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Like the waxwings in the juniper, a dozen at a time, divided, paired, passing the berries back and forth, and by nightfall, wobbling, piping, wounded with joy. Or a party of redwings grazing what falls—blossom and seed, nutmeat and fruit— made light in the head and cut by the light, swept from the ground, carried downwind, taken.... It's called wing-rowing, the wing-burdened arms unbending, yielding, striking a balance, walking the white invisible line drawn just ahead in the air, first sign the slur, the liquid notes too liquid, the heart in the mouth melodious, too close, which starts the chanting, the crooning, the long lyric silences, the song of our undoing. It's called side-step, head-forward, raised-crown, flap- and-glide-flight aggression, though courtship is the object, affection the compulsion, love the overspill—the body nodding, still standing, ready to fly straight out of itself—or its bill-tilt, wing-flash, topple- over; wing-droop, bowing, tail-flick and drift; back-ruffle, wingspread, quiver and soar. Someone is troubled, someone is trying, in earnest, to explain; to speak without swallowing the tongue; to find the perfect word among so few or the too many— to sing like the thrush from the deepest part of the understory, territorial, carnal, thorn-at-the-throat, or flutelike in order to make one sobering sound. Sound of the breath blown over the bottle, sound of the reveler home at dawn, light of the sun a warbler yellow, the sun in song-flight, lopsided-pose. Be of good-cheer, my father says, lifting his glass to greet a morning in which he's awake to be with the birds: or up all night in the sleep of the world, alive again, singing.

One bright morning in a restaurant in Chicago as I waited for my eggs and toast, I opened the Tribune only to discover that I was the same age as Cheerios. Indeed, I was a few months older than Cheerios for today, the newspaper announced, was the seventieth birthday of Cheerios whereas mine had occurred earlier in the year. Already I could hear them whispering behind my stooped and threadbare back, Why that dude’s older than Cheerios

We have the whole evening ahead of us, We think, our eyesight starting to weaken, We must have missed the houselights growing dim, But how could that moment have escaped us when The roots of the paper trees struck water And transformed themselves into the real thing— This nervous wood at the edge of a small, Provincial town whose still lifes waken To find that they’re portraits after all And subject to the risk of animation? Tonight we may discuss—after the Chopin Nocturnes, after the I-don’t-know-how-many Performances of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata— The gradual reduction of Roman columns, The disease of too many lakes and clouds. Do cobblestones have a future? Is rain Removable? Depressing mornings find Characters in bed who have no reason To get up, the light a yellowish half-light Mirroring the mind, its sad affections. At the lake, a flat of faultless summer Is being taken down, the view abandoned; The puzzled players change their places. Once You might have found them walking in an orchard, The blossoms opening their mouths to speak And song occurring as if it were natural; Now that trees uproot themselves and bankrupt Agriculture wanes in its drying furrows, Property and battlefields turn out to share A fate in common—they exchange hands. Shrines “fallen out of the perpendicular,” Stones “that have apparently once been tombstones”— We are on someone’s estate not far from Moscow. How simply the sun goes out like a match! How deeply the wounds stay on the surface! He said the best that can be said for property: It lets an old man fall in love with landscape, Lets so many trees have a chance to be noticed, Allows the self-interested birds to preen, Until the property is lost again. To an upstart creditor who sells the trees For lumber, then, to the sounds of saws, Tramps through the hallway in his dirty boots To explain, in tears, the dreary motivation: His mother’s dying, his young wife’s in love With a boor . . . The Babel of trouble starts; Among all the hells that go on talking, Only one is real, though it is silent, And everything leads up to it—to lose The land, to lose the very ground you stand on. If the temporary brilliancies gather once more In the middle distance, and the modal lark Persuades the summer evening to reveal One private little splendor not for sale, Still, a gunshot, onstage or off, Tells us what no one is prepared to know: Love is a tourniquet tightening its bands Around the slowly dying wrist of freedom, Futility’s a spinster bending over A book of household accounts forever. Bathed in the acid of truth, all things Become possible: to be a cold snake At an interview, to live on scraps of soap To keep oneself warm, to resemble a cat Constantly stalking the shadow of nothing, To the horse’s clop-clop outside the window, Or the sound of a guitar from a neighboring room, The doctor, with a smile, asks, What is man? A hero about to be done-in for good? A villain about to be rescued by pain? The governess is wearing her old forage cap. That’s Epihodov playing his guitar. Astrov is talking about trees. We could be Racing the wolves at thirty below In a ravine whiplashed by snow, or slowly Succumbing to boredom in a seaside town, Waiting for a future that will never be, The heat getting worse, far off the waves Pounding faintly late in the moonlight, At a low moment in our lives.

For hours now the Last Supper has been over, And the beating almost over, and morning’s cry Yet to be heard by the workmen in the courtyard Warming themselves by the hasty fire, and Peter, Near the agony in the garden, feeling something Terrible happening, blinking back stale sleep, Peter turns his face from strangers’ stares. “This man also was with Jesus.” The others Slowly turning toward him with cold interest, And his own voice, thick-tongued: “I do not know him.” That the cock crows not then but at the third No Must tell us much about the nature of faith, How it leans on separations, how it robes simple Gestures—a hand waving from an open window— With deferral, as if real knowledge only comes after, As though Peter could only see what he’d done Upon going from the high priest’s courtyard And, all alone, weeping bitterly in the dawn. That much we can understand, but why then Does Chekhov revisit this known, hard ground With a half-frozen student who, on his way back From a failed hunt, thinks how this same chill Easter wind must have blown in Rurik’s age And scourged the hungry poor in the years Of Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible? Wind, raw wind, hunger, icy needles of rain . . . The same as then—until, coming on two widows, A huge, shapeless old woman in a man’s overcoat And her putty-faced daughter washing a kettle, The student asks if he might share their fire, Saying, as he does, that St. Peter had on such A night warmed himself before a fire, on such A cold, extraordinarily long and terrible night. Murmuring welcomes, they bring him inside, And soon he finds himself describing in detail That part of the gospel which is Peter’s betrayal: “. . . thus I imagine it: the garden deathly still And very dark, and in the silence came Sounds of muffled sobbing—” Here his account Breaks off when the absently-smiling Vasilissa Suddenly weeps, burying her eyes in her apron; Whereupon her daughter, herself bowed down By sickness and filth, blushes and turns away. The student, for all his theology, is speechless. There’s nothing for it now but to step out With empty game-bag and find his moonlit Way back home across the ancient marsh. Only then does he see in the waterlogged Meadow, well beyond the river’s sedges, Something remarkable: a high-walled garden Looming green against a background of sand. Nineteen hundred years crossed in heartbeats! In that kindled instant all the world’s travails Drop from his shoulders. Just twenty-two, He has found the very quick of faith. Gone are hunger, sleet and useless words. Gone! Ah, we leave him there at century’s end, Before he has returned to his village —And all that returning would surely mean— In this, the briefest of the master’s stories.

Where is the word I want? Groping in the thicket, about to pinch the dangling berry, my fingerpads close on air. I can hear it scrabbling like a squirrel on the oak's far side. Word, please send over this black stretch of ocean your singular flare, blaze your topaz in the mind's blank. I could always pull the gift from the lucky-dip barrel, scoop the right jewel from my dragon's trove.... Now I flail, the wrong item creaks up on the mental dumbwaiter. No use— it's turning out of sight, a bicycle down a Venetian alley— I clatter after, only to find gondolas bobbing in sunny silence, a pigeon mumbling something I just can't catch.

We dreamed of glowing children, their throats alive and cancerous, their eyes like lightning in the dark. We were uneasy in our skins, sixth grade, a year for blowing up, for learning that nothing contains that heat which comes from growing, the way our parents seemed at once both tall as cooling towers and crushed beneath the pressure of small things— family dinners, the evening news, the dead voice of the dial tone. Even the ground was ticking. The parts that grew grew poison. Whatever we ate became a stone. Whatever we said was love became plutonium, became a spark of panic in the buried world.

I was waiting to try out one of my inventions from the flattop garage roof — parachutes this time — when I tasted a black cherry from the next yard, wondering even at that age who had prior rights and what was constitutional so instead of  jumping I wrote a brief brief called Yaakov vs. the Tree Trunk where everyone laughed herself crazy at Marlboro vs. Madison or Red Stain vs. the State of New Jersey so bless me you fools for aren’t you mortals? And don’t you bend your body down over the water to taste the ice? And who, in your family, even ever just thought of swallowing a goldfish from the bowl, say, picking up its slippery body, bending your neck back and gulping it down even before they entered law school?

Out of the nursery and into the garden where it rooted and survived its first hard winter, then a few years of freedom while it blossomed, put out its first tentative branches, withstood the insects and the poisons for insects, developed strange ideas about its height and suffered the pruning of its quirks and clutters, its self-indulgent thrusts and the infighting of stems at cross purposes year after year.  Each April it forgot why it couldn’t do what it had to do, and always after blossoms, fruit, and leaf-fall, was shown once more what simply couldn’t happen. Its oldest branches now, the survivors carved by knife blades, rain, and wind, are sending shoots straight up, blood red, into the light again.

The cherry trees bend over and are shedding On the old road where all that passed are dead, Their petals, strewing the grass as for a wedding This early May morn when there is none to wed.

Off Highway 106 At Cherrylog Road I entered The ’34 Ford without wheels, Smothered in kudzu, With a seat pulled out to run Corn whiskey down from the hills, And then from the other side Crept into an Essex With a rumble seat of red leather And then out again, aboard A blue Chevrolet, releasing The rust from its other color, Reared up on three building blocks. None had the same body heat; I changed with them inward, toward The weedy heart of the junkyard, For I knew that Doris Holbrook Would escape from her father at noon And would come from the farm To seek parts owned by the sun Among the abandoned chassis, Sitting in each in turn As I did, leaning forward As in a wild stock-car race In the parking lot of the dead. Time after time, I climbed in And out the other side, like An envoy or movie star Met at the station by crickets. A radiator cap raised its head, Become a real toad or a kingsnake As I neared the hub of the yard, Passing through many states, Many lives, to reach Some grandmother’s long Pierce-Arrow Sending platters of blindness forth From its nickel hubcaps And spilling its tender upholstery On sleepy roaches, The glass panel in between Lady and colored driver Not all the way broken out, The back-seat phone Still on its hook. I got in as though to exclaim, “Let us go to the orphan asylum, John; I have some old toys For children who say their prayers.” I popped with sweat as I thought I heard Doris Holbrook scrape Like a mouse in the southern-state sun That was eating the paint in blisters From a hundred car tops and hoods. She was tapping like code, Loosening the screws, Carrying off headlights, Sparkplugs, bumpers, Cracked mirrors and gear-knobs, Getting ready, already, To go back with something to show Other than her lips’ new trembling I would hold to me soon, soon, Where I sat in the ripped back seat Talking over the interphone, Praying for Doris Holbrook To come from her father’s farm And to get back there With no trace of me on her face To be seen by her red-haired father Who would change, in the squalling barn, Her back’s pale skin with a strop, Then lay for me In a bootlegger’s roasting car With a string-triggered I2-gauge shotgun To blast the breath from the air. Not cut by the jagged windshields, Through the acres of wrecks she came With a wrench in her hand, Through dust where the blacksnake dies Of boredom, and the beetle knows The compost has no more life. Someone outside would have seen The oldest car's door inexplicably Close from within: I held her and held her and held her, Convoyed at terrific speed By the stalled, dreaming traffic around us, So the blacksnake, stiff With inaction, curved back Into life, and hunted the mouse With deadly overexcitement, The beetles reclaimed their field As we clung, glued together, With the hooks of the seat springs Working through to catch us red-handed Amidst the gray breathless batting That burst from the seat at our backs. We left by separate doors Into the changed, other bodies Of cars, she down Cherrylog Road And I to my motorcycle Parked like the soul of the junkyard Restored, a bicycle fleshed With power, and tore off Up Highway 106, continually Drunk on the wind in my mouth, Wringing the handlebar for speed, Wild to be wreckage forever.