...some average of the holiness in every person you have ever run
    into,
consider this, something almost like a wall covered in green vines,
an emblem for the spirit, or if not that, what happens when two
    lovers
stand among bushes in a garden off Houston, arguing a little, but
    afraid
really to get into it because they fear winding up alone,
and then several music lovers or ex-drug takers wandering along
on a summer day past the restaurant supply stores and the vacant
lot where the wino hotel used to be, they're walking to Chinatown,
these holy people like pilgrims in Benares where they are talking
about putting crocodiles into the river to eat the corpses, you
    probably heard about it,
and there is some question about procedure in the cremation rites,
    all that,
but they're obviously part of it, too, the holiness, and still it's
    summer
and my friend has changed into her bathing suit and is walking
the three blocks to the public pool, it's getting kind of late, she'll
    swim
twenty laps and finish as the life guard, a slender boy with an
    island accent,
waits for her to come up out of the water like a rectified god.

Charlie Smith

We are tired of arguing about who is the most hurt.
Better to toddle off for a little Chinese.
The locust flowers each year like cornmeal in the gutters.
An extraordinary way of putting things, saved up
for the love affair of the century,
gets used by a baker's apprentice talking to his dog.
Investors sink back into the shadows.
Someone with a huge capacity for ambivalence nods off.
The cutrate sky seems for a moment to throb.
Affairs that began in spring's alarming weather die of heatstroke.
A generous gesture hovers in the back of the mind,
but never steps forward. Cravings appear,
like baskets of fresh linen, in the homes of our friends.
Tenderness is appraised and turned in for theft.
The fragrance of dispatched gardens, like a telegram
from the government, is just a memory. It is so fitful,
so desperate, this business of what matters.
Another's down with a stroke. This way of looking at things
will be forgotten. It was only an experiment.

Charlie Smith

Spark, then fire begins. Fire pulls oxygen
deep into the box. Come, child, there's something
I'd like to show you in the back of this
iron box. Fire inhales, huffs, and spits

more fire. Startled awake, a spider is killed.
The curious child is drawn deeper in,
as the fire says land thinks like, Home is red,
and Yellow is the color of love, so

the child becomes more familiar as she
begins to pat the fire, to name it Good
Sir, think of it as a kind dog. Walls rise
around the child, the fire is all tongues

for her. It licks the knee that she scraped
at play, nests in her hair the way gentle
birds will at dawn. Climbing up until she
can look straight into the eye of the fire,

the child asks that the fire sing the new song
for her. But the fire only beats and huffs,
slaps out the refrain that it knows the best:
Come, child, there's something I'd like to show you

here in the back of this box. The child cries
herself to sleep, her tears make the great smoke
that is her bed, and the great smoke carries
the child back up into the tree, where she