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MORNING Reading the bones, wetting a fingertip to trace archaic characters, I feel a breeze of silence flow up past my wrist, icy. Can I speak here? The bones say I must. As the first light strikes across the lake, magpies scream, and the cast bones say the work must come true, it’s been true all along, we are what we do out on our digs. Dictor and looker, all eyes, with spade and a jeweler’s loupe I sift mud & dust for bone, for shellcast. Spy, archeologist of freshness, I expect sight-made-sound to reveal fear cold at the throat of change, and loosen its grip so that mind, riding the bloodwarm stream, wells up as the speech that bears it and is telling. EVENING Magpies scream. Though the tongues of birds say Now and warn forward, free of a live past, we seek back and forth for change, the ghostly sparkling of our watertable under everywhere. If I don’t speak to tap & ease it out, I go dry & dumb & will die wicked. On the lake of the poets a stone lamp flickers. It casts eight moons dancing, casting doubt on the moon that rides above the winter air. Ice thaws in a poet’s throat; the springing truth is fresh. It wakes taste. The taste lasts. Language floods the mud; mind makes a cast of words; it precipitates, mercurial, like T’ang discourse riding the tidal constant of its source.

saw the magnet grow electric and the fixed points become a field in rural Denmark as the needle moved through various materials all the while remaining parallel: the usual: silver, zinc, lead, etc. and then tried needles of glass needles of shellac with all the west above while below, the east in winding spirals traveling three years across Europe, a good friend of Hans Christian Andersen and of aluminum, whose name points to its invisible lights within whose forces crossed and became his galvanic opus,The Soulin Nature, as well as various Italian newspapers — to eventually end up as a park in Copenhagen dominated by green, a lake, and shade in which a woman dressed in green sits reading to this day.

This season for us, the Jews— a season of candles, one more on the seven-branched candlestick for the seven days of the week, but let it be seven in the sense of luck in dice, seven of the stars in the constellations: Orion, Aldebaran in the sky lively over Jerusalem Let the fuel last the besieged       such as we are, to nourish us. Let the oil continue for heat, for illumination, flame crouching in the lamp, the glass smoky (December upon us) the light not fail. The air has been mild for days— & the 7 rings through my life despite the 8 of this week— bushes in the doorway of 7 Charles where I lived, 51, crackle with dryness, are bare still. That house with the lucky number brought me luck & misluck, both, like the other that added to 7, out of 4 & 3, that seven underlying the eight of this week, the 8 just over, the 7 just under a third of the years with Stefan: I praise them both today— the lasting oil in the seven-branched candlestick: absence of all fear—the smallest drop of fuel enough to leap from. new york, 1973

There’s just no accounting for happiness, or the way it turns up like a prodigal who comes back to the dust at your feet having squandered a fortune far away. And how can you not forgive? You make a feast in honor of what was lost, and take from its place the finest garment, which you saved for an occasion you could not imagine, and you weep night and day to know that you were not abandoned, that happiness saved its most extreme form for you alone. No, happiness is the uncle you never knew about, who flies a single-engine plane onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes into town, and inquires at every door until he finds you asleep midafternoon as you so often are during the unmerciful hours of your despair. It comes to the monk in his cell. It comes to the woman sweeping the street with a birch broom, to the child whose mother has passed out from drink. It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker, and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots in the night. It even comes to the boulder in the perpetual shade of pine barrens, to rain falling on the open sea, to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

For Barbara Green Happiness. I am not used to this. (There is always something wrong.) Look at it the bright early tree. (I am trying to find out how you fell.) The leaves have already turned. (I want you to see this, how they glow outside the glass.) Morning light strikes differently. For so many years I hardly had time to know such moments. They struck me with such intensity I would have said battered me open. I never understood they were mine. I was panicked. Unhappiness caught up with me all the time. Did you know the speed of light never alters even when you go faster it will be still that much faster than you? (I am thinking that in your fall something momentous occurred.) What I see as beautiful I want you to see too. Next door, the workmen are hammering. Very soon we’ll go to lunch. For some reason this moves me to tears. How life is. (One does not have to explain what occurs. One only need say it has meaning.) Years ago, when I was young I traveled to Italy, took in the great sights. I was in awe, yet I did not understand seeing Masaccio’s frescoes fading like shadows into the walls, this would be the only time nor that I would never forget. Those muted shades are still with me, as possession and longing, and the view too of the square before that church the air, newly spring, that day, all of it. Life, I have finally begun to realize, is real. (All this time you recover from falling will sink indelibly into mind.) The leaves may fall before you are able to see them. Science has recently learned the line of existence is soft and stretches out like a field wind and light shaping the grass energy of sight giving consciousness force. In the meantime we live out our lives. (This morning we talked for so long everything became lucid. How can I say what I see?) At each turning perfection eludes me. One moment is not like another. Last spring the house next door caught fire. There was the smell of gas. We thought both houses would go. I vanished up the hill, went to the house of a friend where we listened for flames and to that aria from Italian opera, was it the one of love, or jealousy, or grief? My house was untouched. Now the one next door is painted, fixed. In place of perfection, the empty hands I turned out to the world are filled. With what? A letter half written, the notes I make on this page, this new feeling about my shoulders of age, that sad child’s story you told me this morning, the workmen’s tools sounding and stopping. What? As time moves through me, does it also move through you? I keep remembering what you said, ways you have of seeing (and that light must have curved with you fall.) This is the paradox of vision: Sharp perception softens our existence in the world. 1986

Happy as something unimportant and free as a thing unimportant. As something no one prizes and which does not prize itself. As something mocked by all and which mocks at their mockery. As laughter without serious reason. As a yell able to outyell itself. Happy as no matter what, as any no matter what. Happy as a dog’s tail.

Babies do not want to hear about babies; they like to be told of giants and castles. Dr. Johnson No one keeps a secret so well as a child Victor Hugo My mother stands at the screen door, laughing. “Out out damn Spot,” she commands our silly dog. I wonder what this means. I rise into adult air like a hollyhock, I’m so proud to be loved like this. The air is tight to my nervous body. I use new clothes and shoes the way the corn-studded soil around here uses nitrogen, giddily. Ohio, Ohio, Ohio. Often I sing to myself all day like a fieldful of August insects, just things I whisper, really, a trance in sneakers. I’m learning to read from my mother and soon I’ll go to school, I hate it when anyone dies or leaves and the air goes slack around my body and I have to hug myself, a cloud, an imaginary friend, the stream in the road- side park. I love to be called for dinner. Spot goes out and I go in and the lights in the kitchen go on and the dark, which also has a body like a cloud’s, leans lightly against the house. Tomorrow I’ll find the sweatstains it left, little grey smudges. .       .       . Here’s a sky no higher than a streetlamp, and a stack of morning papers cinched by wire. It’s 4:00 A.M. A stout dog, vaguely beagle, minces over the dry, fresh-fallen snow; and here’s our sleep-sodden paperboy with his pliers, his bike, his matronly dog, his unclouding face set for paper route like an alarm clock. Here’s a memory in the making, for this could be the morning he doesn’t come home and his parents two hours later drive his route until they find him asleep, propped against a streetlamp, his papers all delivered and his dirty paper- satchel slack, like an emptied lung, and he blur-faced and iconic in the morning air rinsing itself a paler and paler blue through which a last few dandruff-flecks of snow meander casually down. The dog squeaks in out of the dark, snuffling me too me too. And here he goes home to memory, and to hot chocolate on which no crinkled skin forms like infant ice, and to the long and ordinary day, school, two triumphs and one severe humiliation on the playground, the past already growing its scabs, the busride home, dinner, and evening leading to sleep like the slide that will spill him out, come June, into the eye-reddening chlorine waters of the municipal pool. Here he goes to bed. Kiss. Kiss. Teeth. Prayers. Dark. Dark. Here the dog lies down by his bed, and sighs and farts. Will he always be this skinny, chicken-bones? He’ll remember like a prayer how his mother made breakfast for him every morning before he trudged out to snip the papers free. Just as his mother will remember she felt guilty never to wake up with him to give him breakfast. It was Cream of Wheat they always or never had together. It turns out you are the story of your childhood and you’re under constant revision, like a lonely folktale whose invisible folks are all the selves you’ve been, lifelong, shadows in fog, grey glimmers at dusk. And each of these selves had a childhood it traded for love and grudged to give away, now lost irretrievably, in storage like a set of dishes from which no food, no Cream of Wheat, no rabbit in mustard sauce, nor even a single raspberry, can be eaten until the afterlife, which is only childhood in its last disguise, all radiance or all humiliation, and so it is forfeit a final time. In fact it was awful, you think, or why should the piecework of grief be endless? Only because death is, and likewise loss, which is not awful, but only breathtaking. There’s no truth about your childhood, though there’s a story, yours to tend, like a fire or garden. Make it a good one, since you’ll have to live it out, and all its revisions, so long as you all shall live, for they shall be gathered to your deathbed, and they’ll have known to what you and they would come, and this one time they’ll weep for you. The map in the shopping center has an X signed “you are here.” A dream is like that. In a dream you are never eighty, though you may risk death by other means: you’re on a ledge and memory calls you to jump, but a deft cop talks you in to a small, bright room, and snickers. And in a dream, you’re everyone somewhat, but not wholly. I think I know how that works: for twenty-one years I had a father and then I became a father, replacing him but not really. Soon my sons will be fathers. Surely, that’s what middle-aged means, being father and son to sons and father. That a male has only one mother is another story, told wherever men weep wholly. Though nobody’s replaced. In one dream I’m leading a rope of children to safety, through a snowy farm. The farmer comes out and I have to throw snowballs well to him so we may pass. Even dreaming, I know he’s my father, at ease in his catcher’s squat, and that the dream has revived to us both an old unspoken fantasy: we’re a battery. I’m young, I’m brash, I don’t know how to pitch but I can throw a lamb chop past a wolf. And he can handle pitchers and control a game. I look to him for a sign. I’d nod for anything. The damn thing is hard to grip without seams, and I don’t rely only on my live, young arm, but throw by all the body I can get behind it, and it fluffs toward him no faster than the snow in the dream drifts down. Nothing takes forever, but I know what the phrase means. The children grow more cold and hungry and cruel to each other the longer the ball’s in the air, and it begins to melt. By the time it gets to him we’ll be our waking ages, and each of us is himself alone, and we all join hands and go. .       .       . Toward dawn, rain explodes on the tin roof like popcorn. The pale light is streaked by grey and that green you see just under the surface of water, a shimmer more than a color. Time to dive back into sleep, as if into happiness, that neglected discipline .... In those sixth-grade book reports you had to say if the book was optimistic or not, and everyone looked at you the same way: how would he turn out? He rolls in his sleep like an otter. Uncle Ed has a neck so fat it’s funny, and on the way to work he pries the cap off a Pepsi. Damn rain didn’t cool one weary thing for long; it’s gonna be a cooker. The boy sleeps with a thin chain of sweat on his upper lip, as if waking itself, becoming explicit, were hard work. Who knows if he’s happy or not? A child is all the tools a child has, growing up, who makes what he can.

I always forget the name, delphinium, even though it was the flower the hummingbirds loved best. They came in pairs—sleek, emerald-bright heads, the clockwork machinery of their blurred wings thrumming swift, menacing engines. They slipped their beaks. as if they were swizzle sticks, deep into the blue throat of delphinium and sucked dry the nectar- chilled hearts like goblets full of sweet, frozen daiquiri. I liked to sit on the back porch in the evenings, watching them and eating Spanish peanuts, rolling each nut between thumb and forefinger to rub away the red salty skin like brittle tissue paper, until the meat emerged gleaming, yellow like old ivory, smooth as polished bone. And late August, after exclamations of gold flowers, tiny and bitter, the caragana trees let down their beans to ripen, dry, and rupture— at first there was the soft drum of popcorn, slick with oil, puttering some- where in between seed, heat, and cloud. Then sharp cracks like cap gun or diminutive fireworks, caragana peas catapulting skyward like pellet missiles. Sometimes a meadowlark would lace the night air with its elaborate melody, rippling and sleek as a black satin ribbon. Some- times there would be a falling star. And because this happened in Wyoming, and because this was my parents’ house, and because I’m never happy with anything, at any time, I always wished that I was some- where, anywhere else, but here.

The gregarious dark is shifting when she puts her second drink, the free one, half on the coaster. The tipped wine poised at the brim is the beginning of the bad girl she’ll promise never to be again tomorrow, who can taunt him now to prove he doesn’t love her and never could: her hand slides up his thigh until he tenses— ‘My little prig, don’t you want to fuck me?’ the bad girl she couldn’t be at home, his wife on ice. All he can do is smile back as though she’s made a harmless good-natured joke, and struggle not to look around to see who’s heard, who’s watching. He wants to smash the wine glass in her face so he can know for once exactly what he’s done wrong; but he places it instead back safely on the coaster quickly before she sees. Never cautious enough, he is prepared even if she knocks it over to go down on his hands and knees and wipe it up, kind and forgiving. In all ways careful to acquit himself so that tomorrow when she says she doesn’t deserve him, he’s too good, he can believe her. Tomorrow will be his happy hour. There won’t be anything she wouldn’t do for him.

I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheelto a kitchen stool and watch it turn.—DUCHAMP I had the happy idea to suspend some blue globes in the air and watch them pop. I had the happy idea to put my little copper horse on the shelf so we could stare at each other all evening. I had the happy idea to create a void in myself. Then to call it natural. Then to call it supernatural. I had the happy idea to wrap a blue scarf around my head and spin. I had the happy idea that somewhere a child was being born who was nothing like Helen or Jesus except in the sense of changing everything. I had the happy idea that someday I would find both pleasure and punishment, that I would know them and feel them, and that, until I did, it would be almost as good to pretend. I had the happy idea to call myself happy. I had the happy idea that the dog digging a hole in the yard in the twilight had his nose deep in mold-life. I had the happy idea that what I do not understand is more real than what I do, and then the happier idea to buckle myself into two blue velvet shoes. I had the happy idea to polish the reflecting glass and say hello to my own blue soul.Hello, blue soul. Hello. It was my happiest idea.