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At five I wake, rise, rub on the smoking pane A port to see—water breathing in the air, Boughs broken. The sun comes up in a golden stain, Floats like a glassy sea-fruit. There is mist everywhere, White and humid, and the Harbour is like plated stone, Dull flakes of ice. One light drips out alone, One bead of winter-red, smouldering in the steam, Quietly over the roof-tops—another window Touched with a crystal fire in the sun’s gullies, One lonely star of the morning, where no stars gleam. Far away on the rim of this great misty cup, The sun gilds the dead suburbs as he rises up, Diamonds the wind-cocks, makes glitter the crusted spikes On moss-drowned gables. Now the tiles drip scarlet-wet, Swim like birds’ paving-stones, and sunlight strikes Their watery mirrors with a moister rivulet, Acid and cold. Here lie those mummied Kings, Men sleeping in houses, embalmed in stony coffins, Till the Last Trumpet calls their galleries up, And the suburbs rise with distant murmurings. O buried dolls, O men sleeping invisible there, I stare above your mounds of stone, lean down, Marooned and lonely in this bitter air, And in one moment deny your frozen town, Renounce your bodies—earth falls in clouds away, Stones lose their meaning, substance is lost in clay, Roofs fade, and that small smoking forgotten heap, The city, dissolves to a shell of bricks and paper, Empty, without purpose, a thing not comprehended, A broken tomb, where ghosts unknown sleep. And the least crystal weed, shaken with frost, The furred herbs of silver, the daisies round-eyed and tart, Painted in antic china, the smallest night-flower tossed Like a bright penny on the lawn, stirs more my heart, Strikes deeper this morning air, than mortal towers Dried to a common blindness, fainter than flowers, Fordone, extinguished, as the vapours break, And dead in the dawn. O Sun that kills with life, And brings to breath all silent things—O Dawn, Waken me with old earth, keep me awake!

The night’s drifts Pile up below me and behind my back, Slide down the hill, rise again, and build Eerie little dunes on the roof of the house. In the valley below me, Miles between me and the town of St.-Jeannet, The road lamps glow. They are so cold, they might as well be dark. Trucks and cars Cough and drone down there between the golden Coffins of greenhouses, the startled squawk Of a rooster claws heavily across A grove, and drowns. The gumming snarl of some grouchy dog sounds, And a man bitterly shifts his broken gears. True night still hangs on, Mist cluttered with a racket of its own. Now on the mountainside, A little way downhill among turning rocks, A square takes form in the side of a dim wall. I hear a bucket rattle or something, tinny, No other stirring behind the dim face Of the goatherd’s house. I imagine His goats are still sleeping, dreaming Of the fresh roses Beyond the walls of the greenhouse below them And of lettuce leaves opening in Tunisia. I turn, and somehow Impossibly hovering in the air over everything, The Mediterranean, nearer to the moon Than this mountain is, Shines. A voice clearly Tells me to snap out of it. Galway Mutters out of the house and up the stone stairs To start the motor. The moon and the stars Suddenly flicker out, and the whole mountain Appears, pale as a shell. Look, the sea has not fallen and broken Our heads. How can I feel so warm Here in the dead center of January? I can Scarcely believe it, and yet I have to, this is The only life I have. I get up from the stone. My body mumbles something unseemly And follows me. Now we are all sitting here strangely On top of the sunlight.

Dark frost was in the air without, The dusk was still with cold and gloom, When less than even a shadow came And stood within the room. But of the three around the fire, None turned a questioning head to look, Still read a clear voice, on and on, Still stooped they o’er their book. The children watched their mother’s eyes Moving on softly line to line; It seemed to listen too—that shade, Yet made no outward sign. The fire-flames crooned a tiny song, No cold wind stirred the wintry tree; The children both in Faërie dreamed Beside their mother’s knee. And nearer yet that spirit drew Above that heedless one, intent Only on what the simple words Of her small story meant. No voiceless sorrow grieved her mind, No memory her bosom stirred, Nor dreamed she, as she read to two, ’Twas surely three who heard. Yet when, the story done, she smiled From face to face, serene and clear, A love, half dread, sprang up, as she Leaned close and drew them near.

Memory was the room I entered down a long corridor Thrown by the white drugs of pain though pain Was adrift on a glassy stream of green tide Where images flickered and ran on I didn’t write poetry for publication In those days but to grab the attention Of readers nearby who had been crushed by life Who floated across the exercise yard like headaches Smoking rag-cigarettes looking sideways For the next punishment for a break or maybe distraction Chips of memory kept rising to the surface Of our minds to take another bite I had no idea why poetry the squid caught me It clung to my brain in the damaging climate A creature in the alien element of air Arising from centuries of survival Thoughts must be inky and capable Of working the bait with a black beak For a quick kill and a metaphysical rise up through the abyss Poetry in those days was a handmade lure There were no fish or birds so I spun my lines To the ones with heads spring-loaded with resentment Their temper a red fleck twitching in an eye While poems of the future waited in line to hear my number

Pretty girl. The weather has knocked her down again and given her to the lake to wear as a skin. Why am I always being the weather? There were days in the winter when her smile was so lovely I felt the breathing of my own goodness, though it remained fetal and separate. I was a scavenger who survives with a sling and stones, but whose god nonetheless invents the first small bright bird. And it was like flight to bring food to her lips with a skeletal hand. But now she will always be naked and sad. She will be what happens to lake water that is loved and is also shallow enough. The thickening, the slowing, the black blood of it, the chest opened to reveal the inevitable heart attack. God, the silence of the chamber we watch from. What happens to water that isn’t loved? It undergoes processes. It freezes beside traffic. But the reaching out to all sides at once, the wet closing of what was open? That is a beautiful woman. So of course I stand and stare, never able to pinpoint the exact moment I killed her.

The reservoir churned and cloud-deformed The far line of hills, fused, bunched color bitter wind against this hunch my folded bones I can see the rust earth beneath trees, the rough mats gathering weight in semi-darkness, dim nesting bases of trees Graft of dark cloud upon lighter one behind, building up of something, a thickening, deposit of cold air, dark web of insistence, built up in me How long can it be here? A simmering of trees, a dark moiling a winter weight a mid-shimmering of heat-distorted things The positioning of bolts of deep orange, gold-green and amber molded, wicked in together Drops in pressure, now, a field of cold, a shift between rain and snow The movement into this remembering of separate things, train sounding its horn, removing itself from the scene Snow thickening the far bars of trees, graying them in Blotting, dulling, gauzing over this dream It is snowfalling, it is beauty-filling and cleansing this burn of words it is delivering something seeming to uplift and to begin pressing downward, this ink into frozen droplet this thing Snow plinking in the leaves, the left hands of trees the neat levers and pulls the odd weeds The rich fringe of emptying trees the shifted pins the breaks into dense pines into period reeds into gutterings What happens to the opposite shore is untenable is unmanageable to me That stratagem of damage, that unmattering Believe me it is some abomination of things being killed and that mattering to me That exquisite built thing that is obliterated its tiny white amplitude, its singing crushed into particles, its must on the undersides of leaves Now I am sure the world has not unfolded before me anymore but has closed into rows of its foldings Something in the collections of those trees bare branches upthrust, the brush of them bare branches up-brushed their lip along mesh of shore weeds, the flanged grasses the scrim of their midst I am in them again meddling in darks that are in them and the white gold that is their outermost screen that is their leafleting their grief that is in me thin dredge of pebbles and strange glandular patternings of trees against trees against cut-bank against breath The rubied lung of sumac tragedian

chains of the willow, desolate weft birds and the slim reprieves the socketing together of weeds before water straight-pins of jet incontrovertible smears of dense cloud against bullet-train whitenings, unleashed the reductions to tense the awful dozes into deep sinks flush grows upward, secreting, soaking through the old damasks fretwork of trees, their balances achieved then slipped off touched-up surge of cloud across water The river shuttles onward, reconstituting It gains the red threads of taillights the spare greens and the thousand paired whites warping over, shaping off The ducks come forth out of something unclear The trees drain their weights into water The ducks are a tension I have not known of How they pivot, disfiguring the whole field dragging their trapezoid blear They are careful and meet their trains behind them like brides Now the whistles of those taken to air The disturbance of them in this river and the wavering cardiographies up-rushed, up-stayed This is the push of all strayed things into night the heavying of trees against sky-fire stolen into a river, cloistered down I do not want anything more than this taking of last light into pocketings and loose garments unbearable closets of the trees the stitched-in bones and the placketings This feeling of everything unhanded suddenly let go into robes The half-bustled willow rails forward The still surface. The quieted surface. The same sharp planets exacting there

Barely discerned clouds Hard, hard to get here what worth, what worth River of steel. River of no one becoming you. Trees that are emptier today, more forced in their forms To focus on them is to be made glad of them in their strangeness The earth extrudes through them toward emptiness The few elms dismembering The willow’s bloom above shore like a curtaining To focus on it is to be mostly taken into its tapes and its filters It is lost to the surface of this river The dull, impenetrable, intractable surface resisting, unetchable Now the faint rain. I don’t know what to do with all this waiting things getting themselves readied toward emptiness The scratchy, shattering elm, its crimped skin, its exfoliating, its rivening its being disfigured by fortune and by wind A crone with old frills at her hair The grasp of her toward me

clouds in rafts above, upon one another, pushed up along the margin of sky dark underbellies Shirring of grasses and the nearly empty apple tree behind Where is this beginning from? The roll of clouds bolsters up close moves vaguely east Hear the interstate, its rush of backdrop constant Oh those deep colors are something sacred There are patches of olive green, chartreuse, umber, piled against each other, snapping and smoking almost and then the empty prongs and systems cross-hatchings against the grays, burnished and glowing The cloud roll has changed now, been buffeted slowly into bunches, disorganizing Oh, these torches before me that seem to burn brighter as the light fades This aching gradation, smear and gleam-forth and then the bare black hands up through splaying and forcing the crowns so slightly, just a tender worrying up from inside the swollen gloves, the spheres of them, the undoing the serial falling-off Furious brocade, yes, devastation That one oak in its torque and above, against the maddening subtle surface of the sky the barely defined roads upon it, the passages the growings-forth gobbed and wrought, rich impasto stubborn, unbecoming Now the grays, almost purple, seem to move forward branching up from out of the background darkening forth surge from within the mass organisms coming up against each other, bulging and turning off, roiling slow and mesmeric the contained motion of it rooted static movement, within stasis painstaking damage then recovery, damage then recovery A lighter band of sky now, stratum between dark cloud and complicated span of tree-frieze layering, up-changing free-needled, built-up duns and copperings score and rose-green gore, stitch and fret always upon the under-thing, the broad backing up over the one

The shelter of it carved, caved Across the river, the park and the little Ferris wheel closed down The great oaks emptying, russet, gusseted the hovering slant light leaking from the outer edge of cloud bed leads and shawls pulled forth Thy synchrony of the lost elements recovered the shivering water surfaces, planar unmeldings, remeldings, riverine alchemies, unlocketed selves now the reemergence, the sun pouring global gold uptilted, gobleted, incanted Am I not as God made me but stranger? Made stranger still by what I have seen at this hour of earth untended, unministered— light caught up in the river’s grooved tread That sun more like a mass grope out of emptiness and the black river weeds before it, torn and trained, rocketed and stark and stuck-to The tall shadow of the willow grows forth And the spare stems of the grasses and the rods of the mullein And these are the stations of this river The houses and the boats and the parked cars The growing wedge the ducks make moving forward, the shape of the element there among the weeds that jut forward, the mass of the willows growing deeper in green and sundering The backfall of sun going downward The surface of the river coming clear of its own admixture The ducks moving over like slow planes in formation, barely seen needles hauling white threads, secretly heeding The fish in my skin relinquishes Will I know then what I have become? The river darkens from its end of trees closing in There is the sun and this deep depression Exiting as viewed in this river