Read an Excerpt

THIS, THEN

Someone wearing a vest of radon implants
coaxed my tongue to be sweetly laid out in a kurgan of rain.
This is the rain’s nest, he said, where you will be joined
by the skin of a galloping horse held up by sticks.
Just then God’s mouth filled with lead.
People at that time started, it seemed, to bleed
in the streets from their ears.
This wasn’t force of listening, they
just were scraped by some large thing moving past,
sleet of arrows, yielding shelf of stones.
I stared at them, peak, peak, peak. The quills in their hands
and feet slicked into me, over
the border into me like I was being shot up, quietly and in secret
by drum solos.
Let us dip the tip of horror in horror.
Randy went down, Albert rappelled under the waves.
Something, all we’d never said, was eating
up from below.
St. Teresa of Avila was sitting in a gold chair
in a breathing-through-a-straw house in a suburb
quite far out, where what she’s saying — it eggs slowly from
her mouth — is taken up in spikes along the back legs of the hum
from swelling, overhead wires.