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There came gray stretches of volcanic plains, Bare, lone and treeless, then a bleak lone hill Like to the dolorous hill that Dobell saw. Around were heaps of ruins piled between The Burn o’ Sorrow and the Water o’ Care; And from the stillness of the down-crushed walls One pillar rose up dark against the moon. There was a nameless Presence everywhere; In the gray soil there was a purple stain, And the gray reticent rocks were dyed with blood— Blood of a vast unknown Calamity. It was the mark of some ancestral grief— Grief that began before the ancient Flood.

I guess these trailers lined up in the lot off the highway will do. I guess that crooked eucalyptus tree also. I guess this highway will have to do and the cars and the people in them on their way. The present is always coming up to us, surrounding us. It's hard to imagine atoms, hard to imagine hydrogen & oxygen binding, it'll have to do. This sky with its macular clouds also and that electric tower to the left, one line broken free.

Last night the apple trees shook and gave each lettuce a heart Six hard red apples broke through the greenhouse glass and Landed in the middle of those ever-so-slightly green leaves That seem no mix of seeds and soil but of pastels and light and Chalk x’s mark our oaks that are supposed to be cut down I’ve seen the neighbors frown when they look over the fence And see our espalier pear trees bowing out of shape I did like that They looked like candelabras against the wall but what’s the sense In swooning over pruning I said as much to Mrs. Jones and I swear She threw her cane at me and walked off down the street without It has always puzzled me that people coo over bonsai trees when You can squint your eyes and shrink anything without much of A struggle ensued with some starlings and the strawberry nets So after untangling the two I took the nets off and watched birds With red beaks fly by all morning at the window I reread your letter About how the castles you flew over made crenellated shadows on The water in the rainbarrel has overflowed and made a small swamp I think the potatoes might turn out slightly damp don’t worry If there is no fog on the day you come home I will build a bonfire So the smoke will make the cedars look the way you like them To close I’m sorry there won’t be any salad and I love you

When I look at it, it’s simple, really. I hated life there. September, once filled with animal deaths and toughened hay. And the smells of fall were boiled-down beets and potatoes or the farmhands’ breeches smeared with oil and diesel as they rode into town, dusty and pissed. The radio station split time between metal and Tejano, and the only action happened on Friday nights where the high school football team gave everyone a chance at forgiveness. The town left no room for novelty or change. The sheriff knew everyone’s son and despite that, we’d cruise up and down the avenues, switching between brake and gearshift. We’d fight and spit chew into Big Gulp cups and have our hearts broken nightly. In that town I learned to fire a shotgun at nine and wring a chicken’s neck with one hand by twirling the bird and whipping it straight like a towel. But I loved the place once. Everything was blonde and cracked and the irrigation ditches stretched to the end of the earth. You could ride on a bicycle and see clearly the outline of every leaf or catch on the streets each word of a neighbor’s argument. Nothing could happen there and if I willed it, the place would have me slipping over its rocks into the river with the sugar plant’s steam or signing papers at a storefront army desk, buttoned up with medallions and a crew cut, eyeing the next recruits. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that I could be anywhere, staring at a hunk of asphalt or listening to the clap of billiard balls against each other in a bar and hear my name. Indifference now? Some. I shook loose, but that isn’t the whole story. The fact is I’m still in love. And when I wake up, I watch my son yawn, and my mind turns his upswept hair into cornstalks at the edge of a field. Stillness is an acre, and his body idles, deep like heavy machinery. I want to take him back there, to the small town of my youth and hold the book of wildflowers open for him, and look. I want him to know the colors of horses, to run with a cattail in his hand and watch as its seeds fly weightless as though nothing mattered, as though the little things we tell ourselves about our pasts stay there, rising slightly and just out of reach.

Never think you fortune can bear the sway Where virtue’s force can cause her to obey.

After eighteen years there’s no real grief left for the man who was my father. I hardly think of him anymore, and those dreams I used to have, in which he’d be standing in a room of people I didn’t know—maybe his new friends, if the dead have friendships— those dreams no longer trouble my sleep. He’s not in the crooked houses I wander through or in the field by the highway where I’m running, chasing down some important piece of paper, desperate to reach it as it’s lifted in the wake of trucks or flattened and marked by passing cars, as it’s lifted again to swirl over a broken wood fence. I don’t know why the paper’s so important, or if anything is even written there. I don’t know where the dead go, or why it’s good to forget them, not to see them if they come crowding the windows or trying to lay themselves down and press along our bodies at night and ask that we love them again, that our sorrows include them once more. This morning I couldn’t get up. I slept late, I dreamed of the single sheet of paper, which I never managed to reach as it stuttered and soared over the grass and a few flowers, so that I woke with a sense of loss, wondering who or what I had to mourn besides my father, whom I no longer mourn, father buried in the earth beneath grass, beneath flowers I trample as I run.

at the altarpiece of Saint Teresa No need to be coy— you know what she’s doing And so did Bernini, when he found Teresa in the full-throttle of her divine vision, caught her at it, carving this surrender so fluidly you expect the impossible: for her tang to swell up, ripe as seafoam, from the gulf of her flushed and falling figure. Perhaps this is how God comes to us, or should come to us, all: the bluntly and beautifully corporeal at prayers in the Sunday school of pleasure. Why shouldn’t He come to us as He did to Teresa? A saint on her back— a girl tearing open the gift He gave her?

You lie in our bed as if an orchard were over us. You are what’s fallen from those fatal boughs. Where will we go when they send us away from here?

i. I grew up an anxious painting by my dad’s shaking hand. In the painting of my dad, a quiet hole beats through the dull, black night. I’m heir to an orange heart in the rhythmic black where a man leans quietly and wonders. I wonder about my dad, a hole in my painting. I used to think my dad was dull, but his shaking hand gave rhythm to my body. In my dad’s painting, a hole glows orange in the dull night where I sit beneath the canvas looking up. My dad looks down and laughs. When I went into my dad’s painting and saw a man lean toward a bright, orange hole, night shook through my shirt in an inherited rhythm, duplicating the heart held by his anxious body. My painting a laughing dad. My heart a hole where on a bright, orange night, I dropped a tattered shirt, shaking. ii. My dad said the man was meant to be looking at the painting he’s in, but it didn’t quite work. And so the hole where he’s looking now. The finger-thick lines around him don’t hide a failed painting or reveal any struggle to mean. My dad believes in action and the truth of process: a man looks into a hole and so he is. He looks past the hole to what brought him to it. The tattered painting doesn’t work as finger-thick evidence of his struggle to mean, but the correspondence of his belief shakes through its presence. To believe in holes and men looking into them. To lean toward action and the presence of process where a man looks at the painting he’s in and is. iii. A man looks at the hole he’s in and laughs. He never thought about what the colors mean, the hole bright orange in the black night. Like babies painting a painting of babies, the man laughs at the hole he’s in and looks down to feel his heart beneath a tattered shirt. He’s shaking like an old man’s dad. Is a man the hole he falls into? Colors are the correspondence of babies— they lean and fall into the holes we leave them. A baby looks at the hole he’s in and laughs. He shakes, no colors or dads to hold him still. iv. My dad’s fingers spilled around the surface without distinction, causing the offense we call process. The painting, having the grace of endurance, allows the line its tiny provocation, but lacking the confrontation that would compel the painting into itself—the man looks down, not in; we look at, not through. The painting communicates by presence alone, letting us know that it’s here without a message, or a message embodied in its delivery, a swallowed swallow. The man and the hole he looks into are homage to us. The man doesn’t have a mouth, the hole doesn’t have a shape. Our provocation is presence alone. v. I used to went into my dad’s painting I grew up In When I dull black orange heart wonder about quiet and saw a man      I      my dad      a hole rhythmic wonders the painting through the night I’m heir to anxious painting     my dad’s painting     My painting an inherited rhythm his shaking hand glows in my painting      think my dad’s a hole beats of my dad where I sit In a orange hole black where my night shirt shook a tattered night in the canvas      in the dull shirt        and a man leans by shaking hand       I dropped a laughing dad beneath an orange night     an orange hole quietly my dad in duplicating heart his anxious dull rhythm     My dad held by body was lean down to my body but gave up looks and laughs through a bright My heart      the looking toward a hole shaking on a bright where vi. doesn’t work     where he’s looking now but the painting he's in is presence He looks tattered     The man looking so finger-thick My dad     The finger-thick lines    the correspondence to the painting he’s in     And the hole it didn’t quite mean what brought him to it evidence of his process reveal the man was meant a hole of My action at the dad of any truth To mean in looks      and of looks to be don’t hide my dad at work     toward his past he is the hole the painting believes in but shakes around failed action    struggle to lean through for process where a man and a struggle and a painting as to him     and so To belief      or its presence said to believe in holes and men looking into them vii. the hole looks at A man he’s in and shakes Like A baby looks at the correspondence of babies and laughs     He bright and orange painting never a man he falls into       Colors are of babies the colors mean no colors     they lean night babies painting a black still hole about dads he’s the hole we fall into     the holes in his shaking heart in the thought leave them     and down the what hole He’s like a tattered shirt      the man laughs at the looks he’s an old man’s hole    to feel beneath dad or to hold the laughs He Is in him viii. we call a swallow homage to provocation the hole doesn’t have a message fingers in its delivery lacking grace but the man looks down without endurance confrontation embodied    swallowed causing the process of presence having shape    letting us know that it’s there not in    not without a message     a tiny surface My dad’s distinction allows The painting its mouth spilled The man through The painting the line we look at     the painting into or around      Our man looks into that the offense would he alone have The us and the is are by presence alone the hole communicates itself the provocation doesn’t compel

In every life there’s a moment or two when the self disappears, the cruel wound takes over, and then again at times we are filled with sky or with birds or simply with the sugary tea on the table said the old woman I know what you mean said the tulip about epiphanies for instance a cloudless April sky the approach of a butterfly but as to the disappearing self no I have not yet experienced that You are creating distinctions that do not exist in reality where “self” and “not-self” are like salt in ocean, cloud in sky oxygen in fire said the philosophical dog under the table scratching his balls