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Covet not the sun its honorarium nor authorize the stars their grants to write. The sojournors spotted a forest adrift with language, but couldn't make sense of it. The woods at odds with the usual channels and those neighboring mountains didn't look like pyramids, no matter the scale. Read this part as if the sum of lilac mattered to you. For love of someone else's vortex, toss the luminaries aside. In lieu of flowers, please donate and in exchange for your sympathy I'll give you edits on the level of the line. Poems are to war as are ghosts to the proverbial orchard. Headstones offer us nothing but an end to syntax. Microsoft Word inverts the sea. I read your manuscript. Reader, I married it. I fear for the estuaries. They are so small this time of year.

Eleven o’clock, and the curtain falls. The cold wind tears the strands of illusion; The delicate music is lost In the blare of home-going crowds And a midnight paper. The night has grown martial; It meets us with blows and disaster. Even the stars have turned shrapnel, Fixed in silent explosions. And here at our door The moonlight is laid Like a drawn sword.

One writes to ask me if I’ve read Of “the Jutland battle,” of “the great advance Made by the Russians,” chiding—“History Is being made these days, these are the things That are worth while.” These! Not to one who’s lain In Heaven before God’s throne with eyes abased, Worshipping Him, in many forms of Good, That sate thereon; turning this patchwork world Wholly to glorify Him, point His plan Toward some supreme perfection, dimly visioned By loving faith: not these to him, when, stressed By some soul-dizzying woe beyond his trust, He lifts his startled face, and finds the Throne Empty, turns away, too drunk with Truth To mind his shame, or feel the loss of God.

“We're going,” they said, “to the end of the world.” So they stopped the car where the river curled, And we scrambled down beneath the bridge On the gravel track of a narrow ridge. We tramped for miles on a wooded walk Where dog-hobble grew on its twisted stalk. Then we stopped to rest on the pine-needle floor While two ospreys watched from an oak by the shore. We came to a bend, where the river grew wide And green mountains rose on the opposite side. My guides moved back. I stood alone, As the current streaked over smooth flat stone. Shelf by stone shelf the river fell. The white water goosetailed with eddying swell. Faster and louder the current dropped Till it reached a cliff, and the trail stopped. I stood at the edge where the mist ascended, My journey done where the world ended. I looked downstream. There was nothing but sky, The sound of the water, and the water’s reply.

Over the still world, a bird calls waking solitary among black boughs. You wanted to be born; I let you be born. When has my grief ever gotten in the way of your pleasure? Plunging ahead into the dark and light at the same time eager for sensation as though you were some new thing, wanting to express yourselves all brilliance, all vivacity never thinking this would cost you anything, never imagining the sound of my voice as anything but part of you— you won't hear it in the other world, not clearly again, not in birdcall or human cry, not the clear sound, only persistent echoing in all sound that means good-bye, good-bye— the one continuous line that binds us to each other.

I believed death was a flat plain spectacular endlessly Can you distort my voice when I say this? My scared ghost peeling off me Distortion, she says, as if she has just made it up And then she is quoting a line from a poem Or is it a whole poem, I wish I could remember My voice opens and calls you in I don’t know if you can hear me I said, I carry inside me the trace of a threat that I cannot discharge I said, I want to ask you things you can’t ask a person who doesn’t exist She said, Why can’t you ask them If we can’t have everything what is the closest amount to everything we can have? She said, Why can’t you have everything Well, you know, when you’re looking for a person, sometimes they appear And a light goes on and off in the opposite window, twice Yes, you say, that was a sign Strange love for the living, strange love for the dead Listen. I don’t know who you are but you remind me of — I wish you would put some kind of distortion on my voice, I tell her So people don’t know it’s me They know what they know, she said I told a story about my shame It got cold when the air touched it Then it got hot, throbbed, wept, attracted fragments with which it eventually glittered Till I couldn’t stop looking at it Exactly, she says And then she is quoting a line from a poem, I don’t know which one In my dream she reached out to touch me as if to say, It’s all right How I began to believe in something Are you there? The wind called to the trees And then it happened And they said, How do you feel? And I said, Like a fountain Night falls from my neck like silver arrows Very gently

Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end, Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like When he’s held by the sea’s roar, motionless, there at the end, Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he’ll never go back. When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat, When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down No longer appear, not every man knows what he’ll discover instead. When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are suspended in flight, Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end.

When I came to this mountainside almost fifty years ago it never occurred to me that there would be an end to it. I went along never thinking about the time when I would have to quit. I imagined—I guess — all this would last forever, if I imagined it at all. Now I'm in my seventies and all I can think about is the time when my life will be here no more. For example, I love being in the woods felling and bucking hardwood trees, stacking and covering the blocks, then a year or two later, hauling them to the woodshed where I stack them again, and split them all winter long into the right size for the weather—then bring them into the house. Now this chore I love so much is seriously painful, and I can see, now, an end to it.

Out the living-room window I see the two older children burning household trash under the ash tree in wind and rain. They move in slow motion about the flames, heads bowed in concentration as they feed each fresh piece in, hair blown wild across their faces, the fire wavering in tongues before them so they seem creatures half flame, half flesh, wholly separate from me. All of a sudden the baby breaks slowly down through the flexed branches of the ash in a blaze of blood and green leaves, an amniotic drench, a gleaming liver-purple slop of ripe placenta, head first and wailing to be amongst us. Boy and girl look up in silence and hold gravely out flamefeathered arms to catch her, who lands on her back in their linked and ashen hands. Later, when I take her in my arms for a walk to that turn on the high road where the sea always startles, I can see how at intervals she's thunderstruck by a scalloped green leaf, a shivering jig of grassheads, or that speckled bee that pushes itself among the purple and scarlet parts of a fuchsia bell. And her eyes are on fire.

herds of buffalo gone now you search the undulating sea of grass near campo and wildhorse for the great hairy horned whales but none surface instead if you look carefully you see the shallow swimming hahe issi the pronghorn antelope you identify with this striped sailfish skimming the surface a harpoon’s throw away from hungry nesters diving for the cereal great plains plankton seed visible but fast