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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.

I laze about, deranged and unafraid to godly kiss you, kiss the pharmacist that whipped you, undilute, to dilate high your animus of lime and lye. I know of an upstairs hell. A creamy, vascular thump through bonus years of things that pass and things that do not move. Your cellular mouth. Your mess of inattention. Now that none of us are good looking I think that/they are right. Strokes of light you taped across my nipple. Patterns staked to fake the love we cannot feel so slick the miser of your hand through my bad heart. Genius, you are blond enough. Once in a while. And in the end, when I sweep coolly up and will not be drawn back, then I will tell you of it. How I can. In writing, I am making an attempt to depict my beautiful nose through imagery. I will tell you of it. Once in a while. I will miss you. And the tape. To be flung down, petals from a balcony.

We start stopping when she’s afraid something bad will happen. Don’t worry, I say, all will be well. How could she know? She’s never read it, never heard of Elizabeth and Jane, never wanted Mr. Darcy. Like me she needs to know how things will end. I know Elizabeth will be fine. As I knew, last week, my sister weeping, that Elinor– sobbing, begging–wouldn’t lose Marianne. It’s Jane Austen! My sister doesn’t know that in Austen nothing really bad happens. I leave her on the couch with the last hours. How much my sister will have to endure, alone, with this new drama. Later her message. The last one in which she will sound like herself. Hi, it’s me. The movie was unbelievable. Unbelievable.

Late, I have come to a parched land doubting my gift, if gift I have, the inspiration of water spilt, swallowed in the sand. To hear once more water trickle, to stand in a stretch of silence the divining pen twisting in the hand: sign of depths alluvial. Water owns no permanent shape, sags, is most itself descending; now, under the shadow of the idol, dry mouth and dry landscape. No rain falls with a refreshing sound to settle tubular in a well, elliptical in a bowl. No grape lusciously moulds it round. Clouds have no constant resemblance to anything, blown by a hot wind, flying mirages; the blue background, light constructions of chance. To hold back chaos I transformed amorphous mass—and fire and cloud— so that the agèd gods might dance and golden structures form. I should have built, plain brick on brick, a water tower. The sun flies on arid wastes, barren hells too warm and me with a hazel stick! Rivulets vanished in the dust long ago, great compositions vaporized, salt on the tongue so thick that drinking, still I thirst. Repeated desert, recurring drought, sometimes hearing water trickle, sometimes not, I, by doubting first, believe; believing, doubt.

With what deep murmurs through time’s silent stealth Doth thy transparent, cool, and wat’ry wealth Here flowing fall, And chide, and call, As if his liquid, loose retinue stay’d Ling’ring, and were of this steep place afraid; The common pass Where, clear as glass, All must descend Not to an end, But quicken’d by this deep and rocky grave, Rise to a longer course more bright and brave. Dear stream! dear bank, where often I Have sate and pleas’d my pensive eye, Why, since each drop of thy quick store Runs thither whence it flow’d before, Should poor souls fear a shade or night, Who came, sure, from a sea of light? Or since those drops are all sent back So sure to thee, that none doth lack, Why should frail flesh doubt any more That what God takes, he’ll not restore? O useful element and clear! My sacred wash and cleanser here, My first consigner unto those Fountains of life where the Lamb goes! What sublime truths and wholesome themes Lodge in thy mystical deep streams! Such as dull man can never find Unless that Spirit lead his mind Which first upon thy face did move, And hatch’d all with his quick’ning love. As this loud brook’s incessant fall In streaming rings restagnates all, Which reach by course the bank, and then Are no more seen, just so pass men. O my invisible estate, My glorious liberty, still late! Thou art the channel my soul seeks, Not this with cataracts and creeks.