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Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead! There’s none of these so lonely and poor of old, But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold. These laid the world away; poured out the red Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene, That men call age; and those who would have been, Their sons, they gave, their immortality. Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth, Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain, Honour has come back, as a king, to earth, And paid his subjects with a royal wage; And Nobleness walks in our ways again; And we have come into our heritage.

These hearts were woven of human joys and cares, Washed marvellously with sorrow, swift to mirth. The years had given them kindness. Dawn was theirs, And sunset, and the colours of the earth. These had seen movement, and heard music; known Slumber and waking; loved; gone proudly friended; Felt the quick stir of wonder; sat alone; Touched flowers and furs and cheeks. All this is ended. There are waters blown by changing winds to laughter And lit by the rich skies, all day. And after, Frost, with a gesture, stays the waves that dance And wandering loveliness. He leaves a white Unbroken glory, a gathered radiance, A width, a shining peace, under the night.

I’ve been thinking about the anatomy of the egg, about the two interior membranes, the yolk held in place by the chalazae, gases moving through the semipermeable shell. A curious phrase,the anatomy of the egg, as if an egg were a body, which it is, as if the egg could be broken then mended, which, depending on your faith, broken yes, but mended? Well. Best to start again, with a new body, voided from a warmer one, brooded and turned. Better to begin as if some small-handed animal hadn’t knocked you against a rock, licked clean the rich yolk and left the albumen to dry in the sun — as if a hinged jaw hadn’t swallowed you whole. What I wanted: a practice that reassured that what was cracked could be mended or, at least, suspended so that it could not spread. But now I wonder: better to be the egg or scaled mandible? The small hand or the flies, bottle black and green, spilling their bile onto whatever’s left, sweeping the interior, drinking it clean? I think,something might have grown there, though I know it was always meant to be eaten, it was always meant to spoil.

A Deaf Blind poet doesn’t like to read sitting up. A Deaf Blind poet likes to read Braille magazines on the john. A Deaf Blind poet is in the habit of composing nineteenth-century letters and pressing Alt+S. 
A Deaf Blind poet is a terrible student. A Deaf Blind poet does a lot of groundbreaking research. A Deaf Blind poet is always in demand. A Deaf Blind poet has yet to be gainfully employed. A Deaf Blind poet shares all his trade secrets with his children. A Deaf Blind poet will not stop if police order him to. A Deaf Blind poet used to like dogs but now prefers cats. A Deaf Blind poet listens to his wife. 
A Deaf Blind poet knits soft things for his dear friends. A Deaf Blind poet doesn’t believe in “contributing to society.”

His clumsy body is a golden fruit pendulous in the pear tree Blunt fingers among the multitudinous buds Adriatic blue the sky above and through the forking twigs Sun ruddying tree’s trunk, his trunk his massive head thick-nobbed with burnished curls tight-clenched in bud (Painting by Generalíc. Primitive.) I watch him prune with silent secateurs Boots in the crotch of branches shift their weight heavily as oxen in a stall Hear small inarticulate mews from his locked mouth a kitten in a box Pear clippings fall soundlessly on the ground Spring finches sing soundlessly in the leaves A stone. A stone in ears and on his tongue Through palm and fingertip he knows the tree’s quick springtime pulse Smells in its sap the sweet incipient pears Pale sunlight’s choppy water glistens on his mutely snipping blades and flags and scraps of blue above him make regatta of the day But when he sees his wife’s foreshortened shape sudden and silent in the grass below uptilt its face to him then air is kisses, kisses stone dissolves his locked throat finds a little door and through it feathered joy flies screaming like a jay

I happen in from another unremarkable Tuesday in the realm of gratuitous sound, but here, I can hear again the quiet voices of the ontological, the clink of ice cubes in uplifted glasses, the scrape of chairs, the mournful lowing of floorboards, the long history of blood retold in my ears. I scuffle to the bar, thoughts drowned by my suddenly thunderous presence in this world, and the silence flowing from the neon jukebox, the silence going down smooth as the shot of loneliness that would naturally follow a Billie Holiday song if one were playing— —while everywhere hands are fluttering like sheets in winds of gossip, hollering above last call for one more round.

I kissed a woman whose freckles aroused our neighbors. Her trembling lips meant come to bed. Her hair falling down in the middle of the conversation meant come to bed. I walked in my hospital of thoughts. Yes, I carried her off to bed on the chair of my hairy arms. But parted lips meant kiss my parted lips, I read those lips without understanding soft lips meant kiss my soft lips. Such is a silence of a woman who speaks against silence, knowing silence is what moves us to speak.

I remember Tony arguing in front of his mirrors, the soldiers were painting the trees, Tony sat on the floor of white hair, and all the trees were painted white. And he spat at Alfonso’s irony, but when they played accordion, the fourth among us had no name. “I am not sleeping with Tony! He simply cuts my hair!” —but our dinner is a tiny blue fish and, with my lean brother-in-law, we are playing cards. I pull spade after spade after spade but this skinny sparrow, this barber no simple soul, takes me with his fingers by my nose and kisses me, quickly, on the lips! When Tony washed my hair, when Alfonso kissed between my toes, when my lips trembled, when the fourth one laughed, when Tony slept, slept in the earth, on the empty streets of our district, a bit of wind called for the life which no one knew, a life which daily took all of us: my neighbor taken, his wife taken, their apartment quiet. I say this slowly, as if unaffected: their apartment quiet, on the floor, dirty water from their boots.

Love cities , this is what my brother taught me as he cut soldiers’ hair, then tidied tomatoes watching Sonya and I dance on a soapy floor— I open the window, say in a low voice, my brother. The voice I do not hear when I speak to myself is the clearest voice. But the sky was all around us once. We played chess with empty matchboxes, he wrote love letters to my wife

Each man has a quiet that revolves around him as he beats his head against the earth. But I am laughing hard and furious. I pour a glass of pepper vodka and toast the gray wall. I say we were never silent. We read each other’s lips and said one word four times. And laughed four times in loving repetition. We read each other’s lips to uncover the poverty of laughter. Touch the asphalt with fingers to hear the cool earth of Vasenka Deposit ears into the raindrops on a fisherman’s tobacco hair. And whoever listens to me: being there, and not being, lost and found and lost again: Thank you for the feather on my tongue, thank you for our argument that ends, thank you for my deafness, Lord, such fire from a match you never lit.