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The well rising without sound, the spring on a hillside, the plowshare brimming through deep ground everywhere in the field— The sharp swallows in their swerve flaring and hesitating hunting for the final curve coming closer and closer— The swallow heart from wingbeat to wingbeat counseling decision, decision: thunderous examples. I place my feet with care in such a world.

the 14-year-old girl was treated like: (a) a grown woman. (b) a grown man. the bikini-clad girl was handled by the cop like: (a) a prostitute. (b) a prostitute by her pimp. the girl was slung to the ground like: (a) a sack of garbage into a dumpster. (b) somebody had something to prove. the girl’s braids flew around her head like: (a) helicopter blades. (b) she’d been slapped. the black girl was pinned to the ground like: (a) an amateur wrestler in a professional fight. (b) swimming in a private pool is a threat to national security. the girl’s cries sounded like: (a) the shrieks of children on a playground. (b) the shrieks of children being torn from their mothers. the protesting girl was shackled like: (a) a criminal. (b) a runaway slave. liken it or not —mckinney, texas, june 2015

What I’ve come to discuss is mostly about shadows and the airs left behind in caring, discarding, the long inhibitions of whereso and when. Alabaster, a dark quire, in its many pages and premises the maze, from which move tendrilled purples and contusions, magnificent fuchsia receivers of false content, the splayed flower, arterial, like the premise of a door is where it leads to or from. Communication of vessel, vial, capsule, hull, a tiniest nil fires the neurons from their swooning stall, is not a healing but adaptation to same a quickening in deleting of sensation a prior sizing. Stacked leaves (green shadows) are givens in the columned garden, what work is needed to determine that shape? Some hysteric trope of repetition, rage for accretion, dazed by its own mute replication, like the minute lines of a hand. They are its cries (writes Ponge, among others), the tongue inseparable from its utterance (langue). We weep to hear it, a language forgot. I was saying I keep speaking from some chamber sound deleted, which is why I never call or write. In that theatre are many eclipses and moons refracted in pinholes and wheels wherein revolve astonished birds, and the Queen of Night sleeps a rest restorative and profitable, and andante allegro, the dead ships never sail.

I carried my fear of the world to my children, but they refused it. I carried my fear of the world on my chest, where I once carried my children, where some nights it slept as newborns sleep, where it purred but mostly growled, where it licked sweat from my clavicles. I carried my fear of the world and apprenticed myself to the fear. I carried my fear of the world and it became my teacher. I carried it, and it repaid me by teaching me how to carry it. I carried my fear of the world the way an animal carries a kill in its jaws but in reverse: I was the kill, the gift. Whose feet would I be left at? I carried my fear of the world as if it could protect me from the world. I carried my fear of the world and for my children modeled marveling at its beauty but keeping my hands still— keeping my eyes on its mouth, its teeth. I carried my fear of the world. I stroked it or I did not dare to stroke it. I carried my fear of the world and it became my teacher. It taught me how to keep quiet and still I carried my fear of the world and my love for the world. I carried my terrible awe. I carried my fear of the world without knowing how to set it down. I carried my fear of the world and let it nuzzle close to me, and when it nipped, when it bit down hard to taste me, part of me shined: I had been right. I carried my fear of the world and it taught me I had been right. I carried it and loved it for making me right. I carried my fear of the world and it taught me how to carry it. I carried my fear of the world to my children and laid it down at their feet, a kill, a gift. Or I was laid at their feet.

Twelve dollars sixty cents, & the fact that there is no blood no storm can’t wash into dirt, that the time for these words is already ended, that for all the rain that has been here before so have I. & there is less water in the world than a famous woman once said, & I know that, & that the stars in the river also are real I also know, for they disappear also & refuse also to be touched. & I have touched bare things, & it works— it can be the sole unbraided moment in a life— but even so, what better days look like to me is still the tiny gore of heartbreak, & long walks with small shoes that can’t be taken off, & schools in a city I love that put molded cages over their clocks, because that works too to remind us we are not ready. & the worst of all is anything that stays as it is when touched. At lunchtime a woman famous for her ability to praise the ineffable says she can’t believe anyone returns to where they came from. But of course they do. In fact some do nothing else. & what is it they leave behind? Perhaps not the meaning of time, but the time of meaning, & the fact that whatever happens, tomorrow will change it.

About the age of twenty, when the first hairfall signals that nature is finished with the organism and we just begin to conceive the use of women (having been all this time more enamored of the fountain than the cistern), we retire to nursing homes, whether they be kaleidoscopic gardens aimed like a blunderbuss of hermeticism at our neighbors, or a desperate dream safari through old Zambesi, where the suicidal waves of angry natives give the illusion that we are advancing rapidly, or the crow’s-nest of this windless office block where the cook is already boiling the last sail. And sitting on the bench like a snowfall of beard expectorated by a cloudy hat, we consider the byproducts of life, such as (to name only the least offensive to the nose) the body itself when it has finally reached that eminence from which all is visible and from which it nonetheless feels the need to move on to a homestead of its dreams like an abandoned chicken coop on the sandy streamside under the tulip poplars, and to words, which result from an instinct for what is impossible: to soften the blow for others, including ourselves.

The sea bit, As they said it would, And the hill slid, As they said it would, And the poor dead Nodded agog The poor head. O topmost lofty Tower of Troy, The poem apparently Speaks with joy Of terrible things. Where is the pleasure The poetry brings? Tell if you can, What does it make? A city of man That will not shake, Or if it shake, Shake with the splendor Of the poem’s pleasure.

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted who disappeared into those shadows. I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here, our country moving closer to its own truth and dread, its own ways of making people disappear. I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods meeting the unmarked strip of light— ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise: I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear. And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these to have you listen at all, it's necessary to talk about trees.

Remembering the past And gloating at it now, I know the frozen brow And shaking sides of lust Will dog me at my death To catch my ghostly breath. I think that Yeats was right, That lust and love are one. The body of this night May beggar me to death, But we are not undone Who love with all our breath. I know that Proust was wrong, His wheeze: love, to survive, Needs jealousy, and death And lust, to make it strong Or goose it back alive. Proust took away my breath. The later Yeats was right To think of sex and death And nothing else. Why wait Till we are turning old? My thoughts are hot and cold. I do not waste my breath.

[Grand Forks, North Dakota] A boy just like you took me out to see them, the five hundred B-52’s on alert on the runway, fully loaded fully manned pointed in all the directions, running every minute of every day. They sound like a sickness of the inner ear, where the heard foams up into the noise of listening, where the listening arrives without being extinguished. The huge hum soaks up into the dusk. The minutes spring open. Six is too many. From where we watch, from where even watching is an anachronism, from the 23rd of March from an open meadow, the concertina wire in its double helix designed to tighten round a body if it turns is the last path the sun can find to take out, each barb flaring gold like a braille being read, then off with its knowledge and the sun is gone.... That’s when the lights on all the extremities, like an outline, like a dress, become loud in the story, and a dark I have not seen before sinks in to hold them one by one. Strange plot made to hold so many inexhaustible screams. Have you ever heard in a crowd mutterings of blame that will not modulate that will not rise? He tells me, your stand-in, they stair-step up. He touches me to have me look more deeply in to where for just a moment longer color still lives: the belly white so that it looks like sky, the top some kind of brown, some soil—How does it look from up there now this meadow we lie on our bellies in, this field Iconography tells me stands for sadness because the wind can move through it uninterrupted? What is it the wind would have wanted to find and didn’t leafing down through this endless admiration unbroken because we’re too low for it to find us? Are you still there for me now in that dark we stood in for hours letting it sweep as far as it could down over us unwilling to move, irreconcilable? What he wants to tell me, his whisper more like a scream over this eternity of engines never not running, is everything: how the crews assigned to each plane for a week at a time, the seven boys, must live inseparable, how they stay together for life, how the wings are given a life of seven feet of play, how they drop practice bombs called shapes over Nevada, how the measures for counterattack in air have changed and we now forego firepower for jamming, for the throwing of false signals. The meadow, the meadow hums, love, with the planes, as if every last blade of grass were wholly possessed by this practice, wholly prepared. The last time I saw you, we stood facing each other as dusk came on. I leaned against the refrigerator, you leaned against the door. The picture window behind you was slowly extinguished, the tree went out, the two birdfeeders, the metal braces on them. The light itself took a long time, bits in puddles stuck like the useless splinters of memory, the chips of history, hopes, laws handed down.Here, hold these he says, these grasses these torn pods, he says, smiling over the noise another noise,take these he says, my hands wrong for the purpose, here, not-visible-from-the-sky, prepare yourself with these, boy and bouquet of thistleweed and wort and william and timothy. We stood there. Your face went out a long time before the rest of it. Can’t see you anymore I said.Nor I, you, whatever you still were replied. When I asked you to hold me you refused. When I asked you to cross the six feet of room to hold me you refused. Until I couldn’t rise out of the patience either any longer to make us take possession. Until we were what we must have wanted to be: shapes the shapelessness was taking back. Why should I lean out? Why should I move? When the Maenads tear Orpheus limb from limb, they throw his head out into the river. Unbodied it sings all the way downstream, all the way to the single ocean, head floating in current downriver singing, until the sound of the cataracts grows, until the sound of the open ocean grows and the voice.