Wear latex gloves. All day, all night, one week. To Rainbow Grocery, the Amnesia Bar. White, too pure, preferably. Let them believe that your hands, if outed, would suppurate yellow sores. It’s 1995. San Francisco. You ridiculed the plans for your neighbor’s helicopter pad: a bulls-eye or a medcross on the undraining roof. You followed Thom Gunn down the hill each day, his leather jacket growing bigger and bigger. The counter-lady with ribboned pigtails would not touch you. Any change from your banana muffin? A waterfall of nickels. Air as barbed wire, as mason-dixon, as moat.

That evening, the family of possums funneled through the kitty door, ate an entire twelve-pack of butterscotch pudding. You threw rolls of toilet paper; the father did not flinch. Rotten aim, declared your beloved. The gloves clubbed hand into flipper, too clumsy to contour your weapons. With a broomstick, she whisked out the possums, banished. Crashing through the backyard jasmine like a bad breath.

Thanks to your theatricality, said your beloved, the possums know we’re softies. You took a shower. Still you refused to abandon the gloves. Their touch deposited talc on zinc counters, the ceramic frog that cerberused the gourmet cheese shop. Miraculous as barium dye, illuminant of hysteria: a syphilitic noise, a tapeworm writhing on a toilet seat. How to fight history? you asked. Ephemeral markers. Your beloved toweled herself off, curled into the couch. No sex, she said, until she could see your hands.

You stacked bricks over the kitty door. Mopped butterscotch off the linoleum. Why wouldn’t you explain? You wore the gloves for your brother, comatose for years, now dead, whose boy palm print had been imprinted onto clay, spray-painted gold, now framed on your office wall. Perhaps, your relationship nascent, you had summoned your pet gargoyles; had deliberately spilled gas on your boots; had begged for the diaphane-winged mechanisms of her recoil.

Drowsily she stumbled into the kitchen. You set the mop in the sink, unrolled the gloves. Could she suppress the chemicals of impending flight? Yes. She kissed the inflamed pink band of your wrist, the two veins that merged and diverged like tweezers, the jostling bones; that part of your body, after the knee, voted most likely to fail.

I Want To Tell You Yes

I want to eat your sparrow, come
here. I want to lick your sparrow claws come
here. I want to cut your sorrows out
you’re hollowed out. Come here.
I want to suck your fingers off.
Come here.
I want to give you your history back.
Your fingers back. I want to tell you yes.
Come back. I want to show you my pressure,
my heavy, my opened and clothes, my under
and o’s. Come here. I want to finger
your bones back. I want to sew your bones back
I want to re-blood your history.
I want to undo you like a mystery
novel. Is this the kitchen? The table-saw?
Is this your memory? Your tree-dream? You’re declawed.
I want to give you your teeth back. Your teeth marks.
I want to spit back your teeth-pull. I want to unhinge your heart-jaws.
Come here. I want to sit you down on the bed and give you back
my years. Here. I breathed your name into the leaves.
Here. I breathed you back into the trees. Here. This is your tree-dream
this is your tree-house, this is a bedroom, this is a silver broom
this is a shallow dream. This is my tree-dirt, my bee shirt.
This is my honey-stalk and these are your climbing shoes.
Harmonica me to sleep again. Put your sparrow on my back skin.

Lake Country

My father married
a native. She looks
like clay. Like the land.
She looks
like a history he loves.

*****

You’ve walked well ahead of me on the trail
that ends at the highway, past the inlet
flooded with spring. Next to the creek nailed
to a beech tree is an inscription I always catch
you reading: There is no music like
a little river’s. You don’t know or care
who said this first, but you stare at the lake
like it is the beginning of something.

*****

A fever broke out in late June
after the storm left our yard
treeless. Do you remember?

Our mother still can’t look
at the upturned roots of the elm
tree. She thought its twisted limbs

were magic and something was blown
out of her the night it fell. She looks
like something limp made tight,

a hammock strung among our bodies.

*****

…