Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility –

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –

Or rather – He passed Us –
The Dews drew quivering and Chill –
For only Gossamer, my Gown –
My Tippet – only Tulle –

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground –
The Roof was scarcely visible –
The Cornice – in the Ground –

Since then – ’tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses’ Heads
Were toward Eternity –

You can also
walk around the woods
and talk about
how old the trees are

Or take a nap
in a flannel shirt
while I listen
to the radio report
on the storm

You can wake
in the middle of the night
into my eyes
without a future

–

Du kan ocksä
gå runt i skogen
och berätta
hur gamla träden är

Eller sova middag
med flanellskjortan på
medan jag lyssnar
på radio
om stormen

Du kan vakna
mitt i natten
in i mina ögon
utan framtid

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