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Absorbed in planting bulbs, that work of hope, I was startled by a loud human voice, “Do go on working while I talk. Don’t stop!” And I was caught upon the difficult choice— To yield the last half hour of precious light, Or to stay on my knees, absurd and rude; I willed her to be gone with all my might, This kindly neighbor who destroyed a mood; I could not think of next spring any more, I had to re-assess the way I live. Long after I went in and closed the door, I pondered on the crude imperative. What it is to be caught up in each day Like a child fighting imaginary wars, Converting work into this passionate play, A rounded whole made up of different chores Which one might name haphazard meditation. And yet an unexpected call destroys Or puts to rout my primitive elation: Why be so serious about mere joys? Is this where some outmoded madness lies, Poet as recluse? No, what comes to me Is how my father looked out of his eyes, And how he fought for his own passionate play. He could tear up unread and throw away Communications from officialdom, And, courteous in every other way, Would not brook anything that kept him from Those lively dialogues with man’s whole past That were his intimate and fruitful pleasure. Impetuous, impatient to the last, “Be adamant, keep clear, strike for your treasure!” I hear the youthful ardor in his voice (And so I must forgive a self in labor). I feel his unrepentant smiling choice, (And so I ask forgiveness of my neighbor).

I try to think of the cup of a hand, of legs in a tangle, and not the thistle though even it, purpled, spiking away, wants to be admired, wants to say, whistle a little for me. O every little thing wants to be loved, wants to be marked by the cry that brings desire to it, even blue-eyed fly to the bloated hiss of death. To love is to be remiss: the horse alone in the wide flat field nods its head as if the bridle and bit were missed or mocked; the cow slung with the unmilked weight of her tremendous teats shoots a look back over her shoulder at O lonesome me. I want to say to her need as if crooning could be enough, sweet, sweet mama . . . truth be told, the thousand lisping bees to the milkweeds' honey terrifies me. When the stink of slurry season is over and the greened fields are slathered, fecund, overtall foxgloves tip with the weight of their fruit. Then I dream a little dream of you and me, curled like two grubs on the top of a leaf wind-driven and scudding along the lake's surface. All night we glide to its blue harbor and back again. The fattened slack of us singing O darlin' darlin' darlin'.

Now the rich cherry, whose sleek wood, And top with silver petals traced Like a strict box its gems encased, Has spilt from out that cunning lid, All in an innocent green round, Those melting rubies which it hid; With moss ripe-strawberry-encrusted, So birds get half, and minds lapse merry To taste that deep-red, lark’s-bite berry, And blackcap bloom is yellow-dusted. The wren that thieved it in the eaves A trailer of the rose could catch To her poor droopy sloven thatch, And side by side with the wren’s brood— O lovely time of beggar’s luck— Opens the quaint and hairy bud; And full and golden is the yield Of cows that never have to house, But all night nibble under boughs, Or cool their sides in the moist field. Into the rooms flow meadow airs, The warm farm baking smell’s blown round. Inside and out, and sky and ground Are much the same; the wishing star, Hesperus, kind and early born, Is risen only finger-far; All stars stand close in summer air, And tremble, and look mild as amber; When wicks are lighted in the chamber, They are like stars which settled there. Now straightening from the flowery hay, Down the still light the mowers look, Or turn, because their dreaming shook, And they waked half to other days, When left alone in the yellow stubble The rusty-coated mare would graze. Yet thick the lazy dreams are born, Another thought can come to mind, But like the shivering of the wind, Morning and evening in the corn.

The big front wall that blocks off the courtyard often catches the newborn light of the sun like the side of a barn. The body awakes in the morning to a room, messy and empty, that smells of the first, clumsy perfume. Even that body, wrapped now in sheets, is the same that it was when it thrilled in discovery. Her body wakes alone to the extended call of morning, the languor of another morning returning in the heavy shadows: the barn of childhood and the heavy tiredness of sun hot in the indolent doorways. A perfume worked itself into the usual sweat of her hair, a smell the animals knew. Her body took secret pleasure in the sun’s suggestive, serene caress—like a real touch. The languor of bed saps the sprawled limbs, still youthful and plump, like a child’s. The clumsy child used to smell the mixed scent of tobacco and hay, used to tremble when touched by the man’s quick hands: she liked playing games. Sometimes she played lying down with the man in the hay, but he wasn’t smelling her hair: he’d find her closed legs in the hay and pry them open, then crush her like he was her father. The perfume was flowers ground upon stones. It often returns, in the slow rise from sleep, that undone aroma of far-off flowers, of barns and of sun. No man can know the subtle caress of that sour memory. No man can see, beyond that sprawled body, that childhood passed in such clumsy anxiety.

These be two Country women. What a size! Great big arms And round red faces; Big substantial Sit down places; Great big bosoms firm as cheese Bursting through their country jackets; Wide big laps And sturdy knees; Hands outspread, Round and rosy, Hands to hold A country posy Or a baby or a lamb— And such eyes! Stupid, shifty, small and sly Peeping through a slit of sty, Squinting through their neighbours’ plackets.

On the mudroad of plodding American bodies, my son wove like an antelope from stall to stall and want to want. I no’ed it all: the wind-up killer robot and winged alien; knives hierarchical in a glass case; the blow-up vinyl wolf bobbing from a pilgrim’s staff. Lured as I was by the bar-b-que’s black smoke, I got in line. A hog carcass, blistered pink on a spit, made its agonized slow roll, a metaphor, I thought, for anyone ahead of me—the pasty-faced and broad. I half-longed for the titanium blade I’d just seen curved like a falcon’s claw. Some truth wanted cutting in my neighbors’ impermanent flesh. Or so my poisoned soul announced, as if scorn for the body politic weren’t some outward form of inner scorn, as if I were fit judge. Lucky my son found the bumper cars. Once I’d hoped only to stand tall enough to drive my own. Now when the master switch got thrown and sparks skittered overhead in a lightning web, I felt like Frankenstein or some newly powered monster. Plus the floor was glossy as ice. Even rammed head-on, the rubber bumper bounced you off unhurt and into other folks who didn’t mind the jolt, whose faces all broke smiles, in fact, till the perfect figure-eight I’d started out to execute became itself an interruption. One face after another wheeled shining at me from the dark, each bearing the weight of a whole self. What pure vessels we are, I thought, once our skulls shut up their nasty talk. We drove home past corn at full tassel, colossal silos, a windmill sentinel. Summer was starting. My son’s body slumped like a grain sack against mine. My chest was all thunder. On the purple sky in rear view, fireworks unpacked—silver chrysanthemum, another in fuchsia, then plum. Each staccato boom shook the night. My son jerked in his sleep. I prayed hard to keep the frail peace we hurtled through, to want no more than what we had. The road rushed under us. Our lush planet heaved toward day. Inside my hand’s flesh, anybody’s skeleton gripped the wheel.

1 The woman stands on tiptoe to kiss the man and for a moment, with their twin-teal backpacks, parkas, and other gear— they look like one new creature. A mutation. 2 Seated in La Rosita their gear guards the table where they sip cafe con leche and lean forward, sitting tall, pelvises tilted forward, to talk—whisper?—their physical closeness almost embarrassing (but to whom?) at this early hour— light rivering in her chestnut hair, their foreheads almost touching as they sit further forward straddling their chairs toes pressed down, heels up, wrists crossed; a posture almost too intimate for a public space at breakfast but somehow right in the Spanish café. She says that while it is absurd to sell forsythia it is a small miracle to buy cactus on 107 th Street and Broadway. (If they’re strangers in Manhattan they seem more at home than I’ve ever been.) They listen to the brisk chatter and clatter of plates and music from the Spanish station which now plays “Yellow Submarine”— universal language?—“our friends are all aboard.” They study the menu and note the beautiful sounds words like huevos and arroz make for eggs and rice. The generous syllabic count and vowel length seem like an echo for their love. And their desire to linger. (Other eyes are on them, not only mine.) They have drawn the morning from a sea of newsprint—in at least three languages—toward their window seat. 3 The light changes along with the brisk pace of the walkers. Someone in a tan Mackintosh reaches out to hail a yellow cab, while the sun gilds the fire escapes and people rise energetically from their beds. 4 Don’t their eyes tire of each other? Or is it not the eyes that tire? They’re not looking, they’re drinking, communicating through their skin several inches apart. Love can’t be trusted. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t real. They linger over coffee; he strokes the back of her neck; she doesn’t feel impelled to look up or stop but, later, she kisses him behind the ear. 5 And in the mountains there is snow melting to get down from the heights to pour through the clefts in the twisted rocks: natural arches, obstacles—horseshoe shapes. And in the plains there is a dropping of the shoulder-armor, a tingling in the hip sockets, so that even a chance touch at the hipbone startles the center and starts a slow convulsion— release of two creatures (peculiarly, perilously at odds), used to training their gaze on the peripheries, like this bicycle tethered to a parking meter, orange handlebars, silver trunk like a treasure chest perched—not locked—on a wrought iron ledge fixed over the chrome wheel-casings— blue shadow-dappled twig-littered canopies, or the small tantalizing cursive c in the blue neon soft as silk, announcing café Equense where the couple might return in the voluptuous dark. The dark, quietly vibrating like a Mouth Harp, or her—noiseless—breathing…or, when they are lost in Olmsted’s misty, labyrinthine rambles and, framed by traffic, they pause beside the lake in the dank air where the water is still, another world from the blood-running pavement, the meat-packing plants gray and dour below the rotting piers— warped—(and will they be replaced with fresh wood or fazed out with poured concrete that knows no give or take—no—swelling—…?) What can love repair? By what force of love can they imagine themselves beyond the squalor that surrounds them onto another plane blessed and blessing! 6 Who invented ecstasy? What man or woman first walked around with its burden? Cold shelter from the street, among the bronze mailboxes, inside the bright red— freshly painted—door jambs. He picks her up under the buttocks, she arches her thighs around his hips, plants her feet on the tiles: tongues firm, yet tentative, learning their own momentum; (the rubbery wall of her mouth takes him further in and in.) Tongue and tongue, freckle and freckle, tears, shuddering, swelling in the places where they used to ache, “ain’t no cure,” knowing this touch, this grave flicking of tongues could never be repeated, or knowing it could— knowing it in another consciousness. 7 He strokes her neck at the junction where the occipital bone and cervical spine cross, engage, spark; coccyx tingles, cock rises toward her, not into her, through her, to her; rises as he plies the inside of her ass and thighs, or rubs the crevice where her right forefinger and thumb divide, stroking her cheek, or the hollow below her earlobe, ankle bone, clavicle, tonguing every millimeter, until sea dissolves into sky (their raft turns over in warm water and they are that water, and bob, afloat, buoyant; at rest in secret knowledge of each other’s darknesses… and now he could weep.) But there is no ice in the water where they would roil and tumble, and where avenues welcome those who walk hand in hand, gait easy, backpacks half-full, half empty— the sun coming out now, as if synchronized to their desires— and as the runners circle the reservoir they lower their eyes to adjust to the light bouncing off the water to ignite the cinders; the green through the dead- ice capped leaves; a small curve, an indent on the track gleams like a bracelet, before an azure haze takes over. 8 It gets warm. She has to peel her Anorak. She cups her hand over her eyes in the light and wind off the reservoir, to see the easy arcs the gulls make as they spiral upward over the all-angle roller coaster of the rooftops, in the comforting thud of other feet, as if lulled by the sound of a lover’s heartbeat; danger, in distraction; she must kick the chain-link fence in order to set off again, get back into the stream, put her mind back into her body; her body: slender; deceptive. There is a power in it she has always known. And feared. Or feared others would fear. But it’s difficult, with others, always—just how to say it? Necessary to hold some one thing back. Whom could she trust to let it out? It might scare her. (Scare him.) 9 Dawn, a smudge of charcoal, lifted by noon and his body, as if heliotropic, was drawn toward the flares of lilacs, and now he knew to move cautiously, keeping his eyes on the ground to not, as he has done several times, catch his foot on a stone or root cluster and fly off, gashed. 10 He’s relieved when night comes on. He doesn’t need his eyes to know swallows congregate on the stark, bare limbs. The darkness grows through the darkness of that winter tree. Soon they will be one and no one will see them.

Words from a leaf on the shell of a snail? Tendency as reciprocity etched in shale. Cider vinegar wrapped in sealskin? Accept it, so little is genuine. A box on a meteor compelled by earth? Lies, emptiness, grief: it’s not a first. Frost on the dock at Penetanguishene? Tears from Lake Huron, Erie, and Michigan. Not a moment to yourself? Don’t let love put you on a shelf. A preponderance of errors? The soft one sucks her rivers. Love, love, needs no reason. Yes, yes, yes, is my season.

It is an afternoon toward the end of August: Autumnal weather, cool following on, And riding in, after the heat of summer, Into the empty afternoon shade and light, The shade full of light without any thickness at all; You can see right through and right down into the depth Of the light and shade of the afternoon; there isn’t Any weight of the summer pressing down. In the backyard of the house next door there’s a kid, Maybe eleven or twelve, and a young man, Visitors at the house whom I don’t know, The house in which the sound of some kind of party, Perhaps even a wedding, is going on. Somehow you can tell from the tone of their voices That they don’t know each other very well— Two guests at the party, one of them, maybe, A friend of the bride or groom, the other the son Or the younger brother, maybe, of somebody there. A couple of blocks away the wash of traffic Dimly sounds, as if we were near the ocean. They’re shooting baskets, amiably and mildly. The noise of the basketball, though startlingly louder Than the voices of the two of them as they play, Is peaceable as can be, something like meter. The earnest voice of the kid, girlish and manly, And the voice of the young man, carefully playing the game Of having a grown-up conversation with him: I can tell the young man is teaching the boy by example, The easy way he dribbles the ball and passes it Back with a single gesture of wrist to make it Easy for the kid to be in synch; Giving and taking, perfectly understood.

to say no more of art than that it makes, by its very distraction a mode of abiding accordingly, its variations:    each type of thread-and-piecework named double engagement ring, log cabin, or broken dishes all built on the same geometric figures— precise interception of angle and line so too each tale of love is rooted in that first tale:    the poet descending to the underworld finally granted his shade, who'll follow him only to disappear again.      perhaps one version has them reunite affixed in their solo chromospheres the stars, which, to the human eye, appear to overlap substanceless love immune at last to gravity and time— in texas (I might as well recount this as a story) there's a town with a courthouse built on concrete and twisted iron edified in red granite, capitals & architrave of red sandstone with point and punch, a carver broached the effigy of his muse he rendered her attractive features, down to the very blush of course she spurned him, of course there was another to whom she turned love should not be written in stone but written in water (I paraphrase the latin of catullus) the sculptor carried on:    not just the face of his beloved but the face of her other lover: snaggle-toothed, wart-peppered, pudgy them both, made into ugly caricatures of themselves, as wanton as the carver perceived them, and as lewd well, craze and degenerate and crack:   the portraits hold though, long since, the participants have dwindled into dirt beautiful.      unbeautiful.      each with an aspect of exactness tread light upon this pedestal.      dream instead of a time before your love disfigured, a time withstanding even crass, wind-beaten time itself