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All me are standing on feed. The sky is shining. All me have just been milked. Teats all tingling still from that dry toothless sucking by the chilly mouths that gasp loudly in in in, and never breathe out. All me standing on feed, move the feed inside me. One me smells of needing the bull, that heavy urgent me, the back-climber, who leaves me humped, straining, but light and peaceful again, with crystalline moving inside me. Standing on wet rock, being milked, assuages the calf-sorrow in me. Now the me who needs mounts on me, hopping, to signal the bull. The tractor comes trotting in its grumble; the heifer human bounces on top of it, and cud comes with the tractor, big rolls of tight dry feed: lucerne, clovers, buttercup, grass, that’s been bitten but never swallowed, yet is cud. She walks up over the tractor and down it comes, roll on roll and all me following, eating it, and dropping the good pats. The heifer human smells of needing the bull human and is angry. All me look nervously at her as she chases the dog me dream of horning dead: our enemy of the light loose tongue. Me’d jam him in his squeals. Me, facing every way, spreading out over feed. One me is still in the yard, the place skinned of feed. Me, old and sore-boned, little milk in that me now, licks at the wood. The oldest bull human is coming. Me in the peed yard. A stick goes out from the human and cracks, like the whip. Me shivers and falls down with the terrible, the blood of me, coming out behind an ear. Me, that other me, down and dreaming in the bare yard. All me come running. It’s like the Hot Part of the sky that’s hard to look at, this that now happens behind wood in the raw yard. A shining leaf, like off the bitter gum tree is with the human. It works in the neck of me and the terrible floods out, swamped and frothy. All me make the Roar, some leaping stiff-kneed, trying to horn that worst horror. The wolf-at-the-calves is the bull human. Horn the bull human! But the dog and the heifer human drive away all me. Looking back, the glistening leaf is still moving. All of dry old me is crumpled, like the hills of feed, and a slick me like a huge calf is coming out of me. The carrion-stinking dog, who is calf of human and wolf, is chasing and eating little blood things the humans scatter, and all me run away, over smells, toward the sky.

Sir, I am not a bird of prey: a Lady does not seize the day. I trust that brief Time will unfold our youth, before he makes us old. How could we two write lines of rhyme were we not fond of numbered Time and grateful to the vast and sweet trials his days will make us meet? The Grave's not just the body's curse; no skeleton can pen a verse! So while this numbered World we see, let's sweeten Time with poetry, and Time, in turn, may sweeten Love and give us time our love to prove. You've praised my eyes, forehead, breast: you've all our lives to praise the rest.

Inside the night, this hospital, asylum, this party for those undone by desire, forever unslaked, inside a house inside the night, I'm inside this house with eight beams and moonlight pulling on the past through skylights, this house of white noise, wind and dry heat, lonely house on a ridge line, house of ordinary shame, my sister's house with corrals and outbuildings around it, and beyond that, the dog patrolling, and beyond that, skirts and folds of the mountain rising in rumpled geologic scrolls into the range. At the center beneath the moon's silence that nothing ever changes, muffled in blankets with fear beside me on my little bench of sleep, I can hear their voices, could be three or twenty-three, unhinged saints gabbling to their shadows, or panty-sniffers, drug-trippers in all flavors past vanilla, could be Birnam wood on the move, the shriek of its roots thirsty and air-brushed, or a pack of lunatics crooning norteño songs. What is certain is advent. They're coming down, coming towards the heart beneath the feathers, coming for what can't be protected, on a beam of dread, riding that ray. I'm listening, my eyes snapped-open inside darkness, other people in other rooms who know how to sleep through a night like this night, thrown against the roundness of the world which is desire. The old bitch guards this night on the ranch, half shepherd, half other, this is her watch, she gallops the perimeter, anxious to sound like more than one dog, though she's going arthritic and her paws strike the hard ground. Now they quiet, penitents, lunatics, marauders and ragpickers,quiet. Only one left behind and the moon is his hieroglyph, one creature padding down the mountain, coming closer. Coyote knows a good joke, he only wants to let her in on it. He can't stop laughing, can't stop crying, can't stop licking the crevices clean, licking safety and duty until they're empty. I hear the dog listening, ears lifted. Coyote's tongue slides into night air, pressing narcotic vowels through wonder, through longing and longing and wonder awaken. She's close to that edge, that border in the night where one thing becomes another and even an old dog who's worked a ranch eleven years feels the urge to let loose, blow this little settlement,go wild. Clouds loose and blue in the arms of the moon, slant light on this mountain raking us, the dog and I, we feel the pull. Imagine a woman trying to come between coyote and the female he's after when she knows what is dark and offers itself and vanishes has come for her at last? The body wants what it can't have, to follow the path of thirst through the rent in the wire beyond the corral. The dog doesn't move, but who knows better than she the small outpost death has set up in her, maybe she's all desire now to slip under the moon and chase down that lure. Coyote wheedles and croons another minute or two, then lopes off, calling over his shoulder in a language even I can understand, the right names for things not kept in heaven.

Oh, Unreadable One, why have you done this to your dumb creature? Why have you chosen to punish the coyote rummaging for chicken bones in the dung heap, shucked the fur from his tail and fashioned it into a scabby cane? Why have you denuded his face, tufted it, so that when he turns he looks like a slow child unhinging his face in a smile? The coyote shambles, crow-hops, keeps his head low, and without fur, his now visible pizzle is a sad red protuberance, his hind legs the backward image of a bandy-legged grandfather, stripped. Why have you unhoused this wretch from his one aesthetic virtue, taken from him that which kept him from burning in the sun like a man? Why have you pushed him from his world into mine, stopped him there and turned his ear toward my warning shout?

For Fred I could pick anything and think of you— This lamp, the wind-still rain, the glossy blue My pen exudes, drying matte, upon the page. I could choose any hero, any cause or age And, sure as shooting arrows to the heart, Astride a dappled mare, legs braced as far apart As standing in silver stirrups will allow— There you'll be, with furrowed brow And chain mail glinting, to set me free: One eye smiling, the other firm upon the enemy. This post-postmodern age is all business: compact disks And faxes, a do-it-now-and-take-no-risks Event. Today a hurricane is nudging up the coast, Oddly male: Big Bad Floyd, who brings a host Of daydreams: awkward reminiscences Of teenage crushes on worthless boys Whose only talent was to kiss you senseless. They all had sissy names—Marcel, Percy, Dewey; Were thin as licorice and as chewy, Sweet with a dark and hollow center. Floyd's Cussing up a storm. You're bunkered in your Aerie, I'm perched in mine (Twin desks, computers, hardwood floors): We're content, but fall short of the Divine. Still, it's embarrassing, this happiness— Who's satisfied simply with what's good for us, When has the ordinary ever been news? And yet, because nothing else will do To keep me from melancholy (call it blues), I fill this stolen time with you.

En mi país el Otoño nace de una flor seca, de algunos pajaros; . . . o del vaho penetrante de ciertos rios de la llanura. —Molinari, “Oda a una larga tristeza” Each instant comes with a price, the blue-edged bill on the draft of a bird almost incarnadine, the shanked ochre of an inn that sits as still as the beavertail cactus it guards (the fine rose of that flower gone as bronze as sand), the river's chalky white insistence as it moves past the gray afternoon toward sunset. Autumn feels the chill of a late summer lit only by goldenrod and a misplaced strand of blackberries; deplores all such sleight of hand; turns sullen, selfish, envious, full of regret. Someone more adept would mute its voice. The spill of its truncated experience would shine less bravely and, out of the dust and dunghill of this existence (call it hope, in decline), as here the blue light of autumn falls, command what is left of exhilaration and fit this season's unfolding to the alphabet of turn and counterturn, all that implicit arc of a heart searching for a place to stand. Yet even that diminished voice can withstand the currying of its spirit. Here lies—not yet. If, and only if, the leafless rose he sees, or thinks he sees, flowered a moment ago, this endangered heart flows with the river that flees the plain, and listens with eye raised to the slow revelation of cloud, hoping to approve himself, or to admonish the rose for slight transgressions of the past, this the ecstatic ethos, a logic that seems set to reprove his facility with unsettling delight. Autumn might be only desire, a Twelfth Night gone awry, a gift almost too emphatic. Logic in a faithful light somehow appeases the rose, and stirs the hummingbird's vibrato. By moving, I can stand where the light eases me into the river's feathered arms, and, so, with the heat of my devotion, again prove devotion, if not this moment, pure, finite. Autumn cradles me with idiomatic certainty, leaves me nothing to disapprove. I now acknowledge this red moon, to requite the heart alone given power to recite its faith, what a cradled life finds emblematic.

"A cradle thief," my mother called the man we'd see in shops, cafes, parks, even church, with "that poor girl" beside him. Hand in hand, they'd walk as if they didn't feel the scorch of people's stares. The day we saw him press his lips to hers, my mother blocked my eyes as if his mouth (I longed for my first kiss) against her mouth was smothering her cries. All week, I ran a fever that wouldn't break. "A cradle thief"—a voice I only half knew as my own surprised me in the dark, my sick-bed wet with shivers. "A cradle thief," I said again, as if the words could will my window broken, footprint on the sill.

The   first    great    poet  of the  crisis  the   one  whose generation   was  left  as  if firebombed     though      if you    look     back   at    the seminal    work    you   will see  that only a  handful of of   the   poems    explicitly touch   on   that  dark time the    blood    filling     with virulence    and   the  night always          black         and spangled   with  stars  says when           faced         with difficult      material      the poet       should          begin obliquely      creeping     in from   the   edge  a  square of         light             moving imperceptibly   across  the floor as    the earth    turns and   so   I   will   tell    you that  ever  since  I saw  the footage           of              the journalists   hiding  in  the attic      the    rope    ladder pulled     up     after    them only     the       one       with foreign   papers    left     to stand   her   ground  down below   the   journalist    at first     calmly    sitting   on the      couch      but     then huddling  in  a   cabinet  as the     soldiers    enter    the apartment     next       door, the   cries   of   the  mother floating       through       the wall ib’ni       ib’ni the language     ancient       like something       whetted   on stone     the   way   I   image language      would        have sounded     in     the  broken mouth    of     King      David Absalom        Absalom the man-child       hanging     by the    shining    black   noose of     his     own    hair  in the fragrant         woods           of Ephraim ib’ni           ib’ni next    door    the   sound  of a    body      being     dragged from     the    apartment    as his            mother           wails into      the        dark        how many     mothers   and   how many     sons    dragged   out into    a       night     spangled with             stars          where everything    is  a   metaphor for      virulence my     son my   son and   ever  since  I saw    a   clip  of the   footage the       foreign        journalist managed   to    smuggle   out of   the  country   images   of the        journalist       herself hiding   in   a   space   meant for   buckets   and   rags    as next     door    the     soldiers drag    away   a   young   boy please     hear     it   again   a child    of    no    more   than twelve         his        mother’s lamentations             forever seared   in    the    blood   of this    thing   I   call  my  life but     really     what     is    it what   is   this  light  I   hold so   dear  it  wants   to move imperceptibly    across   the floor    as   the   earth   turns so     as   not     to      become too       aware      of      itself?

I ply with all the cunning of my art This little thing, and with consummate care I fashion it—so that when I depart, Those who come after me shall find it fair And beautiful. It must be free of flaws— Pointing no laborings of weary hands; And there must be no flouting of the laws Of beauty—as the artist understands. Through passion, yearnings infinite—yet dumb— I lift you from the depths of my own mind And gild you with my soul’s white heat to plumb The souls of future men. I leave behind This thing that in return this solace gives: “He who creates true beauty ever lives.”

Paper creased is with a touch made less by half, reduced as much again by a second fold—so the wish to press our designs can diminish what we hold. But by your hand’s careful work, I understand how this unleaving makes of what’s before something finer and finally more.