A devil came to me Saturday,
laughing and calling himself Charlie,
shaking the rain out of his hair.

I felt my hindsight slip
as I followed him out to his bike,
as I left my roommates watching TV.

The warm-blooded saint
and the icy blue killer
met one day on
the path of dust.
They stole from each
other, vitality and
secrets—they embraced
In the null gray morning.

The radiator
has been cold for quite
a while and no sooner do we
put our sweaters on than we hear,
beyond our reading, a low, deep, faraway
snap, cool as the cue that comes from the fingertips
of a leaning-in bass singer in a doo-wop group, then more
snaps rise closer and higher in pitch, like other crooners creating

The runner’s the disciple of travel,
Ambassador from determination;
All the wars a runner fights are civil,
The self-turned challenge, the primal agitation.
We tritely say that running signs the human
Spirit, community of close-stepping pack,
Second wind as individual omen,
We measure with matched morals on the track.

One day, she realizes she’s blown up:
It’s not surprising with their snacking choices.
Still, while she likes him any way, she notices
That he is distant. Taking a first step,

1. The Muppets on The Muppet Show

This one’s job
was to yearn.
This one to love improbably.
This one to be pathetic.
This one to run berserk.
None of the jobs were useful
but we did them very well.

I speak god language
because people die
and god is the tongue of death.

Death stopped time, left me behind
my father with the small pot of raspberry jam
he ate with a spoon.

My story-line is a birth, a tooth-
ache, a wedding, a broken wrist, a messy fissure,
a death by fire.

On his motorcycle, Brin drove me to Pine Lake
to go diving. I gripped his waist, loosely afraid

of falling into the traffic on North Elm Street
or Randleman Road, where the cars were racing on

and off Interstate 40. Pine Lake was carved out
of a cow-pasture by bulldozers and filled from

a nearby swamp in 1952. On one side were rows
of small white houses with wire fences—our side

~ after “Marguerite au Sabbat” by Dagnan-Bouveret

A woman, standing near the fires, seems
alone, the flames behind her glowing red,
whipped by a swirling wind, eternal, torn
by air to tongues, by voices harmonized
as if the chants, renewed in light, were born
a thousand years before, and overhead
merge with both flame and smoke, casting a shade

In the middle of December,
something rings

in the corn, the bull’s eye
of campus, in a blue light

that is three-quarters
at best,

tracks me like a sister
into a world of developing

bells. Husks
pull closed over dying meat.

I married a parrot with green eyes
then tried to return to my old life
like a moth caught in the air ducts.
Years of nights, rubbing
his gold-tip wings against my body . . .

 from falling
     she’s a champion—
 
love on blind bicycles
     with up sort of relish rose.
 
the couples whirled
giddily; red stars,
     all sons turned
 
     bright.

In a private room, a woman works tirelessly, altering damaged clothing. There are pants for a man who wants to hide scars, a vest for a girl who needs to feel safe, a wool cape to swoop over the shoulders of one who carries the weight. I enter the room and notice the woman is held together with safety pins and tiny fibers that have attached to her skin and look like glue. There are small lines that look like stitches that hold her dress to her body. She looks at me and the scarf in my hand.  She hums with a needle pursed between her lips, pausing to say with her eyes, I cannot fix this.  She takes my scarf and wraps it around my neck, holding the ends of it in her hands.

You wake up a sphere
of clear crystal and the bed
is in you. The blinds shoot

curved through your belly
and light glints where
there are no eyes.

When words meant to be spoken are bottled up for too long, those words stop showering and shaving. Crank speed metal at four a.m. Carve lines into your forehead with rusty knives. Illegally park in handicapped spaces, create fake ads on Craigslist. Those bottled-up words trade up for down, left for right, dropkick you into the shacklebone zone. They smile in public, beat you in private. Fill your mouth with rains and hurricanes, pee a circle around your soul and mark it for extinction.