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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.

For the young man who would have myrrh from a woman, and cinnamon and aloes, smoother than oil is her mouth. She flatters him with it. Between her lips lies death. The young man learns that as his bride he should instead have taken Wisdom to him. Wisdom is the words that figure her as fear of the Lord. She has seen Israel choose the ways of the oppressor. The young men Strangeness would claim She instructs. Wisdom pleads with them at the city gates that when pride comes, then comes shame. Let a man meet rather with a bear and her whelps than with folly. Withhold not good from those to whom it is due. The Lord’s eyes are on every place, as on Hell and destruction. Whose order was it that made the ends of the earth? Who put clothes on the deep? What is his name, and what is his son’s name, if you can tell? Wisdom can. Still a child, she attended God when God had not yet divided the waters. It was no one but God’s to do to divide what isn’t said from what is. If God was male already, Wisdom was not male. (It may have been Wisdom’s difference from God that let God speak good into being.) Wisdom was God’s delight. She was with him over the waters. The still unformed deep would have lasted had God not given it form. It made God tremble that His call for it to be light there would not let night touch day. (There had to be room between them or they couldn’t be what God said they were.) God and Wisdom were two. Day and night were two also. Day gave it to be seen at once that down was and up. The deep had a face. God’s breath hovered over it until there was wind there instead. The wind is in force in many places over the earth’s dry land. Its going on like that is so it too can have extension and still not be seen. A door woke me. It was having to open and then flap shut against the stable’s north wall. some thuds were back-to-back. After others, there’d be a minute or more of only the wind. The wind had become something the trees had had between them for days now. They’d showed to their tops that they’d be moved only so much. At the same time that it was many trees, the night wind I was hearing them in was one. (One has to be the number God has against the too-many-to-count.) If it had a back to it in those places how far north where right then it was quiet, the wind’s broad front was as high as just below God. (That’s where God starts to be a different nothing than wind.) If nothing’s around the wind to any of its sides, Wisdom confides that God’s around all. Inside all God holds, Wisdom’s at the work of meaning for the faithful that there’s good to be had, if God’s heeded. I wanted to be asleep so I wouldn’t go on making God up out of the wind.

One day there passed by a company of cats a wise dog. And as he came near and saw that they were very intent and heeded him not, he stopped. Then there arose in the midst of the company a large, grave cat and looked upon them and said, “Brethren, pray ye; and when ye have prayed again and yet again, nothing doubting, verily then it shall rain mice.” And when the dog heard this he laughed in his heart and turned from them saying, “O blind and foolish cats, has it not been written and have I not known and my fathers before me, that that which raineth for prayer and faith and supplication is not mice but bones.”

Once there ruled in the distant city of Wirani a king who was both mighty and wise.  And he was feared for his might and loved for his wisdom. Now, in the heart of that city was a well, whose water was cool and crystalline, from which all the inhabitants drank, even the king and his courtiers; for there was no other well. One night when all were asleep, a witch entered the city, and poured seven drops of strange liquid into the well, and said, “From this hour he who drinks this water shall become mad.” Next morning all the inhabitants, save the king and his lord chamberlain, drank from the well and became mad, even as the witch had foretold. And during that day the people in the narrow streets and in the market places did naught but whisper to one another, “The king is mad.  Our king and his lord chamberlain have lost their reason. Surely we cannot be ruled by a mad king.  We must dethrone him.” That evening the king ordered a golden goblet to be filled from the well.  And when it was brought to him he drank deeply, and gave it to his lord chamberlain to drink. And there was great rejoicing in that distant city of Wirani, because its king and its lord chamberlain had regained their reason.

Tune yr sandwich to the key of C Make biscuits in kitchen B Miss Scarlet with her lead pipe Waits behind the cupboard door Clubs one from the other limp Only to begin again innocent & nothing to do but gather into Legion gather into constellation Coming along then a spider its web Holds the walls together holds the floor Up gathers toward a central point Mean & distribution derivation To insert a thumb & see what sticks Past the earth’s crust cirrus And acidic enough to spoon fork but Chew & eat & swallow digesting the fact That nine wonders hope the clouds have Answers hope the clouds have

I wanted to give you something for your pain. But not the drug du jour or the kind word this side of cliché. Something you wouldn’t find on a talk show, in a department store or dark alleyway. I wanted to give you something for your pain but I couldn’t imagine what. Frankincense, myrrh—even gold seemed too plain (too plain and too gross). I needed something that wouldn’t have occurred to you or me, or even Nature: a creature more fabulous, more imaginary than you’d find in a rain forest or tapestry or pixel-loaded screen. Some exotic anodyne an alchemist or astrophysicist would be envious of: a chemical reaction, an astral refraction, an out-of-body, out-of-mind, one-of-a-kind transport from your pain, that would last longer than a day, go deeper than the past. I would have founded a whole new religion if I thought that would suffice. As for love—sacred, profane, or both— I wanted to give you something that didn’t arrive with a roll of the dice and was hard to maintain and had a knack for disappointing. I wanted to give you something for your pain that didn’t smack of a sorcerer’s trick, or a poet’s swoon, or a psychiatrist’s quip. Nothing too heavy or spacey or glib. I’d have given you the moon but it’s been done (and besides, its desolate dust and relentless tendency to wane might have only exacerbated your pain). If I could have given you something you could depend on, could always trust without a second thought, I would have. A splendid view, perhaps, or a strain of music. A favorite dish. A familiar tree. A visit from a genie who, in lieu of granting you a wish, would tend subtly to your every need, and never once tire, never complain. But when all was said and done (or hardly said, not nearly done) I was as helpless as you. Could you tell— or were you so overcome your pain was all that mattered? It seemed to me we were a kind of kin: willing the mind its bold suspensions, but the heart, once shattered, never quite matching its old dimensions. And yet you persevered in spite of pain, you knew to hold hope as lightly as you held my hand (a phantom grasp, a clasp that seemed to come from the other side). And your genial smile made it plain: you were pleased by my wish to please. And then you died.