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Every year without knowing it I have passed the day When the last fires will wave to me And the silence will set out Tireless traveler Like the beam of a lightless star Then I will no longer Find myself in life as in a strange garment Surprised at the earth And the love of one woman And the shamelessness of men As today writing after three days of rain Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease And bowing not knowing to what

I think he knows I’m alive, having come down The three steps of the back porch And given me a good once over. All afternoon He’s been moving back and forth, Gathering odd bits of walnut shells and twigs, While all about him the great fields tumble To the blades of the thresher. He’s lucky To be where he is, wild with all that happens. He’s lucky he’s not one of the shadows Living in the blond heart of the wheat. This autumn when trees bolt, dark with the fires Of starlight, he’ll curl among their roots, Wanting nothing but the slow burn of matter On which he fastens like a small, brown flame.

Knots like two dozen fists swayed with want from the boy’s kaffiyeh, that black and white scarf with its useless hands clopping against the wind in protest against this boy and his somebody lost, against their own swaying in a dance the lost body has lost. A boy. A somebody lost. A body bodied in the lights of inauguration night when every light in the city flared with hope. Always losing, always a boy left with a dozen weights, small circles on strings pulling his head down to the ground. Downcast. Drop your bucket here and make the city yours and all that jive keeps him from running. Escaping the pavement, where bodies finally fall to rest. The kaffiyeh keeps him from bucking against the wind, hurtling himself to the Grey- hound or Amtrak or I -95 with a book bag and hitched finger. His head shrouded in the black and white, the knots keeping his eyes down as he traverses neighborhoods with names like 3rd World, with names like a nation falling. And the coffin-voiced boy is who god tells us he will save, and so those swinging knots must be a kind of redemption, a way to see the bullets that bury you, constantly, as if death is the disguise hiding your wings.

Among the many lives you’ll never lead, consider that of the wolverine, for whom avalanche is opportunity, who makes a festival of frozen marrow from the femur of an elk, who wears the crooked North Star like an amulet of teeth. In the game of which animal would you return as, today I’m thinking snowshoe hare, a scuffle in the underbrush, one giant leap. You never see them coming and going, only the crosshairs of their having passed, ascending the ridge, lost or not lost in succession forests giving way to open meadow where deep snow lingers and finally relents, uncovering acres of lily — glacier yellow, avalanche white — daylight restaking its earthly claim. Every season swallows someone — Granite Mountain with its blunderbuss gullies, Tatoosh a lash on the tongue, those climbers caught if not unawares then perfectly hapless, not thinking of riding that snowstorm to the summit, not thinking wolverine fever in the shivering blood, not thinking steelhead cutthroat rainbow or the languid river that will carry them out.

where is the poetry of resistance, the poetry of honorable defiance unafraid of lies from career politicians and business men, not respectful of journalist who write official speak void of educated thought without double search or sub surface questions that war talk demands? where is the poetry of doubt and suspicion not in the service of the state, bishops and priests, not in the service of beautiful people and late night promises, not in the service of influence, incompetence and academic clown talk?

Darlings, if your owners say you are /not usually like this/ then I must take them / at their word / I am like you / not crazy about that which towers before me / particularly the buildings here / and the people inside / who look at my name / and make noises / that seem like growling / my small and eager darlings / what it must be like / to have the sound for love / and the sound for fear / be a matter of pitch / I am afraid to touch / anyone who might stay / long enough to make leaving / an echo / there is a difference / between burying a thing you love / for the sake of returning / and leaving a fresh absence / in a city’s dirt / looking for a mercy / left by someone / who came before you / I am saying that I / too / am at a loss for language / can’t beg myself / a doorway / out of anyone / I am not usually like this either / I must apologize again for how adulthood has rendered me / us, really 
/ I know you all forget the touch / of someone who loves you / in two minutes / and I arrive to you / a constellation of shadows / once hands / listen darlings / there is a sky / to be pulled down / into our bowls / there is a sweetness for us / to push our faces into / I promise / I will not beg for you to stay this time / I will leave you to your wild galloping / I am sorry / to hold you again / for so long / I am in the mood / to be forgotten.

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children, England mourns for her dead across the sea. Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit, Fallen in the cause of the free. Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres, There is music in the midst of desolation And a glory that shines upon our tears. They went with songs to the battle, they were young, Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow. They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted; They fell with their faces to the foe. They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them. They mingle not with their laughing comrades again; They sit no more at familiar tables of home; They have no lot in our labour of the day-time; They sleep beyond England's foam. But where our desires are and our hopes profound, Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight, To the innermost heart of their own land they are known As the stars are known to the Night; As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust, Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain; As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness, To the end, to the end, they remain.

108 In a decidedly vacant stone plaza, you are tapped on the shoulder by the convulsions of a section of light, and turn back, to your delight. However, to think that the countless hidden fibers of the atmosphere were already attacking you at once and tying you up, shadow and all. Inside the convulsive laughter, fight. Because the fighting spirit is that of the enemy, flooding over the plaza.

If an idea exists but is never found, then the stained-glass windows will reflect nothing back to the ear. Most days filter through the mind, waiting not for movement but for a road to be built, brick by brick, word by word, weariness replaced with joy, but what is joy without the years and the way they open constantly, two or three hearts pumping a volume of blood meant for just one? Our disbelief in the ordinary emerges from the way we color routine: leaves pile up depending on the wind, but why pause to notice? Eventually the seasons embrace what our words will not, the illuminated day just one of a thousand others, and the names we give back to the world mean ultimately little against the way the sun pleads sense from the smallest cradle of dew.

They will soon be down To one, but he still will be For a little while    still will be stopping The flakes in the air with a look, Surrounding himself with the silence Of whitening snarls. Let him eat The last red meal of the condemned To extinction, tearing the guts From an elk. Yet that is not enough For me. I would have him eat The heart, and from it, have an idea Stream into his gnarling head That he no longer has a thing To lose, and so can walk Out into the open, in the full Pale of the sub-Arctic sun Where a single spruce tree is dying Higher and higher. Let him climb it With all his meanness and strength. Lord, we have come to the end Of this kind of vision of heaven, As the sky breaks open Its fans around him and shimmers And into its northern gates he rises Snarling    complete    in the joy of a weasel With an elk’s horned heart in his stomach Looking straight into the eternal Blue, where he hauls his kind. I would have it all My way: at the top of that tree I place The New World’s last eagle Hunched in mangy feathers    giving Up on the theory of flight. Dear God of the wildness of poetry, let them mate To the death in the rotten branches, Let the tree sway and burst into flame And mingle them, crackling with feathers, In crownfire. Let something come Of it    something gigantic    legendary Rise beyond reason over hills Of ice screaming that it cannot die, That it has come back, this time On wings, and will spare no earthly thing: That it will hover, made purely of northern Lights, at dusk    and fall On men building roads: will perch On the moose’s horn like a falcon Riding into battle    into holy war against Screaming railroad crews: will pull Whole traplines like fibres from the snow In the long-jawed night of fur trappers. But, small, filthy, unwinged, You will soon be crouching Alone, with maybe some dim racial notion Of being the last, but none of how much Your unnoticed going will mean: How much the timid poem needs The mindless explosion of your rage, The glutton’s internal fire    the elk’s Heart in the belly, sprouting wings, The pact of the “blind swallowing Thing,” with himself, to eat The world, and not to be driven off it Until it is gone, even if it takes Forever. I take you as you are And make of you what I will, Skunk-bear, carcajou, bloodthirsty Non-survivor. Lord, let me die    but not die Out.