Blackbird It would be unfair to call it ugly: plain, perhaps, would be a better word. Commonplace, though the colour of its feathers is uncompromising in a way the crow's is not. Sitting atop the roof- top it sings: calling for a mate, marking its territory. Wary only of the judgements we would make; its own veiled behind the language it speaks and we do not. Alike, and not, defined too by the difference we note between ourselves.

Saṃsāra I saw bonsai in my father’s garden, their wood rippling within the wire, writhing like dragons in their china, turning blue, their surface cracked. I saw the master, who ran his hand along each branch and bent it back so the skin was white with pressure, and the spine almost showed teeth. I was the one who kneeled in earth, bearing the weight of my failed fruit with the leaning column of my back. I was carving after the gardener when I forced my soul into this form, both the prisoner and the torturer.

The Sins of My Father I grew into my father's name without doubt, or guessed it too late to make a change. But whose name should I bear hereafter? It’s the question that burns me to ashes; since I am often mistaken for my father, as though he has grown backwards, like The Man Who Was Born Old. There was a man with the head of a spear who stopped me in the middle of a street. He thought he had lost me forever after I changed address without paying rent. It took two police officers to clear the air that I was not the reincarnation of my father. A week later, I heard the crow of the raven, then a splash of dust on my clothes, my head swamped with bird’s dung. A woman informed me that my father, who kept a catapult on our kitchen roof, slaughtered ravens in the woods. A dog saw me last month and began to bark, wagging its tail and jumping on my trousers. I froze in the heat and stared at the dog, my face blank as glass, white as a wall, before its owner exclaimed, “Jimmy, coma here! It’s not him!” Jimmy thought that I was my father, who lashed him with a club on a play day. I stooped to caress Jimmy's neck and assured him I was different from the man whose face I inherited. The day I dressed up for my wedding, the sky was smiling at me with a million teeth, and the sun bared its seven fingers on my head. But there was thunder as I stepped out, and I was drowning in the storm that came. It was my mother who invented the idea I should hide each time I walked under the moon. My father killed the moon and injured the stars, that’s why they buried him in the water.

Fishing Cousins The skin of the water shone like quartz and when the sun sat low under the hills, like jasper. When the tide dipped out pockets of tadpoles could be found circling rock hollows like captives. We fished bluegill, walleye, knew the best spots to crook our poles, how to wedge them in cracks of limestone and let them sit 'til a line dipped long. You taught me to flick the rod up to set the hook and how to sit patient as a prospector panning gold, how to nonchalantly pluck a sprig of wild wheat and hold it in the mouth, humming old tunes your daddy taught you before he chased some blonde to Dallas. I think you hated that old shotgun house and that’s why we spent no time in it, were too ashamed of your mom’s Southern Baptist supplications to look her in the face, hated the way washed things never quite came out clean. We found plates of shale or slate and ate last night’s bologna sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, waded in creek water up to our hips, lifted cigarettes from your brother’s dresser and under lips tucked dip from his unlocked Ranger’s broken glove box. Our self-enforced curfew was sundown, when light enough remained to slip back through boxelder and sugar maple, army crawl under rust red barbed wire and shuffle thin through gaps in briar only we had mapped, that would be lopped back each summer; each summer the trail we walked, it seemed, denser than ever.

The Ghost of Li Bai on Mont Ventoux *[Li Bai] is said to have been drowned by leaning over the gunwale of a boat in a drunken effort to embrace the reflection of the moon.* @tab—Herbert Allen Giles, *Gems of Chinese Literature: Verse* Petrarch, you’ve dreamed of seeing to the edge of Spain: must you hate each step up the ridge? Cursing the briars, you pass the poppies by. Cursing the rocks, you snub the saxifrage. Three times, your flesh veers off like melted snow, and thrice, your spirit forces it to trudge back up. At last: the limestone crest. You turn, not to the Pyrenees but to a page of Augustine’s *Confessions*. Put it down! You seek your soul the way I sought the moon. Feel the mistral sigh through firs and beeches; watch the sun droop beneath the Rhône; sip Syrah and pour some out for me: I never let a poet drink alone.

Gypsum When daybreak spades its slurry on the wall, a perfection in gypsum quickens in my eye and I ask myself if god labors in the trades, and if there is delight in what would seem a good day’s work: an arabesque, a dance swayed by what hardens far too soon. Practiced in the art of the trowel, I imagine a god fixed on its work, the wide arcs of it, the crusted wrists, the muscled strokes like rivers cut through on a plain and gentle slope, knowing the end must be a sheen with neither pit nor crease. And when daybreak spades its slurry on the wall I know I have been prepared for this—a life upon which death would smear its tints like a child or a Jackson Pollock. And if not that, then the preferred hues of the day—the neutrals, mute and hung with what might seem bucolic. While I must admit that the stone, the gypsum is ground elsewhere, I must also admit that it is I who will smooth what I’ve come to regard as a wall, and it is I who must press the keys squarely into the laths nailed such that they may at long last bear me up.