You send me another one, at work, mid-morning,

pixels flying through the ether to form pictures of a life

five feet closer to perfect: emails that link to dream house

after dream house, each one more virtuous than the next,

at the beach, in the city, hidden in towns we’ve never heard of.

You don’t tire of looking because what if it exists—

that single spectacular find—like an undiscovered planet

in an infant universe spinning miles from the skittish

dogs next door, the cops stopped across the street again,

and the bleary-eyed woman, cigarette alight,

whose racist slurs fail to break the lawn guy.

What if it’s out there, far from small-town ugly

and rural kitsch? The house we live in now, one hundred

years old, sits on stone, telling fortunes to the wind, whispering

sweet nothings we love but should ignore. Remember,

years ago, on the train ride out west, my hand

warm under yours, yours solid over mine as we sliced

through the night, shrinking valleys and mountains, searching.

Remember the births—a girl, then a boy—their tiny bodies

like harbor lights in the darkness of our room, signaling this

is home? Still, we’re restless: it’s enough and never enough.

We all deserve a roof—of metal, wood, or clay—but also

something diaphanous that lets in moonlight and distance,

that serves up stars in their eternal shining. We’re always

building houses, all of us, in our blood, in our lover’s eyes,

real ones for shelter and metaphors to stretch out in as we run.

These are FARMED, Grandpa,
something you could never have imagined
as you sat patiently chewing on the stump
of a cold cigar, straw fishing hat squished down
over your bald head, “There’s Old Man Diamond,”
Daddy would tease, as you sat waiting for
the solitary-as-you-were walleye pike as he
swirled at the bottom of Big Floyd Lake.

They cooked it in PECANS AND MAPLE SYRUP,
Grandma, a taste you could never imagine, as you stood
aproned, the red gingham curtains behind you and that
old toilet that ran all the time as background music
and you shook the fresh caught fish in your brown paper bag
of Bisquick and laid them lovingly in the sputtering pan
over sliced onions. Crispy, the slight dark parts of their
flesh a hint of the deep shadows of the lake’s underworld
from which they were drawn…

Farmed? Pecans and maple syrup? Did I fly two thousand
miles for this? No rhubarb crisp on the menu, no canasta
duels deep into the night betwixt the two of you, the lamp
over the oilcloth-clad kitchen table swinging slightly, circling
your nightly playing field. All of this I had for ten summers
in our perverse and war-torn world and was never asked
to pay the bill.

I go to Pluto. Imagination
faster than any rocket.
387 degrees below zero.
We bring beach blankets.
And stars, psychedelic popcorn!
They resist being counted,
dislike getting herded
into an equation.

A soothing night settles around us.
Five moons fluff our pillows.

November again,

And the soft ice had been returned

By a low sun. I’d learned

Nothing: the same street turned early

To dark; the man bitter

From glasses of pearly Champagne I’d egged

Him to buy. The lamps begged

Off their halos, cold, pegged me for

That inevitable worn-

Out shame. Tell me, what more could I

Have asked of love but my

Intimacy with blame?

She loves how the night sky
promises nothing.

It just falls as powder falls,
as much by accident

as by design.
Her embroidered sleeves

envy crows that smoke
cigars in old cartoons.

She sometimes wishes
that someone cared enough

to portray her completely wrong.

The sun does not rise easily. A whole planet must spin
on its axis—take with it warring countries, pull culture
clashes and opposing ideologies round and round—to make

these days begin. The colors, not simple either—all splotches of red
and orange and another hue so hard to name I might call it
bravery—bold enough to smear the sky.

There’s a reason such audacious colors strip the heavens
of nightly blue elegance. Boldness requires space
and freedom and takes it all upon morning.

Do you have what it takes? You must,
for you’re a girl and no one will hand it
over, just like that. Be the rising sun. Be

the hue I cannot name.

Asterisms of migrants approach in
bands, they proclaim, stretching out like
constellations that haven’t been
discovered yet, or are considered too
early in the process to be named.

Folks, we have always accosted
grafts of land like this: Whoever
holds it—by force turned into
indelible tradition—gets to
justify what happens to it. Yet after, say,

Kristellnacht, which Jew knew to
leave first? When was the exact
moment that one said: enough,
never again? What collections of
omens or actions solidify into

policy, precisely timed as
quartz wristwatches sewn into hems,
straps of gold for trading out of
terrible situations? Now the
undercarriage rusts, those same Jews

verbose with support for building
walls in regions already inhospitable.
Xenogenies against the new “plague”
yielding the worst results at Seder, they
zip-tie our tongues with ancient arguments.

Salt crystals glitter, shattered glass
on wet boardwalk, wood
darkened by melting snow,

the salt seeps between the cracks
of coming wounds. The hummingbird
is gone, seeds and hulls scattered.

At my step the cats skitter and run;
the ginger, the brindle, the black
and white. Only the tigers and alleys

crouch, ears erect, watching.
In the field beyond the fence
the grass is bent, humped by wind

into curved mounds against snow-
speckled ground. The horses are all
gone. The spiteful neighbor cut

holes in the fence. In the distance
the sky is pale and white, blurring
into cloud and snow until gray bands

press against a flat horizon. In a sudden
flutter a shock of cardinals bursts
through the spindled limbs of your apple tree

blood sprayed from an opened vein
they shoot through the branches the rush of their wings
slicing a scarlet wound in the sky.

You put on music, start up the stove, a flick of gas
and fire. I slice white potatoes, the staple of generations,
the thing that fills bellies, makes hunger flee
even if we can’t stop craving.

You don’t follow recipes, you select
based on instinct, meter out what you need
by eyeing it, by feel, by a taste I do not have.

All I have are yearnings.

You don’t know me well enough to know the things
I want but do not have, or have but do not want, or wanted
but tossed out—onion skin, avocado pit,
what protects or keeps a fruit from rotting.

And what do I know of you? The thing you do not tell me
has a scent, nutty and strong. I don’t ask for much,
not yet anyway. I watch in wonder at how you put together

a pile of odds and ends and make it into art. Then I wonder
when you will feed it to me, when you will take it all apart.