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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.

A man with binoculars fixed a shape in the field and we stopped and saw the albino buck browsing in the oats—white dash on a page of green, flick of a blade cutting paint to canvas. It dipped its head and green effaced the white, bled onto the absence that the buck was—animal erasure. Head up again, its sugar legs pricked the turf, pink antler prongs brushed at flies. Here in a field was the imagined world made visible—a mythical beast filling its rumen with clover until all at once it startled, flagged its bright tail— auf Wiedersehen, surrender— and leapt away— a white tooth in the closing mouth of the woods.

There we go in cars, did you guess we wore sandals? Carrying the till, memorizing its numbers, apt at the essential such as rearranging languages. They occur from route to route like savages who wear shells. “I cannot place him.” Yet I do. He must ascend indefinitely as airs he must regard his image as plastic, adhering to the easeful carpet that needs footprints and cares for them as is their wont in houses, the ones we pass by. Such a day/or such a night reeling from cabin to cabin looking at the cakewalk or merely dancing. These adventures in broad/or slim lamplight, Yet the cars do not cheat, even their colors perform in storm. We never feel the scratch, they do. When lightning strikes it’s safer to ride on rubber going down a mountain, safer than trees, or sand, more preventive to be hid in a cloud we sing, remembering The old manse and robins. One tear, a salty one knowing we have escaped the charm of being native. Even as your glance through the windshield tells me you’ve seen another mishap of nature you would willingly forget, prefer to be like him near the hearth where woodsmoke makes a screen of numbers and signs where the bedstead it’s not so foreign as this lake. The plateau, excursionist, is ahead. After that twenty volumes of farmland. Then I must guide us to the wood garage someone has whitened where the light enters through one window like a novel. You must peer at it without weakening, without feeling hero, or heroine, Understanding the distances between characters, their wakeful or sleep searchingness, as far from the twilight ring the slow sunset, the quick dark.

You get over these constant storms and learn to be married all over again, every day. —Barry Hannah The foyer is hers because the kettle is hers as it was made for water and the water is hers because the sac that grew the baby was hers though the semen that made the sac was his like his boots are his and the tea that’s of the kettle after it enters his mouth is his unless it’s hers since it’s inside the kitchen that’s hers and therefore not his unless he’s simmering the Asian sauces that are his because they’re dense and knotty rather than milkish and paltry like everything else from the nation state of the motherland of the no-mercy child who won’t stop sucking and wanting and whining in the ear that is his although the child herself belongs somehow to the woman and thus its hunger is hers as is the bed and dresser and mirror and latch though the hammer naturally is his and the saw and lumber and back and muscle he suffered to build because he guessed he thought it would be good for something besides this house like a pestilence of people who weren’t his because nothing was his except the whirl he carried in his belly of the mix-up of loving her in the first place like being sucked into a burrow of lava embers and putting your tongue to it until it caught fire and all he could say was that the burn was his—this hole in the mouth— this fiasco of the woman bent now in the garden to smell the cilantro as though she didn’t know his head was split with hating her and loving her and hating her and loving her because she was an ache and a kink and somehow the furrow—the groove and the rut— and age and death and kiss and fuck and not-fuck and song and not-song and no it was not sweet though he’d go on and carry it since also—since mostly—it was.

The incoherent rushing of the train Dulls like a drugged pain Numbs To an ether throbbing of inaudible drums Unfolds Hush within hush until the night withholds Only its darkness. From the deep Dark a voice calls like a voice in sleep Slowly a strange name in a strange tongue. Among The sleeping listeners a sound As leaves stir faintly on the ground When snow falls from a windless sky— A stir    A sigh

After Otto Piene How does beginning go how does remembering without forgetting go in front of me in the snow a man his back lonesome somber how does beginning go not remembering flashes of light that showed him images when he was a boy quick and blinding see the shadows in the light how does not-remembering go listen to the hissing see the light and Germany’s lightness how bright Germany is like soot like images quick and blinding how does beginning go smell the snow it’s new it fell in the night in the dark gets forgotten in images quick listen to the snow it lies light like linen something’s burning a hissing somber like images at night on walls listen to the hissing smell the smell of burning look at the soot on a white background Translated from the German

more so than we did before, but now we know what to do with them. We hang our troubles on them and wipe our shoes against them. We go lethargic on the porch, we tear the bark with spindly fingers. We soak up the sun with restless hunger. So much sky we say in unison, where does it go, do we follow it? Do we let it get away? For months we splay without a fence, door wide open— blue and brash inside and out.Because we can, we keep saying,because we can. We face a lush sense of life that we have nothing to do with. We face our cravings and journey with a new kind, our new people; They all possess smiles and frowns, but more windswept expressions—no permanent downwardness of spirit, the way it was back east. And since we've left the city to be ourselves, we still must face our needy souls— full of want, compulsions. Were we proud of this? The way we turned away? But we've protected these habits, forgone others in return. What is the profession of the culture-hoarder? Who are the gatekeepers? Do we grace them with our backs? Moreover our chests remain empty yet seductively warmed, burning by the fire, our asses cold and exposed. All the wood, crisp birch to shield our lazy lobes, rounded bodies, our cerebrums and other parts. Are we awaiting cheerless ambivalence to greet us in the West? Cavernous and cloudless, unaffected by beauty. Let's be petulant, this is us now, we say. We can't help but find ourselves lustful; crying alligator tears with pails to our eyes,we didn't know we were here we kept saying,we don't know how it happened. We thought and thought, and finally we closed our doors on the trees to hide what we grew temperate for but resolve didn't find us, not alive with force,we flew out of their arms.

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we protested but not enough, we opposed them but not enough. I was in my bed, around my bed America was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house. I took a chair outside and watched the sun. In the sixth month of a disastrous reign in the house of money in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money, our great country of money, we (forgive us) lived happily during the war.