years before anyone
notices, before one of the workers
sees a tuft of green beneath
a nickel box Honda.

Even then, nobody expected anything but weeds.

The young tree, knowing nothing
of the thirty-some shades of rust or
gravity’s quiet, oppressive hand, felt

the sun through busted floorboards
and ruptured right on through. Oh,
how it wore that car like a necklace!

The dented fender pointed up
and east, as if ascending an imaginary
mountain.  The drooping tires hanging
from the branches, graceful as moss.

The workers, who
were used to seeing things die

built a fence around the car
that was now a tree

and declared it a sacred monument,
a reminder that even broken clocks
are right twice a day, and the holy

flowers in mud, flower
in mud.

This isn’t the right way to tell you, my young love,
but I want to feel it’s warmth with all of my toes
and slyly rub my beardless chin into it.

In light of long contemplation – useless attempts to flee
my desires. Late night. You surely sleeping. A candle
burning on the table – I see, I must ask.

This is a most hasty avenue to reveal these savage thing
to you, a pure woman, but I want my apprehensions
regarding your beautiful clavicle to rest.

And lest you be uneasy, this you only need consider –
my love is the sweating passion of a negro singer.
There is no reason to fear my swooning.

We will depart to the civilized Russia of Peredelkino,
a village free of turmoil, and mustachioed women
who may kidnap you for their brothels.

I’ll ride to meet you as midnight snows on my coat.
And I’ll knock six times with the skin of my forehead.
All to embrace the miracle of your clavicle.

My teeth were still misaligned
my mouth thick with surgical padding,
from the first of three molars
that lost their way to the jaw
somewhere in the bowling-ball slick
of palate and sinew and bone.
We did not kiss, I was too sick
with anesthesia and stitches.

But I am not ashamed of sitting
with her naked in my mother’s bed.
The sun made its own picket fence,
shining through the sheets, and
I believed in it too much to worry.

It’s not even a question, why I didn’t tell someone
else. Everyone else is busy scrutinizing my arms.
It’s easy to understand, isn’t it, oh, you are someone
who writes love– but that’s bullshit. I am someone
who has been stupid, and stupid and young, someone
who slept well and often. No, better, I am someone
who stills walks with stupid on my ankles, head up.
I don’t talk about this because even talking brings up
so many nights that weren’t mine to begin with, someone
else’s fucking story, and besides, all I know how to do is yell,
not live, not like, not cry, not in public. Yelling,

that’s easy. Biologically acceptable. Animals yell,
the young are animal. Even the peacocks yell,
and they’re ridiculous. I used to bare my arms,
triumphant. Here is the piece that doesn’t fit. Yell
all you want. I am not here. I am yelling
in the bathroom sink, and I walk high,
still full of stones. My mother couldn’t stomach
it. She forced her fingers under my chin and yelled,
hurt and animal, from the diaphragm, up
and under. How can anyone grow up?

I make mess for myself. It grew up
on its own, but I planned it, precisely. Yelling
is all I know how to do. I hold my head up,
thinking this. Who gives themselves up
first? I have been young, and I am someone
who scheduled my own madness, looked it up
first. I am someone who stands up
on stupid ankles. They’re the worst now, armed
and too tough to cut through. It’s not my arms.
I am someone who hides it better than the stories.
Someone should stop telling the story, should stomach
the end of the lady who swallowed a fly. My arms
don’t flap like wings. My arms are just arms.

Remember the of-course-it’s-burning sun,
and the brassy chord the prairies tongued?
these are the swerving pleasures of the damned.
Something happened; or didn’t.
The point being, I have crossed from one side of the city,
to this one, and you will say that I smell
like a betrayal of principles, like a
meat greasy hamburger that is the stench
of a person on me. Green stench.
I can almost smell you smelling me.
Dad, do you remember watching Samson and Delilah?
But, then, you won’t understand
why my wakeful legs ran me through our neighborhood—
childhood’s dim hallway—at  3 in the morning,
why I won’t tell if the devil, chasing,
looked more like Samson or Delilah.
I should say that the cedars brought me back; no:
the Archer, aiming out of the hammock
into the burning tree-tops: “Red,” he said.
My eyes widened, his too, I think,
the ditch-eyes of ruddy Oklahoma dirt,
slow-circling the cedars down.