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We stopped to watch the accident. Fire! It had finally come to pass. Just as surely as I was a coward carrying a wolf. It stepped out from me, it was paradise leaving me, running towards the giant idea of that melting house. So often you don’t think, “Little nicks of monstrosity, I shall be splendid in it.”

a ladybug, its carapace blown open so a translucent trace of orange gleams from its body, has ascended link by link the smudgy silver curve of my watch band. It must have helicoptered past the sill while I was slumped here squinting in the paper at the ashen packaging another bombing's made of a minivan. Made available in the photo like the homeless in a poem. The pain is far away. But then for moments utterly clear: molten metal guttering down from the Milky Way to fall on us. And sometimes, God, it lands with all its will. My spluttered prayer for it to hold its distance: how ludicrous to blurt it from this comfort. Still it impels itself from me. Please stay away from me. Please stay away from this insectile soul who only weeks ago was wind and shit and jasmine leaves and rain.

my school teacher          asked me     if I wanted to go to Japan      do something good for the Emperor we were led to a harbor a cargo ship    a train to a factory in Doyamaki             where Food was so scarce    we pulled grass, roots anything we could eat girls died of hunger    some went crazy I ran away   was found   by a Japanese soldier Kobayashi took me to a hut            Every evening soldiers countless soldiers        on the wild mountainside Kobayashi An unusually quiet day I found Japan had lost the war I sailed to Korea jumped from the crates   hit my stomach with fists I failed            I named him Young-ju left him at an orphanage met him every Sunday one Sunday I saw another boy in his clothes Young-ju had died of pneumonia already buried I thought of Kobayashi bringing me rice in his drunken stupor                         I thought of the piece of steel I took    at the factory I found some of the steel            so attractive I still believe      he is alive somewhere                 I want to believe that all was just a terrible       fate But then, But then

This chicken is atonement with wings trapped in the Rabbi’s fist The hen shall meet death but I will enjoy a long, pleasant life

Everything is made of everything. — Leonardo da Vinci I found Rome in the woods. Fair to admit it’s mostly tundra to the west in the park, past Toklat the Denali I revised, low grasslands engineered to freeze deep by October — this being Alaska — the great Tabularium close to the Temple of Castor and Pollux I rebuilt that same summer — not superimposed, exact as any scheme in secret — the Arch of Septimius Severus at the gravel bar where fox drank from a river turned stream, a Theater of Marcellus near the ranger station where one raven, such a brat, complained of my Circus Maximus, Trajan’s Column, my Baths of Diocletian, too many spots soaked in unpronounceable Latin. I really did, I shouldered bits of it, a ruin-hushed haunted business, my brain a truck bed, a lift, pulleys big as a whale’s heart, expletives of cheap wonder all over my woodlot and expanse. One self-anoints to embellish day, years, life thus far, and think oneself so ... Then busted — by a raven! Well, that’s memory for you, that’s so-called civilization for you, to layer up, to redo the already done. I mean it’s a fact, the puny life span we’re allotted. And proof — Denali in August, fireweed, spunky scrawny first Latinate —Erechtites hieracifolia— giving off flowers to mark what weeks left, little time bomber, time traveler, ancient slips red-flagging the countdown to winter by climbing its own stalk. Something perverse about that. Something perfectly fiendishly self-conscious about that. • From the start perverse, any premise. Ask ... We can’t know. To be compelled makes an occasion. Rome’s grand past horrific, fire and ash, swamp into bog, lust and bloodlust — The Alaska Range dreams lurid as Rome, the worst way below being fire, summer snow at night off the highest peaks by noon as distant from our cabin as the size of a hand if I held up the one with an eye in the middle to know how this works. Some have the power to raise from the dead a before, before scary and beautiful back to mystery cults, in caves, rubble far under a Roman street, the altar to Mithras still slaying his bull, crumbling the stonework. All things being equal. But they’re not. Agony, it’s older. Ask the moose at Denali, the snowshoe hare, the lynx, such a wily courtly lot. Ask Ovid banished to his hovel on the Black Sea, aching for Rome’s exalted rude cacophony, each exiled month a big thick X down Februarius, Aprilis to home-shattered sick enough for an undersong. Look it up!Undersong: a strain; a droning; the burden of a song —

I take the bird on the woodpile, separate it from its function, feather by feather. I blow up its scale. I make a whole life out of it: everywhere I am, its sense of loitering lights on my shoulder.

Hildegard believed A woman’s brain drew Heat to itself, drew seed From a man all the way up The spine’s long stair The stake bracing the spine Licking all the way orange, Red, blue — shut it — And why not? My brain has been Hungry all this time.

I drove through the narrow Gods— privet and cholesterol, or Irish creamery butter as the waiter called it, as it shaved another day off my life. There was no salt and antimony, just lumpy roads through Meath and Leitrim. The sky was a show of flashing mirrors as day broke on Rosses. Tide out and weed like cow pies on the shore. The punt down and the EEC on the horizon, as I read in the guidebook about pilgrims climbing St. Patrick’s barefoot every summer. Out of the fog a man in Wranglers and spurred boots, clean-shaven, a cigarette in hand, waved me down. “Scrum faced house at the end of the bay.” “Hop in,” I said.“You lookin’ for where John Wayne made

Sky’s gray sheet spreads icy rain. Through the night we heard the branches cracking. Now they bend with the bowed ache of apostrophes. Backs to the window, sitting on the couch, we listen as the radio announces the list of schools closed. An hour earlier I inched my way along the road, tires spinning toward the ditch. Now I read aloud to a teenage daughter, who tolerates my foolishness, my claim that Lao Tzu traversed a more slippery world. With two books open on my lap, one in my hand, two on the floor, I’m surrounded by imperfect translations: a gathering chaos; something mysteriously formed; without beginning, without end; formless and perfect. She responds, Sure, I knew that, so what? I persist: that existed before the heavens and the earth; before the universe was born. She’s ready to go upstairs and listen to the radio. I ask, What was her face before her parents were born? she answers, Nothing. I ask again. She says it again. Where are the angels, nights on humble knees, the psalms of faith, the saints of daylight? She walks out of the room. I’m surrounded by thin books. How pointless to go anywhere on this day, or maybe any other, but then the time comes when there is no other way but to stand firm on ice.

Into these loves, who but for passion looks, At this first sight here let him lay them by And seek elsewhere in turning other books, Which better may his labour satisfy. No far-fetch'd sigh shall ever wound my breast; Love from mine eye a tear shall never wring; Nor in "Ah me's!" my whining sonnets drest: A libertine, fantasticly I sing. My verse is the true image of my mind, Ever in motion, still desiring change; And as thus to variety inclin'd, So in all humours sportively I range: My Muse is rightly of the English strain, That cannot long one fashion entertain.