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I language want to dress my fancies in, The hair's uncurled, the garment's loose and thin. Had they but silver lace to make them gay, They'd be more courted than in poor array; Or, had they art, would make a better show; But they are plain; yet cleanly do they go. The world in bravery doth take delight, And glistering shows do more attract the sight: And every one doth honor a rich hood, As if the outside made the inside good. And every one doth bow and give the place, Not for the man's sake but the silver lace. Let me intreat in my poor book's behalf, That all will not adore the golden calf. Consider, pray, gold hath no life therein, And life, in nature, is the richest thing. Be just, let Fancy have the upper place, And then my verses may perchance find grace.

Small floater, you stay above the fray, a wink at nothing's nod, a raised brow watching p's and q's, a selfless mote between I and m, a little horn of plenty spilling plurals, disdaining the bottom line. Unlike your twin relatives—groupies of wit and wisdom, hangers on in the smallest talk— you work alone, dark of a crescent moon. Laboring in obscurity, you never ask why, never exclaim, never tell anyone where to go. Caught up between extremes, you are both a turning away and a stepping forth, a loss and an addition. You are the urge to possess everything, and the sure sign that something is missing.

Taut with longing You must become The god you sought— The only one

Sunday, September Sunday ... Outdoors, Like an early page from The Appalachian Book of the Dead, Sunlight lavishes brilliance on every surface, Doves settle, surreptitious angels, on tree limb and box branch, A crow calls, deep in its own darkness, Something like water ticks on Just there, beyond the horizon, just there, steady clock ... Go in fear of abstractions ... Well, possibly. Meanwhile, They are the strata our bodies rise through, the sere veins Our skins rub off on. For instance, whatever enlightenment there might be Housels compassion and affection, those two tributaries That river above our lives, Whose waters we sense the sense of late at night, and later still. Uneasy, suburbanized, I drift from the lawn chair to the back porch to the dwarf orchard Testing the grass and border garden. A stillness, as in the passageways of Paradise, Bell jars the afternoon. Leaves, like ex votos, hang hard and shine Under the endlessness of heaven. Such skeletal altars, such vacant sanctuary. It always amazes me How landscape recalibrates the stations of the dead, How what we see jacks up the odd quotient of what we don’t see, How God’s breath reconstitutes our walking up and walking down. First glimpse of autumn, stretched tight and snicked, a bad face lift, Flicks in and flicks out, a virtual reality. Time to begin the long division.

1. hear them cry the long dead the long gone speak to us from beyond the grave guide us that we may learn all the ways to hold tender this land hard clay direct rock upon rock charred earth in time strong green growth will rise here trees back to life native flowers pushing the fragrance of hope the promise of resurrection 2. such then is beauty surrendered against all hope you are here again turning slowly nature as chameleon all life change and changing again awakening hearts steady moving from unnamed loss into fierce deep grief that can bear all burdens even the long passage into a shadowy dark where no light enters 3. night moves through the thick dark a heavy silence outside near the front window a black bear stamps down plants pushing back brush fleeing manmade confinement roaming unfettered confident any place can become home strutting down a steep hill as though freedom is all in the now no past no present 4. earth works thick brown mud clinging pulling a body down heard wounded earth cry bequeath to me the hoe the hope ancestral rights to turn the ground over to shovel and sift until history rewritten resurrected returns to its rightful owners a past to claim yet another stone lifted to throw against the enemy making way for new endings random seeds spreading over the hillside wild roses come by fierce wind and hard rain unleashed furies here in this touched wood a dirge a lamentation for earth to live again earth that is all at once a grave a resting place a bed of new beginnings avalanche of splendor 5. small horses ride me carry my dreams of prairies and frontiers where once the first people roamed claimed union with the earth no right to own or possess no sense of territory all boundaries placed by unseen ones here I will give you thunder shatter your hearts with rain let snow soothe you make your healing water clear sweet a sacred spring where the thirsty may drink animals all 6. listen little sister angels make their hope here in these hills follow me I will guide you careful now no trespass I will guide you word for word mouth for mouth all the holy ones embracing us all our kin making home here renegade marooned lawless fugitives grace these mountains we have earth to bind us the covenant between us can never be broken vows to live and let live

The one horse you gave me you took back when she went insane, when she began to chew wood instead of the expensive grain we bought from the feed store, the grain that had the sweet smell of molasses and was good for even us to chew. She turned into an ugly thing with her wild thoughts, and I forgot about the beauty expected of her when her blanket filled out and complemented her chestnut body and the name the Nez Percé gave her. She rotted and began to stink of promises gone wrong, of gods avenging their defilement. A man who knew what to do with useless horses came and took her away in a wooden trailer she tried to chew, and my tears welled up in huge drops before they splattered on the ground, as I trembled and realized I would have to give up her own ghost for her, ghost which she did not have, ghost which she came here beautifully without.

From where I sit, I can see other things: a silver porcupine, pins standing upright. It is a vanished tale of a vanished forest at the shore of a vanished ocean. I call the dead as often as I can. In the vaults, among mummies—this is pure memorial. I am the girl in whose eyes the name is written. I feel as if veiled, as if soon I shall get to know something. These are people with encephalitis who cannot go forward, but can go backward, and can dance. In this rough draft of my memoirs, my brother comes toward me—frightened, skeletal—longing for marvels. I cannot describe it better than by comparing it to other figures, intoxication. Mere reflexes, as for instance breathing, can become conscious. One of two rivals has his ornamental tail bit off. In dying sounds, barely reaching our ears, a melody continues. No end to it—an infinite progression. All this love of a bygone age. Watch the track of a concentrated sunbeam through our lake ice: part of the beam is stopped, part goes through. Now the upper surface buckles, phantasmagoria of unchained passion—under which the land quakes, the ocean swells, and a myriad-years- old forest snaps and cracks. Surpassing all forms of experience, the wide, deep, freshwater lake—on which the city is built—rises before us. Here a modern idea interposes, a new body made from the elements. Then everything is forgotten. Sometimes thoughts are cut off and sometimes they are the blade which cuts. At the present gravel pit, electric lights in the evening cast their magic blue sheen. There’s the sun, a crack above those hills, breaking the day. If the door open, who comes in? If it close, what will interrupt my train? The staircase effect supplies strong evidence for a subjective map. Downhill, the sun trickles, unperturbed. Here trots a mammoth with red wool, through the black yew forest. The tendency of elements to linger on: You say I dream of what I want, but what I want now is to dream. The cold rind broken, the same wind blows. Through a lens of ice, the dark heat of the sun burns wood, fires gunpowder, melts lead. Perhaps a cloud of musk rises, such as issues from a crocodile in passion. Unless light falls properly upon these flowers, you cannot see them. All associations at this level rain down from above. We talk of word-pictures. We observe vertigo. We reach the cleft by a steep gully or couloir—very dangerous, the path from the heights, the glory of the prospect, the insight gained. What I mean is a disturbance in all the senses at once. You will not find the flower confused. Facing a certain wind, there is always danger.

There was another life of cool summer mornings, the dogwood air and the slag stink so gray like our monsoon which we loved for the rain and cool wind until the rot came into us. And I remember the boys we were the evening of our departure, our mothers waving through the train’s black pluming exhaust; they were not proud in their tears of our leaving, so don’t tell me to shut up about the war or I might pull something from my head, from my head, from my head that you wouldn’t want to see and whoever the people are might be offended. From the green country you reconstruct in your brain, from the rubble and stink of your occupation, there is no moving out. A sweet boy who got drunk and brave on our long ride into the State draws a maze every day on white paper, precisely in his room of years as if you could walk into it. All day he draws and imagines his platoon will return from the burning river where he sent them sixteen years ago into fire. He can’t stop seeing the line of trees explode in white phosphorous blossoms and the liftship sent for them spinning uncontrollably beyond hope into the Citadel wall. Only his mother comes these days, drying the fruit in her apron or singing the cup of hot tea into his fingers which, like barbed wire, web the air.

The intriguing comfort of an imagined past is entered through objects the same way we continue the present but without nostalgia Parents so long for happiness they say one life is not enough and live through their children But children also live backwards through past candles crank telephones   carriages the ascendant animals that lived not in imagination but in Kansas and before there was an Oklahoma with its spotted sun In those days a metaphor for Hell was the corn sheller field corn shriven  shooting out cobs the grindstone   razor strop   even the ladder of progress from which Les Westfield slipped on a mossy rung though his son held the ladder and fell two stories: one the feudal structure of the family   two the harmonic of almost fatal necessity as the maple stump entered his hip along with the difficult remission of breath itself an antique whose furious elaborations mimicked the rose

We, the naturally hopeful, Need a simple sign For the myriad ways we’re capsized. We who love precise language Need a finer way to convey Disappointment and perplexity. For speechlessness and all its inflections, For up-ended expectations, For every time we’re ambushed By trivial or stupefying irony, For pure incredulity, we need The inverted exclamation point. For the dropped smile, the limp handshake, For whoever has just unwrapped a dumb gift Or taken the first sip of a flat beer, Or felt love or pond ice Give way underfoot, we deserve it. We need it for the air pocket, the scratch shot, The child whose ball doesn’t bounce back, The flat tire at journey’s outset, The odyssey that ends up in Weehawken. But mainly because I need it – here and now As I sit outside the Caffe Reggio Staring at my espresso and cannoli After this middle-aged couple Came strolling by and he suddenly Veered and sneezed all over my table And she said to him, “See,that’s why I don’t like to eat outside.”