 levels. We're looking for that sure thing, the glowing yellow of a carpenter's level with its bead of oil or is it air that promises perfection and we know tonight we'll never hold it steady like the ladder in an old song I loved when I was far too young to understand. James, James hold the ladder steady and my mother had to explain a loping because I didn't yet know the edges of my life so well I'd want to climb outside it hanging on only a promise. I still get lost on familiar blocks the sun not gone but leaving floating crookedly down between the buildings or maybe we've built the ground slantingly from landfills as all conversations tend to become lopsided even the most romantic or especially the most romantic. She was ready which rhymed of course but I can't remember how it ended if he really held her steady on the long climb to the bottom rung and why she had to call his name twice as if he might not really be there the ladder just sprouted like a tall tree against her window and her stepping off backwards and singing into the rest of her life. These next two poems are from a series that I've ended up writing about teaching grammar and English at City College where I've been for years and this is based on a story a colleague told me, Adjectives of Order. That summer she had a student who was obsessed with the order of adjectives. A soldier in the South Vietnamese Army, he had been taken prisoner when Saigon fell. He wanted to know why the order could not be altered. The sweltering city streets shook with rockets and helicopters, the city's sweltering streets. On the dusty brown field of the chalkboard she wrote, the mother took warm homemade bread from the oven. City is essential to streets as homemade is essential to bread. He copied this down but he wanted to know if his brothers were lost before older. If he worked security at a 20 story modern downtown bank or downtown 20 story modern. When he first arrived he did not know enough English to order a sandwich. He asked her to explain each part of lovely big rectangular old red English Catholic leather Bible. Evaluation before size, age before color, nationality before religion, time before length, adding and one could determine if two adjectives were equal. After Saigon fell he had survived nine long years of torture. Nine and long he knew no other way to say this. Thank you. Performative language. Because twice I corrected my fifth grade teacher with my natural science confidence of chipmunks chiming back hand still raised like I held the helium of this fact on a string I could not let go of. But the book says so you're wrong and he snapped when you're the teacher you can teach the classes. I am in the trough before a wave of grown up faces chalk stained skirt and heels to make me feel taller. Answering why the answer key I instructed them to use is wrong. Father is not and never will be an adverb. Remember persons places things actions existences ways of doing a toad face teacher in the Ozarks who cursed his straight a student straight into this moment. Think of the fairy tale logic that allows this. The mother in the seven ravens banishing her rowdy sons. Oh that you would turn into seven black ravens and fly away from here on the wings of one implication for giving them back into human bodies. I forgive you I do I apologize. This is not a fairy tale. This is more than karma the kingdom of language with its slippery keys. Each small stone constructs ripples. You cannot do an action in a father way meaning you can think hard or think slowly but never think father. It is a noun a verb my father fathered only one child a girl a raven pray for me father. Think of this as a chance to test your conviction about the nature of the simplest words. And I have one more which is based on a true story and the story was so bizarre that I thought I couldn't write a poem about it but then of course it turned into a poem anyway so. Bay window with divorce and pigeon. Just after the notary's congee signature his soft blue stamp my husband unbecoming my husband I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't been there. I walked into my living room with a folder of papers and found the window broken in a wide symmetrical circle glass sprayed across the hardwood under the couch amid the tufts of the white wool shag we had bought together long slivers jagged improbable and perfectly clear as if the sky itself had exploded at the third story streaking white green yoke of bird shit on the floor shattering ice from the August street lamps opening a hole in the latched window while in the fireplace eyeing me through cold black eyes a single pigeon unbloodily alive its iridescent feathers matted I wanted to kill it for surviving messenger of the obvious flaws in the world's construction in love shelter we forgot the most luminous rooms have been glass. Thank you.