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My father once broke a man’s hand Over the exhaust pipe of a John Deere tractor. The man, Rubén Vásquez, wanted to kill his own father With a sharpened fruit knife, & he held The curved tip of it, lightly, between his first Two fingers, so it could slash Horizontally, & with surprising grace, Across a throat. It was like a glinting beak in a hand, And, for a moment, the light held still On those vines. When it was over, My father simply went in & ate lunch, & then, as always, Lay alone in the dark, listening to music. He never mentioned it. I never understood how anyone could risk his life, Then listen to Vivaldi. Sometimes, I go out into this yard at night, And stare through the wet branches of an oak In winter, & realize I am looking at the stars Again. A thin haze of them, shining And persisting. It used to make me feel lighter, looking up at them. In California, that light was closer. In a California no one will ever see again, My father is beginning to die. Something Inside him is slowly taking back Every word it ever gave him. Now, if we try to talk, I watch my father Search for a lost syllable as if it might Solve everything, & though he can’t remember, now, The word for it, he is ashamed . . . If you can think of the mind as a place continually Visited, a whole city placed behind The eyes, & shining, I can imagine, now, its end— As when the lights go off, one by one, In a hotel at night, until at last All of the travelers will be asleep, or until Even the thin glow from the lobby is a kind Of sleep; & while the woman behind the desk Is applying more lacquer to her nails, You can almost believe that the elevator, As it ascends, must open upon starlight. I stand out on the street, & do not go in. That was our agreement, at my birth. And for years I believed That what went unsaid between us became empty, And pure, like starlight, & that it persisted. I got it all wrong. I wound up believing in words the way a scientist Believes in carbon, after death. Tonight, I’m talking to you, father, although It is quiet here in the Midwest, where a small wind, The size of a wrist, wakes the cold again— Which may be all that’s left of you & me. When I left home at seventeen, I left for good. That pale haze of stars goes on & on, Like laughter that has found a final, silent shape On a black sky. It means everything It cannot say. Look, it’s empty out there, & cold. Cold enough to reconcile Even a father, even a son.

I went out at night alone; The young blood flowing beyond the sea Seemed to have drenched my spirit’s wings— I bore my sorrow heavily. But when I lifted up my head From shadows shaken on the snow, I saw Orion in the east Burn steadily as long ago. From windows in my father’s house, Dreaming my dreams on winter nights, I watched Orion as a girl Above another city’s lights. Years go, dreams go, and youth goes too, The world’s heart breaks beneath its wars, All things are changed, save in the east The faithful beauty of the stars.

How valuable it is in these short days, threading through empty maple branches, the lacy-needled sugar pines. Its glint off sheets of ice tells the story of Death’s brightness, her bitter cold. We can make do with so little, just the hint of warmth, the slanted light. The way we stand there, soaking in it, mittened fingers reaching. And how carefully we gather what we can to offer later, in darkness, one body to another.

Near Butte, Montana

Across North Wales The snowflakes wander, A swarm of white bees. Over the woods A cold veil lies. A load of chalk Bows down the trees. No undergrowth Without its wool, No field unsheeted; No path is left Through any field; On every stump White flour is milled. Will someone tell me What angels lift Planks in the flour-loft Floor of heaven Shaking down dust? An angel’s cloak Is cold quicksilver. And here below The big drifts blow, Blow and billow Across the heather Like swollen bellies. The frozen foam Falls in fleeces. Out of my house I will not stir For any girl To have my coat Look like a miller’s Or stuck with feathers Of eider down. What a great fall Lies on my country! A wide wall, stretching One sea to the other, Greater and graver Than the sea’s graveyard. When will rain come?

All the complicated details of the attiring and the disattiring are completed! A liquid moon moves gently among the long branches. Thus having prepared their buds against a sure winter the wise trees stand sleeping in the cold.

Colonel Cold strode up the Line (tabs of rime and spurs of ice); stiffened all that met his glare: horses, men and lice. Visited a forward post, left them burning, ear to foot; fingers stuck to biting steel, toes to frozen boot. Stalked on into No Man’s Land, turned the wire to fleecy wool, iron stakes to sugar sticks snapping at a pull. Those who watched with hoary eyes saw two figures gleaming there; Hauptmann Kälte, colonel old, gaunt in the grey air. Stiffly, tinkling spurs they moved, glassy-eyed, with glinting heel stabbing those who lingered there torn by screaming steel.

as horses as for as purple as we go as heartbeat as if as silverware as it were as onion as I can as cherries as feared as combustion as want as dog collar as expected as oboes as anyone as umbrella as catch can as penmanship as it gets as narcosis as could be as hit parade as all that as icebox as far as I know as fax machine as one can imagine as cyclones as hoped as dictionary as you like as shadow as promised as drinking fountain as well as grassfire as myself as mirror as is as never as this

I thought about his death for so many hours, tangled there in the wires of the night, that it came to have a body and dimensions, more than a voice shaking over the telephone or the black obituary boldface of name and dates. His death now had an entrance and an exit, doors and stairs, windows and shutters which are the motionless wings of windows. His death had a head and clothes, the white shirt and baggy trousers of death. His death had pages, a dark leather cover, an index, and the print was too minuscule for anyone to read. His death had hinges and bolts that were oiled and locked, had a loud motor, four tires, an antenna that listened to the wind, and a mirror in which you could see the past. His death had sockets and keys, it had walls and beams. It had a handle which you could not hold and a floor you could not lie down on in the middle of the night. In the freakish pink and gray of dawn I took his death to bed with me and his death was my bed and in every corner of the room it hid from the light, and then it was the light of day and the next day and all the days to follow, and it moved into the future like the sharp tip of a pen moving across an empty page.

By new names and then no names at all, their laws will reach your land, Lorine, to feed on your much loved marshy spaces whose occasional faces discern a stranger from far off but like to take a break from well or welding just to talk. We can- not extricate a place from those it’s made of, the sounds it makes. But now from Blackhawk Island to Madison to Washington, geologies thin; more things sound or work the same. Their laws will reach your land, Lorine, by new names then no names at all.