the name out loud, slowly,
so I am aware of each syllable, each vowel
wrapping around the bones like new muscle,
the sound of that person’s body
and how reckless it is,
how careless that his name is in one pile and not the other.

I remember a performance
of Antigone in which she
threw herself on the floor of
the universe and picked up
a piece of dust. Is that
the particle? It startled me.
Was it Scripted? Directed?
Driven? I am a girl, Antigone.
I have a sister. We love
each other terribly. I am a woman
of property. The milk of the footlights.
The folds of the curtain. I remember
a performance of Antigone. She stooped.
There was a wild particle.
It was glorified by my distance.
I heard the hooves of the dust.
The ticking of the script
calibrating oblivion. I saw
the particle hanging
and Antigone needed something
to do with her hands
and she did it.

*

I want your help

I want to ask you a question
There is an unmoving body

but you are at work and I am about to go
because I am entering the waterfall museum

the mirror through which this type is traveling

200,000 cubic yards of dioxin
sliding gate to gate to view

this simple gesture I am stacking

building as garden
cancer of the mouth

fuller vibrato