Today the city reopens. They’ve had the lamb and the gooseneck barnacles. Yesterday two yellow ambulances came and went; the morning shooed away the recollection. I tell myself, if you look to the hills, this year will be different. Five days more till food. And then a friend’s smile, through the telephone. It’s afternoon. The hills are just green, not jade, not precious or achieving, like the last daub on the painter’s palette for the branch in the painting of the Garden that is so living the song of dryads comes through in the beige trapping of duff beneath the elm. And where there is a dark patch, it tells you of their problems—one ran because the artist mistaught her nakedness. In her fleeing she maimed an ant so she couldn’t carry, she fell and cracked her wrist and named it Eve, she measured larksong in an acorn husk. She paid the owl to tie off her arm and used the hawthorn needle on the ground to escape her world, which is only imagined, a smear of Appalachia in the wrong shade of green, too comfortable—the way the trees give room for me to walk through. She never found a dress. Bless her heart. It is green here.

In all this I did not feel real enough to be confined to the lyric. To think I had permission to watch the slim-waisted man half-nude, a nudge over twenty, at the balcony across from mine, mid-day heat he was forced to close the Persian blinds and bake. It didn’t feel real, or I wouldn’t have. At the core I was most surprised he felt any shame. This country was good for that, at least—they wore their bodies and not the other way around. They wore their bodies as you would any other means of blocking weather. Some were proud, some were swift, no one cared who saw. Their hips were lyric and spoke for themselves. Their lips were lyric and dialogue was common. To think I thought I had permission to watch such stories locked in shameless kissing .

And so a mother screams to her mother across the street, balcony to balcony, and rain carries the history behind the plea, trapped in its beads the galleries of the daughter’s having woken to every rug gone from the home, the milk left to spoil in the bottle, the paper three mornings old. Now I am listening to a woman singing from her window, and the trill is less a salvo than someone soothing a lover trembling stuffing a barrel with powder and steel. I am no colder than a floodgate opening, feeling company on my neck and shoulders. And it’s done, she’s calling again through the curtain of bullets, and the name sounds like “O thee, O thee.” When I think, it’s the ransom for the lives I’ve nicked. No one’d believe I’d enter a war not listening.

How else can I last it out. I drank the vase water to remember I’m near the coast. Remember you were smelling grass at night, leaning in to make sure it was docile. You had a method of moving into the curious things you loved. It would not be given to you, the ribbon in the tree, the angel’s vestige, you thought, though you carried a deep sigh into the woods as offering. Let me list what I remember, without the circumstance:

Life was meant to be culled from fear. You smiled when you got the ring. God was plain as eelgrass. You could speak in the long throws of an axe, were required to. The knife didn’t know you yet. There was a slight delay in death. You tried stomach stuffed in tomato with bay. You never found a body that deleted yours. You lay in clover till the blooms were rooks. The café was always oily, your skin always gasping. Can’t remember five years though there are dents from pebbles in your feet. They are equal to grief and the size of. Then it was possible to let diseases talk, on the phone with the girl with reconstructed tear ducts, you talked of faces in the leaves in the Windows wallpaper. If I can be seen, remove the leaf-colored cloak. Let my chest be a good translation.

Your neighbors locked you in and forced you to watch a python enter a woman while she offered no dispute. I am afraid to do what I say. You found a tiny Christmas bell on the corner by the drug store. You waited to be asked what your gift was. Mutts brought many fevers that killed the grass. Mange grew on the milk. You ate a strawberry and two corn chips, trying to limit your body. Repetitious sleep when you stirred mortar for those with carnal arms. A heresy of angels brought you bread you didn’t eat.

He liked to have his head bang on the car door from the youth pastor but with you it was always ghosts whose histories you couldn’t share. I am wracked by my sentence, it would be better to know how to grow a lime. I am wracked by loneliness, and the herbs don’t work, I’m collecting them, my breathing shallows like the scalloped thoughts of a monk drowning. The color of his hair.

Not his. He pulled invisible thread through his lips. You loosely injured the pavement like a saint under the weight of his unasked-for rations. You are forced to stay here, you’re force-fed the blue that’s been for you before. The grass told you you wanted lips skilled in not only but also, but also. You blind me, I. How rote a sadness can I bear without remembering the poplars before December. You trusted the advice of every pebble. You trusted the turnips to freeze in the cellar. Who are you, could be, if someone looked to stay.

I fought for beauty and couldn’t

breathe I fought for

beauty as a name not under

standing beauty

as a fight

as a flight risk

Dear Author, I’ve been meaning all along “fourth-story view” and “I’m too dirty to walk among them” and “everyone in Galicia now is leaving for Christmas to the pueblos where the scallops and the lamb and chocolate nougat and . . . .” What is it to be alone in abundance—to ward off the real-life models of human because you broke the rule—you looked into the mirror at the wrong time of day and saw the look—it was you without the trimmings, not looking at you but past. I hear the door so the girl who rents part of this story has gone.

“If you survive childhood, you have enough to write for a lifetime.” The real source is lost, though it’s attributed to a Georgian who saw Christ in a peacock feather and kept the fowl on her farm to stay close. I grew from the same hill as the expat irises. Close by, Hilda spent years impregnating an entire hillside with daffodil bulbs so once a year, after so many years, she could control the angle of sunshine. A few yards away the grass gave way to coal. I’d collect a flake or two and build cairns for the daffodils, waiting in winter for the legacies to rise. “In 1960, Reagan discovered poverty” here, the paper says, and to “unleash an energy revolution that will bring vast new wealth to our country” was the hook the state swallowed. Everyone there despite this was taught how to gut a fish. The Author gutted a fish and kept the violinish bone for the cairn and for a windchime by his mother’s perennial hanging fuchsia. Crackpipe stored there in a Ziploc, by the hummingbird eggs and twine.