When it was time, the old woman lay down on the forest floor. She furred with moss; she became the ages of the trees. Each year, new shawls of orange leaves, flowing gowns of snow. She lay waiting still. In all her life, never a sound had crossed through her lips. She spent her days sweeping corners clean of unwantedness; any feather on the floor was hers to keep. Children whispered tales—she was a witch; when she had gone, she’d been devoured, frightened rabbit, by an owl. Never a footstep troubled the ground where tree roots held her close.

How achingly

long she waited,

her stories

red in her mouth.

One day a murmuration

rose out of the trees,

crackling the sky, blackening

the forest in sound.

Spotting her at last

one drifted down,

perched on her breast,

and fed her as its own.

“My dearest

uncanny

creature—

Tell me—”

no one exists   behind

the lens     no one

but another body

standing in darkness

1950s streets   they called

the beautiful women

transvestites

words

hadn’t changed   yet.

only in the dark

would their faces

stare out   like models

only not.

I am drawn

into her eyes    they tell

me    love

is transformation

I want

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“Be very quiet,” advised the Duke, “for it goes without saying.”
The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster

Old poet wakes to the fable of himself.
More snow has fallen and the trees are white.

Enter a fox. Now he will watch all day
to see what else.

In a far different county on the margin
or as it were the shore of a silver field of rye
with a borrowed fly rod, casting as he
had been taught again and again
a flicker of red yarn at the end of the line

dancing farther out each shivering as it shivered
and curled and sang over the shimmering lake
as if to conjure by this titillation
his dream of a leaping trout—

angling with nothing, by the slingshot
of this new, loco motion,
to catch nothing more than this ancient technique.

It was yesterday, in the white room of the ortho clinic
the computer screen with the ghostly
sculpture of his lucent pelvic bones–
arches and empty places where the pathologist
says cartilage would be doing its work.

A dreamscape, a cage showing signs of thinning
age, but no telltale cracks to worry about.
Not ice. Not broken at the fundament.

Could still swerve and pulse to the beat.
Like fishing, to love without intention
except for the blessedness.

Whenever a man follows me too close,
I think of my Nana scrubbing out my father’s mouth

with clementine soap, like a mudslide in frosted tip
southern California, just after the Ham Man stopped

by on Christmas Eve to deliver their annual lump
of cinnamon crusted gorgeous fat—

how when anonymous footsteps don’t pass
me on the sidewalk but shuck themselves into shadows

I replay my father punching through his sister’s
Brady Bunch drum set, his bottom lip the border

between pleasure & punishment, that smirk before
suds swallowed, the purpling passed down paint-by-number

of our family’s jawbones canoeing around each other
but the water is frozen, the water is frozen.

We should formulate a solution. Perhaps an immaculate
contraption to reverse the heartbreak, to unflatten the little
rabbit. The tread mixed with red is not a good match
for the fur. Your conviction (gulp) that you will endure
a going-to-church accident is not unfounded.
A little joggle should free you from the muck

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A man collapses sideways
into his wife’s arms,
his ridiculous hat falling.

But she is not there to catch him.
She has already departed
for the field of blackbirds.

Oak leaves tremble.
Lime blossoms drift over the water.
Six centuries pass by unnoticed.

The man’s house stands vacant,

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Till age twelve, I fear
fire like a bear come
from the trees to maul me. I shy
away from patchouli incense
left smoldering by my hippy mother,
yahrzeit candles Bubby and Zaidy
burn for their dead.

Till Bubby huffs in frustration, Don’t hate
the beast for its nature, and passes
me a matchbox—her twisted
brown hand to my round white one.
I remove a single twig, pinch it
between thumb and pointer finger
like it might ignite by its own desire.
I flick the red head
against countertop as I’ve seen Bubby
do a thousand times (even with arthritis
she’s quicker than me).

Three strikes it takes for my spark
to catch. Then the magic trick
of combustion—sudden hiss
where I manage, just, not to drop
the match. In a flash, flame rises
on hind legs, then settles
to its haunches, watching me.
Orange as a ginger cat, crimson
like my mother’s new Vega.

Are you afraid
still of such a nincompoop? Bubby asks
of my thimble-sized blaze. I shake
my frizzy head. Now blow it out,
she says, and I do
before it bites my skin.

But later, while she and Zaidy dream
in their too-cold bedroom, I slow-
tiptoe downstairs and light match
after match till I feel sure. Till fire
comes when I call
and leaves without a single snarl
when I finally send it home.

To her question about childhood, he shrugged.
Couldn’t figure out how to say it.

As a boy, he had tried the choir and quit.
Served at the altar for a single summer and fall.

Once, he pilfered church wine and rubbed it
across a small wound to feel for Jesus.

He had studied the Stations of the Cross.
It could be done, he thought.

The carrying, the nailing, the bystanding,
the enduring, the imploring,

believing
in what can be felt but not seen.

All around, it didn’t seem that hard.
At least not impossible.

But the church pushed harder than it pulled,
while the world told other stories.

And now they were traveling for the summer,
eating breakfast outside the tent

they had pitched in a field by the Deschutes River.

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What does it mean to be lying on my bed

and feel nothing belongs to me? The world is…—

Detached? /

/ Simulacrum??

—have we finally reached the place where the movie

I’m watching is more real than reality? The irony: the movie

is The General, from 1926—the movie is silent, is black

and white, is the kind of thing made when morals

were loose and people noticed because reality was still

a thing that existed, a green light’s flashing, if distant.

It is December 2022—here is Pennsylvania—I am Lizzy,

now a poet and a wife. These should be my anchors,

but I could just as easily write: it is April 1865—here is

Washington D.C.—I am Dolley Madison, once a First

Lady, now a painting. Maybe it’s not that things

are less real, it’s that we’re noticing how categories

always have been just that: categories, nothing more,

nothing less. The words that stood for something

have always been ink on a page. The land we stole

to give our noble ideas a home, a real place

we could defend … — In China, people are

waving blank sheets: the thing Kaminsky

said he must write upon over and over, to keep the dead

from waving flags of their surrender. The dead in Urumqi

are still dead, turned to black ash, while white paper

protests catch wind. Over and over. Maybe simulacrum

means this: not that reality ceases to exist,

but reality has always been a place    beyond what’s left to say.

My family forked mashed potatoes, peas,
and Salisbury steak from Swanson’s TV dinners
served on TV trays as a reporter’s urgent voice

narrated poorly filmed scenes: green blur of jungle,
young men toting guns and ammo, helmets heavy.
I read comics as I ate: Batman, Richie Rich,

Sad Sack. What did Vietnam have to do with me?
After school, Keith K. and I played with army men
of metallic blue and olive green, the two sides

in their enmity poured from the same mold
and striking the same poses. A sniper crawled
supine, a soldier raised a bayonet overhead,

one took a knee to steady his bazooka, another flung
a grenade. Some merely marched, weapons slung
over shoulders. Others hunched over rifles,

and their leader wielded only a pistol. In battle,
Keith and I made spitty sounds of gunfire,
hurled dirt clods, and detonated bombs

deep in our throats. We never dreamed up
reasons for our fighting. We just went at it,
gung-ho. Our war was endless

entertainment—until, come suppertime,
our parents called us in. We never declared
who won or lost—soon, our truce would end,

our make-believe resume. I collected my little men
and hosed them clean, while Keith, who’d ground
his troops into the dirt to hide them,

couldn’t find them all. He left them buried.
Maybe they’d turn up tomorrow, maybe not.
What did we know of war? It strikes me,

these years later, Keith’s grasp was far superior.
What happened during. What came after.