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Sit on the park bench and chew this mint leaf. Right now, way above your head, two men floating in a rocket ship are ignoring their delicate experiments, their buttons flashing red. Watching you chew your mint, the men forget about their gritty toothpaste, about their fingers, numb from lack of gravity. They see you and, for the first time since liftoff, think home. When they were boys they were gentle. And smart. One could tie string around a fly without cinching it in half. One wrote tales of sailors who drowned after mistaking the backs of whales for islands. Does it matter which man is which? They just quit their mission for you. They’re on their way down. You’ll take both men — a winter husband and a summer husband. Does it matter which is — don’t slump like that. Get up, we have so much work to do before —                          wait               you’re going the wrong     way               small whelp of a woman!         this is not how we     behave                       where are you going this world is already       willing to give you anything                  do you want to know Latin okay             now everyone here knows Latin            want inflatable     deer deer!               i promise the winter / summer children will barely hurt                   dear        i’m hurt   that you would ever think i don’t glisten to you         i’m always glistening tame your voice       and               turn around the men are coming                    they’ve traded everything for you               the gemmy   starlight the click                          click                                  click of the universe   expanding stop aren’t you known              aren’t you known here how can you be certain that anywhere else will provide more pears than you could ever eat remember the sweet rot of it all come back             you forgot your sweater what if there’s nothing there when you — you don’t have your sweater what if it’s cold

he is harmless, camera’d in a muffled parliament of cantaloupe-motions. For every doubt a speech. He plans to quarter it and quarter the quarters. The knife first rehearses a meridian, then the equator, then mid-cut tilts and leaves a tatter on one half’s rim. You can tell he thinks about what thought is bad at. You can see that by comparison a chimp would appear, within its limitations, deft, while the man with no limitations with respect to principles of melon-slicing does not. You can tell he withholds himself from cantaloupe, as if frightened they will go extinct and take costs sunk in the skill of slicing them, and further tell it will be the same next time, him approaching the fruit as though newly, wondering if it had a stone in it, or pith and segments, or required coring, or stank when punctured, or would show pleasing shapes in section. He switches grip, placing his palm over the fat edge of the blade because a sock puppet has squeaked, Safety first. The rinds parted from the sixteenths are more or less a waste of flesh, according as thrift argued with intemperance. You can tell the impending chunks will be publicly homely, not those of the cruise ship buffet where the night-shift Neopolitan surpasses himself with flutes and scallops. You can tell right off a mind unquiet and at once absent, now remembering J. at seventeen, something out of a Kenyan Vermeer, smiling elfinly as she sliced the cantaloupe. You could tell by the way she sliced the cantaloupe the way one slices a cantaloupe would tell a lot. He draws the knife along each inside edge to shave the pulp and seedmatter, varying pressure, speed, and angle of attack like a deaf man bowing a cello. Stutters mark the inner faces. He slices the slices radially into chunks, and varies the spacing between the cuts from equal angles, which makes the pieces too big at the center, to equal volumes, which makes them too long at the poles. You can tell, as he squeezes a lime-half over the pile and steps back to admire his freehanded benighted by-committee cantaloupe-justice, he cannot be the children’s hockey coach or run for office, the erratic hexes him, he circulates sometimes fogged and twitching in his house, not wishing you could not tell, exactly, but wanting out.

1. A man can stand with both feet touching the ground until his legs no longer reach that far, until the ground disappears. 2. Giant Baba stands six feet ten inches tall, taller in Japan. It doesn’t matter how tall you are. 3. A man can hold a woman, can’t stand to lose her to the heart’s wreckage. His body will fall apart one day—a rock crab’s chassis stripped clean by seagulls, a dandelion gone to seed. 4. Giant Baba stands over seven feet tall. When he lifts you over his head, you will be eight and a half feet above the ground. 5. A man can stand for anything when seen from below—fatherhood, majesty, satisfaction after conquest. In the end all men are seen from above—patch of lawn, chunk of stone. 6. Giant Baba towers above your house, dangles you by the ankle. Your life looks so small from the sky. 7. A man and a woman can wrestle together in the same bed. A man and a woman and a marriage can brawl all night. 8. Giant Baba looms dark against the stars, back blotting out the Milky Way, arms cradling you and your family history. Listen to his mammoth heartbeat, war drum, earthquake. Just listen. 9. A man can stand naked in a foreign country, can search for meaning in strange tongues. He tries to find himself in stories about famous battles, about giants. It doesn’t matter where he stands. 10. Giant Baba’s body is made of girders and mastodon bones. When you stand outside to look at your house from new angles, when you think of how your father died, the giant will be there to catch you.

up a little,” he says, shutting the rusted tailgate, “maybe at least lean down from your high horse and look busy,” picking up his work gloves and his spade. “You’re not the only hick on the clock with an education,” he says, half- laughing, half-wheezing, and spits, his bottom lip bulging with a load of Skoal,“even if you do think pretty highly of your poetry.”

my daughter says. Unless the car could float. Unless by car you mean boat. Unless the ocean turned to ice and promised not to crack. Unless Greenland floated over here, having lifted its anchor. Unless we could row our country there. Our whole continent would have to come along, wouldn't it? Unless we cut ourselves free. What kind of saw could we use for that? What kind of oars could deliver one country to another? She asks, Why is Greenland called Greenland if it’s not green? Why is Iceland called Iceland if it’s greener than Greenland? Unless it’s a trick, a lie: the name Greenland is an ad for Greenland. Who would go promised nothing but ice? Who would cut her home to pieces and row away for that?

You could pick it up by the loose flap of a roof and all the houses would come up together in the same pattern attached, inseparable white cubes, olive trees, flowers dangling from your hand a few donkey hooves might stick out flailing the air for balance, but the old women would cling like sea urchins and no children would fall. Even though it is small, the people are Greek, and it sits like an oyster in the middle of the Aegean still it is tough, it reminds you of wagon trains, prairie schooners drawn up in circles by night you could swing it around your head and still nothing would happen, it would stay solid, the white walls rising up out of the sea the pillared crown of the temple... For twenty-six hundred years it has endured everything, but now we who have forgotten everything, we whose homes have all gone to super highways, belt cities, long thin lines our glittering buses snort into the main square, the spider web with sticky fingers glues itself to the town, slowly it begins to revolve, faster and faster tighter and tighter it is wound till the young men cannot stand it, they pack up and leave town the sky is full of children with wild eyes and huge faces falling to the ground.

the bare-backed barback in the bear bar’s back bar barebacked with a bare bear who was also a barback back there

For Rebecca Feldman and Brian Roessler That's what the first line says of the song I've been playing all summer at the keyboard—trying to get my hands around its dark, melancholy chords, its story line of a melody that twists up like snakes from melodic minor scales that I've also been trying to learn, though I'm no great shakes as a practicer of scales. Come to think of it, neither am I much when it comes to love—no great shakes, I mean. Not that I haven't had my chances. Twenty years married, I made a lousy husband, half asleep, selfish, more like a big baby than a grown man, the poet laureate of the self-induced coma when it came to doing anything for anybody but me. "Now and then he took his thumb out of his mouth to write an ode to or a haiku about the thumb he sucked all day." That's what I imagined my ex-wife said to our therapist near the end. She did say: "It's all about Bill." She was right. And suddenly it frightens me, remembering how, at our wedding, our poet friends read poems of (mostly) utter depression to salute us. I wondered if their griefs in love had double-crossed our union, if strange snakes in the grass of our blissful Eden had hissed at us, and now I worry, on your wedding day, if I'm not doing the same damned thing . . . . I haven't come to spring up and put my curse on your bliss. Here's what I want to say: You're young. You don’t know what love is. And as the next line of the song goes, you won't —"Until you know the meaning of the blues." Darlings, the blues will come (though not often, I hope) to raise their fiery swords against your paradise. A little of that you unwittingly got today, when it rained and you couldn't be married outside under the beautiful tree in Nan and Alan's yard. But paradise doesn't have to be structured so that we can never reenter it. After you've kicked each other out of it once or twice (I'm speaking metaphorically, of course), teach yourself how to say a few kind words to each other. Don't stand there angry, stony. Each of you let the other know what you are feeling and thinking and then it may be possible to return to each other smiling, hand in hand. For arm in arm, you are your best Eden. Remember the advice the old poet sang to you on the afternoon of August 4, 2001, the day you got married. May you enjoy a good laugh thinking of him and his silver thumb now that you've turned the key into your new life in the beautiful Massachusetts rain and—hey, now—sun!

I sang my songs so much that they became the soundtrack for my dreams, the melody of my moods, a room I lived in, and a balm for my wounds. I sang my songs enough to know them backward and forward, enough to wonder if they could lift me from hometown haunts to center stage. I’d sung my songs enough to think I could take on Baltimore’s best talent at the Harlem Theatre Amateur Hour and maybe even win. If you sing a song enough, it can go to your head that way.

for Robert Creeley (1926—2005) You told me the son of Acton’s town nurse would never cross the border into Concord, where the Revolution left great houses standing on Main Street. Yet we crossed into Concord, walking through Sleepy Hollow Cemetery to greet Thoreau, his stone stamped with the word Henry jutting like a gray thumbnail down the path from Emerson and his boulder of granite. We remembered Henry’s night in jail, refusing tax for the Mexican War, and I could see you hunched with him, loaning Henry a cigarette, explaining the perpetual wink of your eye lost after the windshield burst in your boyhood face. When Emerson arrived to ask what you and Henry were doing in there, you would say: You got a song, man, sing it. You got a bell, man, ring it.