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I. ADMIRAL Laid out on vellum, the past is a long wound. It unfolds five centuries later, beneath the heavy pens of scholars. The world shifts and spins as the Admiral's bronze astrolabe measures the paths between stars. The sky is written in the sea's uneasy mirror, and mermaids comb their hair in the distance. They are not, he writes,so beautiful as I have heard. He dreams of his own circuitous route to the Heavens. God and the Crown. Both want too much. II. GOVERNOR At Guanahani, they swam to the caravel bearing parrots and balls of cotton thread, these people so unlike him they could not not be saved. Too angry to sleep, the Governor haunts every room in his castle. The servants whisper in their own tongue. The severed hands of the Taino wave in clear salt water, in pink-tinted water. They wave as the gold mines dry up, as the Governor leaves Hispaniola in chains. Mermaids, dog-headed men and women with breastplates of copper— They draw their bows, and arrows cover the shore of Columbus's dream. No, not the Taino, whom he once called in dios. They touch his white skin. They have the faces of Christian angels.

My wife sits in her swivel chair ringed by skeins of multicolored yarn that will become the summer sweater she has imagined since September. Her hand rests on the spinning wheel and her foot pauses on the pedals as she gazes out into the swollen river. Light larking between wind and current will be in this sweater. So will a shade of red she saw when the sun went down. When she is at her wheel, time moves like the tune I almost recognize now that she begins to hum it, a lulling melody born from the draft of fiber, clack of spindle and bobbin, soft breath as the rhythm takes hold.

If but some vengeful god would call to me From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing, Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy, That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!” Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die, Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited; Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I Had willed and meted me the tears I shed. But not so.   How arrives it joy lies slain, And why unblooms the best hope ever sown? —Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain, And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . . These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.

He stood up suddenly and threw himself and his grey canvas sack to the bus's floor, then, clutching the sack's edges, he struck the floor with it again, four or five times, then stopped. No one moved, everyone had moved for a moment, away from him as he had struck the floor. He sat looking at the contents of the bag, now strewn all over. Cassetts, broken cassette cases, assorted papers, and pieces of his old cassette recorder. He sat quite still for a moment. Whatever had been happening wasn't happening anymore. Nothing continued to happen, then something began to happen again. He began to pick up his things, put them into the sack. No one moved. They all looked at him, or they all tried not to look at him. He put his things into the sack with steadily increasing speed.

I have been taught never to brag but now I cannot help it: I keep a beautiful garden, all abundance, indiscriminate, pulling itself from the stubborn earth: does it offend you to watch me working in it, touching my hands to the greening tips or tearing the yellow stalks back, so wild the living and the dead both snap off in my hands? The neighbor with his stuttering fingers, the neighbor with his broken love: each comes up my drive to receive his pitying, accustomed consolations, watches me work in silence awhile, rises in anger, walks back. Does it offend them to watch me not mourning with them but working fitfully, fruitlessly, working the way the bees work, which is to say by instinct alone, which looks like pleasure? I can stand for hours among the sweet narcissus, silent as a point of bone. I can wait longer than sadness. I can wait longer than your grief. It is such a small thing to be proud of, a garden. Today there were scrub jays, quail, a woodpecker knocking at the white- and-black shapes of trees, and someone’s lost rabbit scratching under the barberry: is it indiscriminate? Should it shrink back, wither, and expurgate? Should I, too, not be loved? It is only a little time, a little space. Why not watch the grasses take up their colors in a rush like a stream of kerosene being lit? If I could not have made this garden beautiful I wouldn’t understand your suffering, nor care for each the same, inflamed way. I would have to stay only like the bees, beyond consciousness, beyond self-reproach, fingers dug down hard into stone, and growing nothing. There is no end to ego, with its museum of disappointments. I want to take my neighbors into the garden and show them: Here is consolation. Here is your pity. Look how much seed it drops around the sparrows as they fight. It lives alongside their misery. It glows each evening with a violent light.

The brook is this mix of roar & hiss as if God has managed to scalpel a section of tempest & clothespin it in the woods Over There Always draped in the trees while we eat white summer peaches from celadon bowls while the sun bleaches & blue jay squawks score the maple, oak birch and apple-treed sky with their oblique Scriabin musics. Fifteen years since I have seen a real Fall her deciduous burlesque, her glistering things sifting on the old cider mill. A holy show. I hold a wooden fragrance & a sodden mush of crushed flowing apples in a cache and will never give it up. The cardinal is the best bird because it is a red mark on the blank snow amid the charcoal Twombly of maple, oak birch and apple branches. Pines are green & faraway, don’t figure. My sister in spring is even prettier, her smile the genuine quality of it undiminished in the many months since I have been in Happy Valley. It roars and is constantly in spate because it has its reasons spring being spring plus my visiting.

Yeah. It’s only a matter of environment if I’m a genius. A genius is kohlrabi in a turnip in kale in cellophane in the freezer. In files they descend on the white skin and converge in the corner’s follicles. The ants are illuminated. Basta. Translated from the Slovenian

“The Knights of the Joyous Venture”—Puck of Pook’s Hill What is a woman that you forsake her, And the hearth-fire and the home-acre, To go with the old grey Widow-maker? She has no house to lay a guest in— But one chill bed for all to rest in, That the pale suns and the stray bergs nest in. She has no strong white arms to fold you, But the ten-times-fingering weed to hold you— Out on the rocks where the tide has rolled you. Yet, when the signs of summer thicken, And the ice breaks, and the birch-buds quicken, Yearly you turn from our side, and sicken— Sicken again for the shouts and the slaughters. You steal away to the lapping waters, And look at your ship in her winter-quarters. You forget our mirth, and talk at the tables, The kine in the shed and the horse in the stables— To pitch her sides and go over her cables. Then you drive out where the storm-clouds swallow, And the sound of your oar-blades, falling hollow, Is all we have left through the months to follow. Ah, what is Woman that you forsake her, And the hearth-fire and the home-acre, To go with the old grey Widow-maker ?

When he was my age and I was already a boy my father made a machine in the garage. A wired piece of steel with many small and beautiful welds ground so smooth they resembled rows of pearls. He went broke with whatever it was. He held it so carefully in his arms. He carried it foundry to foundry. I think it was his harp, I think it was what he longed to make with his hands for the world. He moved it finally from the locked closet to the bedroom to the garage again where he hung it on the wall until I climbed and pulled it down and rubbed it clean and tried to make it work.

In the greenest of our valleys By good angels tenanted, Once a fair and stately palace— Radiant palace—reared its head. In the monarch Thought’s dominion, It stood there! Never seraph spread a pinion Over fabric half so fair! Banners yellow, glorious, golden, On its roof did float and flow (This—all this—was in the olden Time long ago) And every gentle air that dallied, In that sweet day, Along the ramparts plumed and pallid, A wingèd odor went away. Wanderers in that happy valley, Through two luminous windows, saw Spirits moving musically To a lute’s well-tunèd law, Round about a throne where, sitting, Porphyrogene! In state his glory well befitting, The ruler of the realm was seen. And all with pearl and ruby glowing Was the fair palace door, Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing And sparkling evermore, A troop of Echoes, whose sweet duty Was but to sing, In voices of surpassing beauty, The wit and wisdom of their king. But evil things, in robes of sorrow, Assailed the monarch’s high estate; (Ah, let us mourn!—for never morrow Shall dawn upon him, desolate!) And round about his home the glory That blushed and bloomed Is but a dim-remembered story Of the old time entombed. And travellers, now, within that valley, Through the red-litten windows see Vast forms that move fantastically To a discordant melody; While, like a ghastly rapid river, Through the pale door A hideous throng rush out forever, And laugh—but smile no more.