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I sit in my sorrow a-weary, alone; I have nothing sweet to hope or remember, For the spring o’ th’ year and of life has flown; ’Tis the wildest night o’ the wild December, And dark in my spirit and dark in my chamber. I sit and list to the steps in the street, Going and coming, and coming and going, And the winds at my shutter they blow and beat; ’Tis the middle of night and the clouds are snowing; And the winds are bitterly beating and blowing. I list to the steps as they come and go, And list to the winds that are beating and blowing, And my heart sinks down so low, so low; No step is stayed from me by the snowing, Nor stayed by the wind so bitterly blowing. I think of the ships that are out at sea, Of the wheels in th’ cold, black waters turning; Not one of the ships beareth news to me, And my head is sick, and my heart is yearning, As I think of the wheels in the black waters turning. Of the mother I think, by her sick baby’s bed, Away in her cabin as lonesome and dreary, And little and low as the flax-breaker’s shed; Of her patience so sweet, and her silence so weary, With cries of the hungry wolf hid in the prairie. I think of all things in the world that are sad; Of children in homesick and comfortless places; Of prisons, of dungeons, of men that are mad; Of wicked, unwomanly light in the faces Of women that fortune has wronged with disgraces. I think of a dear little sun-lighted head, That came where no hand of us all could deliver; And crazed with the cruelest pain went to bed Where the sheets were the foam-fretted waves of the river; Poor darling! may God in his mercy forgive her. The footsteps grow faint and more faint in the snow; I put back the curtain in very despairing; The masts creak and groan as th’ winds come and go; And the light in the light-house all weirdly is flaring; But what glory is this, in the gloom of despairing! I see at the window just over the street, A maid in the lamplight her love-letter reading. Her red mouth is smiling, her news is so sweet; And the heart in my bosom is cured of its bleeding, As I look on the maiden her love-letter reading. She has finished the letter, and folding it, kisses, And hides it — a secret too sacred to know; And now in the hearth-light she softly undresses: A vision of grace in the roseate glow, I see her unbinding the braids of her tresses. And now as she stoops to the ribbon that fastens Her slipper, they tumble o’er shoulder and face; And now, as she patters in bare feet, she hastens To gather them up in a fillet of lace; And now she is gone, but in fancy I trace The lavendered linen updrawn, the round arm Half sunk in the counterpane’s broidered roses, Revealing the exquisite outline of form; A willowy wonder of grace that reposes Beneath the white counterpane, fleecy with roses. I see the small hand lying over the heart, Where the passionate dreams are so sweet in their sally; The fair little fingers they tremble and part, As part to th’ warm waves the leaves of the lily, And they play with her hand like the waves with the lily. In white fleecy flowers, the queen o’ the flowers! What to her is the world with its bad, bitter weather? Wide she opens her arms — ah, her world is not ours! And now she has closed them and clasped them together — What to her is our world, with its clouds and rough weather? Hark! midnight! the winds and the snows blow and beat; I drop down the curtain and say to my sorrow, Thank God for the window just over the street; Thank God there is always a light whence to borrow When darkness is darkest, and sorrow most sorrow.

To stop the blood of flowers and to reverse harmony. To die in the river, to die in the river. To hear the heart of a rat. There is no difference between the silver of the moon and the silver of my tribe. To clear the field and to run to the edge of the earth. To bear a crystal in the chest: the word. Soap evaporates at the door, fire illuminates the day. To look back, to look back one more time. And to remove the robe. The poppy has bitten the sky. To walk empty roads and drink shadows. To feel the oak at the mouth of the well. To stop the blood of flowers, to stop the blood of flowers. Altars watch each other face to face. To lie down on a blue cabbage. Translated from the Slovenian

Position is where you put it, where it is, did you, for example, that large tank there, silvered, with the white church along- side, lift all that, to what purpose? How heavy the slow world is with everything put in place. Some man walks by, a car beside him on the dropped road, a leaf of yellow color is going to fall. It all drops into place. My face is heavy with the sight. I can feel my eye breaking.

you are my bread and the hairline noise of my bones you are almost the sea you are not stone or molten sound I think you have no hands this kind of bird flies backward and this love breaks on a windowpane where no light talks this is not time for crossing tongues (the sand here never shifts) I think tomorrow turned you with his toe and you will shine and shine unspent and underground

From this height the sunset spans the whole world before me: houses and trees are shadows neon flares between them like sudden fire the freeways run, always strangely vacant with riderless cars empty air the windows up here refract the blue slate and rose light making the hills on the horizon collide with ideas of Sussex, piedmont or the cold clear wind of the Abruzzi but that is never what is out there. At home, the lamp curls its aurora into the corners of the room and out the windows squares, rectangles of light stake out a territory on the ragged lawn. In the center of things between the pressing of the window and air — a small space — there is a meeting that defines nothing, everything.

When the cow died by the green sapling, her limp udder splayed on the grass like something from the sea, we offered our words in their low calibrations— which was our fashion—then severed her horns with a pug-toothed blade and pounded them out to an amber transparency, two sheets that became, in their moth-wing haze, our parlor windows. They softened our guests with the gauze-light of the Scriptures, and rendered to us, on our merriest days, the sensation of gazing through the feet of a gander. In time we moved up to the status of glass—one pane, then two—each cupping in proof of its purity a dimple of fault, a form of distortion enhancing our image. We took the panes with us from cottage to cottage, moth-horn and glass, and wedged up the misfitted gaps with a poultice of gunny and wax. When woodsmoke darkened our bricks, we gave to the windowsills a lacquer of color—clear blue with a lattice of yellow: a primary entrance and exit for light. And often, walking home from the river and small cheese shop, we would squint their colors to a sapling green, and remember the hull of that early body, the slap of fear we suffered there, then the little wash of recovery that is our fashion—how we stroked to her bones a cadenced droning, and took back from her absence, our amber, half-literal method of sight.

After Rilke's “Les Fenêtres” i how much     loss gains suddenly in emphasis and     brilliant sadness ii far from that which lives and turns iii languages of our vain comings and goings wilt and gnaw iv beat them,                                punish them for having said and always said v tear out, finally,      our spells vi one life pours and grows impatient for another life vii and the lovers, look on them there, immobile and frail pinned like the butterflies for the beauty of their wings viii too great in the outdoors ix like the lyre, you should be rendered a constellation

Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word? He is a brittle crazy glass; Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford This glorious and transcendent place, To be a window, through thy grace. But when thou dost anneal in glass thy story, Making thy life to shine within The holy preachers, then the light and glory More reverend grows, and more doth win; Which else shows waterish, bleak, and thin. Doctrine and life, colors and light, in one When they combine and mingle, bring A strong regard and awe; but speech alone Doth vanish like a flaring thing, And in the ear, not conscience, ring.

abide with me don’t ever abide gimme anytime a pile of leaf-hay across the field underneath the bright new blue tractor pulling the tedder which is the waffler or fluffer

The garments worn in flying dreams were fashioned there— overcoats that swooped like kites, scarves streaming like vapor trails, gowns ballooning into spinnakers. In a city like that one might sail through life led by a runaway hat. The young scattered in whatever directions their wild hair pointed, and gusting into one another, fell in love. At night, wind rippled saxophones that hung like windchimes in pawnshop windows, hooting through each horn so that the streets seemed haunted not by nighthawks, but by doves. Pinwheels whirled from steeples in place of crosses. At the pinnacles of public buildings, snagged underclothes— the only flag—flapped majestically. And when it came time to disappear one simply chose a thoroughfare devoid of memories, raised a collar, and turned his back on the wind. I closed my eyes and stepped into a swirl of scuttling leaves.