A gecko mistaken for a bird that sings in the night.
It is no bird. A healer blows smoke into the wound.
Sees through flesh to a bone once broken.
In the sea, they say, there is an island made of bottles and other trash.
Plastic bags become clouds and the air a place for opportunistic birds.
One and a half million plastic pounds make their way there every hour.
The pellets are eggs to the seabirds, and the bags, jellyfish to the turtle.
So it is with diapers, shampoo, razors and snack wrappers, soda rings
and six-pack holders. Even the sacks to carry it all home flow to the sea.
Wind has lofted the water into a distant city, according to news reports:
most of that city submerged now, with fish in the streets.
It is no bird. The man hasn’t sold any of his carved dolphins.
Geckos don’t sing. The vendor of sarongs hasn’t sold a single one.
Prau, the boats are called throughout this archipelago.
Spider-looking. Soft-motored. Waiting at dawn.
Geckos can’t blink, so they lick their own eyes to keep them wet. Their bite
is gentle, they eat mealworms and crickets. This is why no crickets sing.
No one talks about it, but people look to the sea
toward where the plane went down. There is time to imagine:
one hundred eighty-nine souls buckled to their seats on the seafloor,
the wind too much for the plane, the gecko now at the door.
After the earthquake, people moved into the family tombs.
Many graves now have light and running water.
Others live at the dumps in trash cities, where there is work sorting
plastic, metal, glass, tantalum from cell phones and precious earths.
This work is slow. A low hum of ordinary life drills into the mind
like the sound of insects devouring a roof. There is no hope for it.
There is only the sea and its yes, lights in the city of the dead,
and a plastic island that must from space appear to be a palace.
THE LAST PUPPET
Moonlight taps on the puppet maker’s hut, the tip of a brush
touching hide, light falling into water from an egret’s wings
like tears on glass. Stones dusted with ash. Taps as if someone were there,
attempting to wake us up. A bell ringing in a tomb of cloud.
This debris is the puppet maker’s house, taken by a sudden wind.
A storm like the future, filled with pigs, trees, cars, and something
no one should wish to see. Fires on the seafloor. Burnt weather.
The once-soft air embalmed in salt. As if God said it.
They kill the snake, drain its blood into a glass of liquor
along with its still-beating heart. Not everyone does this.
You drink it, and later you chew and chew the strong muscle of snake.
In another place, the blood of fruit bats is given without the heart.
No one knows the difference this makes.
Souls have their own world. The corpse its bone cage.
Nothing but fire everywhere the fire finds air.
There are no hides left, this is the last puppet.
The puppet maker lifts it to the light and has it speak
a language it will never speak again, its shadow finding the shadow
on the wall of no one else. Then he puts a last song in its mouth.
Souls have their own world. They are the descendants of clouds.
Take this puppet to America. Hold it to the light.
THE LIGHTKEEPER
A night without ships. Foghorns calling into walled cloud, and you
still alive, drawn to the light as if it were a fire kept by monks,
darkness once crusted with stars, but now death-dark as you sail inward.
Through wild gorse and sea wrack, through heather and torn wool
you ran, pulling me by the hand, so I might see this for once in my life:
the spin and spin of light, the whirring of it, light in search of the lost,
there since the era of fire, era of candles and hollow wick lamps,
whale oil and solid wick, colza and lard, kerosene and carbide,
the signal fires lighted on this perilous coast in the Tower of Hook.
You say to me, Stay awake, be like the lens maker who died with his
lungs full of glass, be the yew in blossom when bees swarm, be
their amber cathedral and even the ghosts of Cistercians will be kind to you.
In a certain light as after rain, in pearled clouds or the water beyond,
seen or sensed water, sea or lake, you would stop still and gaze out
for a long time. Also, when fireflies opened and closed in the pines,
and a star appeared, our only heaven. You taught me to live like this.
That after death it would be as it was before we were born. Nothing
to be afraid. Nothing but happiness as unbearable as the dread
from which it comes. Go toward the light always, be without ships.
THE CROSSING
No matter how light it was or wet the fields, and whether or not the horses
from the stable down the road had broken their fence and were grazing
near our windows as horses in a dream, Anna would be gone, out
pounding the earth with her pronged hoe. She never woke me, although I slept
beside her, like sleeping near a hill wrapped in house-silk. Her teeth floated
in water on the nightstand where she kept her spectacles, this woman who
crossed, as a girl of my age, in the hold of a ship for weeks, lowering
her bucket of night soil by rope, then, from the sea-rinsed bucket, pouring
seawater over herself on the lower deck where bathing was permitted.
The salt stiffened her hair and burned her eyes, but she was clean.
It isn’t what they tell you, pisklę—calling me the name of a little bird that sings