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(To F. W. Harvey) Out of the smoke and dust of the little room With tea-talk loud and laughter of happy boys, I passed into the dusk. Suddenly the noise Ceased with a shock, left me alone in the gloom, To wonder at the miracle hanging high Tangled in twigs, the silver crescent clear. Time passed from mind. Time died; and then we were Once more at home together, you and I. The elms with arms of love wrapped us in shade Who watched the ecstatic west with one desire, One soul uprapt; and still another fire Consumed us, and our joy yet greater made: That Bach should sing for us, mix us in one The joy of firelight and the sunken sun.

Adam ate an apple it got stuck in his throat and they called him Eve the progenitor the creator of all things the mother of strength and fortitude and sadness Adam ate an apple choked on it so hard a rib popped out of his chest and they called it Eve the progenitor the creator of all things the mother of strength and fortitude and sadness it takes the hacking of a body to make a woman Adam hacking up a piece of his body it was just a piece of fruit they called me fruit once too they called me fruity before they called me flaming before they called me faggot before they called me woman i thought i would have to hack this body into pieces woman, a name stuck in my throat right under the apple Adam tried to eat choked on it for years waited for my ribs to pop out my chest to explode for my Eve to be created from the fruit i couldn’t swallow they called me fruit once until they called me woman and then they just called me fruitless as if it took a womb to be progenitor creator mother of all things strength and fortitude and sadness they reckon God looked at the image of herself and called it Adam they still don’t call me woman they still don’t birth me Eve even though they cast me out my throat shrunken close with the fruit still stuck in it like Adam before they called him Eve and suddenly i am a stranger to Eden i am a stranger to this body as if it hadn’t always been mine i reckon God looked at the image of herself and called it me but i don’t know if that was before or after the apple before or after Adam choked which came first the progenitor or the mother the apple or the rib the strength or the sadness this body was God’s original creation but they called it sin they called it Adam I reckon God looked at the image of  herself and called Adam Eve after she choked on his name some fruit that bloomed in everyone else’s throat but she could never quite swallow the fall of man was an apple hacked up from a fruitless body a woman learning what evil was like a man forcing his name upon you the fall of man was a rib being torn from a chest and men calling that violence holy naming a woman based only on the body parts she’s made of the fall of man was the beginning of Eve Eve casting out Adam’s name Eve discovering who she was the progenitor the creator of all things the mother of strength and fortitude and sadness the fall of man was Eve becoming a woman with or without Eden’s approval and now every time someone tries to call her Adam tries to force the apple of his name down her throat she laughs she swallows she looks at God herself and she smiles

Weeks after ice-out, last fall’s leaves make a pathway to the lake, radiant blue and still deathly cold. I press my hot forehead to the window, smudging it. Blow and the glass steams. As if looking at a photo through parchment, I’m detached, the way I saw his body in the CAT scan from a foggy distance. I’d like to open the window, release a wounded bird nursed to health. Wiping the glass with my sleeve I see white pelicans wheel and flash in the sky.

When one thing is becoming another, when writing is morphing, when the writing of an hour becomes the desire to write at all hours and into the night, fueled on caffeine or wine and desiring instruments of writing; typewriters, even a nib and ink well, and considering all the ways of stretching a space, digital or hard copy; hard copy, an ugly expression for printed matter, and for that matter, printed matter is efficient but lacks beauty. Page, a soft and elongated word; page, an extension at the end of my fingers; page, a screen that holds dreams and desires; the page of legal document that bind. The page is a promise. I read all sides, turning the page counterclockwise and turning the page over for what I may have missed. Desire is a stick for scratching words into the dirt and for chiseling stone until the words become solid. The pen is a body, an anatomy, not an earthworm with indecipherable ends; the pen has a head and tail, and inky guts. And the brain of the pen belongs to the maker of marks. later hours/another hour/late hours/early hours/happy hour/visiting hours. All the elements of the dying hour surround my laptop, in the dying blades of cut grass and in the dying battery. Finches continue their making of a nest of twigs and grasses, but I know the nest is early paper, the raw ingredients and pulp. I know the world is a page turner, a paper globe, and I know that the birds are the great writers of the sky.

The beautiful plate I cracked in half as I wrapped it in tissue paper— as if the worship of a thing might be the thing that breaks it. This river, which is life, which is wayfaring. This river, which is also sky. This dipper, full of mind, which is not only the hysterical giggling of girls, but the trembling of the elderly. Not only the scales, beaks, and teeth of creatures, but also their imaginative names (elephant, peacock) and their love of one another, the excited preparations they sometimes make for their own deaths. It is as if some graceful goddess, wandering in the dark, desperate with thirst, bent down and dropped that dipper clumsily in this river. It floated away.Consciousness, memory, sensory information, the historians and their glorious war. . . The pineal gland, tiny pinecone in the forehead, our third eye:   Of course it will happen here. No doubt. Someday, here, in this little house, they will lay the wounded side by side. The blood will run into the basement through the boards. Their ghosts are already here, along with the cracked plate wrapped in old paper in the attic, and the woman who will turn one day at the window to see a long strange line of vehicles traveling slowly toward her door, which she opens (what choice does she have?) although she has not yet been born.

In memory of Anthony Kerrigan The pure shapes of things shake and are fall ing under the cry of bajo el cri cri and chirping of the six margaritas daisies that I loved but now know deflower when the men bent upon murdering me bend down in cabinets and on cliffs and in cafes where some flamenco guitarist breaks his fingers on the grave accents   /   /   /     breaks his fingers on the acute \ \ hunting now even in the graves

Afterward, the compromise. Bodies resume their boundaries. These legs, for instance, mine. Your arms take you back in. Spoons of our fingers, lips admit their ownership. The bedding yawns, a door blows aimlessly ajar and overhead, a plane singsongs coming down. Nothing is changed, except there was a moment when the wolf, the mongering wolf who stands outside the self lay lightly down, and slept.

For I can snore like a bullhorn or play loud music or sit up talking with any reasonably sober Irishman and Fergus will only sink deeper into his dreamless sleep, which goes by all in one flash, but let there be that heavy breathing or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house and he will wrench himself awake and make for it on the run—as now, we lie together, after making love, quiet, touching along the length of our bodies, familiar touch of the long-married, and he appears—in his baseball pajamas, it happens, the neck opening so small he has to screw them on— and flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles himself to sleep, his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child. In the half darkness we look at each other and smile and touch arms across this little, startlingly muscled body— this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making, sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake, this blessing love gives again into our arms.

Just when I’m ready to call in the day and put it to bed without supper you send the mockingbird who plays with his musical zipper, exposing the World’s underlife. You send purfume from the autumn olive whose septillion flowering ears are full of bees singing songs for the revolution. Out back Jake’s Creek is speaking in tongues— Missed you-missed you-missed you. You wear me down, obsessively rubbing your hands along my better judgment, kissing the upturned noses of all my higher principles, until my clothes are big as a mast sail, until my longing leavens one thousand wedding cakes, my longing is an undertow, and all the tourist beaches are posted:Danger. Come for me—I’ll break off my arms and will them to a body of water, hang my legs up in overalls at night so they won’t come after us, feed English to the birds in sweet pats of butter Then our loving gets raucous— white moths yapping their wings—you wag, you wag in the little fingerbowl of me. Your verbstem assumes declensions of mythic proportions. My vowel sounds open on the south-most hallelujah side of the mountain. Then metaphysically speaking we’ve stopped speaking metaphorically—Silence nuanced as a landscape in snow.

The dark streets are deserted, With only a drugstore glowing Softly, like a sleeping body; With one white, naked bulb In the back, that shines On suicides and abortions. Who lives in these dark houses? I am suddenly aware I might live here myself. The garage man returns And puts the change in my hand, Counting the singles carefully.