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I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning to the sea, then turned right along the surf rounded a naked headland and returned along the inlet shore: it was muggy sunny, the wind from the sea steady and high, crisp in the running sand, some breakthroughs of sun but after a bit continuous overcast: the walk liberating, I was released from forms, from the perpendiculars, straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds of thought into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends of sight: I allow myself eddies of meaning: yield to a direction of significance running like a stream through the geography of my work: you can find in my sayings swerves of action like the inlet’s cutting edge: there are dunes of motion, organizations of grass, white sandy paths of remembrance in the overall wandering of mirroring mind: but Overall is beyond me: is the sum of these events I cannot draw, the ledger I cannot keep, the accounting beyond the account: in nature there are few sharp lines: there are areas of primrose more or less dispersed; disorderly orders of bayberry; between the rows of dunes, irregular swamps of reeds, though not reeds alone, but grass, bayberry, yarrow, all ... predominantly reeds: I have reached no conclusions, have erected no boundaries, shutting out and shutting in, separating inside from outside: I have drawn no lines: as manifold events of sand change the dune’s shape that will not be the same shape tomorrow, so I am willing to go along, to accept the becoming thought, to stake off no beginnings or ends, establish no walls: by transitions the land falls from grassy dunes to creek to undercreek: but there are no lines, though change in that transition is clear as any sharpness: but “sharpness” spread out, allowed to occur over a wider range than mental lines can keep: the moon was full last night: today, low tide was low: black shoals of mussels exposed to the risk of air and, earlier, of sun, waved in and out with the waterline, waterline inexact, caught always in the event of change: a young mottled gull stood free on the shoals and ate to vomiting: another gull, squawking possession, cracked a crab, picked out the entrails, swallowed the soft-shelled legs, a ruddy turnstone running in to snatch leftover bits: risk is full: every living thing in siege: the demand is life, to keep life: the small white blacklegged egret, how beautiful, quietly stalks and spears the shallows, darts to shore to stab—what? I couldn’t see against the black mudflats—a frightened fiddler crab? the news to my left over the dunes and reeds and bayberry clumps was fall: thousands of tree swallows gathering for flight: an order held in constant change: a congregation rich with entropy: nevertheless, separable, noticeable as one event, not chaos: preparations for flight from winter, cheet, cheet, cheet, cheet, wings rifling the green clumps, beaks at the bayberries a perception full of wind, flight, curve, sound: the possibility of rule as the sum of rulelessness: the “field” of action with moving, incalculable center: in the smaller view, order tight with shape: blue tiny flowers on a leafless weed: carapace of crab: snail shell: pulsations of order in the bellies of minnows: orders swallowed, broken down, transferred through membranes to strengthen larger orders: but in the large view, no lines or changeless shapes: the working in and out, together and against, of millions of events: this, so that I make no form of formlessness: orders as summaries, as outcomes of actions override or in some way result, not predictably (seeing me gain the top of a dune, the swallows could take flight—some other fields of bayberry could enter fall berryless) and there is serenity: no arranged terror: no forcing of image, plan, or thought: no propaganda, no humbling of reality to precept: terror pervades but is not arranged, all possibilities of escape open: no route shut, except in the sudden loss of all routes: I see narrow orders, limited tightness, but will not run to that easy victory: still around the looser, wider forces work: I will try to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening scope, but enjoying the freedom that Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision, that I have perceived nothing completely, that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.

Do not imagine you can abdicate Auden Prologue If the sea could dream, and if the sea were dreaming now, the dream would be the usual one: Of the Flesh. The letter written in the dream would go something like:Forgive me—love, Blue. * I. The Viewing (A Chorus) O what, then, did he look like? He had a good body. And how came you to know this? His body was naked. Say the sound of his body. His body was quiet. Say again—quiet? He was sleeping. You are sure of this? Sleeping? Inside it, yes. Inside it. * II. Pavilion Sometimes, a breeze: a canvas flap will rise and, inside, someone stirs;a bird? a flower? One is thinking Should there be thirst, I have only to reach for the swollen bag of skin beside me, I have only to touch my mouth that is meant for a flower to it, and drink.

shepherdboy?   not the most salient image for contemporary readers nor most available.   unless you’re thinking brokeback mountain : a reference already escaping.   I did love a montana man, though no good shepherd rather: a caveman, came spelunking into that grotto I’d retreated to what light he bore illumined such small space—physically, temporally and did he have a grove of beech trees? no, no grove but together we found an old-growth stand of   redwood we gouged each other’s chests instead of wood:   pledges that faded he was not cruel nor I unwitting.   but what endures beyond any thicket? example: he took me to the ocean to say farewell.   I mean me: farewell to ocean the ocean, for that matter, to me.   us both fatigued, showing signs of wreckage and that man I had loved stood back from the edge of things he did not hold me I expected not to be held we all understood one another: shepherd understudy, ocean, me and did he go back to his fields and caves? yes, but they were gone strip-mining, lumber, defoliant, sterile streams: you knew that was coming weren’t we taught some starched sermon: the pasture awaits us elsewhere back up a moment: the forest you mentioned—remember, instead of a grove? untouched for the most part.   some human damage, but not ours we left no mark, not there in the midst of those great trees: not in the concentric rings that might have held us far past living instead, I put that man, like so many others, on paper— a tree already gone from sight where once it had drawn the eyes upward: the crest of a mountain.   crumpled thoughts, crumpled love shepherdboy, do you see the wild fennel bulbs I gathered for you olallieberries, new-mown grass, the tender fruits of   the coastal fig? I put them on paper, too, so fragile.   for nothing is ever going to last For Haines Eason

A yarn ball and a hill maintain an equipoise until their neatness starts to bore the gods of potential and energy who hedge bets, reckoning the odds of when the rest will be set in motion, and who, first stumbling upon this clew, constructed both the incline and the inclination to unwind. Like most gods, though, they haven’t planned to stay; they mastermind the scheme,ex nihilio, then slip behind the shadow show and designate an agent, chief remaker of their mischief made. Each time, disguised, this leitmotif gets salvaged and replayed, a universe begins, for orogens and origins suppose a Way Things Were before some volatile, untimely That— sweetness perverted by the core or belfry by the bat, or here, a hilly green, whose still life, eerily serene, completes their best contrivance yet: from high above, a williwaw, a hiss, and then the silhouette of one terrific paw.

I grew up in a village built on coal and labor. An outhouse on a dirt road by a water pump glared at the whitewashed fences of uniformed yards that gaped like broken teeth in the mouths of miners. All summer we played Cossacks and Bandits, shot our symbolic rifles and revolvers and when killed would crush a wild cherry in the breast pocket, the spot where the heart stopped. Who started it? The red spreading over white satin never to be washed away completely, “I killed you! I killed you!” I screamed as he fell down. Men found him three years later in the abandoned mine after an explosion, his clothes covered with coal dust and blood. Women howled like wolves. “It’s nothing, he’ll get up,” I thought, “it’s just that stupid wild cherry on his shirt.”

The rhinestone lights blink off and on. Pretend stars. I'm sick of explanations. A life is like Russell said of electricity, not a thing but the way things behave. A science of motion toward some flat surface, some heat, some cold. Some light can leave some after-image but it doesn't last. Isn't that what they say? That and that historical events exchange glances with nothingness.

A levitating anvil. Omen of seagull blown inland. Ranch gate said Riverstyx, but it was the woodland that looked lethal: no place to put down your foot. Bucolics demand boustrophedon. The by-the-book. “The male cicadas thrummed their stomachs while a dragonfly eyed us from a pole hook. Ripening grapefruit. Us just under. Shoulder to shoulder. Tree-shook.” Milky skies belied the baffled thunder ... They left, not footsteps,trails in uncut grass. “Like parallel snakes. No wonder.” Eurydice should have thought moccasins, aka cottonmouths, apropos stealth. Distilled to systole-diastole. Assassins. And everywhere sharp palmettos clacked their tongues in homage to language — “I should have rhymed them with stilettos.” Why would E. shed her red wedge with its Mary Jane band, wetland mosquito and midge circling ankle (punctuated, understand, by the awl, to mimic ellipses ... )? “Because” — O. — “she mimicked the shy strand of epiphyte — Spanish moss — goose-pimpling the languid pond with its dependent clause.”

I see you once I’ve got you down to size: a two-day-stubble squatter; jailbait eyes; the bottle-headed trophy mom; the mentor always angling his face down from the center of his universe to shine a light on yours. The fated anorexic, whose allures shimmer in the mirror for her eyes only, denying what her denial denies. Once you become a cliche I can hate you— or, treat me tenderly and let me date you. But that only retards the writing-off that comes with boredom, amour propre, or (cough) irreconcilable differences, i.e., those things about you that are least like me, yet just slightly different, my foible’s homophone, so in hating yours I really hate my own. This keeps the focus where it wants to be— On whom, you ask? Invariably on.... See? I didn’t even have to say, did I? I love you so much. No need to reply.

But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart. A strategy of continence, avoidance, mule-headedness, and hope. The next assassin, brush fire, or virus swerves this way, head-on collision; We see it coming and can’t divert — the path too crowded with pilgrims. By the side of the road to Calvary blooms a mustard bush. It never means to do anything but propagate. It sees the centuries winnow themselves in and out, And hears itself appropriated for a parable. It keeps all these things, and ponders them in its heart While casting savior seeds generation after generation.

My boy, not of your will nor mine You keep the mountain pass and wait, Restless, for evil gold to shine And hold you to your fate. A stronger Hand than yours gave you The lawless sword—you know not why. That you must live is all too true, And other men must die. My boy, be brigand if you must, But face the traveller in your track: Stand one to one, and never thrust The dagger in his back. Nay, make no ambush of the dark. Look straight into your victim’s eyes; Then—let his free soul, like a lark, Fly, singing, toward the skies. My boy, if Christ must be betrayed, And you must the betrayer be, Oh, marked before the worlds were made! What help is there for me? Ah, if the prophets from their graves Demand such blood of you as this, Take Him, I say, with swords and staves, But—never with a kiss!