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They told me there’d be pain so when I felt it, sitting at my beat-up farm desk that looks out glass doors onto the browning garden—plain sparrows bathing in the cube-shaped fountain so violently they drain it, the white-throats with their wobbly two-note song on the long way south still, and our dogs out like lights and almost falling off their chairs freed of the real-time for awhile as time began for me to swell, slow down, carry me out of all this almost to a where about as strong a lure as love.

Work out. Ten laps. Chin ups. Look good. Steam room. Dress warm. Call home. Fresh air. Eat right. Rest well. Sweetheart. Safe sex. Sore throat. Long flu. Hard nodes. Beware. Test blood. Count cells. Reds thin. Whites low. Dress warm. Eat well. Short breath. Fatigue. Night sweats. Dry cough. Loose stools. Weight loss. Get mad. Fight back. Call home. Rest well. Don't cry. Take charge. No sex. Eat right. Call home. Talk slow. Chin up. No air. Arms wide. Nodes hard. Cough dry. Hold on. Mouth wide. Drink this. Breathe in. Breathe out. No air. Breathe in. Breathe in. No air. Black out. White rooms. Head hot. Feet cold. No work. Eat right. CAT scan. Chin up. Breathe in. Breathe out. No air. No air. Thin blood. Sore lungs. Mouth dry. Mind gone. Six months? Three weeks? Can't eat. No air. Today? Tonight? It waits. For me. Sweet heart. Don't stop. Breathe in. Breathe out.

The legendary muscle that wants and grieves, The organ of attachment, the pump of thrills And troubles, clinging in stubborn colonies Like pulpy shore-life battened on a jetty. Slashed by the little deaths of sleep and pleasure, They swell in the nurturing spasms of the waves, Sucking to cling; and even in death itself— Baked, frozen—they shrink to grip the granite harder. “Rid yourself of attachments and aversions”— But in her father’s orchard, already, he says He’d like to be her bird, and she says: Sweet, yes, Yet I should kill thee with much cherishing, Showing that she knows already—as Art Pepper, That first time he takes heroin, already knows That he will go to prison, and that he’ll suffer And knows he needs to have it, or die; and the one Who makes the General lose the world for love Lets him say,Would I had never seen her, but Oh! Says Enobarbus, Then you would have missed A wonderful piece of work, which left unseen Would bring less glory to your travels. Among The creatures in the rock-torn surf, a wave Of agitation, a gasp. A scholar quips, Shakespeare was almost certainly homosexual, Bisexual, or heterosexual, the sonnets Provide no evidence on the matter.

Here in the electric dusk your naked lover tips the glass high and the ice cubes fall against her teeth. It's beautiful Susan, her hair sticky with gin, Our Lady of Wet Glass-Rings on the Album Cover, streaming with hatred in the heat as the record falls and the snake-band chords begin to break like terrible news from the Rolling Stones, and such a last light—full of spheres and zones. August, you're just an erotic hallucination, just so much feverishly produced kazoo music, are you serious?—this large oven impersonating night, this exhaustion mutilated to resemble passion, the bogus moon of tenderness and magic you hold out to each prisoner like a cup of light?

My mare, when she was in heat, would travel the fenceline for hours, wearing the impatience in her feet into the ground. Not a stallion for miles, I’d assure her, give it up. She’d widen her nostrils, sieve the wind for news, be moving again, her underbelly darkening with sweat, then stop at the gate a moment, wait to see what I might do. Oh, I knew how it was for her, easily recognized myself in that wide lust: came to stand in the pasture just to see it played. Offered a hand, a bucket of grain— a minute’s distraction from passion the most I gave. Then she’d return to what burned her: the fence, the fence, so hoping I might see, might let her free. I’d envy her then, to be so restlessly sure of heat, and need, and what it takes to feed the wanting that we are— only a gap to open the width of a mare, the rest would take care of itself. Surely, surely I knew that, who had the power of bucket and bridle— she would beseech me, sidle up, be gone, as life is short. But desire, desire is long.

The heat of autumn is different from the heat of summer. One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider. One is a dock you walk out on, the other the spine of a thin swimming horse and the river each day a full measure colder. A man with cancer leaves his wife for his lover. Before he goes she straightens his belts in the closet, rearranges the socks and sweaters inside the dresser by color. That’s autumn heat: her hand placing silver buckles with silver, gold buckles with gold, setting each on the hook it belongs on in a closet soon to be empty, and calling it pleasure.

Sheets entangle him Naked on his bed Like a toppled mast Slack sails bedeck At sea, no ballast For that even keel He cannot keep— No steering wheel As he falls asleep

Twenty-four thousand times in any year, lightning strikes and kills. On the Heath, the timber shells, like bony Flemish spires, point heavenwards in warning. The stags take note and bow their heads at the sky’s first challenge, or hurl a bellowing peal back in defiance. Quicken your pace. Ask for Belfont, Bedfound, Bedefunde, Beda’s spring, however the changes ring, where he dispatched his woman each morning from their heap of  halfsmart, crosswort, bloodcup, from under their thatch, to fetch even in such storms, even when she had reached nine months    ... When will it end, this barrenness, these waves of agony, barefoot through lynchet, dyke, furze, thistle, the gusts and groans, water breaking overhead? Beda’s woman lies back in the heather bed of history; you press on. At your feet is a baby, and another, heads like mushrooms, crowning, crying, put out for the Heath to take care of. Their mewings pierce the air. But there is no milk. Do not pick them. Leave them to the Dama dama who gather round. Consider instead the oaks, each ring another year that these might have suffered. Pass on through Hag Lane into Bedfont.Spring with a drinking vessel. Old English byden, a tub or container, funta, on loan from Rome (whose roots and tesserae lie scattered beneath your modern tread),fons or fontus. That distant rumbling is just a farmer bringing home grain. They are far behind you now between dead oaks and dark enclosing deer, exposed, yet silent. Thunder has paused. Head for the church, the fighting cocks (or peacocks) of St. Mary the Virgin, East Bedfont, and hurry on through its topiary nonsense, past the tombs of those who died on February the 31st, or aged three hundred and sixty-one. Enter the pudding stone. At the font like a cowled servant presenting the first and final course, is a Friar, sworn to poverty, chastity, his vessel raised, fending off storms.

He thinks when we die we’ll go to China. Think of it—a Chinese heaven where, except for his blond hair, the part that belongs to his father, everyone will look like him. China, that blue flower on the map, bluer than the sea his hand must span like a bridge to reach it. An octave away. I’ve never seen it. It’s as if I can’t sing that far. But look— on the map, this black dot. Here is where we live, on the pancake plains just east of the Rockies, on the other side of the clouds. A mile above the sea, the air is so thin, you can starve on it. No bamboo trees but the alpine equivalent, reedy aspen with light, fluttering leaves. Did a boy in Guangzhou dream of this as his last stop? I’ve heard the trains at night whistling past our yards, what we’ve come to own, the broken fences, the whiny dog, the rattletrap cars. It’s still the wild west, mean and grubby, the shootouts and fistfights in the back alley. With my son the dreamer and my daughter, who is too young to walk, I’ve sat in this spot and wondered why here? Why in this short life, this town, this creek they call a river? He had never planned to stay, the boy who helped to build the railroads for a dollar a day. He had always meant to go back. When did he finally know that each mile of track led him further away, that he would die in his sleep, dispossessed, having seen Gold Mountain, the icy wind tunneling through it, these landlocked, makeshift ghost towns? It must be in the blood, this notion of returning. It skipped two generations, lay fallow, the garden an unmarked grave. On a spring sweater day it’s as if we remember him. I call to the children. We can see the mountains shimmering blue above the air. If you look really hard says my son the dreamer, leaning out from the laundry’s rigging, the work shirts fluttering like sails, you can see all the way to heaven.

It’s my favorite photo— captioned, “Daddy and His Sweetheart.” It’s in black and white, it’s before Pabst Blue Ribbon, before his tongue became a knife that made my mother bleed, and before he blackened my eye the time he thought I meant to end my life. He’s standing in our yard on Porter Road beneath the old chestnut tree. He’s wearing sunglasses, a light cotton shirt, and a dreamy expression. He’s twenty-seven. I’m two. My hair, still baby curls, is being tossed by a gentle breeze. I’m fast asleep in his arms.