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For part of one strange year we lived in a small house at the edge of a wood. No neighbors, which suited us. Nobody to ask questions. Except for the one big question we went on asking ourselves. That spring myriads of birds stopped over briefly. Birds we’d never seen before, drawn to our leafy quiet and our brook and because, as we later learned, the place lay beneath a flyway. Flocks appeared overnight—birds brilliant or dull, with sharp beaks or crossed bills, birds small and enormous, all of them pausing to gorge at the feeder, to rest their wings, and disappear. Each flock seemed surer than we of a destination. By the time we’d watched them wing north in spring, then make an anxious autumn return, we too had pulled it together and we too moved into what seemed to be our lives.

I can’t go to the east village anymore because it is like going on a tour of my worst dates. I get older, my heart leaps at the sight of children who don’t belong to me, I pronounce everything like an Italian opera title. I used to listen to songs and have someone in mind for the you parts, now I just want to be where the light is intense, I want the kind of heat that kills you if you drive into it unprepared. This isn’t a metaphor for anything else. When I speak of the light, I mean the light. I go to church and sing along and feel just as moved as if my faith were blind. When I speak of the blind, I mean the light. Truly the only things Lindsay Lohan and I have in common are our preoccupations with fame and weight loss, and yet I recognize a kinship there, as if those two things mattered more than anything. When I speak of the darkness, I mean this living. In a restaurant called Caracas, I once spent fifteen minutes arguing about an Ayn Rand book because every time he said Anthem I thought he meant We the Living and I said what dystopia, what about the woman, and he said what about the Home of the Infants and I said what Home of the Infants? What about loving a man so much you’ll sleep with another man in order to finance the first man’s tuberculosis treatment? Welcome to Russia, I said, and we were looking at each other and then not. I tried to picture Caracas, tried to leave him for elsewhere, a fever.

Not to be confused with messenger pigeons, birds sent behind enemy lines in war, but think passengers as in birds carrying suitcases, sharing a berth on a train, or traveling in bamboo cages on a ship, always migrating on a one-way to extinction. How would extinction look on a graph? A steady climb, or a plateau, then a precipitous cliff at the dawn of humans? Nesting grounds eight hundred square miles in area. Skies swollen with darkening multitudes. Days and days of unbroken flocks passing over.Ectopistes migratorius. And the last of the species, Martha, named for Martha Washington, dies in a cage in 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo. Forget clemency. We are the worst kind of predator, not even deliberate in our destruction. Our killing happens à la carte, on the side (side of Dodo?). And because the nineteenth century did not enlist a battlefield artist for extinctions, there are no official witnesses to the slaughter, just participants. If you could somehow travel back to this scene, through the would-be canvas, you would run flailing your arms toward the hardwood forests and the men with sticks and guns and boiling sulphur pots to bring birds out of the trees, as if you could deliver 50,000 individual warnings, or throw yourself prostrate on the ground, as if your one body could hold sway.

Fish always accurately know where to move and when, and likewise birds have an accurate built-in time sense and orientation. Humanity, however, lacking such instincts resorts to scientific research. Its nature is illustrated by the following occurrence. A certain soldier had to fire a cannon at six o’clock sharp every evening. Being a soldier he did so. When his accuracy was investigated he explained: I go by the absolutely accurate chronometer in the window of the clockmaker down in the city. Every day at seventeen forty-five I set my watch by it and climb the hill where my cannon stands ready. At seventeen fifty-nine precisely I step up to the cannon and at eighteen hours sharp I fire. And it was clear that this method of firing was absolutely accurate. All that was left was to check that chronometer. So the clockmaker down in the city was questioned about his instrument’s accuracy. Oh, said the clockmaker, this is one of the most accurate instruments ever. Just imagine, for many years now a cannon has been fired at six o’clock sharp. And every day I look at this chronometer and always it shows exactly six. Chronometers tick and cannon boom.

Given an old woman and given a barrow. I.e. the system old woman O and barrow B. The system is moving from the paved yard Y to the corner C, from the corner C to the Stone S, from the stone S to the forest F, from the forest F to the horizon H. The horizon H is the point where vision ends and memory begins. Nevertheless the system is moving at a constant velocity v, along a constant path, through a constant destiny, renewing its impulse and its meaning from within itself. A relatively independent system: in landscapes from horizon to horizon always just one old woman with a barrow. And thus we have, once and for all, that geodetic unit, the unit of travel there and back, the unit of autumn, the unit Our daily bread, the unit of wind and lowering sky, the unit of the distance home, the unit As we forgive them, the unit of nightfall, the unit of footsteps and dust, the unit of life-fulfillment Amen.

You take a kitchen-mallet and a knife and hit the right spot, so it doesn’t jerk, for jerking means only complications and reduces profit. And the watchers already narrow their eyes, already admire the dexterity, already reach for their purses. And paper is ready for wrapping it up. And smoke rises from chimneys. And Christmas peers from windows, creeps along the ground and splashes in barrels. Such is the law of happiness. I am just wondering if the carp is the right creature. A far better creature surely would be one which—stretched out—held flat—pinned down— would turn its blue eye on the mallet, the knife, the purse, the paper, the watchers and the chimneys and Christmas, And quickly say something. For instance These are my happiest days; these are my golden days. Or The starry sky above me and the moral law within me, Or And yet it moves. Or at least Hallelujah!

If someone tells you that your poem is nostalgic, take it as a compliment. There's no greater praise. In Greek,nostos means "return" and algia"pain." What's a poem without the return of pain?  If they tell you that your poem is melancholic, take that as a compliment, too. In Greek,melan means "black" and khole"bile." What's a poem without the most pernicious disorder of the body and soul?  Pain and illness.  If your poem is nostalgic and melancholic, see a doctor.

I am the blossom pressed in a book, found again after two hundred years. . . . I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper.... When the young girl who starves sits down to a table she will sit beside me. . . . I am food on the prisoner's plate. . . . I am water rushing to the wellhead, filling the pitcher until it spills. . . . I am the patient gardener of the dry and weedy garden. . . . I am the stone step, the latch, and the working hinge. . . . I am the heart contracted by joy. . . . the longest hair, white before the rest. . . . I am there in the basket of fruit presented to the widow. . . . I am the musk rose opening unattended, the fern on the boggy summit. . . . I am the one whose love overcomes you, already with you when you think to call my name. . . .

I Brag, sweet tenor bull, descant on Rawthey’s madrigal, each pebble its part for the fells’ late spring. Dance tiptoe, bull, black against may. Ridiculous and lovely chase hurdling shadows morning into noon. May on the bull’s hide and through the dale furrows fill with may, paving the slowworm’s way. A mason times his mallet to a lark’s twitter, listening while the marble rests, lays his rule at a letter’s edge, fingertips checking, till the stone spells a name naming none, a man abolished. Painful lark, labouring to rise! The solemn mallet says: In the grave’s slot he lies. We rot. Decay thrusts the blade, wheat stands in excrement trembling. Rawthey trembles. Tongue stumbles, ears err for fear of spring. Rub the stone with sand, wet sandstone rending roughness away. Fingers ache on the rubbing stone. The mason says: Rocks happen by chance. No one here bolts the door, love is so sore. Stone smooth as skin, cold as the dead they load on a low lorry by night. The moon sits on the fell but it will rain. Under sacks on the stone two children lie, hear the horse stale, the mason whistle, harness mutter to shaft, felloe to axle squeak, rut thud the rim, crushed grit. Stocking to stocking, jersey to jersey, head to a hard arm, they kiss under the rain, bruised by their marble bed. In Garsdale, dawn; at Hawes, tea from the can. Rain stops, sacks steam in the sun, they sit up. Copper-wire moustache, sea-reflecting eyes and Baltic plainsong speech declare: By such rocks men killed Bloodaxe. Fierce blood throbs in his tongue, lean words. Skulls cropped for steel caps huddle round Stainmore. Their becks ring on limestone, whisper to peat. The clogged cart pushes the horse downhill. In such soft air they trudge and sing, laying the tune frankly on the air. All sounds fall still, feilside bleat, hide-and-seek peewit. Her pulse their pace, palm countering palm, till a trench is filled, stone white as cheese jeers at the dale. Knotty wood, hard to rive, smoulders to ash; smell of October apples. The road again, at a trot. Wetter, warmed, they watch the mason meditate on name and date. Rain rinses the road, the bull streams and laments. Sour rye porridge from the hob with cream and black tea, meat, crust and crumb. Her parents in bed the children dry their clothes. He has untied the tape of her striped flannel drawers before the range. Naked on the pricked rag mat his fingers comb thatch of his manhood’s home. Gentle generous voices weave over bare night words to confirm and delight till bird dawn. Rainwater from the butt she fetches and flannel to wash him inch by inch, kissing the pebbles. Shining slowworm part of the marvel. The mason stirs: Words! Pens are too light. Take a chisel to write. Every birth a crime, every sentence life. Wiped of mould and mites would the ball run true? No hope of going back. Hounds falter and stray, shame deflects the pen. Love murdered neither bleeds nor stifles but jogs the draftsman’s elbow. What can he, changed, tell her, changed, perhaps dead? Delight dwindles. Blame stays the same. Brief words are hard to find, shapes to carve and discard: Bloodaxe, king of York, king of Dublin, king of Orkney. Take no notice of tears; letter the stone to stand over love laid aside lest insufferable happiness impede flight to Stainmore, to trace lark, mallet, becks, flocks and axe knocks. Dung will not soil the slowworm’s mosaic. Breathless lark drops to nest in sodden trash; Rawthey truculent, dingy. Drudge at the mallet, the may is down, fog on fells. Guilty of spring and spring’s ending amputated years ache after the bull is beef, love a convenience. It is easier to die than to remember. Name and date split in soft slate a few months obliterate.

I thank the spiders’ webs and the circus dancers who stain our eyes with Rapid movements and authorize our handcuffs to make no distinction Between night and day or love and hate. No one will know the sum of our arduous daily separations from bed to Work. These pillars actually belong to you since I have not counted them Or know any more than you do where they are or in what country they Still exist. We can put all our concerns into a loaf of bread and French Kisses, go to movies and watch the splashing milk on the screen imitate the forest in the moonlight. Why all the fuss about the patrons becoming Feathers, discharging their ideas of nobility on the evening news? There Are no lights in the theater just soft snow from the balcony that is the Little red schoolhouse where all this began. Actually it was because of you I did not attend as often as I should have. I was too embarrassed to face you across the clay modeling tables since I Always felt like the clay in your hands was a cartoon version of my teen Years, dear slippery-fish ladies of the sleepy west. Don’t forget, my early life will be yours, too, With its self-descriptions of poetic justice, The tiny creatures we write about can describe themselves in the moss We leave behind.