And even one’s sour self can seem to be
Innocent of the malice that is poison.

shrubs so petal heavy
their limbs swim in the light
                                                            wind

Scared sacred scarred
the aging and unread bard

Like everything else they are
like nothing else—

We were tuned like two crystal sets to the race stations
where we heard the saxophones of the Black Zion.

In the dark we crossed the borders of the Caucasus

I came to Alabama for the dreams

   of Sun Ra, who said he was born on another

impossible, uninhabitable bottom land and unreconstructed

Estas brutal, someone says about the heat or the boricua 
walking down the street with a dulce de leche. My sister shivers. 
I paraphrase a fever when I mount the stairs to the roof to swelter

After the sporty dolphin show
you might wander down the dimmed aqua stairs
into a darkness they have cut windows

Sometimes you wait a while for the bus—
the bus of happiness
probably—just now passing the fried pie hutch

I think it is well known now
how you can take one part of the country
and re-erect it somewhere else, how the abrupt, snow-streaked