Black caterpillars squirmed under noses.
Spit curls wormed down from hairlines.

What comes more easily now
than writing to the dead?

On the cold coast west out of Hoquiam
I’m a stalker with a short-handled gun,

When the taps ran blood
         she set her books on fire—
then she was in a white place

Blood flares from the nostrils.
The lungs, the enormous watermelon bellows,
are lined with it.
Legs conduits,

On May 11th, 1943, my father, terminal,
hugged me at home in a New York blackout
and kissed me in his bathrobe goodbye forever

A woman came down the hill from her farm
with her two little children
to have her neighbor cut

She called the white ducks with a soft
Clucking of her tongue and they came to
Her busy hands for the hard corn she shelled.

When he came home from the mines,
he went through the cellar; stripped
off his blackened work-clothes

He said he was going to make this the worst beating
I had ever had, while pulling the split strop out
From its hiding place on the top shelf of the