The old bodhi tree rises from dirt,
Vishnu-armed, grasping green hearts
in heavenward hands; light

slopes over sinewed shoulders,
fans through open spaces, falls
in rays around my lotus self. A leaf

flickers, its rustle rousing me
out of my waking dream: I look
up, and see not an Oz monkey

but a temple monkey
emerge from the green canopy
above me. He is no Monkey King,

he has no wings, and I have no
Golden Cap to command him:
so he and I, we are equals

at the feet of Sri Maha Bodhi.
I confess to Monkey, tell him
I once thought God was a great

humbug, like the old Wizard
in the Palace of Oz, promises
like hot air lifting a balloon

over a horizon hidden by rainbows
I could never cross again
while a hundred more years

clung to my spirit, gifting me
with a profane tongue
and a lead weight in my chest: but

beneath this tree, I remember that
my Bodhisattva once wore a thorn crown
heavier than my years. Monkey says

nothing, lets me trace our common tree
in his cabochon eyes,
his fur-lined simian face. I think

Auntie Em would be shocked
to hear me think this way, but
a hundred years and a million tears

have changed me. Monkey and I watch
Sri Maha Bodhi, broad-branched,
salute the lemon-stained sky light

that lands at our feet and says:
hallelujah.

There will be no
pain. A light pres-
sure (lighter than
a thumb) behind

the temples – that’s
all there is to
it. No curved lines.
No blurs. Just end-

less rows of Eu-
clidian per-
fection: that is
to say, freedom

from yourself. Hu-
manity, my dear,
is the worst sort
of prison. Each

rib is a bar
for a cage you
never asked for.
You may feel a

gentle pressure
behind the ster-
num just now. Don’t
try to fight. It

will all be o-
ver easier
if you don’t. Pic-
ture a pulsing

Yet there is music in her blood singing too loud and I am but a flute wrenched from a madman’s hands tasting metallic lips that never kiss never speak seeing red in the gray always red but not fire always rhythm not dance and my thoughts are wings I’ve never unfolded and my skull has windows I’ve never opened and I am small and I am small and I and I and and

iron lung, on-
ly we are the
lung and it breathes
for us. No i-

ron, in truth. It
is soft as eye-
lids and as qui-
et too, with smoothed

fingertips. Child,
hush now. Let the
singing fade. All
this I shall give.

here is a metallic rhythm in my skull

Not knowing whether she was feathered eel or leak-sprung boot, he answered the door. She had brought him soup, had chanced to touch his fingers warm as the tongue of a sheep. Now, he was Mars reclining upon the chaise.  Behind her the chair where she would sit. And there, his gesture to remove her coat. His eyes scouts for the trembling hand, and the hands, too, are scouts. She has come prepared for this. She plucked her brows and fashioned herself in garments to part the seas. She reads the titles of his scattered books. Part dog and part scientist, she gathers evidence. Finds that what lingers in the trash is more insidious than what clings to a wall.  A city ends here, in this room, and in the others cradled within this brick; sadness cooked up and delivered to cluttered caves of solo citizens. These are kingdoms of solitude.  Rodin would send Rilke out on missions to explore the panther in its gloom, the sculpture in its dish. Like the current from a dried up stream, she’s barely visible, but she has come through a forest of decades to piece him together. His wish? Explore her and then scavenge for the next blue fish.

He asked, “Why not take
that jewelry from your dead
mother’s safe deposit box?”
Now you have a lovely emerald.
Your siblings never found out.

He said your spouse wouldn’t
suspect a thing if you invited
that cute business associate
over to your hotel room. You
still smile to yourself about that one.

And when he told you 
to send the fat cats a message,
you felt no anxiety pushing
a button in the voting booth   
for someone who could start a war.

So when his confident voice says:
“Twenty stories, that’s not so far.
Don’t you know you’re immortal?”
Go ahead and have an adventure.
He’s never steered you wrong.

An ancient king
wears heavy wooden prayer beads
looped about his neck, maybe of koa or woodrose.

White-robed, he is sworn to protect local
villagers from demons. There are many—
a snow queen with killing blasts of ice,  a troupe of viral bats

victim's heads dangling
from necks like spent cherry blossoms, and hissing
foxes that split trees wide open,

but the great master zaps them all,
unprepared for what comes next—
a white serpent who slithers along

trying to finger her emptiness, until one day,
Su-Su spots an herbalist on her mountainside.
She is beautiful, snake charms the good man and becomes his wife,

helps him brew herbs to combat a disease
that chars villagers into sticks of ash.
The king wonders why his services are no longer necessary,

discovers that Su-Su is pouring
a bit of herself into every brown bottle, which is why the medicine
is making her husband a household name.

screams
Su-Su is upsetting the order of things, dangerous
when demons have relations with humans.

Of course, it ends badly, there’s one last kiss before
she is entombed for eternity.
The healer drifts away on a clot of earth.

“Ulla…”

“Ulla…”

“Ulla…”

“Ulla…”

The Martian wandered, and it wondered.

It wondered at the artistry of this great city the humans had made; proud and tall, even under the black dust, even throttled at every bend by the tangled red weed.

On Mars, there was no pride in cities. No color, no architecture to speak of — only building after featureless, airtight building. Martians were creatures of pragmatism. They had to be.

“Ulla…” the Martian muttered. “Ulla, Ulla, Ulla…”

It wandered, and it wondered if its people would remember it. The humans surely would. What stories would they tell of the Martians? What would their histories say of this short, pointless war? Would they confess to the atrocity they had wrought on their spaceborne enemies?

Of course, the Martian reflected, picking its agonizing way through the weed-choked rubble, what place did it have to judge the humans? Had it not murdered them by the hundreds with its fire? By the thousands with its smoke?

The Martian remembered them running, their many-colored faces made ashen by poison. Their screams had been so small. There had been power in the Martian’s tentacles.

Among those fleeing Earthlings, the Martian had seen a tiny human, with a head and appendages that seemed too big for her...his...had it been male or female? It did not matter.

Two other humans, larger than the young one, had gathered the latter close. They wrapped the child in their arms and raised their faces to the War Machine.

And the Martian...it had lowered its heat ray.

“Ulla, Ulla, Ulla, Ulla…” the Martian mumbled.

Eradicate them all, the superiors had said; a simple order. That town was not to be saved for draining.

Presently, the Martian came upon yet another ruined building, a sort of long, tapered triangle. The highest tip stood nearly level with the War Machine.

More of those strange spasms, for which the Martian had no name, wracked its body. It was getting harder to see. Each movement came a little slower than the last. The Martian braced one of the War Machine’s many tentacles against the building’s spire, struggling to keep the tripod upright, but the blackened architecture crumbled away at its touch. Gone in a puff of black dust, like so much else.

The Martian had its duty.

Alone in this desolate, alien city, so unlike the Martian’s own, it wondered if the violence had been worthwhile. As it watched, one of those lithe, four-legged creatures, the ones humans domesticated, gnawed on a scrap of burned flesh, far below the Machine’s tentacles. Human or Martian, it was impossible to tell.

For the sake of all Mars, they had sung. For the sake of all Mars.

The Martian wandered on, spooking the beast away, and it wondered what that small human called itself. What did it see when the Martian’s War Machine had razed the world around it? Perhaps these humans had stories, like those the Martians told many, many centuries ago, of beings infinitely greater than they, beings of terrible power and invincible might.

“Ulla, Ulla, Ulla, Ulla…” the Martian murmured.

The human buildings shrank as the Martian stumbled through the dust. Past the tall triangle rose squat, rectangular structures. These, the Martian knew about. The superiors had been quite specific: destroy the little buildings, force their human occupants to flee.

Another Martian had already been through here. Some of the buildings still burned. Blackened bodies cowered in the blacker dust.

Even had this not been the case, the Martian could not bring itself to raise the heat ray. It hardly had the strength to move its tentacles anymore, much less use them to cause yet more destruction. More death. There had been so much death.

The spasms were worse now, coming faster and lasting longer.  Was this how the humans had felt in the Martian’s smoke?

“Ulla…” the Martian moaned, when the choking finally passed. “Ulla, Ulla, Ulla…”

The Martian wondered why it was still wandering. What was the point? It would not change anything. With pained movements, the Martian brought the War Machine to a quivering stop, towering over the crumpled human homes. Light sparkled off the Machine’s metal cockpit. The Star was brighter here, huge and pale in the scarlet sky as it sank toward the horizon.

From its vantage, the Martian could see down into the nearest human structure, lit in uneven bars by the setting Star. Their living buildings were so strange; cluttered with unnecessary objects, priceless space wasted to store solid food. Now heaps of red weed tangled through their windows and up their roofs.

The Star’s light caught along the edges of a tiny square, drawing the Martian’s labored gaze deeper into the structure. It brought one twitching tentacle down into the home, sifting the larger items aside until it could reach the thing.

Extricated, the object proved to be an image, primitively preserved by way of flash powder. A different small human, its mammalian hair long and dark.

The Martian brought the glittering rectangle close to its cockpit, opening its hatch so it could see the image clearly.

“Ulla…”         

The Martian had a duty. It had to leave. For the sake of all Mars.

Movement arrested the Martian’s attention. An adult human, peering at the War Machine from beneath a patch of weed. It studied the Martian with careful eyes. This one was not afraid. Perhaps it already knew.

But the Martian had little concern for the human. It looked down at the image once more. The spasms came, and they did not stop. Darkness crept over the little human child’s face. Was the Star giving way to night already? Earth days were so very short.

“Ulla…” the Martian brushed the image’s face with a tentacle. It stared at the child until night overtook the Machine. Alone in the dark, the Martian held the image close.

“Ulla…”

“Ulla…”

“Ulla…”

“U—”

SEA LEGS

The worst part is the thirst, a crashing wave of it every few hours. Thank Poseidon
for the fleur de sel they keep on hand to top the fancy caramel lattes. When she’s homesick,
she eats it by the handful. Between customers, she touches the tender places where her gills
used to be, stares blankly around at her new life. Her girlfriends come in for iced mochas,
teetering confidently on their new legs. Some of them are trying out high heels or the strange
sight of toes in flip flops. Come on, they say, we’re going out to get some boyfriends.
She smiles. She guesses they all got what they wanted – a little house by the shore,
a little sun on skin. A new way to breathe. And her job? Really, she’s lucky.

Still, everyone asks so much of her. It’s hard to get used to the deep fried smells from the
Shrimp Shack next door. At closing she stops herself from taking a swim in the mop bucket.
She can never go back there, not even under the guise of a scuba trip. None of them can,
that was the deal. Sometimes she thinks the sea-witch appears to her on the ceiling of her
room, though it might be a trick played by early morning ocean light. The witch’s deep voice
curls out of the pink conch shell the mermaid keeps on her bedside table. She says, by the
way, being human means washing the same dishes every day. Did I forget to tell you that?

The blank American beach
offers broad Atlantic broader Pacific
rapine of conquistadors and pilgrims
shady dealings vast distances in hard times
hopefears requiring a forebear forego
almost all for a certain uncertain promise
and in such incredible amnesia, must play
the wisdom game against lapping tides

The waves taunt
But the lives he’ll never live
and the reasons he can’t recall
taunt him worse

Remember is the command
to Proteus wrestling his strange self in the sand

Remember—The 144,000 souls at creation and at the end, woven throughout time, reiterated into tenements and tents engorging both strangeness and recognition confounding and affirming a single mammoth truth with each contentious breath
‍ Remember—The distortion built into all seeing so the round of the year appears an arrow penetrating the depths of the unprecedented
‍ ‍ Remember—The command to Arjuna to know his own soul and still to kill, to seek in blood and betrayal the knot tied in all souls
‍ ‍Remember—Not to panic when you get here

Or was it something else?

The force of the night is against knowing—resistance
like a rusty fishing reel or trying to write down a dream
The path back chewed by feet bent by backs bent faded
by the claims of posterity mistranslated
at the insistence of the angels’ autocorrect

It dances on the tip of his tongue
holds him close and rebuffs him
sprouting and concealing worlds
without reward

As I ran from the shadows of the other beasts, the third of their cohort came before me. A she-wolf, lean and burdened with the cravings of every unfortunate soul who’d traveled this path. Her snarl and her bared teeth inspired a fear so great that I forsook my mountain destination for the darkness nearby, hoping to hide from the gaze of the lupine huntress.

As I ran into the dark and lost my way in the wilderness, I saw a form not much unlike my own, and called out, “Good man, please aid me.” 

“I was once a man,” my rescuer began. As he recounted his history and his deeds, he became recognizable to me, the cadence of his speech reflecting his celebrated prose. When he explained he’d lived in Rome under Augustus and reached “I was a poet,” he erased all doubt about who was speaking.

“You are the great Virgil,” I stated. “Who chronicled the flight from fallen Troy and fair Dido’s tragedy in the bosom of Carthage.” 

The poet, or the faint shade that still held his form, nodded his acknowledgement. “I am who you say. It is my task now to convey you forward.”

“Then you will help me face that beast, so that I may return whence I came?” 

“I am here to take you on a journey to another realm. For the beast you encountered allows no man along her path, but drove you here with purpose. Come.”

As we entered on the steep and savage path, the poet spoke of our surroundings. Though we passed a sign urging any who entered to abandon all hope, my curiosity bested my despair. Even the arrival of Charon and his eyes of ember seemed a singular thrill in its novelty.

“No good soul ever takes its passage here,” great Virgil warned as we took our river journey, yet I remained focused on our surroundings until the moment we plunged into darkness, falling like men with seizing sleep. When I stood erect on the brink of an abyss, the poet bade me follow him into the blind world.

Virgil’s lack of fear stayed my own, and we entered the first circle. The air filled with sighs from sorrow without torments, and the crowds held many multitudes of infants, women, and men.

When I queried as to the reason for their fate, Virgil explained that they had come in the time before. “They did not sin; and yet, though they have merits, that’s not enough, because they lacked baptism.” He continued as I examined this realm of limbo, incredulous. “For these defects, and for no other evil, we now are lost and punished just with this: we have no hope and yet we live in longing.”

“By ‘we,’ you suggest you count yourself among those punished thus?” I asked, and the Roman’s shade confirmed. Armed with that knowledge, I looked more closely at the crowds, and found I was no stranger to many of the figures moving all about us. 

“Is that blinded man not Homer, the supreme storyteller of his age? Do I not see the bearded figure of Alexandria’s Euclid? And that greatest of inventors, Archimedes, who fell in Syracuse in Rome’s conquest of your dear Phoenicians?” Around them I found the finest minds of antiquity. Horace and Cicero and Plato. Men without whose ideas my modernity would be all the poorer, doubtless still mired in the darkest of ages.

“Please, we must continue,” Virgil implored. “We have many circles yet to view, and only I may lead you there in safety.”

I remained where I stood, glancing at the shades of Moses, Noah, Ruth, and the others left unharrowed, with no mercy granted even for the virtue of their own bloodlines.

“Then it was no action of yours that condemned you to this realm?” I asked my master. “Save the absence of a choice you could not have known to make?”

“Yes, but we have far more to see. We will view the true torments of the unjust, and you will see how minor is our punishment.”

“For what reason would I want to see this?” I queried. “For the beast that drove me here was fearful enough.”

“When we have finished, I promise you will journey to the realms of paradise, the finest fruit borne of mankind’s goodness.”

“Then this is not paradise? How comes that to pass?”

Virgil began to explain the promise of those realms to come, and their own congregations of great men and women wrapped in freedom from all suffering. When I remained obstinate, Virgil spoke of fair Beatrice, wrongly supposing I found him an inferior guide or wished to part his company.

“What could more be paradise than a realm full of our species’ brightest lights?” I implored. “Why would a simple soul like mine scoff at the chance to roam free among them? To converse with them as I have you, and glean all the knowledge they have to impart.”

The great poet struggled to answer. “I was sent to save you from that great beast, and to show you these realms rarely seen by man. For I can no longer pass this knowledge to the living, and it is to you this task must fall.”

“No, for the beast that drove me here must have meant that I find you, no less than Juno brought your Aeneas to his mission. For it was not the lion nor the spotted beast that pursued me, but their lupine compatriot. Was it not a she-wolf that birthed the founders of your great city? Who suckled the brothers ere their eventual quarrel? Why would she decide my way if not for me to find one of Rome’s leading lights?”

Virgil continued to protest, but soon conceded to my argument. It was now he who followed me, as I moved among the crowd and began to seek the wisdom of those who formed it. Before long, I’d joined a dialog between Herodotus and Livy about the virtues of Rome, and found my intellectual curiosity sated as never before.

My abandoned hope returning as I contemplated the sheer numbers of great figures sharing their fate in this ambiguous circle, I turned to the poet and voiced my chosen lot. “Yes, I have decided it is here I will abide.”