My body of course remained but all else
was a cluster of tiny white bubbles
floating up, up, up, to an unseen top.

I wake from the dream another person, tasting metal
or salt, smelling turpentine, my shoulder askew and
my jaw out of whack. My father has not been stabbed

My black-lettered Hebrew Bible, dense 
and doughty as a cobble. The Bible in Hebrew—irreducible!
Yet at the first verse, a hair-thin net of cracks
appears, each crack a vast highway, and wildly we leap 

After you’ve become a human drum
to let high frequency thrumming
create magnetic pictures of your
brain, you examine the evidence,

They are not hard to get to know:
6 and 9 keep changing their minds,
8 cuts the most graceful figure
but sleeps for an eternity,

Here bricks are so rare they are like agates
We wonder who would carry them so far
Here I feel good because I have nothing
I am thinking about

The planets whirled across the blackboard all morning, 
Saturn with its twelve rings, Jupiter with its belts,
red Mars, green Venus, the familiar blue Earth
where we sat in that eighth-grade class learning light

Faring
and with a full tank:
                              past death regardless

One red-winged blackbird can’t begin
Without the other, hidden in the cedars.
Listen, listen, listen,
For he struts between

The room was airless and damp,
the sheets a skin of sweat.
The greasy feather pillow
curled like a postage stamp.