A man with a watch knows what time it is.

A man with two watches is never sure.

-Segal's Law

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We need to hear everything twice these days.

Click click of rabbit teeth in wildgrass.

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These days tick, a metronome

counting down the dawn's double

 

whammy: golden purse, timed bomb.

The skeleton of yesterday rises, holds watch

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dial with its faint echo against cold bone.

Tested on teeth. How seconds double down like gaslight,

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feed on air before a hand appears to adjust

the mean time. Disregarding atoms, we believe

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the two bells contretemps in the clocktower:

one insists on praise, one, a tick ahead, the grave.

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I knew After the abortion, spontaneous or not, my uterus was a big steel bell. It rung for everything. Men, baby blankets, formula, binkies, onesies. It's normal to walk down the baby aisle and press your nose into a package of Pampers. After the abortion, my uterus, steel, magnetic, pulled not only sperm and egg inside it but also the future--Higgs Boson particles, String Theory, Monkey wrenches, Hannah Arendt, the strange flooding of the Oregon Coast. A choice you make makes you believe you can discern the future. The uterus isn't an empty jar. It's full of potential. It's noisy in there. Some people think noise isn't as cute as a baby. and, when it rains, the drops sound loudly against the metal sides. It reminds me not to get a metal roof in Portland, Oregon. You can tuck all your futures in the rafters of a wood-framed house on the corner of 34th and Hawthorne. We can move to the coast one day. Our uterus isn't empty. It is full of dreams. It carries within it a star full of Higgs Bosons, which gives us mass where no mass was thought to be. On July 4, 2012, the Cern Particle Collider detected a new particle which behaved, interacted, and decayed in ways predicted for the Higgs Boson. If you can discern from Cern a particle already named from a mathematical model, can you discern a Zoe from a mathematical model written job plus health insurance times spouse equals baby?

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I know some people who had babies when they were sixteen. Five years older, five years younger than I may have had a baby. Jamee, who had three babies before she was twenty-three, is dead now. That is not related to the baby-having except she died of an aneurysm which  may have been caused by smoking, stress, drinking, abusive husband one, abusive husband two, a breast cancer scare, heredity, pure kindness in the Billy Joel sense that only the good die young. At sixteen,  one divorce doesn't mean all marriages will be divorces. At sixteen, being broke and living with your mother doesn't mean you'll never have a job again. At sixteen, you won't necessarily die but you may not find yourself living on the Oregon Cast helping to discover the Higgs Boson with your spouse in the form of mountain of waves sending negative ions up your nose, releasing dopamine and/or allowing you to climb the coast range behind your dream house on the coast to search for psilocybin and/or a place off the beaten path to grow your own dope to sell so one day you can afford both child and healthcare. And then they'll legalize pot and the future you constructed out of thin air will once again be abracadabra'd into a new plan with new endometrial lining.

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Every month is a new future. There are so many Higgs Boson particles in the world. Hear them ping inside the collider. Hear them ping against the metal of your uterus. The future lives inside there a million times a billion times. You are the predictor of particles if not futures. Choose the spin. Choose the parity. Mass has been found where there was supposed to be none, thanks to Higgs. If you choose to lose it, you can find it again.

 

To the mother of the boy who smirked and stood, ungiving, in the path of Native elder, Nathan Phillips.

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I wonder how many times you've watched the video--how many versions, how many angles on your son you have investigated in an attempt to piece together . . . what? A defense of him? Or (I hope) some way of telling him not only that he was wrong, but that he is part of something much bigger--bigger even than his crowd of friends, than the March for Life he attended--that is also wrong. Will you tell him that where he stood, how he stood, contains in it generations of oppression, of power wielded for the sake of power alone?

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Surely, you've talked to him. I imagine that after the back claps he must have gotten from peers, after checking his Snapchat, his Instagram, he might have called home. To be honest, given his performance of white masculinity, I imagine he called his father. He was still high on a new kind of rush, something even beyond scoring the winning goal in the division lacrosse championship. He's telling his dad how he stood thee and didn't let "this Indian" pass, how he looked him in the eyes, how he's sure he saw defeat. Maybe his dad told him great, and to be safe and learn something while he was on his big trip. Maybe he just passed the phone to you.

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Does your son talk to you differently than he does to his father? Did you hear his voice go monotone, more bored somehow? You thought he was just being a teenager, shutting out his mother. Or did you hear the uncertainty he was trying to hide? Did you press him? I don't imagine he told you that he could feel the pounding of that drum pulse through his body like a second heart. I don't imagine he told you how his own heart fell in line, how he beat to the rhythm of Nathan Phillips's mallet. If he were to talk about this, his fists would tighten, he'd use sharp words, and his face would light up with anger: how dare his body betray him in that way. Of course he didn't tell you this over the phone. Instead, he responded flatly to those probing questions a mother knows to ask a son who is hiding something: yes, his friends are fine; no, he didn't meet any girls. At the end of that call, when you said, "I love you," did you do it in the way that means You'd better be living up to the kid I raised you to be?

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Are you wondering, at this point, who you've raised him to be?

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Like you, I am a mother. Like you, I am raising a son. You send your son to Catholic school, which must be expensive (I send my son to preschool, which is expensive)--so you must value his education and hope that his future is bright. I am like you in this way, too. But my son is not white, and I know that his future is contingent in part on your son learning from what happened in DC. I know that if your son continues to think that he can stop anything, that he knows what ought to be stopped, what ought to be built, who ought to be stopped--that my son's future becomes less promising. Don't get me wrong--I am certain that my son will do amazing things. But as long as we live in a country where white boys, with their untouchable bodies, stand in opposition to people of color, we will be living with a future where white men oppose people of color not only with their bodies, but with their walls, with their hatred, with their guns. In this future, my son, in a hoodie and a cap and a puffy jacket like the one your son wore--that boy, my son, is a thug and will be arrested and jailed, and this will not be unusual. It is not, now, unusual, and if you do not talk to your son, if you do not let the rest of us talk to your son and to you, this becomes my son's future..

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It strikes me that it is MLK weekend. Your son probably has Monday off from school, as does my son. Did he plan to stay the extra day in DC? Did his chaperones plan a trip to the Museum of African American History? Did he stay or, with all the media, with them honing in on his name, on your address, did you tell him to come home?

 

Is he there with you? Has he cried yet? Have you?

 

It used to be an easy job. Down in the bowels of the basement, you'd watch video monitors in your security cubicle. No windows, an ergonomic chair. Along the wall, radios with dials crackled with phantom voices, apprising you of changes behind th epointed iron fences, pedestrains on the mown grounds. In the corner, a cabinet for Old Glory, a crisp flag you lowered every sunset, unfurled every sunrise.

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Part of your duties back then, it wasn't difficult. You hoisted the flag full or half--there was no in-between. It was a task on a long checklist of to-dos. In th emorning, you could mark an X and move on.

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At the end of the day, another X when you and a fellow guard went through the routine, raising the flag for a moment to its topmost again before it came home to you. You'd fold with your partner in a dosey-doe dance, transforming the swath of colors into a triangular pillow of importance.

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Half-staff doesn't make sense to you. You've never understood halfway anyway; a person's dead or she's not. But now that big flag's always in motion. You raise and lower it so often during daytime hours, whenever the proclamations come down.

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And you run up to the roof so often it's easier for you to work from a makeshift office in the stairway landing, midway up from the bottom floor. You don't go to lunch--you call out for pizza so you can stay put.

 

A church, a school, a movie theater. People somewhere else, living somewhere lives, then suddenly not living their somewhere lives. Maybe tomorrow; maybe Friday.

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Today. You get theh call; the order comes. A nightclub in California. A responder and almost a dozen kids.

 

Twelve people. Twelve months. Thirteen stripes. Fifty stars.

 

Fifty steps you walk to the roof to find the November air churning. The flag's metal clips tick-tick-tickety against the steel pole like a drummer's high hat with no back beat. With your calloused hands, you unwind the rough halyard off its cleat, tug the rope, raise it on the pole to its peak for an instant.

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The pulleys don't squeak--overuse keeps the mechanism running smoothly. This day, you run through the ritual, lower the Stars and Stripes to its halfway position between the staff's top and bottom.

 

Afterward, you go back to your seat in the stairwell. You wait for nightfall, the next call.

 

I knew her in the way you know someone you regularly serve food to in a restaurant, the way you know the young man who changes the oil in your car. We were neighbors. She was the woman who lived in the condo across the driveway, the one I passed on the way to the mailbox, who puffed on cigarette after cigarette while sitting outside on a chair meant for a kitchen table, her feet resting above a homemade wooden sign, letters written in black cursive script, a sign that said BELIEVE. One hand propped behind her ass, she crossed her leg over the opposite knee, her ankle jerking, foot fidgeting, before finally slowing down to move in circles, drawing an invisible letter “O,” as if dipping her toes into warm river water until it became frigid again. She was one of those women in constant motion. Some days upon seeing her outside, I waved. Other times, I pretended not to recognize her, hoping she might not remember who I was.

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I knew her more than that. Before we moved into the condo across from hers, she worked at the restaurant with me, only for a few months, somewhere near the end of my six-year stretch. She was friendly, with a crooked smile and a distinct laugh, a voice that sounded more slurred as the night went on, that became muddied by the hour, and she was the butt of a running joke that she’d leaned in to kiss the boss, because she had, one night when she must have sipped or popped something from her purse.

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She had a thing for babies. When customers held infants on their laps or plopped them into highchairs, she crumbled and scattered crackers on the tables in front of them, asked to pick up the children, to hold them. The young mothers looked hesitant before they nodded, said, “yes,” “of course,” and she cradled the babies in her arms, swung them around for a bit in an awkward, clumsy way, then tossed them up into the air a few inches, parents with tight smiles sitting more upright, as if about to spring from their chairs at a moment’s notice.

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“It makes people uncomfortable,” I told our boss. “The mothers. I just don’t want you to get sued. If she drops someone’s baby.”

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I hadn’t thought about whether she’d lose her job. I continued shaking cock-tails, racing by while she placed menus in front of patrons and poured water into glasses, viewed her in my peripheral vision as we snatched steaming plates of food from the cooks’ line. It hadn’t occurred to me that the babies might have reminded her of her own sons, now grown. That perhaps these moments in this dimly lit room of laughter, with the sound of an acoustic guitar, banter and chatter, brought her instances of relief, her eyes glimpsing hints of a future, an answer to a perpetual question. That in the faces of the infants, their drooling, smiling mouths and tiny fists, she searched for some kind of light, some kind of solace.

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Days later, my boss fired her, and she was gone. Still, I didn’t think much about it. I thought about the book I wasn’t getting published, the thankless adjunct work I was weighed down by, this horrible rash in the middle of my neck that nothing, not coconut oil or diaper rash cream or hydrocortisone would help to subside.

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This was before we became neighbors. Before I looked down at the pavement when I walked by her chair, wondered if she was still unemployed, if she’d ever found out why she was fired. This was before her much younger boyfriend, in his mid-twenties, with the gray tooth and no shirt knocked on my other neighbor’s door and screamed that she’d just blown her brains out. Asked if he could use the phone. This was before I slept through the gunshot and ambulance, the mess of cop cars, before the landlord asked if we’d heard the commotion, before the mattress with the big black X landed on top of our recycling bin, breaking it in two, and this was before the younger boyfriend, who’d lived with her for years, disappeared like smoke, the lights in her place still on, and I began once again to walk by the empty chair and the BELIEVE sign still outside, waiting for someone to sit.

 

A bomb has a signature, & so does the man

who makes the bomb & so does the man whose

hands hold the bomb, move the bomb, unseal

the envelope untape the package unclose

the box catch the fire a bomb catches as

its message as a god. Somewhere a man falls

to his knees to ask a secret of his god &

somewhere a man is waking, tasting

coffee slipper-footed somewhere a man is

walking to the door he's opened so many

times his hands have worn the gold off

of the knob & so it doesn't reflect the image of

himself as he sets his coffee on the stair before

stepping with one foot forward to lift the package

addressed in a hand he almost knows he's never

seen before. Somewhere a street shivers a wire

touches a wire & tells it to be a god & a man falls

to his knees to find his god is still

a secret, the morning lifts itself, the buildings

with their walls & windows rise & rise &

fall into soot, somewhere is there a god with

the gold rubbed off of him watching but not

reflecting the image of a man who steps with

one foot forward into the absence he will enter

as though it is an answer, as though it is his name.

 

It takes four generations for monarch butterflies to complete their migration from Mexico through the United States and back again, the fourth generaion coming south to survive the winter, flying sometimes near the ground to find a roost, but sometimes up seven, eight, nine thousand feet to catch the breeze where it can do the work. Today, they are flying right over the Five freeway, past Sand Diego to the border, where Billy, a border patrol agent, participates in the banal task of processing people he will never see, never know, conscripted somehow into a war he never had an interest in. Billy, who wanted to be an artist. Billy, who has no hatred for the enemy in this war.

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The breeze that carries the monarchs, carried their forebears over the oblivious heads of John Fremont and his men as they fought their little war in 1846. Fremont, hwo would not take unarmed people prisoners, choosing to execute them instead. Fremont, who planted an American flag in the Rocky Mountains somewhere and made the West the property of the United States.

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The breeze today pulls the monarchs over the gray wolf stalking a pocket mouse that's hiding in a San Diego thornmint--this gray wolf who does not know about the wall that is going to make her and her species extinct, as it will do to the pocket mouse, as it will do to the San Diego thornmint, as it will do to the Mexcian flannelbush, the Yaqui chub, the fountain darter, the ocelot, the Texas hornshell, and eighty-five other species we know of and 112 species no one has yet discovered.

 

It pulls the monarchs over Felix, whose wife will have a baby next month in El Centro, California, and so he has been thrust into this war against Billy, whom he does not know, whom he would love like a brother if they ever met, bonding over baseball and family and art. Both have the souls of painters, but neither have been able to find the itme, caught up in the complex chores of survival. In another, more beautiful universe, they are colleagues who work together on murals on the walls of buildings in their towns.

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The monarchs eventually come to roost in Mexico to create the next generation of butterflies, the generation that will begin a new migration. Those yet uncreated butterflies will awaken to a world essentially different from the world of their parents. It will be a harder world, more barren. It will be a world where Billy has grown to hate those he fights because he is confronted every day with the humiliating task of saying no, and he turns that frustration toward its easiest target. He will stand in his backyard and curse them, unaware that Felix, who has never seen his baby and probably won't for years, curses him back.

 

(with excerpts from the Kavanaugh hearings)

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Would it be fair to say

one thing is like another? Like the ions forced to relive

the old bombing campaigns, over and over, in our upper atmosphere--

Hanover, Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden

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haunted me episodically

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Dresden china is hard-paste porcelain,

rock and clay

fired at very high temperature

 

seared into my memory.

Dresden reduced to

rock and clay

4,000 tons of explosives fired at very high velocity

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Would it be fair to say

there are many means of measure--of heat, velocity, testimony, rage?

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Would it be fair to say

that we have all sorts of things we can compare?

some traumatized ions 600 miles up;

one woman up in front of 11 million viewers and

11 white men

the target of constant harassment

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Would it be fair to say

one thing is like another, one can illuminate the other?

 

For example, before the shockwaves--the bombers dropped

magnesium flares first, to illuminate

the cities, to give the men a target at which to aim.

 

My mother calls him P-Murt

because she says she refuses to say

his name again, his name, she says,

a name she hears which feels here all the time

seems in the air, in her ear, she says,

everywhere and so renames him in

reverse: A tic, soft con or kid's trick (like

when we used to fall for spelling

g-i-p backwards every time) turns him

like a clock--widdershinning that 5th

Avenue tower, undoing the spell

of time and place and lack, retracts

name's power. My mother names him armless,

superfluous, a swagger-less rapper,

whose rhymes are brands, whose brands are witless

innuendo, a nip, a flash, the status

quo: EZ-Mart, Quik-Trip, Kum & Go's

hot dogs sweating under heat lamps, bacon

air deodorizers, penny pools

and platitudes on plaques, on koozies

or caps: Keep Calm and Carry On;

I don't get drunk, I get awesome;

a mechanical catfish singing

above the register: buh-buh-buh-bad to the bone.

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