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for Roger Caillois Water hollows stone, wind scatters water, stone stops the wind. Water, wind, stone. Wind carves stone, stone's a cup of water, water escapes and is wind. Stone, wind, water. Wind sings in its whirling, water murmurs going by, unmoving stone keeps still. Wind, water, stone. Each is another and no other: crossing and vanishing through their empty names: water, stone, wind.

She goes out to hang the windchime in her nightie and her work boots. It’s six-thirty in the morning and she’s standing on the plastic ice chest tiptoe to reach the crossbeam of the porch, windchime in her left hand, hammer in her right, the nail gripped tight between her teeth but nothing happens next because she’s trying to figure out how to switch #1 with #3. She must have been standing in the kitchen, coffee in her hand, asleep, when she heard it—the wind blowing through the sound the windchime wasn’t making because it wasn’t there. No one, including me, especially anymore believes till death do us part, but I can see what I would miss in leaving— the way her ankles go into the work boots as she stands upon the ice chest; the problem scrunched into her forehead; the little kissable mouth with the nail in it.

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations To Christ our Lord I caught this morning morning's minion minion favorite, darling; also, an underling or servant , king- dom of daylight's dauphin dauphin prince; a French historical term, along with “chevalier” , dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wimpling rippling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing! Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle! Buckle! to bend, attach; prepare for flight or battle. The verb could be descriptive of the bird’s action, or it could be the speaker’s imperative. AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier! chevalier French word for “knight” or “champion”; pronounced Chev-ah-leer, to rhyme with “here” and “dear” No wonder of it: shéer plód shéer plód slowly, laboriously, and without break; these accent marks, inserted by Hopkins, tell the reader to place more accent or emphasis on those syllables when reading aloud makes plough down sillion sillion Fresh soil upturned by a plow (“plough”) Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear ah my dear Compare with the same phrase in the poem “Love (III)” by George Herbert, a poet Hopkins admired. , Fall, gall gall to become sore, crack, or chafe themselves, and gash gold- vermilion vermilion a vibrant scarlet color .

For Angela The Windigo is a flesh-eating, wintry demon with a man buried deep inside of it. In some Chippewa stories, a young girl vanquishes this monster by forcing boiling lard down its throat, thereby releasing the human at the core of ice. You knew I was coming for you, little one, when the kettle jumped into the fire. Towels flapped on the hooks, and the dog crept off, groaning, to the deepest part of the woods. In the hackles of dry brush a thin laughter started up. Mother scolded the food warm and smooth in the pot and called you to eat. But I spoke in the cold trees: New one, I have come for you, child hide and lie still. The sumac pushed sour red cones through the air. Copper burned in the raw wood. You saw me drag toward you. Oh touch me, I murmured, and licked the soles of your feet. You dug your hands into my pale, melting fur. I stole you off, a huge thing in my bristling armor. Steam rolled from my wintry arms, each leaf shivered from the bushes we passed until they stood, naked, spread like the cleaned spines of fish. Then your warm hands hummed over and shoveled themselves full of the ice and the snow. I would darken and spill all night running, until at last morning broke the cold earth and I carried you home, a river shaking in the sun.

1 I wanted out of the past so I ate the air, it took me further into air. It cut me, an iridescent chord of geometric light. I breathed deep, it lit me up, it was good. All these years, lightning, rain, the sky, its little daisies. Memento mori and lux. 2 And you can’t blame me. This daisy-feeling. I was a poet with a death-style of my own waking. I occupy the rest of it. A blue-green leaving feeling. To no longer belong to a body sometimes open to air. In rain, in early morning rain. 3 Today was the day of the amphitheater in mind. The day of a dreaming speech where the light is dope and that’s all you can say. When a feeling degrades and evolves into thought like 2 a.m. dilated, revealed a star. It will say this long agony is great being awake. It is being lovely now. 4 All the stars are here that belonged to whatever was speaking. I built my life out of what was left of me. Sky and its procedures. A romanticism of clouds, trees, pale crenellations, and poetry. A musical joybang. Touching everything. 5 When the words come back their fictions remain. Thunderheads and rain, lexical waters raking gutters, carving a world. The stylus will live in the flash. A daring light from pewter to whatever. Now discrete observations produce undramatic sound, like I am a bubble, make me the sea. O, make me the sea. 6 For a long time the names of things and things unnamed. For a long time hawks and their chicks, fox and their cubs, mice and their mice. For a long time bunnies and boojum, and a name for every bird in me. I am native to feathers — their netherside. 7 The sun was a goldish wave taped to a book. A wavy diagram in a fusty book. Foxed old wave. A soft electro-fuzz enters the head. A soft fuzzy opiate lightness. What could be the message in this pointillist masquerade. What use memory. 8 I came from a different world. I will die in it. Someone saw it, I love them for seeing it. I love seeing it with them. Love watching it die in me. It wasn’t behind or beside me. Finding it wasn’t it. Being it was everything. That was the thing I thought as I fell. 9 I am that thing in morning, whatever motors in the skull, something is claimed. Sudden rain keeps it real. Rooftops from the window look stunned. Cleansed. Looking out over the day, the pale performing day. I always consult the air before composing air. 10 And what have you been given, the blue nothing asks, who are you under clanging brass? Who are you, Saturday; sing to me. See the crows thread summerismus. Afternoon shade mirrors an issuelessness. A perfection of beetle slowly treading summer’s blade. The leaves broadcast color. I was born in summer, my conqueror, breaking into wisteria. 11 The sun was a golden rag nailed to a ladder. And here the marigolds grow down to the banks. The mayflies drowse above water. How then the dazzling surface and its dictions under piled clouds, and clouds sitting there by place and sound. One thing. This thing and sound glitters. Indicative transitive particular battles the void. All afternoon a green-gold silent light on the spotted grass, sprung. 12 I know it’s summer even if I can’t decipher the call. I believe in the birds haunting me. I held on. I’m full of bluster but also full of vision. I’m not ready to put the book down. To stop singing bright spots thrilling the quicksilver over my torrent. I make sounds, forget to die. I call it living, this inhuman conch in the ear. A pewter sensation and wind. 13 The sun remains a yellow sail tacked to the sky. I am climbing air here. I am here in the open. The kestrel swerves. Its silent kerning. A stunning calibration of nothing. I’m left to see.

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.