They settle.
It’s what they do.
“Colonial” now is just
a settled style, a label
for what to them is 
a quaint moment
in their past. “Frontier”
is a counter spell
they’ve settled on
to counteract
the miasma around
“genocide.”“Antebellum” prettifies
their mouths and settles
raw old acid in their stomachs,
and “settler” itself is now nobler
and sweeter than history
would suggest. 

They tell me to leave it alone,
say it’s just a way of speaking,
aren’t you tired of talking as if
it’s so damn deadly out here?
Settle down and look at the lovely eclipse
or something more or less not
killing you or those you love right now.
So much beauty in the world. So much
to be said for that, you one-note note taker
on the warped order of the settled places;

try speaking instead of what you think
of the sparrows and starlings. Speak of how they settle
on the feeders or the ground to eat and eat 
and shit and eat some more, of how they do it all
so natively you’d think they were here all along.
Settle in, half-breed; after all, you look like you could belong.
Find some beauty round here and act like 
you are the poet we know you can be and watch 
the sun come up over the old farm pastures
where the surveyors and diggers have yet to roam.

We believe
you should know
that you could become
the face of the moment 

like a green-eyed girl
in a refugee camp
on the cover
of a magazine

or a girl kneeling over a boy
shot through the mouth
in a newspaper story
about an antiwar protest

You could be even be more
A whole country’s heart-sized hole 
A tear-trailed staring mask 
A death-flecked dirty suit of clothes

hovering by a mass grave
full of black plastic bags and flies
in the wake of a conflict
we’ve chosen for all to see

We think you have 
what it takes to be
the specimen needed
for such a time

We can even leave your name
out of it if you prefer — trust us
Ever hear of Sharbat Gula
or Mary Ann Vecchio

Just think it over
Sleep on it 
We’ll get back to you
when the time is right

Third floor neighbors 
had a lovely cat
who went nuts one day
and attacked and drew blood
from all who came near.
No disease, no injury
was found after they put her down;
no one could explain, the vet saying only
that no one knows, sometimes,
how wires get crossed.

I got up to pee last night
and grandmothers,
none of them mine,
were everywhere
in the house —
musty old aprons a-flutter
as they thronged the rooms
silently disapproving of 
everything. I came out
of the bathroom and they
were gone, with only the scents
of lilac water and disdain
left behind. I went 
right back to bed as if nothing
had happened, as if no sacrifice 
or offering could or should be made
in response.

It’s faintly ridiculous
to hear all this talk from all sides
about saving “the country”
when “the country” in question
is as dead as a roomful of 
broken disappointed grandmas
and as savage
as a cat in a third floor walkup
who hasn’t been
outside for years and
chooses violence and death 
as a worthy way to go. 

I don’t know why
any of this has happened
or why I don’t keep sage
in the house against such things
any longer, as I once did,
as if no one knows
how wires get crossed.

In the beginning,
after the collapse became
inevitable, no alien hand
reaching in to stop it,
we kept using words like
“awakening” and “rebirth,”
but no one really wanted that
if it meant things would look 
truly different.

In the beginning,
after the birds fell silent
and the seas turned gray
and hopeless, after we began 
to notice the voice
of flatline in the wind, 
people said that was a song,
a new song, and it would be
alright sooner or later —
but none of them were singing
and that should have been a clue.

In the beginning,
once it had become clear
that hope would be a mistake
unless it was a hope of complete
erasure and restart, we kept at it
with chants and the like 
for a time. We did all
the small things
we were asked to do even after
it became obvious it wasn’t going 
to be enough. 

In the beginning,
we sat in the ruins 
of the time before
and did all the same things
and hated all the same people
and shit in the same holes
we’d always filled with our shit
before. We looked with disfavor
upon what we’d wrought and then
wrought it again in a slightly 
cleaner form until the true beginning
took us away from it and put us
in the garbage by ourselves
to dwindle as the new day began
to brighten and there we stayed until
finally we were gone. 

This place, my home,
narrowing to the width
of a sick dropping falling
from a sick hole. 

Or, it was always this way
and I’ve gotten bigger —
not much, but enough
to see difference 

between what I used to think 
was vast and what I see now as
already small  but tapering off even more
before it falls to the bowl,

the smell noticeably
more acid than rose,
now that I know
what a rose can be.

Common wisdom says
if you find yourself on fire
you must stop, drop, and roll
until there is no more fire,

but no one follows that up
with any wisdom at all about 
what to do with all these ashes
and hard charred hunks
left behind by the flames.

It would be good to know.
There’s so much of this
going around
it’s hard to distinguish
smoldering people
from the land on which
they suffer,
the land onto which
they’ve fallen

rolling in agony 
until they either 
put the fire out
or spread it to
another,
and then another.