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The moon swells and its yellow darkens nearer the horizon and soon all the aluminum rooftops shall appear, orange and distinct beside the orange sun, while the diamond flares in its vacuum within. It is simple to be with the shovel, thoughtless, inhabited by this divorce, it is good the luminous machinery, silenced, waits, nice that the conveyor belts choked with sand convey nothing. When I return home to coffee at 7:45 the lithe young girls will be going to high school, pulling to their mouths stark cigarettes through Arizona’s sunlight. These last few months have been awful, and when around five the roosters alone on neighboring small farms begin to scream like humans my heart just lies down, a stone.

Once Phidias stood, with hammer in his hand, Carving Minerva from the breathing stone, Tracing with love the winding of a hair, A single hair upon her head, whereon A youth of Athens cried, “O Phidias, Why do you dally on a hidden hair? When she is lifted to the lofty front Of the Parthenon, no human eye will see.” And Phidias thundered on him: “Silence, slave: Men will not see, but the Immortals will!”

1 Rain fell as a glass breaks, something suddenly everywhere at the same time. 2 To live like a painting looked into from more than one angle at once — eye to eye with the doorway, down at the hair, up at your own dusty feet. 3 “This is your house,” said my bird heart to my heart of the cricket, and I entered. 4 The happy see only happiness, the living see only life, the young see only the young, as lovers believe they wake always beside one also in love. 5 However often I turned its pages, I kept ending up as the same two sentences of the book: The being of some is: to be. Of others: to be without. Then I fell back asleep, in Swedish. 6 A sheep grazing is unimpressed by the mountain but not by its flies. 7 The grief of what hasn’t yet happened — a door closed from inside. The weight of the grass dividing an ant’s five-legged silence walking through it. 8 What is the towel, what is the water, changes, though of we three, only the towel can be held upside down in the sun. 9 “I was once.” Said not in self-pity or praise. This dignity we allow barn owl, ego, oyster.

1 It opens as a long lamplit evening with Rembrandt, stretched out with the glossy book of his Works on Paper. Brown-petal etchings and drawings: nut-brown, browner, irreclaimable rills of iron-gall ink sucked and feathered into the paper's wan cusps and culverts. The ink...it's as if there's no pulling away from the wet, flowing line to the tiny hedge-village perched on the edge of the cliff and the paper. Here the ink's overwatered and we barely, down in the forested loam, disengage the gentle saint, his rounded hat molding his crown like thatch on low rooftrees...St. Jerome. 2 Hunched, sunk in a deep-toned wash, he cares only for the huge, softleaved book propped on his knees. At nightfall Jerome swallowed up by his Bible misses the wistful look of his lion withdrawn to the forested ridge, the drawing's diagonal. And from there, one can say that landscape exists: prowls and spinnies where a lion might wind a lioness, or his prey... He looks out on tree-clouded peaks, tiny hamlets, two lambs in a wattle-fold. What the lion sees, we see. For Jerome, though, the lion is Judah, his seal and seed— Jesse's stem drops thickset leaves for him to read. 3 Saskia, of course, thrones in painting. Still, tiny sketches tumble from odd cabinets: the dear in a lopsided turban or twilled garden hat, sketched "on my wedding-day"— Saskia. A cluster of lines, a rippled race of curls and cloudsets. And, for a rarity, in Rembrandt, flowers. The simple, surprised, smiling face of Saskia as Flora...After her fourth lying-in (she was dying), he took to long walks on the city's outskirts; his sketchbook came home with mere touches of charcoal, a reed, a waterfowl, estuarial shallows unfolding to the rim. 4 Now life is meaner, chaotic. Rushes of arousal, lawsuits, debts...this print of a kitchen drab, eyes wandering, mouth a vacant, uptilted half-lune, her work-swollen hands on Saskia's velvet shawl, The thighs parted, abdomen pear-pendulant, the pulled-off stocking-stays grooved in the flab to her copse of cross-hatchings—No one wants to see this. But his hand made this stock, of himself the substance and seed. Fine- spun cosmos, brown tangle, soft sign: the old man spares us nothing. The book, the look, the lieu, the end of the Line.

I might as well begin by saying how much I like the title. It gets me right away because I’m in a workshop now so immediately the poem has my attention, like the Ancient Mariner grabbing me by the sleeve. And I like the first couple of stanzas, the way they establish this mode of self-pointing that runs through the whole poem and tells us that words are food thrown down on the ground for other words to eat. I can almost taste the tail of the snake in its own mouth, if you know what I mean. But what I’m not sure about is the voice, which sounds in places very casual, very blue jeans, but other times seems standoffish, professorial in the worst sense of the word like the poem is blowing pipe smoke in my face. But maybe that’s just what it wants to do. What I did find engaging were the middle stanzas, especially the fourth one. I like the image of clouds flying like lozenges which gives me a very clear picture. And I really like how this drawbridge operator just appears out of the blue with his feet up on the iron railing and his fishing pole jigging—I like jigging— a hook in the slow industrial canal below. I love slow industrial canal below. All those l’s. Maybe it’s just me, but the next stanza is where I start to have a problem. I mean how can the evening bump into the stars? And what’s an obbligato of snow? Also, I roam the decaffeinated streets. At that point I’m lost. I need help. The other thing that throws me off, and maybe this is just me, is the way the scene keeps shifting around. First, we’re in this big aerodrome and the speaker is inspecting a row of dirigibles, which makes me think this could be a dream. Then he takes us into his garden, the part with the dahlias and the coiling hose, though that’s nice, the coiling hose, but then I’m not sure where we’re supposed to be. The rain and the mint green light, that makes it feel outdoors, but what about this wallpaper? Or is it a kind of indoor cemetery? There’s something about death going on here. In fact, I start to wonder if what we have here is really two poems, or three, or four, or possibly none. But then there’s that last stanza, my favorite. This is where the poem wins me back, especially the lines spoken in the voice of the mouse. I mean we’ve all seen these images in cartoons before, but I still love the details he uses when he’s describing where he lives. The perfect little arch of an entrance in the baseboard, the bed made out of a curled-back sardine can, the spool of thread for a table. I start thinking about how hard the mouse had to work night after night collecting all these things while the people in the house were fast asleep, and that gives me a very strong feeling, a very powerful sense of something. But I don’t know if anyone else was feeling that. Maybe that was just me. Maybe that’s just the way I read it.

No ladders, no descending angels, no voice out of the whirlwind, no rending of the veil, or chariot in the sky—only water rising and falling in breathing springs and seeping up through limestone, aquifers filling and flowing over, russet stands of prairie grass and dark pupils of black-eyed Susans. Only the fixed and wandering stars: Orion rising sideways, Jupiter traversing the southwest like a great firefly, Venus trembling and faceted in the west—and the moon, appearing suddenly over your shoulder, brimming and ovoid, ripe with light, lifting slowly, deliberately, wobbling slightly, while far below, the faithful sea rises up and follows.

The world below the brine, Forests at the bottom of the sea, the branches and leaves, Sea-lettuce, vast lichens, strange flowers and seeds, the thick tangle, openings, and pink turf, Different colors, pale gray and green, purple, white, and gold, the play of light through the water, Dumb swimmers there among the rocks, coral, gluten, grass, rushes, and the aliment of the swimmers, Sluggish existences grazing there suspended, or slowly crawling close to the bottom, The sperm-whale at the surface blowing air and spray, or disporting with his flukes, The leaden-eyed shark, the walrus, the turtle, the hairy sea-leopard, and the sting-ray, Passions there, wars, pursuits, tribes, sight in those ocean-depths, breathing that thick-breathing air, as so many do, The change thence to the sight here, and to the subtle air breathed by beings like us who walk this sphere, The change onward from ours to that of beings who walk other spheres.

The world had fled, with all its silly cares and questionable aches, and in one swoon we rose above its stupefying airs like flying lovesick pigs up to the moon. In that blue light where two lives equaled all, our souls looked down upon a spinning ball. The world returned, and this was a surprise I raged against like someone on a rack, telling the sun, tears clouding my stunned eyes, give us our splendid isolation back. I craved third rails, a shot of something strong when I found out it doesn’t last for long. The world came back and stayed, pain never ended, but when the aches and cares begged for a hand, grew softer in the light we’d made and tended, I finally began to understand love’s widening third stage, and of the three this was the most outstanding ecstasy.

The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;— Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

If I close my eyes now, I can still see them canopied by the visor of my sunhat: three children islanded on a narrow rim of earth between the huge crack-willow that they squat before, hushed, poised to net a frog, and the pond the frog will jump to (it got away) a glass its dive will shatter. The unbroken image pleases my mind’s eye with its density, such thick crisscross of tree-trunk, earth, and tall grass I see no breach, no source for the light that steeps it but a blue burning in the pond’s green glass. The grass withered, the tree blew down, earth caught the frog, the children grew. Sky’s ice-blue flame teased along the wick it would consume.