I feel the need for more humanity
because the winter wren is not enough,
even with its complicated music emanating
from the brambles. So I relent to my friend
who keeps bugging me to see her shaman,
tutored by the Indians who live at the base
of Monte Albán. Tutored also by the heavy bag
at Sonny’s Gym: Box like heaven / Fight like hell
his T-shirt says; the graphic shows an angel’s fist
buried to the wrist in Satan’s brisket, while the prince
of dark jabs the angel’s kisser. Victor
has sandpiper legs, his ponytail a mess of webs,
but he has eaten the ayahuasca vine
and chanted in the sweat lodge
and entered the fight-cage in a bar in Tucson,
Adam’s apple jiggling his Star of David
when he writes me out a prayer.
He says he flew here to visit his grandma,
only she died before the plane touched down—
the dead leave yard sales to the living,
who shoot staple guns at telephone poles
and soothe their eyes with slabs of meat.
No matter how many rounds you go in practice,
he says you always come out unprepared
om ah hum
vajra siddhi padma hum
for the mountain of junk inside the house: cedar canoe
in the rafters and the box of Kotex he found
from her last menstrual period in the 1950s.