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Sometimes the way to milk and honey is through the body. Sometimes the way in is a song. But there are three ways in the world: dangerous, wounding, and beauty. To enter stone, be water. To rise through hard earth, be plant desiring sunlight, believing in water. To enter fire, be dry. To enter life, be food.

At times it is like watching a face you have just met, trying to decide who it reminds you of— no one, surely, whom you ever hated or loved, but yes, somebody, somebody. You watch the face as it turns and nods, showing you, at certain angles, a curve of the lips or a lift of the eyebrow that is exactly right, and still the lost face eludes you. Now this face is talking, and you hear a sound in the voice, the accent on certain words— yes! a phrase . . . you barely recall sitting outside, by a pool or a campfire, remarking a peculiar, recurring expression. Two syllables, wasn’t it? Doorknob? Bathroom? Shawcross? What the hell kind of word is shawcross? A name; not the right one. A couple of syllables that could possibly be a little like something you may once have heard. So the talk drifts, and you drift, sneaking glances, pounding your brain. Days later a face occurs to you, and yes, there is a resemblance. That odd word, though, or phrase, is gone. It must have been somebody else. Yes, it’s like that, at times; something is, maybe; and there are days when you can almost say what it is.

after Richard Wilbur The opposite of walk? A psychic with a crystal ball and tarot deck who sees green when your palm is read. At the sign of a red palm I don’t walk, I run.

Card in pew pocket announces, “I am here.” I made only one statement because of a bad winter. Grease is the word; grease is the way I am feeling. Real life emergencies or flubbing behind the scenes. As a child, I was abandoned in a story made of trees. Here’s the small gasp of this clearing come “upon” “again”

Be strong Bernadette Nobody will ever know I came here for a reason Perhaps there is a life here Of not being afraid of your own heart beating Do not be afraid of your own heart beating Look at very small things with your eyes & stay warm Nothing outside can cure you but everything's outside There is great shame for the world in knowing You may have gone this far Perhaps this is why you love the presence of other people so much Perhaps this is why you wait so impatiently You have nothing more to teach Until there is no more panic at the knowledge of your own real existence & then only special childish laughter to be shown & no more lies no more Not to find you no More coming back & more returning Southern journey Small things & not my own debris Something to fight against & we are all very fluent about ourselves Our own ideas of food, a Wild sauce There's not much point in its being over: but we do not speak them: I had written: "the man who sewed his soles back on his feet" And then I panicked most at the sound of what the wind could do to me if I crawled back to the house, two feet give no position, if the branches cracked over my head & their threatening me, if I covered my face with beer & sweated till you returned If I suffered what else could I do

From an epigram by Plato When I was a boy, a relative Asked for me a job At the Weeks Cemetery. Think of all I could Have raised that summer, That money, and me Living at home, Fattening and getting Ready to live my life Out on my knees, humming, Kneading up docks And sumac from Those flawless clerks-at-court, those beautiful Grocers and judges, the polished Dead of whom we make So much. I could have stayed there with them. Cheap, too. Imagine, never To have turned Wholly away from the classic Cold, the hill, so laid Out, measure by seemly measure clipped And mown by old man Albright The sexton. That would have been a hell of A way to make a living. Thank you, no. I am going to take my last nourishment Of measure from a dark blue Ripple on swell on ripple that makes Its own garlands. My dead are the secret wine jars Of Tyrian commercial travelers. Their happiness is a lost beginning, their graves Drift in and out of the Mediterranean. One of these days The immortals, clinging to a beam of sunlight Under water, delighted by delicate crustaceans, Will dance up thirty-foot walls of radiance, And waken, The sea shining on their shoulders, the fresh Wine in their arms. Their ships have drifted away. They are stars and snowflakes floating down Into your hands, love.

The way to the river leads past the names of Ash the sleeves the wreaths of hinges Through the song of the bandage vendor I lay your name by my voice As I go The way to the river leads past the late Doors and the games of the children born looking backwards They play that they are broken glass The numbers wait in the halls and the clouds Call From windows They play that they are old they are putting the horizon Into baskets they are escaping they are Hiding I step over the sleepers the fires the calendars My voice turns to you I go past the juggler’s condemned building the hollow Windows gallery Of invisible presidents the same motion in them all In a parked cab by the sealed wall the hats are playing Sort of poker with somebody’s Old snapshots game I don’t understand they lose The rivers one After the other I begin to know where I am I am home Be here the flies from the house of the mapmaker Walk on our letters I can tell And the days hang medals between us I have lit our room with a glove of yours be Here I turn To your name and the hour remembers Its one word Now Be here what can we Do for the dead the footsteps full of money I offer you what I have my Poverty To the city of wires I have brought home a handful Of water I walk slowly In front of me they are building the empty Ages I see them reflected not for long Be here I am no longer ashamed of time it is too brief its hands Have no names I have passed it I know Oh Necessity you with the face you with All the faces

when the cultivators of corpses are busy seeding plague across vast acres of the land, choking schools and churches in the motley toxins of grief, breeding virile shoots of violence so soon verdant even fools fear to tread in their wake :: when all known tools of resistance are clutched in the hands of the vile like a wilting bouquet, cut from their roots, while the disempowered slice smiles across their own faces and hide the wet knives in writhing thickets of hair for future use :: when breathing in the ashen traces of dreams deferred, the detonator’s ticking a queer echo that amplifies instead of fading :: when there- you-are is where-you-were and the sunset groans into the atlantic, setting blue fire to dark white bones.

So many years later, the old dog still circles, head lowered, crippled by arthritis, nearly blind, incontinent. We repeat the litany, as if we need convincing that the end is right. I'll get her an ice cream cone if you'll drive her to the vet, my wife says. So there we sit on the front steps with our friend, and in the car, as always, when she senses the doctor's office drawing near, she moans and tries to burrow underneath the seats. What remains, the memory of how she taught us all the way we need to learn to live with wasting. There we sit, together, one last time as all that sweetness slowly disappears.

But you made every delicate, elegant wrist & glistening ankle. But you made them beautiful in braided rope & dime store gold. But you made every necklace clasp. But you made them caress the nape like an errant wind after a shower. But you made every eyelash erotic. Every single strand of hair soft. But you made them from dust & bone. Made every glorious singing thigh. Every button nose. But you made them with holes— wide open to the faintest hints of salt in a sea breeze, salt in the sweaty mouth of a navel, salt in the blood, sweet in every wrong way.