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Yankee Doodle went to town, A-riding on a pony; Stuck a feather in his hat And called it macaroni.

A branch, the hand of Apollo, The plane tree’s polished, broad bough, Spread above you, may it bring you The universe’s immortal peace. You’d meet me on the broad and shining shore Of Pylos, so I’d planned, With Mentor’s tall ship pulled up on the beach Snug in the sand. We would be bound, as those who sailed with the gods, In the winged friendship of youth, And would take our seats in the stone thrones that Time And custom had made smooth And meet that man who still in the third generation Reigned serene, a sage Whose tales of travels and holy decrees had ripened In his mind with age— At dawn, we’d attend the sacrifice to the gods, The ritual slaughters Of the three-year-old heifers, and hear the single cry That rose from his three daughters When the axe thwacked, and the black-fringed, slow-rolling eye Drowned in a swoon Of darkness, and the gilt horns were rendered idle, A hazy half moon. My love imagined you, as a sister her brother, In your virginal bath, How Polycaste rinsed your naked body and dressed you In a robe of fine cloth. I thought to prod you a little with my foot As dawn was about to break: The gleaming chariot’s yoked for us and ready. No time to lose! Awake!

My leaf blower lifted the blackbird— wings still spread, weightless, floating on the loud, electric wind almost as if it were alive. Three or four times it flew, but fell again, sideslipped down like a kite with no string, so I gave up. . . I had work to do, and when the dust I raised had settled in that other world under the rose bushes, the ants came back to finish theirs.

For Arthur Sze (Qin) Dim Sum equivalent to:dot, speck heart. Stone piled on stone I finish my meal. In this early sunrise I see shadows where a cairn of rocks used to stack in the direction of eastern light. In late morning, I lit red candles and placed them next to a three-hinged mirror, as a way of seeing shadows of shadows. Milkweed grows on the side of the road in ditches, reminiscent of professors’ soft words, amazing the brilliant contemplation and thought pattern as you learn, slowly. In my body neuron-zipped words and more words. My lexicon building from nothing to something good. Embossed tattoos like small notes on sheet music. Dots and lines, strands and strings I rest on the note D, increased by one half as my orchestra director signals, dashes and spaces for letters as grace notes in Morse code. Notes in staccato igniting instrumental waves of burning wood, a fiery spark over and speck dust played in harmonics, as a coot hovers over a brook dives in comes back with a fish. No one would ever know its true beauty and calmness, the setting sun across an arctic lake, unless it is witnessed. As speckled day owls, brants, and mergansers float in the sunset. To learn you must be open, diligent, and willing to be an individual. 11,000 murres with webbed feet land also without any fear of predators. But still, on the page grow spotted mushrooms and morels. Examine the distortion and effects of the warming earth. The change of the ice age with purpose as the warming earth today, but I take heart in sun along with the core of a gingko tree’s light.

When the plowblade struck An old stump hiding under The soil like a beggar’s Rotten tooth, they swarmed up & Mister Jackson left the plow Wedged like a whaler’s harpoon. The horse was midnight Against dusk, tethered to somebody’s Pocketwatch.  He shivered, but not The way women shook their heads Before mirrors at the five & dime—a deeper connection To the low field’s evening star. He stood there, in tracechains, Lathered in froth, just Stopped by a great, goofy Calmness.  He whinnied Once, & then the whole Beautiful, blue-black sky Fell on his back.

I’ve expanded like the swollen door in summer to fit my own dimension. Your loneliness is a letter I read and put away, a daily reminder in the cry of the magpie that I am still capable of inflicting pain at this distance. Like a painting, our talk is dense with description, half-truths, landscapes, phrases layered with a patina over time. When she came into my life I didn’t hesitate. Or is that only how it seems now, looking back? Or is that only how you accuse me, looking back? Long ago, this desert was an inland sea. In the mountains you can still find shells. It’s these strange divagations I’ve come to love: midday sun on pink escarpments; dusk on gray sandstone; toe-and-finger holes along the three hundred and fifty-seven foot climb to Acoma Pueblo, where the spirit of the dead hovers about its earthly home four days, before the prayer sticks drive it away. Today all good Jews collect their crimes like old clothes to be washed and given to the poor. I remember how my father held his father around the shoulders as they walked to the old synagogue in Philadelphia. "We're almost there, Pop," he said. "A few more blocks." I want to tell you that we, too, are almost there, for someone has mapped this autumn field with meaning, and any day October brooding in me, will open to reveal our names—inscribed or absent — among the dry thistles and spent weeds.

You hear the sun in the morning through closed shutters. As you sleep the early sky is colored in fish scales, and you open your eyes like a street already lined with fruit.

For your birthday, I’m learning to pop champagne corks with a cossack sword when all you asked for was world peace. I’m actioning the deliverables to wish you many happy returns of the ecstasies that are imminent when all you requested was a contentment so quiet it’s inaudible. Remember when I gave you a robe of  black silk that floats and does not rustle? When all you desired was to turn from what was finished and hard in the darkness. And when you said I gave you what I wanted myself  I gave you what I didn’t want: gift certificates to spas that wax hearts, a blind date with the inventor of friction. Today I bring an actual-size sunrise and many glow words from the inmates of  this late-stage civilization who navigate in your slipstream and to whom you say keep rowing. When you were born you were placed on a small throne on castors while the Stop Shopping Choir sang hosannas, a defining moment. People noticed something nascent about you that persists in your fondness for the first person primordial. You own it. You know why voices die in throats and trees struggle in silence: the deepest trauma cannot spare a sound. If you meet a mystery you do not disturb it with little picks and suction things. You say the shape of  happiness is too fine for capture spray, and it is well to remember the days when plastic boxes snapping shut were all that women had to celebrate. Yet it is not seditious to rebel against a culture like circus music, so cheerful we’d need a cadaver tendon to fix it. That’s what you say. You are hard to fathom as a guttering compass that is neither hush nor howl. I’m thinking of  the time you placed an Aeolian harp in the window, took me by the notebook, and asked me to consider why turkeys bob their heads when they walk and geese don’t though they both waddle. You watched my ethereality show and commiserated when they adorned my rival in a deconsecrated rosary bead bikini and send her to St. Barts while I was remaindered to an orange jumpsuit organ-swiping plot. That century I was betrayed by a dedicated icemaker, you burned a feather pen to revive me. You tried my device that prevents accidental workplace nudity, vetted its magnetic veils, and at Christmas sent fruitcake privacy filters. Remember when I was dismissed as overness consultant? How you resigned in solidarity and grew a sky-colored flower since I could not be satisfied with the sky itself? You gave me a robe of  black silk that floats and does not rustle and advised me to turn from what was finished and hard in the darkness. If  I critiqued the treasure revealer you said do not test its softness against your cheek. Today I raise my glass of wheat grass and atmospheric information to wish you every beyond of  thought in which to consider all that is majorly good. I won’t sing Happy Birthday, a song so overdetermined it sounds bereaved. I’ll sing of  passions that persist in the Elysian Fields. Though shackled to a boulder at the moment, I’m unpacking boxes from your last move, wrapping the contents in recycled moonlight and presenting them to you as objects exactly forgotten and largely what you wanted. I nerve myself  for the encounter.

The sunlight almost unfaceable, and weightless, and the gravities, wind-flickers, shadows, the ripped black places crows make on the phone poles— how to keep your own counsel, even against the little stabs, the winds and chromes— • Various flashes, the office door, a supper glass, a last smear of streetlight on the bedsheets. Nothing. On into the soaring, black release. • The messages say syllabus and vetting that and will be absent. Nothing. On into the what? the air you’re gliding on or falling from, the wind of it making ahs and salves in the hollow of your chest, Celina of a bodily sibilance like willows, of the shimmering, midsummer glance. You would allow yourself a message. How to make it low-key. How to keep it to a few lines. • On into the wind of whatever is happening. What leashes you seems to have come undone. You lean down into the white heap of black words. You pad out toward the water fountain into someone’s eyeshadowed look, the lush backwash of her skirt. You weigh maybe three or four ounces, swirling down the stairwell in whichever wind this is, your ribs aching with what they sing so shamelessly.

Your husband is stretched out on the ground as if he were listening for something. Ask him to come back to the table. Whatever was there is now here.