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Sleep, she will not linger: She turns her moon-cold shoulder. With no ring on her finger, You cannot hope to hold her. She turns her moon-cold shoulder And tosses off the cover. You cannot hope to hold her: She has another lover. She tosses off the cover And lays the darkness bare. She has another lover. Her heart is otherwhere. She lays the darkness bare. You slowly realize Her heart is otherwhere. There's distance in her eyes. You slowly realize That she will never linger, With distance in her eyes And no ring on her finger.

Mama said it only existed in storybooks with its soft surface of  bluebells but there it was spinning so close to the earth that it bent every weather vane in Omaha it was prom night and I thought I’d pluck a few trumpets to bring your Grandma so I pulled our red ladder out of  the garage and climbed to the roof I stood up and imagined I was balancing the moon on my head the narrow windows of  Union Station gleamed like ice chips and the thin faces of the clock tower told me it was almost eight I was going to be late picking Nancy up if  I didn’t get a move on so I snipped off the best stems and hurried back down to my Ford I sped through every stop sign on my way to her parents’ house she was waiting with her arms crossed trying not to look upset I think she thought she was going to get stood up so when I popped open the door and told her to get in she couldn’t help smiling a bit she asked what’d taken me so long and I figured I should go ahead and give her the flowers I’d brought her I’d set them back behind the steering wheel to not ruin the surprise I told her she was the princess and I was the knight who rode into the stars so he could flare their notes to her on a blue horn

1 In the evening haze darkening on the hills, purple of the eternal, a last bird crosses over, ‘flop flop,’ adoring only the instant. 2 Nine years ago, in a plane that rumbled all night above the Atlantic, I could see, lit up by lightning bolts jumping out of it, a thunderhead formed like the face of my brother, looking down on blue, lightning-flashed moments of the Atlantic. 3 He used to tell me, “What good is the day? On some hill of despair the bonfire you kindle can light the great sky— though it’s true, of course, to make it burn you have to throw yourself in ...” 4 Wind tears itself hollow in the eaves of these ruins, ghost-flute of snowdrifts that build out there in the dark: upside-down ravines into which night sweeps our cast wings, our ink-spattered feathers. 5 I listen. I hear nothing. Only the cow, the cow of such hollowness, mooing down the bones. 6 Is that a rooster? He thrashes in the snow for a grain. Finds it. Rips it into flames. Flaps. Crows. Flames bursting out of his brow. 7 How many nights must it take one such as me to learn that we aren’t, after all, made from that bird that flies out of its ashes, that for us as we go up in flames, our one work is to open ourselves, to be the flames?

I have a special ticket to another planet beyond this Earth. A comfortable world, and beautiful: a world without much smoke, not too hot and not too cold. The creatures are gentler there, and the governments have no secrets. The police are nonexistent: there are no problems and no fights. And the schools don’t exhaust their students with too much work for history has yet to start and there’s no geography and no other languages. And even better: the war has left its “r ” behind and turned into love, so the weapons sleep beneath the dust, and the planes pass by without shelling the cities, and the boats look like smiles on the water. All things are peaceful and kind on the other planet beyond this Earth. But still I hesitate to go alone.

My dear, you are the high-speed car chase, and I, I am the sheet of glass being carefully carried across the street by two employees of Acme Moving who have not parked on the right side because the plot demands that they make the perilous journey across traffic, and so they are cursing as rehearsed as they angle me into the street, acting as if they intend to get me to the department store, as if I will ever take my place as the display window, ever clear the way for a special exhibit at Christmas, or be Windexed once a day, or even late at night, be pressed against by a couple who can’t make it back to his place, and so they angle me into the street, a bright lure, a provocative claim, their teaser, and indeed you can’t resist my arguments, fatally flawed though they are, so you come careening to but and butt and rebut, you come careening, you being both cars, both chaser and chased, both good and bad, both done up with bullets that haven’t yet done you in. I know I’m done for: there’s only one street on this set and you’ve got a stubborn streak a mile long. I can smell the smoke already. No matter, I’d rather shatter than be looked through all day. So come careening; I know you’ve other clichés to hammer home: women with groceries to send spilling, canals to leap as the bridge is rising. And me? I’m so through. I’ve got a thousand places to be.

Chestnuts fell in the charred season, Fell finally, finding room In air to open their old cases So they gleam out from the gold leaves, In the dusk now, where they dropped down. I go watch them, waiting for winter, Their husks open and holding on. Those rusted rims are rigid=hard And cling clean to the clear brown, And the fall sun sinks soon, And the day draws to its dark end, .and the feet give up the gray walk, no longer lingering, light gone, and I am here and do not go home. Hollow gifts to cold children: The chestnuts they hid in small caches Have gone hollow, their gleam gone, Their grain gone, and the children are home.

I was on the porch pinching back the lobelia like trimming a great blue head of hair. We’d just planted the near field, the far one the day before. I’d never seen it so clear, so gusty, so overcast, so clear, so calm. They say pearls must be worn or they lose their luster, and that morning I happened to remember, so I put them on for milking, finding some sympathy, I guess, between the two. Usually I don’t sit down until much later in the day. The lobelia was curling in the sun. One by one birds flew off, and that should have been a sign. Trust is made and broken. I hardly sit down at all. It was the time of year for luna moths, but we hadn’t had any yet settling on the porch or hovering above the garden I’d let the wild rose take.

What I walked down to the highway for, through the summer dawn, was the Sunday funnies, or so I thought— but what I remember reading there in the shadowless light among meadowlarks singing was tracks in the deep warm dust of the lane, where it parted with its beige dryness the meadow’s dew— the sleek trail where a snake had crossed and slid into tall grass; the stippled parallels with marks between them where a black blister-beetle had dragged its bulbous belly across in search of weeds more green; the labyrinth of lacelike dimples left by a speed-freak tiger-beetles’s sprints that ended where it took wing with a little blur of dust-grains; and stepping through the beetle-trails, the wedge-heels and sharp-clawed hands of skunk-track crossing unhurried and walking along the ditch to find an easy place for climbing; not far past that, a line of cat-prints running straight down the lane and ending with deep marks where it leaped across the ditch to the meadow for birds asleep or wandering baby rabbits: and freshly placed this morning, the slender runes of bob-whites running, scuffles of dustbaths taken— and there ahead crouched low at the lane-edge under purple pokeweed-berries four quail had seen me, and when I walked slowly on toward them, instead of flying they ran with a fluid scuttling on down the lane and stopped frozen till I came too close —then quietly when I expected an explosion of wings they took off low and whispering and sailed, rocking and tilting out over the meadow’s tall bluestem, dropped down and were gone until I heard them whistling, down by the little pond, and whistled back so sharply that when I got back to the  house they still were answering and one flew into the elm and whistled from its shadows up over the porch where I sat reading the funnies while the kittens played with the headlines till when the first gold sunlight tipped the elm’s leaves he flew back out to the meadow and sank down into the sun-brilliant dew on curving wings, and my brothers and sisters waked by the whistling came pouring out onto the porch and claimed their share of the Sunday funnies— and I went on to read the headlines of World War Two, with maps of the struggling armies leaving tank-tracks over the dunes of Libya and the navies churning their wakes of phosphorescence in the Coral Sea where the ships went down on fire and the waves bobbed and flamed with the maimed survivors , screaming in Japanese or English until their gasoline-blistered heads sank down to the tiger sharks and the war was lost or won for children sitting in sunlight, believing their cause was just and knowing it would prevail, as the dew vanished away.

Like fossil shells embedded in a stone, you are an absence, rimmed calligraphy, a mouthing out of silence, a way to see beyond the bedroom where you lie alone. So why not be the vast, antipodal cloud you soloed under, riven by cold gales? And why not be the song of diving whales, why not the plosive surf   below the road? The others are one thing. They know they are. One compass needle. They have found their way and navigate by perfect cynosure. Go wreck yourself once more against the day and wash up like a bottle on the shore, lucidity and salt in all you say.

To tiny Ansel Adams, newly arrived on this earth, the sky must seem a miracle. I’d commit the scene to black and white if I could, the sky bright and bottomless, trees gnarled as the knees of elephants. Helpless in his Biltrite pram, Ansel Adams is watching the clouds roll in. Then the clouds would gather speed, roll out again, and the camera pan down to Ansel Adams the man kneeling on granite, choosing one filter over another. It’s as though more and greater apparatus were needed to recapture that first exposure, says the voice-over: as though Ansel Adams were a pioneer toiling after the spirit, not just the body, of America. To tiny Ansel Adams, newly arrived on this earth, the sky must seem a matter of fact. It’s the mind beneath he wants to grasp, stowed in its smart black enclosure. I’d have his pram gather speed and transform, a cartoon robot against the heavens, wheels spinning, into Ansel Adams’ camera. Now the bright black sky is Ansel Adams and Ansel Adams the filter; light renders each tree a bouquet of paper; the Great Depression gathers like so much weather. To tiny Ansel Adams, newly arrived on this earth, the sky is what it is, taut with its isness. Some time before dawn, the section framed by interior blackens and brightens and each tree out there glows with itself, with the certainty of all Ansel Adams’ aspens. No one is watching but this one bewildered immigrant, toiling after sleep, saturated in monochrome. Sometimes it’s all you’ll find in the wilderness: Ansel Adams, tiny in his pram, composing the day just gone.