Not because she told me
you and all your work were just a tree-fort
and to get inside one had to trust
the flimsiest of whining rungs
(nailed, nailed, and re-nailed in the trunk),
or how the floors were rotten plywood
on a lattice-work of soggy two by fours,
all conspiring to keep you in there,
until some backup plan unfolded;

but because you were the only one
who'd stay overnight,
when everybody said they’d come.

And there was nothing, really, up there
except you in your tree fort, as if
a life depended on it,
as if life depended on a life depending on it
as it did.

Deadfall

My palm warm on the trunk
of a drowned out jack pine,
I squint into the glare
and feel how the wind rides
the dead crown,
then I push and I push
until the heartwood
that has held up the rot cracks,
until the great crash
into this black swamp
brings forth a shrill
irrevocable silence.

I saw the pigeon rise and dive,
a maintenance man was sweeping
fledglings from the roof; in silence,
as I was watching from a distance—death
was a perfectionist; he swept them off,
her little ones, the broken nest,
mixed with debris, all spinning down
behind a row of houses.

She rose and dived again, attacked
the bobbing baseball cap—
Go for the eyes!
but she was simply baffled
by this relentless sweeping;
until it stops.

He straightens up,
some other duty calls
the man, and so the bird,
who settles on a barren patch,
flutters a wing and pirouettes,
perhaps perplexed, though I can see
that she will start again.

Back in '71, when I was pregnant with my first child, I went for a long desperate cross-country run through Prussian territory. Waving my arms like a folle, dodging the crottes of maudits corbeaux flustered from the heaps of corpses left over by Napoleon III’s second-last stand, trying to catch the eye of the franc-tireurs, searching for Zündnadelgewehr  in the grenade pits.

In ‘46, just before bringing forth what remains of my second child, I was sitting in a prototype grey Panzer taking *** shots at a couple of charred hibakujumoku (the ******* eternal gingko) when I felt her chewing at my innards. Needlessly and in spite of my best intentions, my strict upbringing and the “Manual”, which I'd almost learnt off by heart, I leapt up off the soiled wicker seat, banged my head on the ****** periscope handle and pulled the red ripcord.

Later, I imagined her breastfeeding on what was described as “the flesh of my withered gland”; I watched her little nails squeezing the calico pythons squirming in my camouflage maternity flack jacket and recited doggerel from the Shorter OED, the classic tales of mirth and fury.

My last, Cenozoic, carried in my matrix through the Sturm und Drang of the Quaternary glaciation, cougar-pelted and covered in flint chips, something like thalidomide finished it off (according to the magnetic resonance). God, how I loved to paint the trichinosis, the rhinitis, no, the rhinocerii (we were pre-literate, after all) on the cave walls. Augustus I called it, buried with blueberries, primitive to any distinctions.

Still, the albino alligators with the orange eyes escaped from the biosphere on the Rhine, the one right beside the nuclear reactor, twenty miles from the cave entrance. They were mutant twins. Reading Herzog's plump lips, they headed straight for the heavily guarded cave door. One paleontologist and one art historian patrolled the opening in alternating twelve-hour shifts. Dressed for duty in typical ice age fashion, long caribou ponchos draped over leopard skin undergarments, they were ready for anything: filmmakers, epistemologists and brutal English; with their laptop PCs, flip phones and clipboards, they were avant-garde obscurantists. They didn't stand a chance, standing there by the door hole, waiting for their cameos.

Today was a day where walking
into the woods, over hardpack,
one foot went right through the path,
then the other, up to my knees.

Today was day in between
being stuck in the snow and the spring
I was ready for, seeds in my pocket,
a sunflower of sorts, for a chickadee;

and so it was, in a wink
you landed on my fingertip: uncertain,
bird, winter and I
vanished together.

1        I sat there, reading you a story.

1.1     Well, reading a story to myself, maybe even in my head, not sure.

1.12    I used a small light clipped onto the binder. I bought a fresh triple 'A' battery in the little pharmacy on the ground floor, beside the broken escalator.

1.13     I brought my binoculars too.

1.131   The windows in your room faced west over a helicopter landing pad and the parking lots of another hospital, an ok view at night, and I could look into the rooms of that hospital and sometimes see this kid looking back, unseeing.

1.2      You were usually half-asleep when I got there, but still willing to talk about the flocks of crows that streamed by your window at dusk.

1.21     The setting sun carved them into the sky. By the time I got there all that was left was the windsock on the roof of the hospital, twisting in the indefinite sunset.

2       The world is coming out, isn't it?

2.01   As if from a broken centrifuge, it is going to fly out and splatter on these walls.

2.012  Whatever energy I have left to write at all arises from the centripetal force gathered those nights, their gravity and implacable stillness.

2.1       I sat with my thermos of mint tea, my feet were on the nurse's stool, the night before us.

2.2       Can something forever conceal itself from, yet express itself in, the world?

2.21      This question in the letter I was reading when it started.

3       Blood everywhere.

3.01   There is still a spot on my wool sock.

3.1     All over the floor in the bathroom.

3.2      And in the sink.

3.21     And when I looked up in the bathroom mirror I saw your eyes. Your eyes!

3.3       And the small vessels in your sclerae were bleeding.

4       Breathe.

4.1       And each item can be the case or not the case while everything else remains the same.

5       And you cannot.

6       Death a midwife.

Sky grabber,
Hide under thick trees;
Stay in places unlit by the sun, like shadows of buildings;
Maintain complete silence;
Use general confusion methods;
Spread pieces of reflective glass on the roof of your car or
Disembark and go in different directions.
(It is unable to get after everyone.)
Form fake gatherings using dolls and statues,
Place them outside fake ditches;
Burn tires for cover smoke;
Leave the microwave open;
Lift the ordinary water dynamo, carefully,
the one fitted with the 30-metre copper pole and
jam the waves and frequencies.
God willing, the operator should be a know-how.