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One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides The Queen Anne’s Lace lying like lilies On water; it glides So from the walker, it turns Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes. The beautiful changes as a forest is changed By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it; As a mantis, arranged On a green leaf, grows Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows. Your hands hold roses always in a way that says They are not only yours; the beautiful changes In such kind ways, Wishing ever to sunder Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.

When the medication she was taking caused tiny vessels in her face to break, leaving faint but permanent blue stitches in her cheeks, my sister said she knew she would never be beautiful again. After all those years of watching her reflection in the mirror, sucking in her stomach and standing straight, she said it was a relief, being done with beauty, but I could see her pause inside that moment as the knowledge spread across her face with a fine distress, sucking the peach out of her lips, making her cute nose seem, for the first time, a little knobby. I’m probably the only one in the whole world who actually remembers the year in high school she perfected the art of being a dumb blond, spending recess on the breezeway by the physics lab, tossing her hair and laughing that canary trill which was her specialty, while some football player named Johnny with a pained expression in his eyes wrapped his thick finger over and over again in the bedspring of one of those pale curls. Or how she spent the next decade of her life auditioning a series of tall men, looking for just one with the kind of attention span she could count on. Then one day her time of prettiness was over, done, finito, and all those other beautiful women in the magazines and on the streets just kept on being beautiful everywhere you looked, walking in that kind of elegant, disinterested trance in which you sense they always seem to have one hand touching the secret place that keeps their beauty safe, inhaling and exhaling the perfume of it— It was spring. Season when the young buttercups and daisies climb up on the mulched bodies of their forebears to wave their flags in the parade. My sister just stood still for thirty seconds, amazed by what was happening, then shrugged and tossed her shaggy head as if she was throwing something out, something she had carried a long ways, but had no use for anymore, now that it had no use for her. That, too, was beautiful.

It happens again As soon as I take down her book and open it. I turn the page. My skies rise higher and hang younger stars. The ship's rail freezes. Mare Hibernicum leads to Anne Bradstreet's coast. A blackbird leaves her pine trees And lands in my spruce trees. I open my door on a Dublin street. Her child/her words are staring up at me: In better dress to trim thee was my mind, But nought save home-spun cloth, i' th' house I find. We say home truths Because her words can be at home anywhere— At the source, at the end and whenever The book lies open and I am again An Irish poet watching an English woman Become an American poet.

Knoxville, December 27, 2016, for Marilyn Kallet’s 70th birthday. This poem was constructed to carry any memory you want to hold close. We arrived when the days grew legs of night. Chocolates were offered. We ate latkes for hours to celebrate light and friends. We will keep going despite dark or a madman in a white house dream. Let’s talk about something else said the dog who begs faithfully at the door of goodwill: a biscuit will do, a voice of reason, meat sticks — I dreamed all of this I told her, you, me, and Paris — it was impossible to make it through the tragedy without poetry. What are we without winds becoming words? Becoming old children born to children born to sing us into love. Another level of love, beyond the neighbor’s holiday light display proclaiming goodwill to all men who have lost their way in the dark as they tried to find the car door, the bottle hidden behind the seat, reason to keep on going past all the times they failed at sharing love, love. It’s weak they think — or some romantic bullshit, a movie set propped up behind on slats, said the wizard of junk understanding who pretends to be the wise all-knowing dog behind a cheap fan. It’s in the plan for the new world straining to break through the floor of this one, said the Angel of All-That-You-Know-and-Forgot-and-Will-Find, as she flutters the edge of your mind when you try to sing the blues to the future of everything that might happen and will. All the losses come tumbling down, down, down at three in the morning as do all the shouldn’t-haves or should-haves. It doesn’t matter, girl — I’ll be here to pick you up, said Memory, in her red shoes, and the dress that showed off brown legs. When you met him at the age you have always loved, hair perfect with a little wave, and that shine in your skin from believing what was impossible was possible, you were not afraid. You stood up in love in a French story and there fell ever a light rain as you crossed the Seine to meet him for café in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. You wrote a poem beneath the tender skin from your ribs to your hip bone, in the slender then, and you are still writing that song to convince the sweetness of every bit of straggling moonlight, star and sunlight to become words in your mouth, in your kiss — that kiss that will never die, you will all ways fall in love. It doesn’t matter how old, how many days, hours, or memories, we can fall in love over and over again. The Seine or Tennessee or any river with a soul knows the depths descending when it comes to seeing the sun or moon stare back, without shame, remorse, or guilt. This is what I remember she told her husband when they bedded down that night in the house that would begin marriage. That house was built of twenty-four doves, rugs from India, cooking recipes from seven generations of mothers and their sisters, and wave upon wave of tears, and the concrete of resolution for the steps that continue all the way to the heavens, past guardian dogs, dog after dog to protect. They are humble earth angels, and the rowdiest, even nasty. You try and lick yourself like that, imagine. And the Old Woman laughed as she slipped off her cheap shoes and parked them under the bed that lies at the center of the garden of good and evil. She’d seen it all. Done it more than once. Tonight, she just wanted a good sleep, and picked up the book of poetry by her bed, which was over a journal she kept when her mother was dying. These words from May Sarton she kept in the fourth room of her heart, “Love, come upon him warily and deep / For if he startle first it were as well / to bind a fox’s throat with a gold bell /As hold him when it is his will to leap.” And she considered that every line of a poem was a lead line into the spirit world to capture a bit of memory, pieces of gold confetti, a kind of celebration. We all want to be remembered, even memory, even the way the light came in the kitchen window, when her mother turned up the dial on that cool mist color 
of a radio, when memory crossed the path of longing and took 
mother’s arm and she put down her apron said, “I don’t mind if I do,” and they danced, you watching, as you began your own cache of remembering. Already you had stored the taste of mother as milk, father as a labor of sweat and love, and night as a lonely boat of stars that took you into who you were before you slid through the hips of the story. There are no words when you cross the gate of forbidden waters, or is it a sheer scarf of the finest silk, or is it something else that causes you to forget. Nothing is ever forgotten says the god of remembering who protects the heartbeat of every little cell of knowing from the Antarctic to the soft spot at the top of this planetary baby. Oh baby, come here, let me tell you the story of the party you will never forget, no matter where you go, where you are, or where you will be when you cross the line and say, no more. No more greedy kings, no more disappointments, no more orphans, or thefts of souls or lands, no more killing for the sport of killing. No more, no more, except more of the story so I will understand exactly what I am doing here, and why, she said to the fox guardian who took her arm to help her cross the road that was given to the care of Natives who made sure the earth spirits were fed with songs, and the other things they loved to eat. They like sweets, cookies, and flowers. It was getting late and the fox guardian picked up her books as she hurried through the streets of strife. But it wasn’t getting late. There was no late, only a plate of tamales on the counter waiting to be or not to be. At this age, said the fox, we are closer to the not to be, which is the to be in the fields of sweet grasses. Wherever you are, enjoy the evening, how the sun walks the horizon before cross sing over to be, and we then exist under the realm of the moon. There’s where fears slay us, in the dark of the howling mind. We all battle. Befriend them, the moon said as a crab skittered under her skirt, her daughter in the high chair, waiting for cereal and toast. What a girl she turned out to be, a willow tree, a blessing to the winds, to her family. There she is married, and we start the story all over again, said her father in a toast to the happiness of who we are and who we are becoming as Change in a new model sedan whips it down the freeway toward the generations that follow, one after another in the original lands of the Mvskoke who are still here. Nobody goes anywhere though we are always leaving and returning. It’s a ceremony. Sunrise occurs everywhere, in lizard time, human time, or a fern uncurling time. We instinctually reach for light food, we digest it, make love, art or 
trouble of it. The sun crowns us at noon. The whole earth is a queen. Then there are always goodbyes. At sunset say goodbye to hurt, to suffering, to the pain you caused others, or yourself. Goodbye, goodbye, to Carrie Fisher, the Star Wars phenomenon, and George Michael, the singer. They were planets in our emotional universe. Some of my memories are opened by the image of love on screen in an imagined future, or broken open when the sax solo of “Careless Whisper” blows through the communal heart. Yes, there’s a cosmic consciousness. Jung named it but it was there long before named by Vedic and Mvskoke scientists. And, there is a cosmic hearteousness — for the heart is the higher mind and nothing can be forgotten there, no ever or ever. How do I sing this so 
I don’t forget? Ask the poets. Each word is a box that can be opened or closed. Then a train of words, phrases garnered by music and the need for rhythm to organize chaos. Like right here, now, in this poem is the transition phase. I remembered it while giving birth, summer sun bearing down on the city melting asphalt but there we were, my daughter and I, at the door between worlds. I was happier than ever before to welcome her, happiness was the path she chose to enter, and 
I couldn’t push yet, not yet, and then there appeared a pool of the 
bluest water. We waited there for a breath to catch up, and then it did, and she took it that girl who was beautiful beyond dolphin dreaming, and we made it, we did, to the other side of suffering. This is the story our mothers tell but we couldn’t hear it in our ears stuffed with Barbie advertising, with our mothers’ own loathing set in place by patriarchal scripture, the smothering rules to stop insurrection by domesticated slaves, or wives. It hurt everybody. The fathers cannot know what they are feeling in such a spiritual backwash. Worship boxes set into place by the need for money and power will not beget freedom. Only warships. For freedom, freedom, oh freedom sang the slaves, the oar rhythm of the blues lifting up the spirits of peoples whose bodies were worn out, or destroyed by a man’s slash, hit of greed. This is our memory too, said America. Heredity is a field of blood, celebration, and forgetfulness. Don’t take on more than you can carry, said the eagle to his twin sons, fighting each other in the sky over a fox, dangling between them. It’s that time of the year, when we eat tamales and latkes. We light candles, fires to make the way for a newborn child, for fresh 
understanding. Demons will try to make houses out of jealousy, anger, 
pride, greed, or more destructive material. They place them in a part of the body that will hold them: liver, heart, knee, or brain. So, my friend, let’s let that go, for joy, for chocolates made of ashes, mangos, grapefruit, or chili from Oaxaca, for sparkling wine from Spain, for these children who show up in our dreams and want to live at any cost because we are here to feed them joy. Your soul is so finely woven the silkworms went on strike, said the mulberry tree. We all have mulberry trees in the memory yard. They hold the place for skinned knees earned by small braveries, cousins you love who are gone, a father cutting a watermelon in the summer on the porch, and a mother so in love that her heart breaks — it will never be the same, yet all memory bends to fit. The heart has uncountable rooms. We turn to leave here, and so will the hedgehog who makes a home next to that porch. We become birds, poems.

For a tree, you're the worst kind of friend, remembering everything. Pale-skinned, slightly brailled, blank page of pre-adolescence. The way the smallest knife-slice would darken with time, rise and widen. mark was here. Left his. But these are the digs you're used to, sufferer of mere presence, scratched years, scratched loves we wanted to write on the world and couldn't trust to an eardrum. (I scarred you myself long ago with my own jack-knife, jill-name. You took her as the morning unsteamed around me. Took us as we had to be taken, in.) Old relief, new reminder, I was young, what could I have written? Didn't care then, had to see it scraped out, big letters beneath your erotic nubs and crotches. O beech, it's no big riddle: we fell in the forest, you heard. Quiet, in your own way. In your own way, spreading the word.

Light from the ugliest lamp I ever saw, here on the table that triples for reading, eating (can’t say dining), business on the phone; ugliest except a few around the corner in that guest house at windows —plaster driftwood; cylinders like rockets or sanitary napkins propping shades; thin torso of a youth; red globe on orange globe, the works,somebody’s collection. Wouldn’t she love this one, lump of lamp base intending landscape, two donkeys in mustard glaze, heads ruefully down, one carrying two rush panniers large enough to hold your pens or salts and peppers; on the other a shifty man with droopy moustache rides, ** grumping under his sombrero; right leg broken off at the knee, left leg clipped at ankle. They make no progress, this mold-made work—the joins, arthritic ridges where dabs of grayish green suggest a wizened bush from which a brass post rises to hold a shade that doesn’t fit and twice has tried to burn, as crusty sores at the rim show. Still, it lights my work. Why hate it? Do I care? These indecorous furnishings stand for failure, are a clutter that weighs down, defeats the purpose, like dumbbells taken along on vacations; the pen jar; lamp base, sextant, portable folding triptych. ** The writing table fills with clutter. Specials coax me to nudge buying into play. A checkout coupon lets me get some brand of lunch meats fifty-five cents off if I spend two dollars but I just can’t find it when I’m shopping, the ticket— with its rubric of good news and inscrutable forest of bar code, black on red—to lead me on; back home there it is, on the table, laying waste my power to spend. What I have wanted (with Larkin) to do must be “essentially undoable, it belongs to the imagination.” Rather, the demolition has begun, piss and shit and blood mix in the snow-white bowl; and yet ** I find the Beech Forest (behind the beach dunes) that Allen recommended “without reservation.” The man was right—it more than satisfies, these beech ponds and their dune forest. I sat on a pitch pine that had blown over and then turned round and risen again, and bowed part making a seat something like a saddle; the tree was growing while I sat on it as were the other pitch pines round the pond ruddy in afternoon, late light of day, rough trunks with tufts of twisted branches green with needles, it was idyllic, wind speaking through the pines, ** solitude:—O, yes, two high-breasted girls came striding by, I heard them coming, I heard them going, yammering at full volume not looking left or right, they passed me, were out of sight and soon of earshot, Doppler effect caused by exuberant youth in oblivious chitchat. And people are smoking in these dry woods too, not policing their butts is how I know, the butts will surface from the heavier, sifting sand, sand spilling, surfing down hills, crashing in waves over the path here. But call it solitude, when a thought—but wait! I thought—I should not be ** having a thought here, this moment: yet a vision of a Chinese poet in his study overlooking such a pond as this arrives out of the silence like the yellow water lilies on the water, pads spreading out in files like a design on the broadloom of a lobby. The sage is working on a poem, brushing it on silk, inspired by a blend of Tao and Confucius. Doubtless he would not forget allusions to Sung poets, if he were not a Sung poet himself, in which case he would have to echo Han or T’ang; and he would be writing of solitude; time passing; absent friends ** (enlightenment would have to be inferred). No matter, I didn’t bring a pen today. However, over there are inkberry bushes, so with a reed I just might make a start. . . . Farther on the path I listen to a bird, a warbler perhaps, I do not know the song or see the bird. There with the pines and sand and birdsong, and no prayer- or guide- or selfhelp-book, no serious commune, the mind must yearn to be led on; it wants a deity, an altar to approach; an altar at least to take steps toward; occasion to rise to—with nothing planned for the mind, ** it’s like a person suddenly blind, not blind for a long time and knowing the ropes, but just now, rope-stung, blind—and groping, feeling around for the way, any way, or, closer to home, when the power goes at night just getting from here to there even though you know the drill, —you never find the batteries when you need them, groping down cellar for the circuit breaker then you flip it; nothing, it’s a bigger failure you are part of— know the layout in general yet without ceremony the mind leans forward, over an edge, hoping for, needing a little ritual, like a guide rail to keep it ** from falling, going down. Even then the mind finds need of other news, keeps on desiring alterity somewhere at hand. For example, walking the streets of Provincetown, nothing to see but lots to look at, all that fluff and buff, the Michelin-man day-trippers aching along; suddenly I want a prayer book, maybe not Bottles and Stools or The Little Red Book but still . . . even a pocket copy of A Shropshire Lad, such as I find soon after all the buff and fluff at Tim’s, the only bookstore on the street, handy for quick reads. Thin as a shortbread biscuit, ** THE RICHARDS PRESS LONDON 1915, no doubt with its khaki cover, intended for some Tommy’s backpack, a backward solace for off-duty hours in the trenches: admittedly not very much on the other hand just the thing I’m talking after; a talisman perhaps is all, an amulet with words that say,buck up, come on, you’ll make it, there’s something on after all this, no matter what the words say. Housman’s “vision,” his drear anguish of love for someone, something, lad and landscape that never were, that might shoot threads of gold among the bloody muslins and the mud; ** mind wants other news than what the ruffled senses bring data of—smoke or flesh or birdsong. It saw there was a space within, reserved for turning toward another; other; that no bullet, arrowwood or beach plum might fill, though these could occupy that space a moment. Again I heard the casual chirping of that bird, off in that tupelo, the song I did not know, below the cries of gull and jay I did. The unknown I saw was not enough to satisfy; or—satisfied when it was framed, complement of what is known for sure. ** It’s—like—when you go someplace strange, new, the seashore, any boundary, you want to learn the names of plants. Start looking at the edges of leaves. It gives a grip on where you are, and who, or seems to, to know bullbrier, bearberry, blueberry. You get a GUIDE or a local to tell. On the dune path I found one, a gnarled bush alone, hollylike but succulent leaf; nothing like it in the book. But why feel helped in nature by a name? When a horde of flower children wanted to know what they should do to be saved (back when) Snyder told them, “learn the names of plants; of animals; learn to do something with your hands.” ** Well I went out to that dune again: to cop a copy of the leaf I took and lost: so it’s only bayberry after all; dioecious, two-sexed: some leaves different from others, that’s OK only one got pictured in my book; but the waxiness, bayberry for sure, set to be rendered into candles for a gifte shoppe, nauseating noose of “scents.” Its nutlets twinkle near the oily leaves aglow above the sand, bone white. Doesn’t make me feel better to know now about that scrawny straggler. Sanctimonious pilgrim know-alls, Bradford & Co.! Forest into desert, just like that. No time flat, considering.

Here, With my beer I sit, While golden moments flit: Alas! They pass Unheeded by: And, as they fly, I, Being dry, Sit, idly sipping here My beer. O, finer far Than fame, or riches, are The graceful smoke-wreaths of this free cigar! Why Should I Weep, wail, or sigh? What if luck has passed me by? What if my hopes are dead,— My pleasures fled? Have I not still My fill Of right good cheer,— Cigars and beer? Go, whining youth, Forsooth! Go, weep and wail, Sigh and grow pale, Weave melancholy rhymes On the old times, Whose joys like shadowy ghosts appear,— But leave me to my beer! Gold is dross,— Love is loss,— So, if I gulp my sorrows down, Or see them drown In foamy draughts of old nut-brown, Then do I wear the crown, Without the cross!

One day the bees start wandering off, no one knows why. First one doesn’t come back, and then another and another, until those who are supposed to stay and guard the hive, those who are making the royal jelly and feeding it to the queen, those who form different parts of the great brain, must put down what it is they are doing and go off in search— having no choice, not if the hive is going to survive, and where do they go, each one vanishing, never to be seen again, off wandering in the wilderness, having forgotten how, forgotten what it was they were after, what it was that gave meaning, having known it at one time, now a veil drawn. Is it that each one is a cell, a brain cell, and now they’re failing one by one, plaque to Alzheimer’s, or the way the cells in the esophagus will begin to mimic the stomach if the acid is too intense, if you’re sleeping and the valve won’t close, a lifetime of eating and drinking the wrong things, those cells compensating, trying their best, but opening the door to those other cells, the wild ones, the ones that call those bees, out there, somewhere, lost, having nowhere to return at night, their search for nectar fruitful, their small saddlebags full, but no one to go home to, no home, no memory of home, it’s as if they’d stumbled into some alternate world, one looking like ours but just a glass width different, just a fraction of sunlight different, the patient waking up, finding herself wandering, someone leading her back to bed, but there is no bed. Confusion of the hive, they call it, and the hive dies, each bee goes down, each light goes out, one by one, blinking out all over town, seen from a great height as the night ages, darkens, as you’re parked in your car with your own true love, until it’s just you two and the stars, until it’s just you.

Before I got my eye put out – I liked as well to see As other creatures, that have eyes – And know no other way – But were it told to me, Today, That I might have the Sky For mine, I tell you that my Heart Would split, for size of me – The Meadows – mine – The Mountains – mine – All Forests – Stintless stars – As much of noon, as I could take – Between my finite eyes – The Motions of the Dipping Birds – The Morning’s Amber Road – For mine – to look at when I liked, The news would strike me dead – So safer – guess – with just my soul Opon the window pane Where other creatures put their eyes – Incautious – of the Sun –

Because the only view we have is the one that looks down on the knees. Praise perspective. Praise shared disdain. Praise space made by connective tissue; the synaptic cleft; elbowroom at the dinner table; polite conversation; lies you push through your teeth. Because dissecting a dog's heart won't change the way it thinks. Praise redirected traffic. Praise the gnarled lip that defends the gentle bones. Because your mother was a seahorse. And to think of her thin is to empty all the ice from the tea glasses; to strain the soup by driving it through your hand. Praise tablecloths; sway-back chairs; the plastic folds that protect slice after slice of cheese.