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Morning glories, pale as a mist drying, fade from the heat of the day, but already hunchback bees in pirate pants and with peg-leg hooks have found and are boarding them. This could do for the sack of the imaginary fleet. The raiders loot the galleons even as they one by one vanish and leave still real only what has been snatched out of the spell. I’ve never seen bees more purposeful except when the hive is threatened. They know the good of it must be grabbed and hauled before the whole feast wisps off. They swarm in light and, fast, dive in, then drone out, slow, their pantaloons heavy with gold and sunlight. The line of them, like thin smoke, wafts over the hedge. And back again to find the fleet gone. Well, they got this day’s good of it. Off they cruise to what stays open longer. Nothing green gives honey. And by now you’d have to look twice to see more than green where all those white sails trembled when the world was misty and open and the prize was there to be taken.

Unless a grain of wheat goes into the ground and dies, it remains nothing but a grain of wheat. —John 12:24 The ingredients gathered, a few small red tufts of the dream spoor per sheaf of Demeter’s blonde wheat, reaped in mourning, in silence, ground up with the pollen and mixed into white wine and honey. These stored forms of light taken under the ground. Taken by mouth. First those who by birth hold in secret the word; then placed on the tongues of the new ones, into whose ears it is meant to be whispered. Word murdered, forgotten so long ago, placed as a kiss on the lips of the soon-to-be-no-longer breathing who mean to enter death with open eyes, with mouths saying Death, what death? We have no word for it in our country where the bride of a brighter oblivion reigns. Not the purple-haired god but the child queen, the raped girl, come back from the dead hand in hand with the child she conceived there, returned in a resurrected virginity, wind through green wheat. Present-day site of a minor refinery in Christ. Although by the tenth generation already the children of light (“in their dark garments”) had trampled and smashed and generally raped the two thousand years of this precinct and its holy meal, intolerable mirror. Men who’d designed and bowed down to a law derived from the sayings of one who appeared here to say that the law is abolished, it is too late, all that is over with. Men who bungled their way through the next eighteen centuries before finally descending into the earth themselves, and what they found there they used, and we thank you for destroying the destroyers of the world. And here at the end this is as good as any other entrance to the underplace, journey of the fallen leaf back to the branch, to the bees of Eleusis among olive blossoms, untroubled among crimson wildflowers. Four thousand years later: same flowers, same bees.

After twenty years of marriage, we walked out of the bush and on to a rough dirt road we followed till we saw a pond we might be able to get to. The ground was boggy and buzzing. The pond was thick with weed and slime. It was not the sort of pond anyone would swim in, but we did — picking and sliding into the water over the bog and bees, bees we suddenly noticed were everywhere, were settling on our hair as we swam, ducks turning surprised eyes our way. After twenty years of marriage what is surprising isn’t really so much the person you are with but to find yourselves so out of place in this scene, cold but not able to get out without stepping over bees, so many bees.

In college, people were always breaking up. We broke up in parking lots, beside fountains. Two people broke up across a table from me at the library. I could not sit at that table again though I did not know them. I studied bees, who were able to convey messages through dancing and could find their ways home to their hives even if someone put up a blockade of sheets and boards and wire. Bees had radar in their wings and brains that humans could barely understand. I wrote a paper proclaiming their brilliance and superiority and revised it at a small café featuring wooden hive-shaped honey-dippers in silver honeypots at every table.

The butterfly was there before any human art was made. Before cathedrals rose in prayer, the butterfly was there. Before pyramids pierced the air or Great Wall stones were laid, the butterfly was there. Before any human, art was made.

Before clock hands showed the time time ceased, and looking glasses were veiled as if they still held familiar faces, in those last moments when breath shallowed like a wellspring running dry, God-words quickened, only then the dying left death-beds borne on the arms of the gathered, lowered to the floor so they might press close, as though a door through which to listen and know the earth's old secrets before it opened, and they entered.

I Behoild Pelides with his yellow hair, Proud child of Thetis, hero loved of Jove; Above the frowning of his brows of wove A crown of gold, well combed, with Spartan care. Who might have seen him, sullen, great, and fair, As with the wrongful world he proudly strove, And by high deeds his wilder passion shrove, Mastering love, resentment, and despair. He knew his end, and Phoebus’ arrow sure He braved for fame immortal and a friend, Despising life; and we, who know our end, Know that in our decay he shall endure And all our children’s hearts to grief inure, With whose first bitter battles his shall blend. II Who brought thee forth, immortal vision, who In Phthia or in Tempe brought thee forth? Out of the sunlight and the sapful earth What god the simples of thy spirit drew? A goddess rose from the green waves, and threw Her arms about a king, to give thee birth; A centaur, patron of thy boyish mirth, Over the meadows in thy footsteps flew. Now Thessaly forgets thee, and the deep Thy keeled bark furrowed answers not thy prayer; But far away new generations keep Thy laurels fresh; where branching Isis hems The lawns of Oxford round about, or where Enchanted Eton sits by pleasant Thames. III I gaze on thee as Phidias of old Or Polyclitus gazed, when first he saw These hard and shining limbs, without a flaw, And cast his wonder in heroic mould. Unhappy me who only may behold, Nor make immutable and fix in awe A fair immortal form no worm shall gnaw, A tempered mind whose faith was never told! The godlike mien, the lion’s lock and eye, The well-knit sinew, utter a brave heart Better than many words that part by part Spell in strange symbols what serene and whole In nature lives, nor can in marble die. The perfect body itself the soul.

the termites had deboned the thing it was clean there was no saving it in one bedroom a dresser with blue drawers its peg-legs rested on pure membrane a girl just stood in her underwear ran the tips of her fingers over her ribs thought greyhound no one knew no explaining why she didn’t fall through the floor the kids were drinking beer in the yard the tetherball rope caught one girl’s throat her mother’s face obscured behind the porch screen the mesquite shadow no one could make her out her feet rested on hot sashes of dust the sounds on the television were far away as that big caliche mound looked lake a waving man the president got shot the boards stayed together for another three days it was a matter of apathy or swelling or everyone was too hot to move

Almost the first reindeer shipped North by boxcar from Lapland but a toy model got there first. A dwarf invented reindeer on his own. He was Santa’s favorite. He hadn't known they already existed. This discouraged dwarf was close to taking his life but Santa showed up encircled by snow. He said, “I will use the real reindeer for my sled always in yoke to your original invention.” That night the gears that turned the Pole stopped and began to turn the other way, so it be so. My love is a toy model waiting for a reindeer to carry me.

1    I gaze through a telescope at the Orion Nebula, a blue vapor with a cluster of white stars, gaze at the globular cluster in Hercules, needle and pinpoint lights stream into my eyes. A woman puts a baby in a plastic bag and places it in a dumpster; someone parking a car hears it cry and rescues it. Is this the little o, the earth? Deer at dusk are munching apple blossoms; a green snake glides down flowing acequia water. The night is rich with floating pollen; in the morning, we break up the soil to prepare for corn. Fossilized cotton pollen has been discovered at a site above six thousand feet. As the character yi, change, is derived from the skin of a chameleon, we are living the briefest hues on the skin of the world. I gaze at the Sombrero Galaxy between Corvus and Spica: on a night with no moon, I notice my shadow by starlight. 2    Where does matter end and space begin? blue jays eating suet; juggling three crumbled newspaper balls wrapped with duct tape; tasseling corn; the gravitational bending of light; “We're dying”; stringing a coral necklace; he drew his equations on butcher paper; vanishing in sunlight; sobbing; she folded five hundred paper cranes and placed them in a basket; sleeping in his room in a hammock; they drew a shell to represent zero; red persimmons; what is it like to catch up to light? he threw Before Completion: six in the third place, nine in the sixth. 3    A wavering line of white-faced ibises, flying up the Rio Grande, disappears. A psychic says, “Search a pawnshop for the missing ring.” Loss, a black hole. You do not intend to commit a series of blunders, but to discover in one error an empty cocoon. A weaver dumps flashlight batteries into a red-dye bath. A physicist says, “After twenty years, nothing is as I thought it would be.” You recollect watching a yellow- and-black-banded caterpillar in a jar form a chrysalis: in days the chrysalis lightened and became transparent: a monarch emerged and flexed its wings. You are startled to retrieve what you forgot: it has the crunching sound of river breakup when air is calm and very clear. 4    Beijing, 1985: a poet describes herding pigs beside a girl with a glass eye and affirms the power to dream and transform. Later, in exile, he axes his wife and hangs himself. Do the transformations of memory become the changing lines of divination? Is the continuum of a moment a red poppy blooming by a fence, or is it a woman undergoing radiation treatment who stretches out on a bed to rest and senses she is stretching out to die? At night I listen to your breathing, guess at the freckles on your arms, smell your hair at the back of your neck. Tiger lilies are budding in pots in the patio; daikon is growing deep in the garden. I see a bewildered man ask for direction, and a daikon picker points the way with a daikon. 5    He threw Duration; sunspots; what is it like to catch up to light? a collapsing vertebra; the folding wings of a blue dragonfly; receiving a fax; buffeted on a floatplane between islands; a peregrine falcon making a slow circle with outstretched wings; he crumpled papers, threw them on the floor, called it City of Bums; polar aligning; inhaling the smell of her hair; a red handprint on a sandstone wall; digging up ginseng; carding wool; where does matter end and space begin? 6    Mushroom hunting at the ski basin, I spot a blood-red amanita pushing up under fir, find a white-gilled Man On Horseback, notice dirt breaking and carefully unearth a cluster of gold chanterelles. I stop and gaze at yellow light in a clearing. As grief dissolves and the mind begins to clear, an s twist begins to loosen the z twisted fiber. A spider asleep under a geranium leaf may rest a leg on the radial string of a web, but cool nights are pushing nasturtiums to bloom. An eggplant deepens in hue and drops to the ground. Yellow specks of dust float in the clearing; in memory, a series of synchronous spaces. As a cotton fiber burns in an s twist and unravels the z twist of its existence, the mind unravels and ravels a wave of light, persimmons ripening on leafless trees.