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The forest is the only place where green is green and blue is blue. Walking the forest I have seen most everything. I’ve seen a you with yellow eyes and busted wing. And deep in the forest, no one knew.

What did I know, what did I know Of gazing silences and terrored stone Brilliances; beauty of what’s hardbitten The auroral darkness which is God Then you arrived, meditative, ironic My head gripped in bony vice Mouth of agony shaping a cry it cannot utter What did I know, what did I know Of a changing permanence The stains and dirty tools of struggle Weaving a wish and a weariness together Years before your time. Years and years I gaze through layered light Within the rock of the undiscovered suns I see, I walk with you among The landscape lush, metallic, flayed Behind us, beyond us now The very sunlight here seems flammable

Aftear night’s thunder far away had rolled The fiery day had a kernel sweet of cold, And in the perfect blue the clouds uncurled, Like the first gods before they made the world And misery, swimming the stormless sea In beauty and in divine gaiety. The smooth white empty road was lightly strewn With leaves—the holly’s Autumn falls in June— And fir cones standing stiff up in the heat. The mill-foot water tumbled white and lit With tossing crystals, happier than any crowd Of children pouring out of school aloud. And in the little thickets where a sleeper For ever might lie lost, the nettle-creeper And garden warbler sang unceasingly; While over them shrill shrieked in his fierce glee The swift with wings and tail as sharp and narrow As if the bow had flown off with the arrow. Only the scent of woodbine and hay new-mown Travelled the road. In the field sloping down, Park-like, to where its willows showed the brook, Haymakers rested. The tosser lay forsook Out in the sun; and the long waggon stood Without its team, it seemed it never would Move from the shadow of that single yew. The team, as still, until their task was due, Beside the labourers enjoyed the shade That three squat oaks mid-field together made Upon a circle of grass and weed uncut, And on the hollow, once a chalk-pit, but Now brimmed with nut and elder-flower so clean. The men leaned on their rakes, about to begin, But still. And all were silent. All was old, This morning time, with a great age untold, Older than Clare and Cobbett, Morland and Crome, Than, at the field’s far edge, the farmer’s home, A white house crouched at the foot of a great tree. Under the heavens that know not what years be The men, the beasts, the trees, the implements Uttered even what they will in times far hence— All of us gone out of the reach of change— Immortal in a picture of an old grange.

We need the ceremony of one another, meals served , more love, more handling of one another with love, less casting out of those who are not of our own household. ‘This turkey is either not cooked enough or it’s tough.’ The culture is in late imperial decline. The children don’t like dark meat or pepper. They say the mother sometimes deliberately puts pepper on the things the grown-ups like better. Less casting out of those in our own household with whom we disagree. The cat will not hear of cat food, he waves it away. He has seen the big thrush taken from the cold box, dressed and put in the hot. ‘If I set the alarm clock, will you turn on the oven when it goes off?’ then she went off to see the profane dancers of the afternoon. It was done. The fact that I don’t like his pictures should not obscure the facts that he is a good man that many admire his work (his canvases threaten my existence and I hope mine his, the intolerant bastard) that we are brothers in humanity & the art. Often it does, though. The cat has followed Hazard from his studio, he looks mean. He upbraids the innocent dog and all of us, he casts us out. ‘There’s pepper in this gravy. We’re supposed to eat dry turkey and you’ve put pepper in the gravy.’ The meal is served , nevertheless with felt love, some godless benediction. The grown ones have wine after the other bottle. They cast out a lot. ‘The dancers this afternoon were, well, thinky ,’ she says. She toys with her glass. ‘He is strictly a one-joke painter,’ he replies, ‘painted that one twenty years ago and is still putting pepper on it, ha hah. Finish your turkey you two and leave a little gravy for someone else.’ The cat is taking notes against his own household. He watches. Hazard would like once to see things with the cat’s eyes, flat. Now it is time to go to bed. Hungry and alone most go to bed in this decline and in all others, yet Someone has fed us again and blessed us with the manners of bohemia. Among barbarians, a lot is expected of us, ceremony-wise. We rise to that expectation.

Eugene, OR Girl shouting Oliver! at the top of the cut-through by Jacob’s Gallery, you have now entered the slenderest of histories, the skin-bound book I store between my temples; in that mean and moonless city, you must hang fraught in your too-long coat, not a winner, but placed, and in this cutty version of forever, forever calling on your unseen beau, one flake in a limbic blizzard, one spark in the synaptic blaze. And now the rain turns, light but going steady on the Willamette. Along the bank, I lift my pace from devil-may-have-me to heading-somewhere and still your mouth in the haze calling is a ruby carbuncle woken by a miner’s head-beam, the reddest berry in the hedgerow, which all but the bird in the fable know not to pluck.

Thin gruel, shallow graves, whiskey watered down, the ne’er-do-well and good-for-nothing crowd of cornerboys and gobshites were among Argyle’s manifold perturbations. Worse still, the episcopal vexations: their excellencies, eminence and graces, red-cassocked dandies and mitered wankers, the croziered posers in their bishoprics with their Easter duties and Peter’s pence, their ledgers full of mortal, venial sins— keepers of the till and tally, bankers of indulgences and dispensations; their bulls and bans and excommunications, nothing but contumely and bamboozles. For all their vestiture, rings and unctions, preaching to bishops, like farting at skunks, was nothing but a mug’s game to the sin-eater, so in earshot of them mum is what he kept. Still, he thought there might be something to it: a life apart from this life where the souls long dead and gone were neither dead nor gone. Some days he felt so happily haunted, by loving ghosts and gods upholding him. Some days he felt entirely alone.

He is pruning the privet of sickly sorrow   desolation in loose pieces of air he goes clip clip clip the green blooming branches fall—‘they’re getting out of hand’    delirious and adorable    what a switch we perceive        multiple identities     when you sing     so beautifully     the shifting clouds  You are not alone is this world not a lone  a parallel world of reflection in a window keeps the fire burning in the framed mandala,  the red shafted flicker sits on the back of the garden chair in the rain the red robed monks downtown in the rain  a rainbow arises simple country      practices thunder lightning,  hail and rain    eight Douglas Iris ribbon layers of attention So   constant creation of ‘self’ is a tricky mess    He is pruning the loquat,   the olive which looks real enough in the damp late morning air May 15, 1995

but lake winds pick him up & blow him into the clouds. I married a dreamer. I wait. He stops to listen to the early lilac orchestra. He starts to change into blowy horizontal lake rain, then migrating red admirals. I thinksay remember. I remember us. We chose the imaginal north/south somewhere between Bartlett Avenue and Jupiter, between Lake Michigan and the Aegean. Remember we drink Serbian Cosmos together, we eat squash blossoms and red snapper soup. We visit the Calatrava before bed. We nurture a magnetic field of words. I am remembering you back. Remembering plays time. Thinking is all remembering. I remember our young bodies. I'm not finished with us. Remember that. If someone asks, "why is that lady out walking in that lake storm?" Tell them "months ago her husband went to the store in a blizzard & never came back." Tell them: "She can't stop looking for him.”

For W.G. Sebald, 1944-2001 This was the work of St. Sebolt, one of his miracles: he lit a fire with icicles. He struck them like a steel to flint, did St. Sebolt. It makes sense only at a certain body heat. How cold he had to get to learn that ice would burn. How cold he had to stay. When he could feel his feet he had to back away.

He lived—childhood summers thru bare feet then years of money’s lack and heat beside the river—out of flood came his wood, dog, woman, lost her, daughter— prologue to planting trees. He buried carp beneath the rose where grass-still the marsh rail goes. To bankers on high land he opened his wine tank. He wished his only daughter to work in the bank but he’d given her a source to sustain her— a weedy speech, a marshy retainer.