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and hue to have unheld a scale— silver dishes little mirrors on their chains— they go that way, This and hoist It’s not like looking into a pool, to let your intelligence run away with you Come back quarter size, apricot moon A changeling is a child who appeared under cover of the ordinary, in exchange The morning came I have such pretty handwriting no one said but I myself thought it to myself so I matted it like the grasses or a canvas or some uncombed hair. It became a mess which was the research of where things go. A child could figure it out if there is such a thing as “out” in the sense of being figured in the thinking was like Origami, everyone folded out of birds, into specific kinds of birds I call you hickory category dot

What’s geography? What difference what mountain it is? In the intimacy of this altitude its discolored snowfields overhang half the world. On a knife rim edge-up into whirlpools of sky, feet are no anchor. Gravity sucks at the mind spinning the blood-weighted body head downward. The mountain that had become a known profile on the day’s horizon is a gesture of earth swinging us above falling spaces, above a map of the world. Disturber of the unseen, provoker of the gusts in which we bend struggling against destruction gaping eastward. The wind fails. The breath held. The illusion of death. The resisting shoulder unopposed lurches west in innocent still air, as steep, as deep.

This gray board fence turns blue in the evening light And the sycamores reign down upon it their diadems, And blue and green batter in wood and stems The stems of light Their green and golden gems. At once, out of a million years of energy, All turn to flesh,—board, gate, and branch— With that quick sunset wrench Which seems like chance, Out of the fashion of an entropy. If then the flesh is yours, as now it is, I have lost yard, sunset, and all Into a mild greeting, and I call The sunset to your thought, to tell it is Parent apparent to your rich apparel. August 1954

Every construction is temporary, including the fire altar. — Roberto Calasso Accommodate the action in your life to wrest the deep perspective of the real from cubic content realms of atmosphere at play beyond the bank and shoal of time. Then resonance begins, and all vibrates. The syntax of position no more sculpts this world of interpenetrative forms than syntaxes of motion render grace. Yet syntax is the caul on all our births; and mothers claw the membrane from our eyes to fret us into life, in losing theirs. From there, each choice engraves a different choice. The decades pass. One needle for one groove. The canticles flare chaos from the spin. The gyre to crackly zero stays the same. (You’ve got to love the Hindus more than most.) We saw grand sweeps of swells from tiny arcs. We sliced the wave face, tumbling into light. My mother hugged me good-bye at seventy-three, knowing, just then, her strength may outlive mine. Accommodate the action in your life, she said, to aeronautical exhausts of every plane and cab I ever caught (my own arcs more elaborate than most). Accommodate the action of your life, she seemed to say: make past and future fuse. I felt her fingers dig into my back: That strength I had is yours. Things die. Not love.

Teucer: . . . in sea-girt Cyprus, where it was decreed by Apollow that I should live, giving the city the name of Salamis in memory of my island home. . . . . . . . . . . Helen: I never went to Troy; it was a phantom. . . . . . . . . . . Servant: What? You mean it was only for a cloud that we struggled so much? — Euripides, Helen ‘The nightingales won’t let you sleep in Platres.’ Shy nightingale, in the breathing of the leaves, you who bestow the forest’s musical coolness on the sundered bodies, on the souls of those who know they will not return. Blind voice, you who grope in the darkness of memory for footsteps and gestures — I wouldn’t dare say kisses — and the bitter raving of the frenzied slave-woman. ‘The nightingales won’t let you sleep in Platres.’ Platres: where is Platres? And this island: who knows it? I’ve lived my life hearing names I’ve never heard before: new countries, new idiocies of men or of the gods; my fate, which wavers between the last sword of some Ajax and another Salamis, brought me here, to this shore. The moon rose from the sea like Aphrodite, covered the Archer’s stars, now moves to find the heart of Scorpio, and alters everything. Truth, where’s the truth? I too was an archer in the war; my fate: that of a man who missed his target. Lyric nightingale, on a night like this, by the shore of Proteus, the Spartan slave-girls heard you and began their lament, and among them — who would have believed it? — Helen! She whom we hunted so many years by the banks of the Scamander. She was there, at the desert’s lip; I touched her; she spoke to me: ‘It isn’t true, it isn’t true,’ she cried. ‘I didn’t board the blue bowed ship. I never went to valiant Troy.’ Breasts girded high, the sun in her hair, and that stature shadows and smiles everywhere, on shoulders, thighs and knees; the skin alive, and her eyes with the large eyelids, she was there, on the banks of a Delta. And at Troy? At Troy, nothing: just a phantom image. That’s how the gods wanted it. And Paris, Paris lay with a shadow as though it were a solid being; and for ten whole years we slaughtered ourselves for Helen. Great suffering had desolated Greece. So many bodies thrown into the jaws of the sea, the jaws of the earth so many souls fed to the millstones like grain. And the rivers swelling, blood in their silt, all for a linen undulation, a filmy cloud, a butterfly’s flicker, a wisp of swan’s down, an empty tunic — all for a Helen. And my brother? Nightingale nightingale nightingale, what is a god? What is not a god? And what is there in between them? ‘The nightingales won’t let you sleep in Platres.’ Tearful bird, on sea-kissed Cyprus consecrated to remind me of my country, I moored alone with this fable, if it’s true that it is a fable, if it’s true that mortals will not again take up the old deceit of the gods; if it’s true that in future years some other Teucer, or some Ajax or Priam or Hecuba, or someone unknown and nameless who nevertheless saw a Scamander overflow with corpses, isn’t fated to hear messengers coming to tell him that so much suffering, so much life, went into the abyss all for an empty tunic, all for a Helen.

zeus: It is to be assumed that I do not exist while most people in the vision assume that I do exist. This is to be one of the extents of meaning between the players and the audience. I have to talk like this because I am the lord of both kinds of sky—and I don't mean your sky and their sky because they are signs, I mean the bright sky and the burning sky. I have no intention of showing you my limits. The players in this poem are players. They have taken their parts not to deceive you [or me for that matter] but because they have been paid in love or coin to be players. I have known for a long time that there is not a fourth wall in a play. I am called Zeus and I know this. thersites: [Running out on the construction of the stage.] The fourth wall is not as important as you think it is. zeus: [Disturbed but carrying it off like a good Master of Ceremonial.] Thersites is involuntary. [He puts his arm around him.] I could not play a part if I were not a player. thersites: Reveal yourself to me and don't pretend that there are people watching you. I am alone on the stage with you. Tell me the plot of the play. zeus: [Standing away.] Don't try to talk if you don't have to. You must admit there is no audience. Everything is done for you. thersites: Stop repeating yourself. You old motherfucker. Your skies are bad enough. [He looks to the ground.] A parody is better than a pun. zeus: I do not understand your language. [They are silent together for a moment and then the curtain drops.] *       *       * And if he dies on this road throw wild blackberries at his ghost And if he doesn't, and he won't, hope the cost Hope the cost. And the tenor of the what meets the why at the edge Like a backwards image of each terror's lodge Each terror's lodge. And if he cries put his heart out with a lantern's goat Where they say all passages to pay the debt The lighted yet. *       *       * The focus sing Is not their business. Their backs lay By not altogether being there. Here and there in swamps and villages. How doth the silly crocodile Amuse the Muse *       *       * And in the skyey march of flesh That boundary line where no body is Preserve us, lord, from aches and harms And bring my death. Both air and water rattle there And mud and fire Preserve us, lord, from what would share a shroud and bring my death. A vagrant bird flies to the glossy limbs The battlefield has harms. The trees have half Their branches shot away. Preserve us, lord From hair and mud and flesh.

Betty, if I set out to write this poem about you it might turn out instead to be about me or any one of my female relatives it might turn out to be about this young native girl growing up in rural Alberta in a town with fewer Indians than ideas about Indians, in a town just south of the 'Aryan Nations' it might turn out to be about Anna Mae Aquash, Donald Marshall or Richard Cardinal, it might even turn out to be about our grandmothers, beasts of burden in the fur trade skinning, scraping, pounding, packing, left behind for ‘British Standards of Womanhood,' left for white-melting-skinned women, not bits-of-brown women left here in this wilderness, this colony. Betty, if I start to write a poem about you it might turn out to be about hunting season instead, about 'open season' on native women it might turn out to be about your face       young and hopeful staring back at me      hollow now from a black and white page it might be about the 'townsfolk'    (gentle word) townsfolk who 'believed native girls were easy' and 'less likely to complain if a sexual proposition led to violence.' Betty, if I write this poem.

Azure, ’tis I, come from Elysian shores To hear the waves break on sonorous steps, And see again the sunrise full of ships Rising from darkness upon golden oars. My solitary arms call on the kings Whose salty beards amused my silver hands. I wept; they sang of triumphs in far lands, And gulfs fled backward upon watery wings. I hear the trumpet and the martial horn That wield the rhythm of the beating blade, The song of rowers binding the tumult. And the gods! exalting on the prow with scorn Their ancient smile that the slow waves insult, Hold out their sculptured arms to my sad shade. From the French of Paul Valéry

Over time, you picture them after dark, in searches focusing on streets and houses close above the churches or balancing on narrow wands of light. And find so much depends upon the way you choose to look at them: high in the night their minor flares confused among the stars, there almost beautiful. Or from way back over the map from where they might resemble a business of flies around the head wound of an animal.

If I beg and pray you to set me free, then bind me more tightly still. — Homer I’m striving to be a better astronaut, but consider where I’m coming from, the exosphere, a desk where the bluest air thins to a lip. Impossible to know the difference from where I sit and space. I promise I still dream of coming back to you, settling on your yellow for the kitchen. We won’t fight. Let it not manifest. Not over the crumpled bodies of laundry. Let us not row over the nail polish, its color, the spilled sun. Inspiration is the deadliest radiation. It never completely leaves the bones. You know. From here, there are no obstructions but the radiant nothingness. An aurora borealis opens like a fish. This. To the pyramids, yes, to a great wall. And there you are, moving from curtain to curtain. O, to fantasize of having chosen some design with you. But the moons over Jupiter. But asteroids like gods deadened by the weight of waiting. I remember you said pastel for the cabinet where the spice rack lives. That I ought’ve picked you up flowers when I had a chance. Daisy, iris, sun. Red roses. Ultraviolet, the color of love (what else but this startles the air open like an egg?). I’m really trying to be better, to commit to memory the old songs about the ground, to better sense your latitudes, see the corona of your face. Take your light as it arrives. Earth is heavenly too. But know that time is precious here. How wine waits years and years to peak. What is there to do: I’ve made love to satellites in your name. I’m saying I can’t say when I’ll return. Remember me, for here are dragons and the noble songs of sirens. Stars that sway elysian. Ships that will not moor, lovers who are filled with blood and nothing more. Who could love you like this? Who else will sew you in the stars? Who better knows your gravity and goes otherwise, to catastrophe? I’ve schemed and promised to bring you back a ring from Saturn. But a week passes, or doesn’t manage. Everything steers impossible against the boundless curb of light. Believe I tried for you. Against space. Time takes almost everything away. To you. For you. A toast to the incredible. I almost wish I’d never seen the sky when always there was you. Sincerely,