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Not long ago, or maybe I dreamt it Or made it up, or have suddenly lost Track of its train in the hocus pocus Of the dissolving days; no, if I bend The turn around the corner, come at it From all three sides at once, or bounce the ball Against all manner of bleary-eyed fortune Tellers—well, you can see for yourselves there’s Nothing up my sleeves, or notice even Rocks occasionally break if enough Pressure is applied. As far as you go In one direction, all the further you’ll Have to go on before the way back has Become totally indivisible.

The mailman handing me a letter, he paid a little. My daughter’s third grade teacher, the electrician putting a light over my back door: they paid as well. The woman at the bank who cashes my check. She paid a part of it. The typist in my office, the janitor sweeping the floor—they paid some too. The movie star paid for it. The nurse, the nun, the saint, they all paid for it— a photograph from Central America, six children lying neatly in a row. One day I was teaching or I sold a book review or I gave a lecture and some of the money came to me and some rolled off into the world, but it was still my money, the result of my labor, each coin still had my name printed across it, and I went on living, passing my days in a box with a tight lid. But elsewhere, skulking through tall grass, a dozen men approached a village. It was hot; the men made no noise. See that one’s cap, see the button on that other man’s shirt, * * * hear the click of the cartridge as it slides into its chamber, see the handkerchief which that man uses to wipe his brow— I paid for that one, that one belongs to me.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough.

Peace fell on the dim lands a sort of abstraction The metronome counted one petal after another So the petals fell as or in some music This song needs no breath just an apparition With a mouth open and eyes and eyes The wet smear of eyes beneath pink Petals in excess of the window frame’s bright Yellow square and yes spring gathers right now The moisture from my breath up into clouds Whose downpour makes of the plum tree in blossom A diminishing crowd for which the natural symbol Refuses to exist a plain blue gem on a pin Faces glowing within the stone like flowers Within the stone like flaws the mind turns inward Turns inward its tangle of wet black boughs A knot pulled tight so tight it ceases to be A knot yes I’ll say it a knot that becomes angelic Another example everywhere seen of the angelic Gears toothless and without cogs a sort of mist That turns the other gear by drifting through it As just now through my eye drifts that storm Battered tree whose broken-petal pocked bark Asks of me a question my mouth can’t speak Like a river that dives underground just there There where the animals thirst the most A desert fox say or say a toad or let’s speak more simply About a plum which bursts through its own explosion Into being and hangs there so ponderously As if as if not concerned with innocence or Gravity or other acute angles as they evaporate Into this poem O no am I speaking again again about dim lands these dim dim lands of of peace

1 Lord, what are the sins I have tried to leave behind me? The bad checks, the workless days, the scotch bottles thrown across the fence and into the woods, the cruelty of silence, the cruelty of lies, the jealousy, the indifference? What are these on the scale of sin or failure that they should follow me through the streets of Columbus, the moon-streaked fields between Benevolence and Cuthbert where dwarfed cotton sparkles like pearls on the shoulders of the road. What are these that they should find me half-lost, sick and sleepless behind the wheel of this U-Haul truck parked in a field on Georgia 45 a few miles north of Damascus, some makeshift rest stop for eighteen wheelers where the long white arms of oaks slap across trailers and headlights glare all night through a wall of pines? 2 What was I thinking, Lord? That for once I'd be in the driver's seat, a firm grip on direction? So the jon boat muscled up the ramp, the Johnson outboard, the bent frame of the wrecked Harley chained for so long to the back fence, the scarred desk, the bookcases and books, the mattress and box springs, a broken turntable, a Pioneer amp, a pair of three-way speakers, everything mine I intended to keep. Everything else abandon. But on the road from one state to another, what is left behind nags back through the distance, a last word rising to a scream, a salad bowl shattering against a kitchen cabinet, china barbs spiking my heel, blood trailed across the cream linoleum like the bedsheet that morning long ago just before I watched the future miscarried. Jesus, could the irony be that suffering forms a stronger bond than love? 3 Now the sun streaks the windshield with yellow and orange, heavy beads of light drawing highways in the dew-cover. I roll down the window and breathe the pine-air, the after-scent of rain, and the far-off smell of asphalt and diesel fumes. But mostly pine and rain as though the world really could be clean again. Somewhere behind me, miles behind me on a two-lane that streaks across west Georgia, light is falling through the windows of my half-empty house. Lord, why am I thinking about this? And why should I care so long after everything has fallen to pain that the woman sleeping there should be sleeping alone? Could I be just another sinner who needs to be blinded before he can see? Lord, is it possible to fall toward grace? Could I be moved to believe in new beginnings? Could I be moved?

I love them all. I love that a handful, a mouthful, gets you by, a satchelful can land you a job, a well-chosen clutch of them could get you laid, and that a solitary word can initiate a stampede, and therefore can be formally outlawed—even by a liberal court bent on defending a constitution guaranteeing unimpeded utterance. I love that the Argentine gaucho has over two hundred words for the coloration of horses and the Sami language of Scandinavia has over a thousand words for reindeer based on age, sex, appearance—e.g., a busat has big balls or only one big ball. More than the pristine, I love the filthy ones for their descriptive talent as well as transgressive nature. I love the dirty ones more than the minced, in that I respect extravagant expression more than reserved. I admire reserve, especially when taken to an ascetic nth. I love the particular lexicons of particular occupations. The substrate of those activities. The nomenclatures within nomenclatures. I am of the unaccredited school that believes animals did not exist until Adam assigned them names. My relationship to the word is anything but scientific; it is a matter of faith on my part, that the word endows material substance, by setting the thing named apart from all else.Horse, then, unhorses what is not horse.

One face looks out from all his canvases, One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans: We found her hidden just behind those screens, That mirror gave back all her loveliness. A queen in opal or in ruby dress, A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens, A saint, an angel — every canvas means The same one meaning, neither more or less. He feeds upon her face by day and night, And she with true kind eyes looks back on him, Fair as the moon and joyful as the light: Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim; Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright; Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.

Hans Richter What if the moon was essence of quinine And high heels were a time of day When certain birds bled The chauffeur is telling the cook The antler would pry into ice floes Swim with a lamp And we’d be shivering in a ditch Biting through a black wing There would be boats There would be a dream country The great quiet humming of the soul at night The only sound is a shovel Clearing a place for a mailbox

In beauty-bright and such it was like Blake’s lily and though an angel he looked absurd dragging a lily out of a beauty-bright store wrapped in tissue with a petal drooping, nor was it useless—you who know it know how useful it is—and how he would be dead in a minute if he were to lose it though how do you lose a lily?His lily was white and he had a foolish smile there holding it up like a candelabrum in his right hand facing the mirror in the hall nor had the endless centuries started yet nor was there one thorn between his small house and the beauty-bright store.

Late for the feast. Let me guess, she said, everything worked against you. Some pulverize experiences at the pool. When the air slaps, they flip into the water and speak of the excitations of distress. The stratagems of delivering an annulled emotion. And how is one to read a nod? Is a nod an exclamation? Does one kiss after a nod? A woman mutters something about the tea being too weak. The walls threaten to expose us, shadows pinch as we mutter jouissance, jouissance, while the university teacher said the use of the word was a considerable error. A most lamentable error, given half of us are illiterate and unattached. Think of words in their system of birth. Now do you see, the teacher said. Ah, see. Dogs were barking for no reason. Some of us went to the ghats and watched the dead burn. Woman in white wailed, her hair a dumb struck line against her rocking spine. We look for other distractions in a place of death. In the afternoon meanings are extolled. We are asked to name our loves. I will not, he said, use common language to talk of love. I will not jump into the substance without reinforcement. He took his body to the breeze and swayed till we begged him to stop. The rain subsided but we were still wet. Thousands have died in a nod.