My first run-in with a natural disaster has so far been a huge disappointment. My mom left a message on my phone last night frantically asking me to call her either that night or the next day to make sure I was alright and not horribly dismembered by Hurricane Fay.

I bought a small amount of canned foods and bottled water, even though I wasn't expecting, even if the winds got intense, to be in any real danger. However, so far there has been almost no wind. In fact, it hasn't even rained today.

I'd just like to say, Florida, you are lame. There's a reason people call you the flaccid wang of America.

Even a crazy person wants to be asked.


Fed by the blown wires
of a storm-fried fusebox,

your mind had always been dark,
hiding its pulses and breaks

behind a steel panel.
Don't say I didn't love you—

I backed away
from your pain because

it was a cruelty too naked
for a frail man to bear;

and because your husband had already
given you the comfort you wanted.

I could examine your wounds
when you were gone.

I would have liked, however, to carry
the wires you'd let burn through.

The back of a person shifts
in front of your grave.

You asked for a tombstone
with an empty box for an epitaph.

Patroclus rising beside him stabbed his right jawbone,
ramming the spearhead square between his teeth so hard
he hooked him by that spearhead over the chariot-rail,
hoisted, dragged the Trojan out as an angler perched
on a jutting rock ledge drags some fish from the sea.

So, I woke up yesterday with something I've had before: a horrible spider bite. The same thing always happens when I get one of these. At first 1.) I think it's a mosquito bite, then 2.) it swells up, then 3.) it starts to look really freaky, then 3.) someone points out that it could be incredibly poisonous and I could die, then 4.) I freak out, then 5.) I start looking on the internet for some sort of a.) assurance that I won't die or b.) assurance that I will die, then 6.) the swelling goes down. Right now I'm on step 5, preferably 5a.

Anyway I was outside talking to my neighbor and I showed it to her and she was telling me about how I have to go to the doctor or I could die and I kind of flipped out and told her she needs to stop giving me these hysterical reactions—something similar happened before and, honestly, I think it's kind of rude.

I guess I could have been less of a freak about it. And it is pretty creepy. I just think it's annoying when people push their own neuroses on you. Unfortunately that's just something to which I happen to be susceptible.

When looking at the bite, be sure to notice the freakish bulls-eye formation of it. Although this is indicative of the work of the venomous and potentially dangerous "brown recluse" spider, these spiders are apparently pretty rare in Florida. Anyway, even as dangerous as it is, the bite of that spider almost never leads to death, just infection and sometimes nervous loss of sleep.

I've imagined you ten or twenty times,
as the wings of the sunset sink and close
around your blushing face and neck,
held in my red, red hands.

Your knees, however, have long since
gone cold for me. They tremble for others.
My ambition, also, shook and died.
I collect crushed shells

along the beach.
The presence of men chases me from place to place.
I store the waves that pour over my feet.
I lie alone on the sand and inhale

the cold humiliation. Voices downwind
mix with and sink into the ocean waves.

Once, in a rusted Ford, I drove
up to the top of the southern hill
above the withered orange grove.
We sat there and my heart grew still.

My breathing, as I held your hand
against your leg, began to slow.
The wind went through the tamarind
above the truck—"It's here, you know,"

you said, and lightly touched my chest.
Meanwhile, behind me the sun went down.
The night's blue deepened the closer it got
to the glassy light of this harbor town.

I can't stop loving you.
We walk on the concrete between
the grass and the beach;
there are mountains
faded and blue
sprawled above the water
hundreds of miles north to south.

Grills here burn coal and burger;
the smell, the heat; tufting sounds
of bare heels hitting the sand;
the smell of sunscreen and boat oil.

Your hand has gone, once, in mine
and I have built it up
to a chilling ideal—

O dolce amor che di riso t'ammanti,
quanto parevi ardente in que' flailli,
ch'avieno spirto sol di pensier santi—
My whole memory of you
has reduced itself
to this once-felt, warm, careless gesture;
again it is there,
its irritated ghost is there.

A sailboat race
has been going for hours.
Too far for us to hear them,
hundreds of white spinnakers
turn slowly around the buoy.
The leader loses its wind
and deflates and reinflates
as a barge passes imperceptibly,
silently behind them.

I am a beard twister.
And now that the hairs
have begun to grow gray,

I feel like I can do that.
These caves, however, are enough
to make anyone crazy;

they swallow us,
they swallow themselves
as you go further and further back.

Oil, dust, bad food.
I try to focus on the work:
timers, wiring, chemicals.

I remember so well
that last time
in the Philippines.

I was young. I climbed on a car
and yelled out “Jericho, Jericho”
just as the bomb tore the embassy apart.

I stood and watched it as a woman watches a flower,
or a bush, red and gold,
bowing and rising in the heat. Poetry.

Even the memory of that,
though, is dissipating,
like the ink of a squid

that has pushed away
as the seaweed sways its fingers
in the vanishing black curls.

Raccoon eyes
in the shadow of the counter reveal that this man,
handsome and pathetic, will be a thief. That he will place

the girl,
half-ugly but powerful, allonge
on the painted flowers of a hotel blanket

we have taken
for granted. Here, in the diner, the criminal will clutch
and sip dumbly from his empty cup of coffee.

Redempteurs du mal,
you will take the serpette, straighten it
with a line of cord. You save.

We have all
at one point done this, be it a lizard crushed,
bone by bone, for the sake of a nest

of birdlings nearby,
or the family broken so that
our lover can be happy alone with us.

Sell your endings,
scowling mouth--continue. Embrace no flesh but that sweat
bursting from you. Reclaim it to your body.

As so many
bodies lost their color beneath you and felt the shoulder of death
rub them clean, declaim your own self's fade to black . . .

Skitters of a dozen green branches, the Florida breeze rattles in my dozing ears. So as the sun goes down we are a tiny city of a few thousand porch-sitters, slowly lifting our cans of beer, slowly watching the time slip through our fingers. By the thousands, we finish what we opened; all at once we turn the doorknobs to our apartments, slide under the covers, and fall asleep.

And I dream of the trees wavering in the half-darkness of the just-set sun, and I am surrounded by the sounds of the wind as it kneels down into the treetops, as it lifts up a flock of sparrows, black against the darkening sky. So in a changing shape they distort themselves and spread apart as they disappear; as the sky darkens, as they dissolve themselves to nothing.