My sister and I scattered the ashes in Bariloche. We climbed the slope with the box in a backpack. It rattled like wood and gravel. There were lakes everywhere. The mountains beyond. Then the wind came. Most of them landed in a treetop. Then we took the ski lift down, ate chocolate. Sometimes joy and pain arrive together. I open the Iliad, see poplars and poppies. A woman shoos a fly as her son sleeps. Someone looks up at the stars. After nine years of war, glimmers of a life everyone wants back. This is my dad in the crown of a pine as the force of the wind bears some of him out to the lakes and stones.

                                         as when the south
                and north winds grapple for a forest in the mountains
                they shake the ash trees and the soft-barked dogwood
                the oaks lurch this way and that
                colliding and breaking their branches
                it's a sound from another world


 

The spear of Ajax enters through the nipple. The body comes down like a poplar born on the banks of a lagoon. A carpenter fells it and cuts its boughs to make a wheel. The trunk lies prostrate, drying on the shore. He came to war unmarried, the young son of Telamon. His mother, a shepherdess, birthed him on the riverbank when she brought the sheep down from the hills. She named him Simeoisios like the river. Suddenly he appears and is lost among two hundred forty dead, but his river name rises from the mouth. There's effort and delay in the life he lives with his parents, the marriage he doesn't have, the bank where he was born. The poem tries to keep him there a little longer. It can't. Now the foaming river is a still pool and his soft, damp torso a dry trunk. This is the glimmer and the song of the glimmer. The spear of Ajax entered through the nipple and exited the shoulder blade. The darkness caught in his eyes as he ran.
 

 

                     as a fish
             rises from the sea with a single leap snatched up by wind
             it lands in the seaweed's fingers
             and vanishes into the waves
                                                


                                     as the gleaming surf
             ignites and snuffs in silence
             when the water senses wind's arrival dreams of storms
             great waves hang soundless
             they don't know where to fall
             until a wind comes and makes its decision

A voice says now like the wind howling in the water's ears. The spirits of the cows and fish, the stubborn mosquito. The horse's verve, the lion's irreversible leap. Thumos, breath, heart, vitality. Life condensed in the chest, a force at the mouth of the stomach. The space where I feel pleasure, wonder, where I suffer, or joy lingers for a while. The voice says now like a gust filling the lungs. The air that slipped out through my parents' teeth. Me leaving home like running in a nightmare, breath calling on the phone. Falling in love. Dad, drunk, yanking out cables, dancing like a madman with my sister and me by the hand. The furor of soldiers with their heads aflame.