Read On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths for Free Online

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    I could not tell because they did not look at me, they who had come from praying to a God in whom I don’t believe, though I am less smug about that not-belief

    (could be wrong, I oftentimes suspect)

    than I am about the wolves. Because I know the wolves were coyotes;

    the wolves were coyotes

    and so I said, “There are no wolves in Illinois.”

    â€œNo, those are wolves,” the man said, turning toward his wife who offered me her twisted smile, freighted with pity or not I couldn’t tell, the pity directed toward me another thing I couldn’t tell, or toward her husband

    the believer in wolves

    (at least he was sticking by them, having staked his claim).

    In the autumn withering, the eyes of the children were noticeably shining, but I saw only the sidelong long-lashed white part of their eyes as they stepped up to the scope.

    â€œCheck out the wolves,” he said (the minutes ticking)

    (the minutes nuzzling one another’s flanks)

    (the minutes shining in the farthest portion of the field

    as whatever emerged from it entered it again).

Pharaoh

    In the saltwater aquarium at the pain clinic
    lives a yellow tang
    who chews the minutes in its cheeks
    while we await our unguents and anesthesias.

    The big gods offer us this little god
    before the turning of the locks
    in their Formica cabinets
    in the rooms of our interrogation.

    We have otherwise been offered magazines
    with movie stars whose shininess
    diminishes as the pages lose
    their crispness as they turn.

    But the fish is undiminishing, its face
    like the death mask of a pharaoh,
    which remains while the mortal face
    gets disassembled by the microbes of the tomb.

    And because our pain is ancient,
    we too will formalize our rituals with blood
    leaking out around the needle
    when the big gods try but fail

    to find the bandit vein. It shrivels when pricked,
    and they’ll say
I’ve lost it
    and prick and prick until the trouble’s brought
    to the pale side of the other elbow

    from which I turn my head away—
    but Pharaoh you do not turn away.
    You watch us hump past with our walkers
    with the tennis balls on their hind legs,

    your sideways black eye on our going
    down the corridor to be caressed
    by the hand with the knife and the hand with the balm
    when we are called out by our names.

Samara

    1.
    At first they’re yellow butterflies
    whirling outside the window—

    but no: they’re flying seeds.
    An offering from the maple tree,

    hard to believe the earth-engine capable of such invention,
    that the process of mutation and dispersal
    will not only formulate the right equations

    but that when they finally arrive they’ll be so
    â€¦
giddy?

    2.
    Somewhere Darwin speculates that happiness
    should be the outcome of his theory—

    those who take pleasure
    will produce offspring who’ll take pleasure,

    though he concedes the advantage of the animal who keeps death in mind
    and so is vigilant.

    And doesn’t vigilance call for
    at least an ounce of expectation,
    imagining the lion’s tooth inside your neck already,
    for you to have your best chance of outrunning the lion

    on the arrival of the lion.

    3.
    When it comes time to “dedicate the merit”
    my Buddhist friends chant
from the ocean of samsara
    may I free all beings
—

    at first I misremembered, and thought
    the word for the seed the same.

    Meaning “the wheel of birth and misery and death,”
    nothing in between the birth and death but misery,

    surely an overzealous bit of whittlework
    on the part of
Webster’s Third New International Unabridged

    (though if you eliminate dogs and pie and swimming
    feels about right to me—

    oh shut up, Lucia. The rule is: you can’t nullify the world
    in the middle of your singing).

    4.
    In the Autonomous Vehicle Laboratory
    RoboSeed is flying.
    It is not a sorrow though its motor makes an annoying sound.

    The doctoral students have