Gold Is a Pleasant Thing to Think About

How it rushes softly through the musculature 
of some landforms, formations some people 
learn to recognize as a kind of body 
where veins of gold rush softly. And so 
in streams -- which are themselves veins
returning what they carry and what we pump
into them to the pulsing sea -- also gold 
rushes. In flecks and nuggets, gold rushes
in streams. How miners somewhere north 
and west of Elko, Nevada -- where already 
the name of the state honors what can be 
dangerous and what can replenish, carve 
and, before that, shimmer -- make the dust 
flat enough and wide enough for us to fly 
along at highway speeds until it all busts 
into a sudden wash beyond the back bowed 
by their digging. In the arroyo, the truck
lets its hold of sand slip through its fingertips
as a boy tosses and catches a shiny stone
while hunting the streambed for arrowhead
shards. All around, the late summer yellow 
hills, yellow rabbitbrush and dust catching up
to what might have been our tragedy but
which turns out to be a way to remember 
with fondness a damaged landscape 
among others as what it was before wagon
tracks began their rending, as what it was 
before the glass and jingling sprung up
like well stations along the interstate: a dry 
place, yes, but not absent of arterial springs
and bands of clouds, a place rich with many 
fierce species, like the yellow rattlesnake
that triggers us into fluid motion, a golden
coiling with eyes like shimmering, golden pools.

Nighthawks Are Pleasant Things to Think About

So is the now-past summer dusk robust 
with hatches: caddis and the mayflies’ dip 

and rise. Duff-backed nighthawks shimmy
open their envelope mouths into nebulas 

of prey. Their diving booms the evening 
air through dihedral beats. Wing bars 

semaphore angles aglow into the safety 
of sundown when the accuracy of falcon

talons commits to the roosting branch
and the stinking owls track only black-

and-white. The hayfield where nighthawks
hunt lays fallow in my memory as far back

as the far-gone solstice goes, banked 
against November’s full moon night racket 

on yesterday’s snow keeping me up, 
pinpricking past seasons and what’s coming: 

constellations in the surprising maw-width 
darkness rushing apart every which way 

except for now right here: winter’s meager 
moan calling ahead to the estival feast.

Fruit Is a Pleasant Thing to Think About

Tony wrote to Pessoa about bananas
and now I am watching
three men talk to the internet 

about what the bananas mean. There seems 
to be consensus among the three men 
talking that bananas have something 

to do with happiness
or maybe the proletariat. Tony delivers
mail in a town with elevation and latitude 

far above the growing zone for fruits
with electric skins, but he stops 
here and there on his route to watch

yellow leaves quiver shadows
across the mailboxes of rich and poor 
alike. For me, the papaya

used to mean happiness. As a young man
I travelled across Mexico, drinking 
agave moonshine and eating whole papayas

from breakfast. Every time, I crunched 
a few seeds as little offerings 
to my gut biome and their visitors. 

Sometimes what I put inside
laid me low. I met some people who had dropped
off the map or who had no mind

for fixing themselves 
to cartography with pinheads or strings. 
Most nights I figured I’d catch a scorpion 

unzipping my backpack. Fruitsellers, when asked,
each had strong opinions on which color
left the deadly sting. One such expert

on Isla Mujeres even warned
quite earnestly of a local red lizard 
with sharp murder in its tail. As will happen, time 

passed and my love 
of papaya waned and my skin makes more
blotches every year. My son is growing up 

to be more gregarious than I am, but that 
does not mean he cares for travel. He tracks
the days after the solstice, watching

for the serviceberries to ripen
the same berries the robins and waxwings
use to get stumbling drunk while I walk

through the solitude of late summer light
to check the mailbox, hoping 
I won’t run into any shopkeeps or vendors.

Microbes Are Pleasant Things to Think About

I pat the dog. I touch my face. I scramble
an egg for my son. I press the spot
where the melon clutched the vine
on some farm in some habitat
called some country. I am habitat. I am 
country. I am testing to see if the melon is 
ripe enough to cut. I am ready to cut. 
I use the knife I didn’t wash
to cut the melon into cubes. I cough. 
The dog looks up. I give the egg
and melon to my son. Our fingers touch.
I am my son. I hear the geese fly overhead.
They didn’t migrate farther south. I walk 
around  the house. I am a house. I take 
off my shoes. I take off my socks. I open 
the door with the latch that sticks. I stand 
in the frozen dirt outside the house. I am 
outside the house. I hear the feet 
of far-away people march toward me. 
I am a latch that sticks. I march in place. 
I stand and breathe. The air comes in. 
It is me. The air goes out. It is me. My feet 
get cold. I trip the latch. I go inside. I see 
the dog. He’s back to sleep. I get so tired. 
I listen to my son. I think about my self. 
I put another clean notion 
on another crooked shelf.

Microbes Are Pleasant Things to Think About

The first encounter with my body
is not my flesh, but a mat 

of roiling organisms, a habitat
alive on the surface of my skin. 

And that’s just where I begin,
The ecosystems which are me descend

within. The assemblage of myself 
comes from all that makes me up. 

I am made up
of so much more than the concept

of my self which satellites across
the dark dome of my skull. 

When I breathe into the dark
morning pulse of star upon star

the pale shadow that emerges 
from my mouth is just that. When I inhale 

the living dark I expand
into an ecosystem, a vast liberation.

Teeth Are Pleasant Things to Think About

How they nip and how they crush
and grind. How the work they do 
wears them down. One of my front 

teeth is grooved from biting 
through fishing line. Each time I tie 
on a fly I crimp down the barb before

I nip the slack. My childhood cowboy-
dentist bent the Novocain needle
with his thumb-thick fingers in front 

of my boyish face. A friend and I vied
to see who would have more teeth 
pulled before braces. We rooted

for our baby teeth to lose to the pliers
before giving way to a permanent smile.
My father’s smile is more grimace 

than grin. He looks particularly Shining-
like in one photo with my son. One autumn,
a kype-jawed trout tore up my thumb 

when I released the hook I had placed 
in its mouth as gently as such piercing 
can be done. My son once brought home 

a tooth his dentist pulled in a molar-
shaped, plastic cup. I held that fish 
half in and half out of the river. My son 

doesn’t fish with me much, our unspoken 
understanding that we like different things.
My son walked down the hall one day

at the orthodontist without needing to hold
my hand. At that time, years back, he had 
just two more baby teeth left to go. 

Walking Is a Pleasant Thing to Think About

Feet taking turns in front of each other 
and following each other have done their part

to carry us through every tragedy,
through those borders that appear 

open and those uncrossable. How generously 
steps work and in opposition to one another 

to carry many bodies, their heads and hands,
from one side of a bridge to the other,

from one continent to another, past steel helmets
past strands of concertina wire,

through a forest dappled with monarchs
opening and closing their wings on their way 

to a border town of cots of bored soldiers 
who could, if they wanted to keep themselves occupied,

could be horrible or could simply look up at the stars
gently invading the sun’s footprints shadows in retreat.

Wind is a Pleasant Thing to Think About

Golden eagles funnel and shriek
through a corridor narrower than the distance 
between here and runnels tampered
muddy by cloven hooves. You can find 
the footage of semis at a standstill shaken, 

lifted, and toppling over. Scraps of all sorts 
of weaves, even skin and wing, banner 
out from wires. My awkward friend 
used to belly-crawl under the low strand
splicing the lane from the borrowed

pasture. Once, a gust nearly blew 
me over when I lifted a foot to step. My son 
is now living through that age with a lot 
of shouting. The tarps we used to use 
for damming ditches were always hunter 

orange. Alone, they were difficult, like clouds, 
to manage. The barn where we almost lived, 
now rehabilitates birds of prey mostly struck
by cars. Summer also brought, and still, a lot
of sky. The pace changes the farther it is

you look up. When my head tilts back
I can’t keep my mouth from opening. Every 
utterance is a form of jetstream. Every billow 
lays a stalk down against its breast. I can’t
tell if it’s me or this place getting fiercer.

Petroglyphs Are Pleasant Things to Think About

Twilight and everyone says it is too late
to take the boys down to see the wall
where men on horseback charge a loco-
motive unencumbered by tracks. The boys 
are busy anyway on the tumbledown 
bluffside above camp, making up 
a complex system of values for all
the sedimentary hues. So I walk into swarms 
of mosquitos and the mud rush of the run-
off river. Mouths of trout, or maybe whitefish
pock the still surface of a side channel’s 
invisible current. The light steams
off into the inevitable night, a tunnel
through a darker mountain. I have to stand
right up close to the cliff to make out
the feathers streaming from the riders’ head-
dresses and the racket of engine wheels 
pistoning invariably toward a golden spike.
If I think about that train scene in Lawrence
of Arabia -- Peter O’Toole’s eyes pale
as two moons in a wildfire sky and all those
extras charging the train -- how what was wrong
with that situation couldn’t help but be
replicated. How much, I wonder, is like that.
Sounds from the boys, almost like laughter
or a fight from their sloughing marketplace,
trickle all the way down the wash carved 
by one or the other unexpected flood.

A Small Blue House on a Hill Is a Pleasant Thing to Think About

The great bulk of the tree
trunk, half as wide
as the house and the leafy
span three times
as broad, must mean
the tree is larger
than what is possible 
or the cottage smaller.

Instructions printed 
underneath: Do not
freeze. Do not expose
to direct sunlight.

A warm and private
place encased in glass
and glitter. When I am
at a loss for how
the make my future
a future, I turn the globe
this way and that;
the watery air shimmers
before settling down.

I like to be alone
under shadowy branches
near a current. Sometimes
a leaf or two falls
or shakes off the wind.

The ideal place sits 
on a bookshelf near
Don Quixote inside the real
place where outside, just now,
snow begins to swirl.

Shadows Are Pleasant Things to Think About

See how the see-through darkness floods 
and pools wherever the winter sun drags 
the shadows, whispering the bodies 
that ground-bound shapes darting upward
have to tell to the contours of the loam 
and the scars and wrinkles that the earth 
mutters back. All that way out beyond 
the skin which breathes the Earth together, 
shadows flood and pool. When the moon 
thumbprints the message of the summer
sun above us we laugh again like we are
small, as if the memory of wonder 
is like a light inside our bodies, ponderous 
as fireflies once batting away the Milwaukee 
dusk and as flickering. How the aspen leaves 
all ripple into a watery sheen that does not
saturate, and how that great shadow 
we wait for races across the valley so quickly 
we don’t even bother trying to catch up.

Popcorn Is a Pleasant Thing to Think About

There must be another way to release
the kernels from the cob

on the ear of popcorn my stepmom
brought home from the farmers

market. We have the microwave
instructions but not the oven.

How likely this is, now at the end 
of an empire, to hold a part 

of an ancient life, stored for centuries
in mud and stacked stone middens 

hidden in cliffs southwest of here,
the husk-topped key to a simple safe 

we did everything we could do to make 
ourselves helpless to unlock. 

Casado. Casado. Casado.

Underneath the music, the mechanism
of your instrument: valve click
and the condensation of breath. I’ve been
in conversation with the two-lane pavement
between Shoshoni and Casper many times
in my life. Sometimes dead evidence
of migrations: pronghorn, raccoon, 
mule deer, skunk; sometimes meadowlark 
song clear through window glass and semi rush; 
sometimes drill rig parts; sometimes undated 
campaign billboards for the president;
sometimes no sound but thought, tire drone, 
wind gusts. This early June, Casado. 
Casado. More than the function of exhalation. 
Exaltation. For the passage of your introspection, 
the feeling of what air can make drives
out the nameless one who names everything
after himself. The revelation of what we have
to make with fingertips, breath, brass, ink:
the world we love and the lives we love
who live or once did, a quiet highway surveilled 
by nothing more than bright June clouds.

(            )

The air in our ears
weds lips to brass. The air refuses

to be masculine. Casado,
ungenderer of air, ungenderer

of voice, of breath. Casado, when you speak
into this conversation

of instruments, the revolutionary air
airs its possibility

free from the tyrant with his shoddy charts
his gender, his false measurements.

(           )

Casper Mountain, invite the Juneness 
of the evening, invite Milena Casado to play
anything she wants. Drill rigs and data center construction
sites stagger in Casado’s trumpet wake, in the inviolable 
revolt inside each artist offering their art 
(even when the artist doesn’t sense this yet).

America, are you just
a blowhard country of followers
and their tyrants? Casado, Casper Mountain, you’re luminous.
You invite us to be luminant. Here comes 
the softer truth of breath: shoot a bullet 
at the North Platte River. If it enters, it sinks. If it ricochets, 
sense some unknown potential
for worse. America, why treat 
what could be a friend like that? Casado
and Casper Mountain don’t.

Casado, when you play to Casper Mountain,
the fountain where blowhards murdered Lorca
runs with clear water lit by June light.
No blowhard dares to drink. The living air
between Spain and the American West
cups its hands and thirsts.

The Octopus Is a Pleasant Thing to Think About

I imagine a body elastic, each limb aware of its own capacity for nervousness. The consciousness of the octopus tendrils out independently eight times while its ninth eye-brain looks
on in wonder, 
or wary, 
or for prey 
or – if contained in the dim hunger of a tank – for a way out. 
Why not touch the plexiglass suckered coil by coil? Why not shift skin, like a goddess 
of many limbs and heads and hues? What is the self if not in color? 

I wonder how I’d delineate the compassion of my limbs if each could make decisions for itself. Who 
would take the measurements and who 
would hold the instruments? 

I like to think I’d break out across the border of linoleum 
inside the Draper, Utah aquarium, all nine of my mental states 
wriggling and 
sticking to the floor, 
watching myself on the move from one safe cell to a larger, livelier cell, 
risking the violence of the climate-controlled air. 

I’d flatten through a crack too thin for one brain to conceive of shimmying.

I’d sense the pulsations of the water and its temperature and have an inking they were fakes. 

I’d skulk in the artificial rocks while sharks and schools of fish, whose colors I couldn’t make my pigments match – deceived as well by the pump-house currents – marched on in their circular migrations, plotting but not leading to the emergence of a new form. 

I’d embody how there is a prison architecture where the independent parts choose to go about their business under the illusion of a singular and powerful stare. 

I would not think in any way I can imagine thinking
that I’d go there,
then I’d go there.

The Deep State Is a Pleasant Thing to Think About

My grandparents filled their house in the red
desert with green light. Not money-green 
but plant. Walls brushed with green. Green
curtains drawn except on the patio doors 
looking out onto three rose bushes my grandpa
tended before the heat of the day made the buds
and blossoms droop, before the waves rising 
from the concrete patio made leaving his little green 
world uncomfortable. The last time I saw my grandpa 
there, I was, I guess, what might be called a man. 

I had already left, forgotten something, returned,
and he was at the piano bench meandering 
through his repertoire. He had not heard me knock 
or trip the front door latch. I could have taken 
anything I wanted. Even when I spoke he did not 
respond to my voice from where he played, so far 
within the places the notes to him. The delicacy
of seeing a man you love when he thinks he is not 
seen. This, I now imagine myself thinking then, this
is how I will remember him. A memory 

we would never share. I was a child the last time 
he drove me to the lake below the blue spring. 
algae bloomed by the lava rock riprap wall
where we hauled in trout cruising the shallows.
Only later, the outhouse pit straight into the lapping
water made its terrible sense. It took longer 
than it should have for me to see the trouble 
of organic matter processed through the human 
gut, to know that some of the do-it-yourself ways 
from our past were better disassembled. My grandpa 

was fond of ice cream and dressing all in tan. He played 
as a young man in the Zion Lodge band, snuck 
off to the highway tunnel blasted through the cliff 
to drink one cold beer with his friend. His fingers 
stayed nimble. Near the end of a way of life, 
how some men drop into their past. How beautiful 
and how terrible the descent. How the things 
that last outlast us, our memory, our memories 
of what passes. How the world is not a memorial, 
but alive and sound. How the deep state began.

An Armillary Sphere Is a Pleasant Things to Think About

Begin with a bronze globe tracked
as if by a form of measurement,
as if by mice or centipedes. Perhaps 
begin with bone, a bone sphere, or consider

a conifer cone. The strobiles of Douglas Fir
distinguish themselves from the seed
apartments of other conifers 
with bracts some say look like mice 

diving between the scales, little mice diving
in the half-open seed doors. Begin, if you wish, 
with a cone. Whichever substance
you start with, make a band 

for microbes and one for stars. Work
on a band for family, considering tracks 
perhaps for mom or dad. A band 
for nebulae where atoms draw close

to one another, group up enough
into thickets that then colors form. Once 
what you’ve made begins to erupt 
with colors, track the bands of color 

on the backs of whomever crawls
out from underneath the dome.

The Dictionary Is a Pleasant Thing to Think About

Perhaps the Italian-
English dictionary I plucked 
this morning from the shelf opposite 

my desk to look up the spelling 
of generosity, a word 
I have trouble remembering 

how to spell, and the first words 
my gaze knifepointed, as if opening a melon 
or dividing the clear tape

seal on a cardboard box addressed 
to my residence but not ordered by me, 
were gangplank and genitals.

How like genitals are
words to the bodies of thoughts,
their bifurcations and convergences,

inside our heads. Funny
how I can feel them there, the thoughts
moving like schools of fish

driven upward by schools 
of bigger fish or maybe dolphins. And how
like the gangplank are words,

slender vehicles for embarcation
and departure from the skull, that ship
we toss about in, seasick

to the rollings of our
oceanic bodies on the oceanic
surface of a planet made mostly 

of the space between markings,
between traceries, pathways of particles
that are only ever visible

when we aren’t throbbing
with the desire, il desiderio, to merge
from particles into waves.

Il Desiderio, which is also, apparently,
an Italian restaurant in Wheelers Hill,
a suburb south of Melbourne, 

where constellations, for which I’d need 
the thrumming of another voice 
to whisper in my ear, wheel 

above the pulsing city and its outskirts. I want
to go to Australia someday, to feel
the soles of my feet on that ground.

Already I feel il desiderio infinito, 
or perhaps I feel the title
of the novel by Francesco Piccolo

I had never heard of, before the dictionary, 
Il desiderio di essere come tutti
The desire to be like everyone.

Crude Oil Is a Pleasant Thing to Think About

I made a diorama while in grammar school: some 
dinosaur horror show in a half-dismantled shoebox 
streaked with oil-based paints. I spent a lot 
of time working on the blood, scraping dried bits off 

my fingernails. Without a microscope to magnify 
or an encyclopedia for looking up, how could I have 
known enough to include algae blooms, lives too small 
to notice, the no-longer-living diving down. Deep 

in the lightless compression, I could not possibly touch 
that viscous, liquid black. Perhaps I backgrounded 
an ancient riverbed or a teeming inland sea. Many plants 
and all sorts of bristling species must have fallen 

in together, and then later, many others. Silt upon silt. 
Sand over sand. How people find what they look for 
where they think to search. How what is now all tearing 
and patching back together was once just the energy 

of melding dead purpose into what we call potential. 
Now when I notice waxwings, I can’t help but see
their ancestry. I imagine their roosts in silent branches
near clear springs, not roadways, not pumps, not clank.


2018-2026
md

Spring

She had not expected to swim again before her departure, but the unseasonable warmth of autumn lingered most afternoons, and the old man drifted into his stories about his daughter swimming straight from the boat. She was less and less sure he knew the girl in the boat and then in the water and the woman he told the stories to were one and the same. Since the boat was long gone, she walked the lake’s edge to where the water deepened more quickly closer to the current coming in from the spring.

The old swimsuit she found no longer fit her well but well enough, so she wore it in case the old man came to the lakeshore on his own. They had always been modest with one another. The swimsuit was sunbleached and a little worn but still red. 

When she left for the first time, she had packed little. What she needed, she remembered thinking to herself, she would find where she landed, and that had been often true. In the time since her return, she had, piece by piece, removed most of what had been hers and had been left behind. This cataloging once-memorable objects for giveaways felt strange to her. In her travels, she had simply left behind what she no longer had room to carry.

In the water, she found her stroke quickly, and she found a pace she could keep up, so she swam out beyond where the spring current was still noticeably colder. Out there she paused for a moment and turned back toward shore. She knew enough about cold water to keep the pause brief. She looked to the shoreline. She saw the shape of the old man walking there, saw him notice her bobbing like some untethered buoy. She watched him cup his hands around his mouth. He called out for her. Daughter. Not her name.