is Dear City. My neighbor walks his dogs
past a monument to a president’s
terrier, Fala, forever bronzed. Washington
has no J Street, no Z, yet the city
maps attend to fifty states and a stretch
of five blocks NE Metro track—a stretch
named Puerto Rico Avenue. Bow down
to the unmapped names: Chocolate City,
Simple City. Ben serves up chili dogs
through a riot, and Walter Washington
is the first and last time a president
picks our mayor. The truth is, presidents
come and go, four or eight years at a stretch.
Barry said, I’m yours for life, Washington;
Emperor Marion, who could get down
with Chuck Brown. Later, reporters will dog
his Bitch set me up, his graft. Dear City,
will you let me claim you as my city?
To love you is to defy precedent.
Your quadrants hustle like a pack of dogs
around the hydrant Capitol. They stretch
and paw, they yap and will not settle down.
Traffic: the berry to Washington’s jam.
For city miles, Barry’s motorcade stretched.
We laid him among vice presidents, down
where the dogs seek congress in Washington.
PIGS IN SPACE
Landing at the Sea of Tranquility,
the clock calls for breakfast—
eight squares of bacon, coated in gelatin;
dehydrated peaches; apricot cereal cubes.
No salt on the loose, no spice,
fifteen cups of coffee per astronaut.
All this fine-tuned in the eight years
since Gemini pilot John Young’s pocket
revealed a corned beef sandwich
courtesy Wolfie’s of Cocoa Beach,
which he offered to Gus Grissom
as the crumbs broke away and floated
toward the fickle innards of the ship.
Now, everything bound into bar or pouch,
cocktail shrimp hand-selected to squeeze
one by one through the tubing.
Inventing the space taco will take
another two decades. Sturdy tortillas
will be fortified for shelf life,
glued together by creamed onions.
In 2008, Korean scientists will perfect
how to prepare kimchi
without the lactic bacterial fizz
that might, given cosmic rays,
just happen to mutate.
But we are not there yet,
and for days the Apollo 11 menu
has asked them to imagine one paste
as beef, another as chicken;
to discern first tuna, then salmon.
As they ready to step outside
the lunar module, Buzz Aldrin unscrews
a tiny vial drawn from his private pouch,
and the wine drapes at one-sixth gravity.
His fingertips grip a tiny chalice,
while the other hand places
a wafer on his tongue. During all this,
NASA cuts the feed. Soon they’ll return
to regularly scheduled acts of faith,
releasing hydrogen and oxygen
to mix inside the fuel cell:
from that, a gathering of water,
and from that, a chowder of corn.
BILOXI BACON
If Marc Chagall’s father
had hauled fish in Mississippi
instead of Vitebsk,
in his paintings
holy mullet would
wing over his rooftops—
mullet, on violin—rooster
and mullet, mullet and goat.
In his chapel of mullet-paned glass
we would gather
to watch each fish relay
the baton of its body
from wave to wave,
across a marathon of hunger.
The body, fried, cradled in grits.
Smoked body, lacquered in cane.
We save the gizzard,
the star-white milt,
while bridal roe bursts
with promise of morning.
When casting nets to the Gulf,
who are we to judge grace?
Chagall saw the wonder
of what sustains us: how one
can scavenge the bottom
and still rise, without apology,
by the silvered dozen.
RHYMES WITH
I stop off on Route 301 to debate
between quarter-bushel bags of oranges—
Temples and Ortaniques I’ll bring back
to the presser we bought cheap, scrubbed clean.
Wear-Ever, promises the stamped metal.
I have been in lust with Florida’s strange:
her match of pastel blue to forest green;
her north more Southern than her south;
how alligators and crocodiles share nine miles
of pond with one shore brackish, the other fresh.
Sporange, promises the dictionary.
Or Blorenge, a mountain in southeast Wales.
In moments like this I must pitch my stance
so that I don’t fall down the mountain,
into a Welsh valley,
into the river of Usk.
We’ll work for an hour, slicing and pressing,
until we’ve filled two bottles to the brim.
What two bodies couldn’t make music,
within such a tight embrace of aluminum?
STILL LIFE WITH SEX
But first, a skull grinning amongst the grapes;
but first, hydrangea moons barely risen;
but first, milky bowls congregating in the sink
and sticky spoons congregating in the bowls;
but first, that vegetal stink; but first,
clank of pipes filling with air; but first,
dirt on your end of the couch; but first,
dirt from your Monday shoes;
but first, a canteen of water;
but first, five lagers;
but first, Magnum P.I.;
but first, Tom Selleck; but first,
kiss me because you clutter the pewter;
kiss me because you track in necessary dirt.
Picture a violin, then add prosciutto.
We are trying to make space and hold it open.
The skull that grins amongst grapes grins at us.
But first, those globes of hydrangea;
there they are, perfect, and cratering to our touch.
HAINS POINT
The old men chide each other to tee up quick, before the rain comes. I want to buy a fountain soda, sit on the porch, and eavesdrop. I want to buy a pitcher of beer. I walk the mini-green, swoops of turf and brick that have been here since 1931. The city assembled this spit over a dozen years from nineteenth-century dredgings. My dad detoured our Cadillac along the channel so we’d see The Awakening, five pieces that hinted at a giant body breaking ground to breathe. The Peace Garden’s funding never came through. The Navy enclosed four acres to build a steel shed, contents unknown, and The Awakening moved to Maryland. The sidewalk is swept with mucky silt and I’m getting mosquito-bit, watching ducks toddle and peck. On the far bank, National glimmers. One plane after another insists on liftoff as the storm eases across the river. The old men chide each other, Go on now. They give each other answers no man gives when a woman does the asking.
WINTER GARDEN PHOTOGRAPH
After Roland Barthes
Barthes withholds this image from Camera Lucida—
Henriette, the five-year-old who grows up to be his mother,
her hands on her hips.
He couldn’t bear that our gaze might find her
ordinary,
as one might find this snapshot
of my grandparents arriving in Rapid City, South Dakota.
Her precise handwriting on the back declares
their “America the Beautiful” tour.
Grandma Jean’s jaunty scarf, Carl in his crisp white
