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Siwashing it out once in Siuslaw Forest I slept under   rhododendron All night   blossoms fell Shivering on   a sheet of cardboard Feet stuck   in my pack Hands deep   in my pockets Barely   able   to   sleep. I remembered   when we were in school Sleeping together   in a big warm bed We were   the youngest lovers When we broke up   we were still nineteen. Now our   friends are married You teach   school back east I dont mind   living this way Green hills   the long blue beach But sometimes   sleeping in the open I think back   when I had you. A spring night in Shokoku-ji Eight years ago this May We walked under cherry blossoms At night in an orchard in Oregon. All that I wanted then Is forgotten now, but you. Here in the night In a garden of the old capital I feel the trembling ghost of Yugao I remember your cool body Naked under a summer cotton dress. An autumn morning in Shokoku-ji Last night watching the Pleiades, Breath smoking in the moonlight, Bitter memory like vomit Choked my throat. I unrolled a sleeping bag On mats on the porch Under thick autumn stars. In dream you appeared (Three times in nine years) Wild, cold, and accusing. I woke shamed and angry: The pointless wars of the heart. Almost dawn. Venus and Jupiter. The first time I have Ever seen them close. December at Yase You said, that October, In the tall dry grass by the orchard When you chose to be free, “Again someday, maybe ten years.” After college I saw you One time. You were strange. And I was obsessed with a plan. Now ten years and more have Gone by: I’ve always known where you were— I might have gone to you Hoping to win your love back. You still are single. I didn’t. I thought I must make it alone. I Have done that. Only in dream, like this dawn, Does the grave, awed intensity Of our young love Return to my mind, to my flesh. We had what the others All crave and seek for; We left it behind at nineteen. I feel ancient, as though I had Lived many lives. And may never now know If I am a fool Or have done what my karma demands.

1 I find a strange knowledge of wind, an open door in the mountain pass where everything intersects. Believe me. This will not pass. This is a world where flags contain themselves, and are still, marked by their unfurled edges. Lean stuff sways on the boughs of pitch pine: silver, almost tinsel, all light gone blue and sprouting orange oils in a last bouquet. 2 These were the nest builders; I caught one last morning, I sang so it fell down, stupid, from the trees. They’re so incorrect in their dead skin. Witness their twig feet, the mistake of their hands. They will follow you. They yearn pebbles for their gullets to grind their own seed. They swallow so selflessly and die like patriots. 3 Last Christmas, a family of five woke from their dreaming and dreamed themselves over: the baby in its pink pajamas, the boy in the red flannel bathrobe he grabbed from the door, a mother, a father, and a sister in curlers; all died. A wood frame house, a cannister of oil, a match—watch as it unsettles. They were so cold; umber. 4 I am away from the knowledge of animal mystics, brujas and sorcerers or the nudging chants of a Tlingit Kachina. I am frightened by regions with wills of their own, but when my people die in the snow I wonder did the depths billow up to reach them?

for Anselm Hollo I what is most valued, the cherished things any moment in Iowa settles so carelessly upon you—cat stickers, a coded signal Home Orange Juice is trucking by, some morning or any day when winter spring summer and the poem begin again II who was it started laughing? someone otherwise somber, the Christmas lariateer spinning double circles, dancing through the lasso at his side, bullwhipping cigarettes from his lovely assistant’s scarlet mouth every hour on the hour next to the howling Santa Claus III would have thought other- wise, conceded the point at first argument; of course there were mornings, the hills went on to Cedar Rapids and Davenport; in its own season the corn’s pollen stung another hand; brown rivers paled with ice; those were the truck washes we had known before, the spit of gravel from the humming wheels; the patient customer of truck stops knows the best of these returns, hulks them into the dark of his coffee with rounded shoulders and extended forearms IV it is the line of force or the vector that sees us through our ambiguities, diagram of rivers, path the semi takes among its various winds, turn the night makes at a neon sign, EATS, locus of all points on the lasso’s rim, itself remembered; somehow each of us knows the double twist of brittle fiber that holds the line together, knows the turns the rain takes, heaves the long land rests against our feet

On opening a long unopened book, what odor rises from the parting pages, what genie is released, what dark spell broken, as if some spirit trapped inside for ages, By this hinge swung open were set free? My father’s hand has jotted in the margins its own blunt text of what must be lecture notes, and planted his place marker Like a flag among “The Dry Salvages”— a UC

1. Is it true that they dream? It is true, for the spaces of night surround them with shape and purpose, like a warm hollow below the shoulders, or between the curve of thigh and belly. The land itself can lie like this. Hence our understanding of giants. The wind and the grass cry out to the arms of their sleep as the shore cries out, and buries its face in the bruised sea. We all have heard barns and fences splintering against the dark with a weight that is more than wood. The stars, too, bear witness. We can read their tails and claws as we would read the signs of our own dreams; a knot of sheets, scratches defining the edges of the body, the position of the legs upon waking. The cage and the forest are as helpless in the night as a pair of open hands holding rain. 2. Do they dream of the past or of the future? Think of the way a woman who wanders the roads could step into an empty farmhouse one afternoon and find a basket of eggs, some unopened letters, the pillowcases embroidered with initials that once were hers. Think of her happiness as she sleeps in the daylilies; the air is always heaviest at the start of dusk. Cows, for example, find each part of themselves traveling at a different rate of speed. Their bells call back to their burdened hearts the way a sparrow taunts an old hawk. As far as the badger and the owl are concerned, the past is a silver trout circling in the ice. Each night he swims through their waking and makes his way back to the moon. Clouds file through the dark like prisoners through an endless yard. Deer are made visible by their hunger. I could also mention the hopes of common spiders: green thread sailing from an infinite spool, a web, a thin nest, a child dragging a white rope slowly through the sand. 3. Do they dream of this world or of another? The prairie lies open like a vacant eye, blind to everything but the wind. From the tall grass the sky is an industrious map that bursts with rivers and cities. A black hawk waltzes against his clumsy wings, the buzzards grow bored with the dead. A screendoor flapping idly on an August afternoon or a woman fanning herself in church; this is how the tails of snakes and cats keep time even in sleep. There are sudden flashes of light to account for. Alligators, tormented by knots and vines, take these as a sign of grace. Eagles find solace in the far glow of towns, in the small yellow bulb a child keeps by his bed. The lightning that scars the horizon of the meadow is carried in the desperate gaze of foxes. Have other skies fallen into this sky? All the evidence seems to say so. Conspiracy of air, conspiracy of ice, the silver trout is thirsty for morning, the prairie dog shivers with sweat. Skeletons of gulls lie scattered on the dunes, their beaks still parted by whispering. These are the languages that fall beyond our hearing. Imagine the way rain falls around a house at night, invisible to its sleepers. They do not dream of us. 4. How can we learn more? This is all we will ever know.

—Washington, D.C. JC was called the Rack at the work farm, aluminum milk pails dangling from his hands. Once a sudden fist crushed the cartilage of nose across his face, but JC only grinned, and the man with the fist stumbled away. JC sings his work farm songs on the street, swaying with black overcoat and guitar, cigarettes cheaper than food. But today he promises four sandwiches, two for each of us. The landlady, a Rumanian widow, has nailed a death mask over JC’s bed, sleeping plaster face of a drowned girl peaceful in the dark. As the girl contemplates water and pigeons batter the window, JC spreads the last deviled ham on two slices of bread, presses them together, then slowly tears four pieces. “Here,” he almost sings, “four sandwiches.”

* In the shape of a submarine frost lengthens on a window. Outside, winter sparrows perch in rhinoceros-colored trees. Mare's tails chase whitely past brick chimneys. I have seen those lights before, small rectangular eyes of far buildings, one church steeple darkening the blue sky. * It looks like a stopped grey heart, if hearts sport such delicate scallops and trees wear hearts on their sleeves. Now the first wasp of spring emerges, its wings a transparency of fish scales, old isinglass or vein-fretted windows— wings of the first untranscendent angel sentenced to death by the god frost. How can some later spring reclaim this paper city or repair its walls damaged in the long drop from the one hundred and twentieth odd year of a tree? * The sky wears that color through which you expect a tornado's black drill. Only cicadas try the air, a scratching that cannon could not silence. Beyond the barn with three siloes and the wind pump stopped like a tin daisy, carp lip the surface of reflected sky, the promised violence. * I always imagined that place as an orchard on a mountaintop, its summer Delicious freckling to a sunset by Seurat. But the last time it was fall, the sere grass bent one way toward an open gate, as though a great wind had swept down stones of the garden walls. Two posts bent where the orchard had been, their purpose obscure. They stood, I think, where flowers had rivaled deepest in their colors and scents.

I Love, though for this you riddle me with darts, And drag me at your chariot till I die, — Oh, heavy prince! Oh, panderer of hearts! — Yet hear me tell how in their throats they lie Who shout you mighty: thick about my hair, Day in, day out, your ominous arrows purr, Who still am free, unto no querulous care A fool, and in no temple worshiper! I, that have bared me to your quiver's fire, Lifted my face into its puny rain, Do wreathe you Impotent to Evoke Desire As you are Powerless to Elicit Pain! (Now will the god, for blasphemy so brave, Punish me, surely, with the shaft I crave!) II I think I should have loved you presently, And given in earnest words I flung in jest; And lifted honest eyes for you to see, And caught your hand against my cheek and breast; And all my pretty follies flung aside That won you to me, and beneath your gaze, Naked of reticence and shorn of pride, Spread like a chart my little wicked ways. I, that had been to you, had you remained, But one more waking from a recurrent dream, Cherish no less the certain stakes I gained, And walk your memory's halls, austere, supreme, A ghost in marble of a girl you knew Who would have loved you in a day or two. III Oh, think not I am faithful to a vow! Faithless am I save to love's self alone. Were you not lovely I would leave you now: After the feet of beauty fly my own. Were you not still my hunger's rarest food, And water ever to my wildest thirst, I would desert you — think not but I would! — And seek another as I sought you first. But you are mobile as the veering air, And all your charms more changeful than the tide, Wherefore to be inconstant is no care: I have but to continue at your side. So wanton, light and false, my love, are you, I am most faithless when I most am true. IV I shall forget you presently, my dear, So make the most of this, your little day, Your little month, your little half a year, Ere I forget, or die, or move away, And we are done forever; by and by I shall forget you, as I said, but now, If you entreat me with your loveliest lie I will protest you with my favorite vow. I would indeed that love were longer-lived, And vows were not so brittle as they are, But so it is, and nature has contrived To struggle on without a break thus far, — Whether or not we find what we are seeking Is idle, biologically speaking.

Love While nothing satisfies, not morning’s Bleary mirror or the slick embrace at hand, Consider our mutual jewel an untouching, a pouring Into sweet emptied arms called worth and habit. Hey, you there, change of mind, eh? So, it is these comic-book poses that promise Softer years, quite bearable as amnesia or sex. Sex Tough talkers, their brain-pans fried black From a constant heat, turn out swell On the boulevard strolling in evening wear. Appearances being unavoidable As the urge to keep tuned, even stars Seems to itch for more, for a squeeze Of all our drizzling nothings, save time. Time Leaning out from this wayside planet, You witness another life blown like glass Without pattern or fatuous secret, Yet a limited edition of uncertain radius. Presume then to be home, a part dismantled By continuity; some guiding light Phasing on and off like an unoriginal religion. Religion Get far up and hard in the hole Between dead of winter skies and beyond Limits of ourselves documented by precinct, Greeted cordially by scandal. Too soon Allegiance becomes resistance and otherwise; Meanwhile, after a holy pinch in the ass You are often saved and, perhaps, in love.

I Out of scarcity,—