While sitting prostrate before the ivory feet of the great Buddha, I spilled almost an entire can of Diet Coke on the floor. I quickly tried to mop up the mess with my long hair. 

The solitary animal walks alone. She has no uterus. She has no bone.
She slithers around dark bars and libraries. She carves
a beautiful girl on the cave wall. She dances with Aurora Borealis,

Nobody understood her cruelty to herself. In this life, cruelty
begets cruelty, and, before long, one would have to chop off
one's own hand to end the source of self-torture. Yet, we

Your country’s memory is short. But know this:
We live, have been living, with this threat
staining the earth we still call home

We shall see the deer as part of the trunks of the forest.

We shall see its antlers imitating the branches of the trees.

Displayed in the coin shop window 
below the Spanish doubloons and Flemish guilders, 
in a row of talismans on felt cushions, 

I have seem them growing wild by the hundreds
along a riverbank on a Pacific island.
As I dipped my oars silently so as not to frighten

After washing your face and leaving it
in the basin of water from which it stared
up at you as you left the room,

The doors have been removed from their hinges
and the windows are boarded up
in anticipation of the hurricane

In the Kyi Valley of Tibet, a snow-white desert
where an orchestra of lamas performs by starlight for the gods,
it is said that when we near death, and may least suspect it,