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1966 There’s trouble on the mountain And the valley’s full of smoke There’s crying on the mountain And again the same heart broke. The lights are on past midnite The curtains closed all day There’s trouble on the mountain The valley people say.

FOR DAVID P—B The eye follows, the land Slips upward, creases down, forms The gentle buttocks of a young Giant. In the nestle, Old adobe bricks, washed of Whiteness, paled to umber, Await another century. Star Jasmine and old vines Lay claim upon the ghosted land, Then quiet pools whisper Private childhood secrets. Flush on inner cottage walls Antiquitous faces, Used to the gelid breath Of old manors, glare disdainfully Over breached time. Around and through these Cold phantasmatalities, He walks, insisting To the languid air, Activity, music, A generosity of graces. His lupin fields spurn old Deceit and agile poppies dance In golden riot.   Each day is Fulminant, exploding brightly Under the gaze of his exquisite Sires, frozen in the famed paint Of dead masters. Audacious Sunlight casts defiance At their feet.

—retracing

It struck them both as strange: although each pond and lake clear to the coast was locked in ice, no open water, the imperious wind kept pushing waterfowl inland. That night a winter moon stood high and pierced the thin clouds’ vapors so the boy could contemplate their emptiness inside. Relentless, the flocks flew westward. The border collie whimpered, putting his forepaws now on one sill, now another, as if some odd creature circled the house. This lifetime later, a man, he looks back on that stay at her farm, its details clear, their meanings still vague. His grandmother called it wrong as well, that the weather should be so frigid even in such a gale. As a rule this kind of cold needed calm. He sees the fire, the dazzle of sparks when she loaded a log. What seemed most amiss was how the old woman’s house no longer felt safe that visit. He wanted and did not want to know what the dog might know. He tried to picture the menace outdoors. He longed to shape it so that he might name it. And after these many miles to now, away from the ruby glow of the metal parlor stove, from that blue-eyed collie, from the woman he so admires and loves recalling that night; after so much time, he still believes that to name a thing is to tame it, or at least to feel less bewildered. Not Death, for instance, but The deaths of Al and Virginia, his parents. Not the abstract legalism,Divorce, but The disappearance of my sweet wife Sarah, run off with that California lawyer. Not simply Alone, but I have no children. Was that the wail of geese coming down the stovepipe? If so, it would be a marvel, but he knew it wasn’t. The caterwaul from the barn was alarming, and more than it might have been had Grandma herself not startled— after which she put on her late large husband’s threaded farming coveralls outside her housedress, which rode up and made a lumpy sash. She stepped out under cloud and bird. He would not follow. Rather, he stood indoors to wait until she came stomping her boots through puddled barnyard holes like a child herself, kicking ice shards to scuttle along like beads from a broken bracelet. No matter. The world had gone wrong, violent and void at once. She said,The mare has foaled. On tiptoe, she read the mercury out the kitchen window, then told her shivering grandson,We’ll call the new colt Zero.

Some days I catch a rhythm, almost a song in my own breath. I'm alone here in Brooklyn Heights, late morning, the sky above the St. George Hotel clear, clear for New York, that is. The radio playing "Bird Flight," Parker in his California tragic voice fifty years ago, his faltering "Lover Man" just before he crashed into chaos. I would guess that outside the recording studio in Burbank the sun was high above the jacarandas, it was late March, the worst of yesterday's rain had come and gone, the sky washed blue. Bird could have seen for miles if he'd looked, but what he saw was so foreign he clenched his eyes, shook his head, and barked like a dog—just once— and then Howard McGhee took his arm and assured him he'd be OK. I know this because Howard told me years later that he thought Bird could lie down in the hotel room they shared, sleep for an hour or more, and waken as himself. The perfect sunlight angles into my little room above Willow Street. I listen to my breath come and go and try to catch its curious taste, part milk, part iron, part blood, as it passes from me into the world. This is not me, this is automatic, this entering and exiting, my body's essential occupation without which I am a thing. The whole process has a name, a word I don't know, an elegant word not in English or Yiddish or Spanish, a word that means nothing to me. Howard truly believed what he said that day when he steered Parker into a cab and drove the silent miles beside him while the bright world unfurled around them: filling stations, stands of fruits and vegetables, a kiosk selling trinkets from Mexico and the Philippines. It was all so actual and Western, it was a new creation coming into being, like the music of Charlie Parker someone later called "glad," though that day I would have said silent, "the silent music of Charlie Parker." Howard said nothing. He paid the driver and helped Bird up two flights to their room, got his boots off, and went out to let him sleep as the afternoon entered the history of darkness. I'm not judging Howard, he did better than I could have now or then. Then I was 19, working on the loading docks at Railway Express, coming day by day into the damaged body of a man while I sang into the filthy air the Yiddish drinking songs my Zadie taught me before his breath failed. Now Howard is gone, eleven long years gone, the sweet voice silenced. "The subtle bridge between Eldridge and Navarro," they later wrote, all that rising passion a footnote to others. I remember in '85 walking the halls of Cass Tech, the high school where he taught after his performing days, when suddenly he took my left hand in his two hands to tell me it all worked out for the best. Maybe he'd gotten religion, maybe he knew how little time was left, maybe that day he was just worn down by my questions about Parker. To him Bird was truly Charlie Parker, a man, a silent note going out forever on the breath of genius which now I hear soaring above my own breath as this bright morning fades into afternoon. Music, I'll call it music. It's what we need as the sun staggers behind the low gray clouds blowing relentlessly in from that nameless ocean, the calm and endless one I've still to cross.

I have just returned from a visit to my pier Often I am permitted to return to my pier For a long time I would go to pier early So much depends upon a pier This is an old pier I celebrate my pier, and what I assume . . . I had a pier There is a certain slant of pier On woman's first disobedience, and the pier Christmas won't be Christmas without the pier I wandered lonely as a pier Pier was spiteful This is just to say I have eaten the pier

this is the track I've had on REPEAT all afternoon:      she is butterfly brilliant riband, rice flour face, silken, even her voice a sashed kimono if I were foolish like her: but aren't I foolish like her spotting the coil of smoke and the billowed sail against the verge of sky simple on the rise surveying the anchorage:      simple me, signal me dreading the confident assumption of return, dreading more uncertain tone to come, the thinning notes, performance too close to my own impatient—swells, a surge:      sick wind but the emotion is, after all, an artfully conjured gesture arranged marriage between a past ache and frail woodwinds I could skip ahead could break the inconsolable loop of harbor, waiting, overlook, waiting, inevitable waning eye troubled robins, once more in the handkerchief trees once more, brief aquarelle of triplet lilies, blue as willowware in that interval before his embrace falters, stuck, founders [shuffle play]    such a pitch of tenderness in the voice such an awful lot of noise

Make your strokes thus:the horizontal: as a cloud that slowly drifts across the horizon; the vertical: as an ancient but strong vine stem; the dot: a falling rock; and learn to master the sheep leg, the tiger’s claw, an apricot kernel, a dewdrop, the new moon, the wave rising and falling

I called a man today. After he said hello and I said hello came a pause during which it would have been confusing to say hello again so I said how are you doing and guess what, he said fine and wondered aloud how I was and it turns out I’m OK. He was on the couch watching cars painted with ads for Budweiser follow cars painted with ads for Tide around an oval that’s a metaphor for life because most of us run out of gas and settle for getting drunk in the stands and shouting at someone in a t-shirt we want kraut on our dog. I said he could have his job back and during the pause that followed his whiskers scrubbed the mouthpiece clean and his breath passed in and out in the tidal fashion popular with mammals until he broke through with the words how soon thank you ohmyGod which crossed his lips and drove through the wires on the backs of ions as one long word as one hard prayer of relief meant to be heard by the sky. When he began to cry I tried with the shape of my silence to say I understood but each confession of fear and poverty was more awkward than what you learn in the shower. After he hung up I went outside and sat with one hand in the bower of the other and thought if I turn my head to the left it changes the song of the oriole and if I give a job to one stomach other forks are naked and if tonight a steak sizzles in his kitchen do the seven other people staring at their phones hear?

I called the white donkey that hurt my left shoulder the last time it appeared, ramming me with its ivory head, cracking my back to relieve me of worry and hope. I called the white donkey, surprised at the sound of my voice. Scared, I wondered if the white head would give me its donkey brain, snowy matter dripping into my ears like the horse of the first man who fell off, the donkey teaching me about desire and the moan, that white hair on the back of my head that warns me. I called the donkey. It came slowly toward me, huge ears shaking with fury, its breath turning the air white as it bit into the white apple of my throat. I faced the donkey, watched its gait become a shuffle of possession, shaking its head as it stopped to root its dirty hoofs in the ground. I stepped back and clicked my fingers, but it would not come closer, its snort commanding I listen as it farted. I walked away and did not know it was I who yearned for labor of the ass because the animal I summoned couldn’t remove the white scar from my heart, a blind life I lived for good.