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Sometimes she’s Confucian— resolute in privation. . . . Each day, more immobile, hip not mending, legs swollen; still she carries her grief with a hard steadiness. Twelve years uncompanioned, there’s no point longing for what can’t return. This morning, she tells me, she found a robin hunched in the damp dirt by the blossoming white azalea. Still there at noon— she went out in the yard with her 4-pronged metal cane— it appeared to be dying. Tonight, when she looked again, the bird had disappeared and in its place, under the bush, was a tiny egg— “Beautiful robin’s-egg blue”— she carried carefully indoors. “Are you keeping it warm?” I ask—what am I thinking?— And she: “Gail, I don’t want a bird, I want a blue egg.”

After James Merrill One evening, tired of games and each other, we spent watching our reflections on a screen — four in a two-seater, angling like sardines. For a dog’s hair I’d milked the wine, uttered words like, “that’s the cure!” swiveled the puckering glass like a mock-dandy, blood slushing at my temples, until the spill, a fatal expression on the white and navy, ruined the smoothness past salvation. A cough of salt, the patting of the fabric, perhaps enough.

I have forgotten the words, and therefore I shall not conceive of a mysterious salvation, I shall not become a tall lily and bloom into blue and white. Then what oracular event shall appear on my doorstep? What announcement shall crowd me to a corner, protesting an unworthiness, which doubtless shall be believed? But these are only bells we hear, pulled down by the arms of the drunken janitor, two fingers missing on his left hand. And we have climbed into that tower, its spiraling wooden staircase creaking beneath our feet. We have seen for ourselves that it is only iron that rings, iron swinging on an iron bar, the rough rope threading down to the cold ground, no death or holiness in those hollow shells.

For Robert Penn Warren Reckless and white as a flashlight beam cast into some dark corner, the moon insists on the deeper blackness surrounding it. Perhaps it wishes to be a woman or a window, cushioning everything, full of itself for the moment, yet frightened, like any egotist. But still the stars patiently insist on their presence, pinholes to nothingness. When else would I walk on such a night in the world? Half answers suggest themselves. The body consumes and wanes, collapses. We get to watch how everyone dies who dies before us, how birds rest. And yet while night solidifies, we can continue our discussion in our effort to open the gift of the world, our hope to find years in this box we tear apart. Birds do not count in our calibration. They crack time randomly, as if it were seeds. With sudden unaccountability they start up and disappear. And yet, in some way all of this is beside the point, for what can we do except continue our conversation, and what would we gain if we disappeared? They tell us that this is so. Do you have any songs from your childhood you still use to sing yourself to sleep? Being, mind, ego: the moon loves itself in cloud shimmers, dancing as if it had pulled a scant nightie off a laundry line to clown with. We can only walk while there is light.

The evening darkens over After a day so bright The windcapt waves discover That wild will be the night. There’s sound of distant thunder. The latest sea-birds hover Along the cliff’s sheer height; As in the memory wander Last flutterings of delight, White wings lost on the white. There’s not a ship in sight; And as the sun goes under Thick clouds conspire to cover The moon that should rise yonder. Thou art alone, fond lover.

From plane of light to plane, wings dipping through Geometries and orchids that the sunset builds, Out of the peak's black angularity of shadow, riding The last tumultuous avalanche of Light above pines and the guttural gorge, The hawk comes. His wing Scythes down another day, his motion Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear The crashless fall of stalks of Time. The head of each stalk is heavy with the gold of our error. Look! Look! he is climbing the last light Who knows neither Time nor error, and under Whose eye, unforgiving, the world, unforgiven, swings Into shadow. Long now, The last thrush is still, the last bat Now cruises in his sharp hieroglyphics. His wisdom Is ancient, too, and immense. The star Is steady, like Plato, over the mountain. If there were no wind we might, we think, hear The earth grind on its axis, or history Drip in darkness like a leaking pipe in the cellar.

after the painting by Brent Lynch The humid nights are best and worst, best because the birds sing at two in the morning when you cannot get back into the other world, worst because it is the moist heat that makes the skin supple, makes you want to rub against someone else, a woman, and there is nothing but the long list of lost chances, things you could have said, perhaps the simple question of will you sleep with me so that it is not just you and this shell of a home, this place where it feels the walls are another layer of my skin, and that is neither best or worst. It is the holding of the dead stink, the memories that was over him, holding them back. It is the utter singleness of being the only person here, the way the thoughts think themselves down to accepting that this is really just me here wondering who I am, just me here wondering why I am awake at two, which trigger it was, knowing all the time all too well the way the war of life is connected to the nervous system of the world, the ganglia of our shared horrors, either mine so large, or so people tell me, and here it seems to be the membrane between the skin of my bones and the skin of this home, the absorbing shock of space that gives when the memories burn their way in or out of me. I would lie here wondering how to tell her I am wrestling with the angel, wrestling with memories in the crevices and cracks of my body, of how I feel right now, what it felt like then, in those times, and I am glad she is not here, and I wish she were here, and she has no name because this is some woman I do not know. I practice in the silence of my thoughts the different pitch and rhythm of how I might ask will you sleep with me, afraid of what to say should she say yes and this decade of my monkish life should lie open and I have to say why I am sitting on the edge of the bed, why I have woke her from the sweet smile I assume she has when I assume her horror is smaller than mine.

The face looking into the room; Behind it light, shaking, like heat Lightning; the face calm and knowing; Seeing, but not seeing who I am; The mouth may be telling something. Something about our helplessness; Something about the confusions of beasts; The consequence of error; systems Haywire, or working; the stars gone All wrong in the body’s courses. Out on the plain of Mars, brilliantly Played under the lights, searched out Beyond any answer, the game went on Far into the night; the bloodiest came Home from the battle seeking the prize. The women were disgraced; hair streaming, Pleading into the staring: buy, buy—; Was it my daughter I was seeing?— The humiliation was pleasing: tears, Laughter, smiles, all mingled together. The light swallowed itself, a balloon Deflating; somewhere in the darkness A murmuring let itself go.

Now comes the evening of the mind. Here are the fireflies twitching in the blood; Here is the shadow moving down the page Where you sit reading by the garden wall. Now the dwarf peach trees, nailed to their trellises, Shudder and droop. You know their voices now, Faintly the martyred peaches crying out Your name, the name nobody knows but you. It is the aura and the coming on. It is the thing descending, circling, here. And now it puts a claw out and you take it. Thankfully in your lap you take it, so. You said you would not go away again, You did not want to go away—and yet, It is as if you stood out on the dock Watching a little boat drift out Beyond the sawgrass shallows, the dead fish ... And you were in it, skimming past old snags, Beyond, beyond, under a brazen sky As soundless as a gong before it’s struck— Suspended how?—and now they strike it, now The ether dream of five-years-old repeats, repeats, And you must wake again to your own blood And empty spaces in the throat.

I asked my father, “would you rather die of cancer or a heart attack? Would you rather be executed or put in jail for life? Which would you rather be— a spy or a sentinel?” And he tried to answer honestly, combing his thinning hair with his fingers, thinking of something else. At last he fell silent. I ran out to savor the dregs of dusk playing with my friends in the road that led to the highway. The ball flew up toward day and landed in night. We chanted. Every other minute a truck, summoned by our warnings, brushed past in a gust of light, the driver’s curses muffled by distance: the oncoming wheels were the point of the game, like the scores in chalk or the blood from scuffed knees that we smeared across our faces: so when my mother called, her voice was quaint and stymied and I took all the time in the world trotting home past tarped barbecue pits, past names of lovers filling with sap, past tentative wind from sprinklers: then I was stunned to see my golden window where all faces, hanging plants, dangling pots were framed by night and dwarfed by a ravenous inward-turning light.