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In September 1607 the village of Fianaise Bhréagach was hit by an unidentified disease, taking the lives of all the villagers. The village was razed and official records expunged. In 2007 an account written by the local undertaker was found buried in the roots of a tree in the quarantined village’s square which unearthed details of this disaster. They sent a horse along the roads to say our town had been closed in, its bloodied hooves had been unshod. The shoes were kept to save the iron or bless the fate of those who stayed across the glens or down the coast. This horse’s message came our way while sentries occupied their posts, the note was tied around its neck declaring death was soon to reach where all would feel its fevered knock: the butcher’s shop, the mill, the church. The hardest village men played tough until the store of ale ran dry; the women stopped their mouths with cloth and held their husbands as they died. Disease took hold with sudden force. We thought that we could hush the moans so skinned and burned the flagging horse and let the fire consume its bones. My children’s skin turned cold and flushed. Acquainted as I was with death I saw their end and held their trust so cut their throats and sucked their breath. I dug their graves and then some more.

Well, friend, we’re here again — sauntering the last half-mile to the land’s frayed end to find what’s laid on for us, strewn across the turf — gull feathers, bleached shells, a whole bull seal, bone-dry, knackered from the rut (we knock on his leathern head, but no one’s home). Change, change — that’s what the terns scream down at their seaward rocks; fleet clouds and salt kiss — everything else is provisional, us and all our works. I guess that’s why we like it here: listen — a brief lull, a rock pipit’s seed-small notes.

Among physicians rich in their death watch In hallways crowded with locked wheelchairs, Cradles of a century’s platitudes, The stale air smelling of disinfectant And weeping wounds enough to stupefy nurses, Among the staring insomniacs of the day room, The stroke victims on their rented gurneys, Complaining orderlies and rattling carts Among these in this place my father lay At the end of everything In the curved landscapes of white sheets Abandoned finally by parents, his son, The loyal company, old friends, his death A sign of other deaths too soon to come Unable to recall one life, his thoughts, Features, he lay unknown to himself, The tall hunter of pheasants out with his boy In vellum corn and brassy orchards In an autumn that never was, the proud White-collared Ford employee lay on a bed Too short for legs tattooed with red burn-rings From daily syringes of Cytosar Considered useless, still a requirement For state funding for a body described Leukemic waiting for Saturday's fiddlers Who came to raise the spirits of the dead With a music he never cared for turned Suddenly attractive, he found genius, Theirs or his like some lyrical phosphor That shapes itself in the dry night air To make a thing then make it disappear He lay listening to the county fiddlers At the end of every purpose, act and form I leave you here, my father, in perfect accord.

the relationship between blackbird and fencepost, between the cow and its egret, the field and wildflowers overrunning the field— so little depends upon their trust. Here, in God we trust to keep our cash and thoughts in line— in the sky, an unexplained white line could be the first of many omens. But this is no country for omens, the line as chalky as the moon, bleak and useless as the moon now rising like a breath of cold air . . . There is gullibility in the air.

Fie pleasure, fie! thou cloyest me with delight, Thou fill’st my mouth with sweetmeats overmuch; I wallow still in joy both day and night: I deem, I dream, I do, I taste, I touch, No thing but all that smells of perfect bliss; Fie pleasure, fie! I cannot like of this. To taste (sometimes) a bait of bitter gall, To drink a draught of soür ale (some season) To eat brown bread with homely hands in hall, Doth much increase men’s appetites, by reason, And makes the sweet more sugar’d that ensues, Since minds of men do still seek after news. The pamper’d horse is seldom seen in breath, Whose manger makes his grace (oftimes) to melt; The crammed fowl comes quickly to his death; Such colds they catch in hottest haps that swelt; And I (much like) in pleasure scawled still, Do fear to starve although I feed my fill. It might suffice that Love hath built his bower Between my lady’s lively shining eyes; It were enough that beauty’s fading flower Grows ever fresh with her in heavenly wise; It had been well that she were fair of face, And yet not rob all other dames of grace. To muse in mind, how wise, how fair, how good, How brave, how frank, how courteous, and how true My lady is, doth but inflame my blood With humours such as bid my health adieu; Since hap always when it is clomb on high, Doth fall full low, though erst it reach’d the sky. Lo, pleasure, lo! lo thus I lead a life That laughs for joy, and trembleth oft for dread; Thy pangs are such as call for change’s knife To cut the twist, or else to stretch the thread, Which holds yfeer the bundle of my bliss: Fie, pleasure, fie! I dare not trust to this.

For 8 months he lay in bed over the difference between “the bell rings” & “he rings the bell.” Did those 2 “rings” SOUND DIFFERENT? The invisible disturbance which is the bell’s vibration beating at the air—a FIELD EFFECT—does it shift with the ringer’s will? This, he thought, was the smallest difference between things which the human mind could hold (or almost hold, the thought-of-it falling away from the thinking, a penny rolling to the horizon & so to sleep . . .). He couldn’t get up. It became clear that he was the murderer. Everyone knows. A man standing at a podium reads from notes. In the audience people nod in immaculate suits, women & men.When I am done someone will transcribe what I say into speech. It will not resemble my notes. He is just THE THING between his notes & his speech. This is only fair, that he be the air. Some of the women wear hats with feathers in them, wild, candescent. In the audience is a boy named B, not the letter, not the note. Another sound, neither letter nor note—

The smallness of this colloquial cannot muffle the full morning orchestra— amphibious greens clotting the trickle of thaw. The tinny fin flip and eyeflake flash— small schools that give shimmer in the dull skulk of wind. ) (cry one pure perennial I can’t doubt) (something by which to) where we are wearing our belts a little tighter— ) rotted out boat bottom: the boat will stay afloat as long as you pretend to row ) In meadows let alone, gravid stems erupt— hale yellows. ) Gravid stems erupt. The hale yellows pale once they’re plucked.

Untitled, 1965, by Alberto Valdés I’m not easily mesmerized. But how can you not be drawn in by swirls, angles and whorls brought together to obey a field of moving colors layered, muted    ... others bright that make you linger there? Just look at those Carpaccio reds. Right then my mind leaps to Cezanne: his dark-blue vest in Self-Portrait(1879–1880); the Seven Bathers(ca. 1900) wallowing in blue; his blue beyond in Château Noir(1904). Consider now the three, or is it four figures in Alberto Valdés’s Untitled(ca. 1965). They are wayward energy, moving right to left (the right one more sensuous than the rest) about to dive into the deep-blue waiting — call it the unknown. I’d like to be there when they meet that blue abyss head on. Will they keep their shape, I wonder, or break up and rearrange themselves into a brighter, more memorable pose ...    into a bigger elemental thing? I’m really asking this: When they run into the landscape of  blue, will these figures lose their logic of  luster? Will they lose their lucid argument of color, their accumulated wealth of geometry? Will they still engage the entire me, hold me, keep me mesmerized?

Stare hard enough at the fabric of night, and if you're predisposed to dark—let’s say the window you’ve picked is a black postage stamp you spend hours at, sleepless, drinking gin after the I Love Lucy

When we go out into the fields of learning We go by a rough route Marked by colossal statues, Frankenstein's Monsters, AMPAC and the 704, AARDVARK, and deoxyribonucleic acid. They guard the way. Headless they nod, wink eyeless, Thoughtless compute, not heartless, For they figure us, they figure Our next turning. They are reading the book to be written. As we start out At first daylight into the fields, they are saying, Starting out. In every sage leaf is contained a toad Infinitely small. Carbonized grains of wheat unearthed From the seventh millennium B.C. town of Jarmo In the Tigris-Euphrates basin Match the grains of three kinds of wheat still extant, Two wild, one found only in cultivation. The separate grains Were parched and eaten, Or soaked into gruel, yeasted, fermented. Took to the idea of bread, Ceres, while you were gone. Wind whistles in the smokey thatch, Oven browns its lifted loaf, And in the spring the nourished seeds, Hybrid with wild grass, Easily open in a hundred days, And seeded fruits, compact and dry, Store well together. They make the straw for beds, They ask the caring hand to sow, the resting foot To stay, to court the seasons. Basil: hatred: king over pain. What did you do on the last day of day camp? First we did games, running around and playing. Then we did crafts, making things. Then we did nature, what goes on and on. Eventually a number Of boys have got big enough Through all the hazards of drag-racing, theft, and probation, To start for junior college, two transfers away, Mysterious as Loch Ness. While of grandmothers a number Have stooping arrived to seventy or eighty And wave the boys on, shaking With more absentminded merriment than they have mustered In half a century. King Henry the Eighth consumed many daisies In an attempt to rid himself of ulcers. Algebra written across a blackboard hurts As a tight shoe hurts; it can't be walked in. Music, a song score, hurts, How far lies one note from another? Graft hurts, its systems of exploitation In cold continuance. Argosies of design, fashions to which the keys Rest restlessly in an Egyptian tomb. In every sage leaf is contained a toad Infinitely small.