To my brother: in his khaki habit like the one the missionaries wore
who were sent to the windy end of empire to serve and secure,
he turns in his cubicle, he rends a veil with his pencil,
he moves a decimal, he breaks and sets code like bone.
For the poor.
To my brother: in jail in his Wu Wear and absolutes—
everything’s a knife—there’s no such thing as silence
as John Cage said when there was irony and random
was a tunnel under the symphony of another century.
For the violated.
To Emma: that demon who was Linnaeus or Levi-Strauss
in another life, publishing the ideologies and taxonomies of smell—
fox, rot, scat, gall, goat, and once a rasher of bacon.
For the cherubim. For the kin.
To the debutant I was: a glistening fly in winter.
For the fevers of children.
To the man at 60: a turnip disinterred, a peasant in snow with bad shoes.
For the cult of the exaggerated girl.
To the rich: chattering dolphins in a sea of benzene.
For the afflicted.
Tonight, in the untowered downtown of Syracuse, the currency
hardens to the gray slugs the slot machine spits out and as the ghost
fish smell in the low haphazard heaven, I make this vow to look around.
For the ones to my right and my left.