TERRORISM At a college in Dearborn, Michigan, students listened to me read a poem about me at camp watching girls hold their breaths under the showers so I could see their breasts swell. Some people call Dearborn a hub of "terrorist" activity. I''ve placed the word terrorist between quotation marks because "Arab" or "Muslim" or "people who look like the terrorists we fear" is what they mean. In my poem about the camp, "Camp Dearborn," I use the words pussy and chicken-shit, and place them between quotes but for different reasons: in the poem, I''m waiting in line to jump over a dam into a river where other boys have drowned--I hesitate until someone shouts "pussy" and "chicken-shit" and you don''t need me to tell you what I did, what I had to do. A famous poet says for a speaker to express authority, he must possess three virtues, one of which is passion. After the reading in Dearborn, a young man approached me. He turned out to be the younger brother of someone I knew and wrote a poem about--a lifeguard who saved a drowning girl. Passion is a deep-seated conviction, says the famous poet.

You need to believe that I believe. I told the young man in Dearborn about his brother saving a life, as if he didn''t already know. He listened, politely, until I stopped talking and then said I was out of line and had acted inappropriately. How, I asked. He said I shouldn''t use words like that. Which, I asked. He was getting flustered. I wanted him to say "pussy" and "chicken-shit.

" He said I should not use words like that in front of women. By "women," he meant Arab and Muslim women. Maybe he meant all women. A lot of Arabs and Muslims live in Dearborn. Some think of it as a hotbed of Islamic terrorism. The phrase "a hotbed of Islamic terrorism" probably should appear between quotes every time people use it, even if they are Arab or Muslim, like me. The famous poet says the other virtues a speaker should possess are discrimination and inclusiveness. By "discrimination" he means the speaker should come to his position without ignoring but by considering opposed positions and finding them wanting.

By "inclusiveness" he means the speaker immediately sees connections between the subject at hand and other issues. Also, the speaker needs to make the reader believe he is doing his subject justice, that he is relating it to the world, making his voice communal, speaking not for any community but with the goal of making communities, the first of which is that of speaker and reader. The young man speaking on behalf of Arab and Muslim women told me that my poems were "indecent" and "immoral"-- I should be ashamed-- I was a terrible Muslim. "Go fuck yourself" is what I wanted to say, but maybe he was right-- I smiled, thanked him for listening, and told him I loved his brother. "Please, will you say I said hello." THE DAY PHIL LEVINE DIED My father never asked me why I gave up becoming a doctor to be a poet. I would''ve told him because of a poem by Levine about a boy and girl on Belle Isle taking off their clothes and walking hand in hand into the filthiest river I knew, the Detroit River. The poem was beautiful, but I kept my mouth shut about it and Levine, sure he''d only ask if the poet was a Jew.

He only ever talked to one Jew, the owner of a furniture shop by the Rouge, and only to haggle over the price of a sofa or dining set he wasn''t planning to buy. He could''ve said a lot that I might have listened to: poems won''t pay bills, and the companies hiring don''t give a shit about all the poems written in English, or Arabic, or any language. He''d never read a poem of mine, and didn''t bother to ask if anyone in the world thought they were any good. He might''ve pointed out how poor and destitute so many poets died. But he did none of this. I told him I was going to be a poet, regardless of failure, and he put a gun to my head and said, "No." SELF-PORTRAIT WITH DOG, POSSUM, NEWSPAPER, AND SHOVEL From the fence and from the possum with the deep gash across its neck, I drag the dog. And when, the temperature steadily climbing, I come back close enough to see its punctured left eye and broken back.

The possum hisses. The dog did this as a game or else being what she is, a thing of unthinking and sometimes violent force, which is right for a dog. I hear her now, tied up behind me, growling, snarling, whimpering for the kill, and over the possum''s head I lay the newspaper with its everyday, everywhere reminders of always something-- a blindfold cinched, a bomb among tomatoes and cucumbers, another animal forever passing through our lives-- raising the shovel high I think this is right but also hard. The first blow is not enough, and I come down again, harder.