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I wake to the sound of water, and think, "Mother has died and gone to France," She is at un autre hôtel , speaking French better than ever, while I stare at the fog that has a river in it—the broad Dordogne, making its river noise, as if all the faucets have been left on all night. The river rushing in one direction only, so different from Blackfish Creek, where the sea floods in and back, scrubbing the sand both ways. Well, one travels so things are different. American actors speak French on TV here. Last night they showed Accident Catastrophe about two babies switched in the hospital at birth. One dies. The parents discover the dead child was someone else's and their child is alive in Florida with son père , though sa mère est morte de some disease, who knows? Anyway, Ed Asner, who plays the lawyer, speaks gravelly French, but people have an American demeanor, they pull their hair on the edge of violence. Then each family gives up a piece, and the child ends up more loved than ever, as if it's inevitable. Or so the river is telling me with its one-way simplicity, like gravity. "Alive in the eternal heart of France"—that's Mother I'm thinking about, for some reason, maybe the journal my wife's been keeping, so like the daily letters Mother wrote to sa mère et son père , when her life was flowing through her like the broad Dordogne. And where is she now? Does she wish my father were with her, one of him alive, and one with her? A bell is ringing wildly, each of its peals like a round boat rolling downstream where the river divides around an island only to sweep back into itself somewhere in the fog.

Ours are the streets where Bess first met her cancer. She went to work every day past the secure houses. At her job in the library she arranged better and better flowers, and when students asked for books her hand went out to help. In the last year of her life she had to keep her friends from knowing how happy they were. She listened while they complained about food or work or the weather. And the great national events danced their grotesque, fake importance. Always Pain moved where she moved. She walked ahead; it came. She hid; it found her. No one ever served another so truly; no enemy ever meant so strong a hate. It was almost as if there was no room left for her on earth. But she remembered where joy used to live. She straightened its flowers; she did not weep when she passed its houses; and when finally she pulled into a tiny corner and slipped from pain, her hand opened again, and the streets opened, and she wished all well.

Rosebud, So. Dak., 1960 we all went to town one day went to a store bought you new shoes red   high heels aint seen you since

The best game the fairies play, The best game of all, Is sliding down steeples— (You know they’re very tall). You fly to the weathercock, And when you hear it crow, You fold your wings and clutch your things And then let go! They have a million other games— Cloud-catching’s one, And mud-mixing after rain Is heaps and heaps of fun; But when you go and stay with them Never mind the rest, Take my advice—they’re very nice, But steeple-sliding’s best!

it’s clear the wind won’t let up and a swim’s out — what you planned is scotched. forget the calls, errands at the mall — yr resolve’s superfluous as a clitoris. how miraculous the gratuitous — spandrels, cathedrals. on a sea of necessity let’s float wholly unnecessary & call that free

It’s now all about money about which poetry rarely reaches transcendence. But love must still fester even under that. Everyone I know frets if poetry can still matter, but what about love? It’s all become too much for them, and they’re all on the soma. It makes sense with these pills when the someone they thought they loved for years by never thinking about it says, “I don’t love you anymore, but let’s stay friends in that mellow woebegone way poetry now sings without singing.” Of course, they’re always asking “What is poetry?” and then answering by saying it’s what Boethius was thinking about when they squished his head until his eyes popped out, or anything barbaric enough to get everyone to stop eating for a bit and reach for a moment past a chatty moment. Sort of a solution to awkward goodbyes. How money becomes a sort of welcome relief that defuses the poetry charging tense moments. “Interesting,” someone remarks between bites, “to be right here in the moment yet also out there watching some once-in-a-lifetime sublimity unfold, as if living as if already dead.” As if standing in a dream far up in the stars somewhere with Scipio

Never anymore in a wash of sweetness and awe does the summer when I was seventeen come back to mind against my will, like a bird crossing my vision. Summer of moist nights full of girls and boys ripened, holy drunkenness and violation of the comic boundaries, defiances that never failed or brought disaster. Days on the backs and in the breath of horses, between rivers and pools that reflected the cicadas' whine, enervation and strength creeping in smooth waves over muscular water. All those things accepted, once, with unnoticing hunger, as an infant accepts the nipple, never come back to mind against the will. What comes unsummoned now, blotting out every other thought and image, is a part of the past not so deep or far away: the time of poverty, of struggle to find means not hateful—the muddy seedtime of early manhood. What returns are those moments in the diner night after night with each night's one cup of coffee, watching an old man, who always at the same hour came in and smiled, ordered his tea and opened his drawing pad. What did he fill it with? And where's he gone? Those days, that studious worker, hand moving and eyes eager in the sour light, that artist always in the same worn-out suit, are my nostalgia now. That old man comes back, the friend I saw each day and never spoke to, because I hoped soon to disappear from there, as I have disappeared, into the heaven of better days.

I. Daily, the kindergarteners passed my porch. I loved their likeness and variety, their selves in line like little monosyllables, but huggable— I wasn't meant to grab them, ever, up into actual besmooches or down into grubbiest tumbles, my lot was not to have them, in the flesh. Was it better or worse to let their lovability go by untouched, and just watch over their river of ever- inbraiding relations? I wouldn't mother them or teach. We couldn't be each other's others; maybe, at removes, each other's each. II. Each toddler had a hand-hold on a loop of rope, designed to haul the whole school onward in the sidewalk stream— like pickerel through freshets, at the pull of something else's will, the children spun and bobbled, three years old and four (or were they little drunken Buddhas, buoyant, plump?). They looked now to the right, now to the sky, and now toward nothing (nothing was too small)— they followed a thread of destination, chain of command, order of actual rope that led to what? Who knew? For here and now in one child's eye there was a yellow truck, and in another's was a burning star; but from my own perspective, overhead, adult, where trucks and suns had lost their luster, they were one whole baby-rush toward a target, toward the law of targets, fledge in the wake of an arrowhead; a bull's-eye bloomed, a red eight-sided sign. What did I wish them? Nothing I foresaw.

I have no wit, no words, no tears; My heart within me like a stone Is numb'd too much for hopes or fears; Look right, look left, I dwell alone; I lift mine eyes, but dimm'd with grief No everlasting hills I see; My life is in the falling leaf: O Jesus, quicken me. My life is like a faded leaf, My harvest dwindled to a husk: Truly my life is void and brief And tedious in the barren dusk; My life is like a frozen thing, No bud nor greenness can I see: Yet rise it shall—the sap of Spring; O Jesus, rise in me. My life is like a broken bowl, A broken bowl that cannot hold One drop of water for my soul Or cordial in the searching cold; Cast in the fire the perish'd thing; Melt and remould it, till it be A royal cup for Him, my King: O Jesus, drink of me.

Home, then, where the past was. Then, where cold pastorals repeated their entreaties, where a portrait of Christ hung in every bedroom. Then was a different country in a different climate in a time when souls were won and lost in prairie tents. It was. It was. Then it was a dream. I had no will there. Then the new continent and the new wife and the new language for no, for unsaved, for communion on credit. Then the daughter who should’ve been mine, and the hour a shadow outgrew its body. She was all of my failures, my sermon on the tender comforts of hatred in the shape of a girl. Then the knowledge of God like an apple in the mouth. I faced my temptation. I touched its breasts with as much restraint as my need allowed, and I woke with its left hand traced again and again on my chest like a cave wall disfigured by right-handed gods who tried to escape the stone. It was holy. It was fading. My ring, then, on my finger like an ambush, as alive as fire. Then the trees offered me a city in the shape of a word followed by a word followed by a blue madonna swinging from the branches. A choir filed out of the jungle singing hallelujah like a victory march and it was.