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I wanted to know what it was like before we had voices and before we had bare fingers and before we had minds to move us through our actions and tears to help us over our feelings, so I drove my daughter through the snow to meet her friend and filled her car with suitcases and hugged her as an animal would, pressing my forehead against her, walking in circles, moaning, touching her cheek, and turned my head after them as an animal would, watching helplessly as they drove over the ruts, her smiling face and her small hand just visible over the giant pillows and coat hangers as they made their turn into the empty highway.

The world bends us to its purpose. In the public gardens, we found a “gazing globe” balanced on a waist-high pedestal, a silver ball a foot in circumference, reflecting sky and ground, ourselves as we stood above it. We stared into its depths, as in a crystal ball, our faces large and wild, arms and legs unnaturally small, as if a spell were on the world, or, finally, we clearly saw the world for what it was: too brightly shining, circular, unadorned. Trees bent toward us, mere shadows of themselves, their shadows more substantial than the trees themselves. The sky at one o’clock a milky white, light-filled, yet without sun or cloud. And beds of tulips rising from the groundswell, each one a little mouth. I knelt beside you on one knee, caught up in walls of air I couldn’t touch or see, the outer world around me wavering, as on a hot summer day. We looked out to the future. Our future selves. You stood dead center in the globe and raised your hand to stop the scene, your palm enlarging until it dwarfed the tallest trees. Then waving goodbye, we walked, as a joke, backward and away, farther and farther away— the globe still gazing on us— leaving ourselves behind to live forever in that silver room, to watch and spy on lovers like ourselves.

man, he said, sitting on the steps your car sure needs a wash and wax job I can do it for you for 5 bucks, I got the wax, I got the rags, I got everything I need. I gave him the 5 and went upstairs. when I came down 4 hours later he was sitting on the steps drunk and offered me a can of beer. he said he’d get the car the next day. the next day he got drunk again and I loaned him a dollar for a bottle of wine. his name was Mike a world war II veteran. his wife worked as a nurse. the next day I came down and he was sitting on the steps and he said, you know, I been sitting here looking at your car, wondering just how I was gonna do it, I wanna do it real good. the next day Mike said it looked like rain and it sure as hell wouldn’t make any sense to wash and wax a car when it was gonna rain. the next day it looked like rain again. and the next. then I didn’t see him anymore. a week later I saw his wife and she said, they took Mike to the hospital, he’s all swelled-up, they say it’s from the drinking. listen, I told her, he said he was going to wax my car, I gave him 5 dollars to wax my car. he’s in the critical ward, she said, he might die . . . I was sitting in their kitchen drinking with his wife when the phone rang. she handed the phone to me. it was Mike. listen, he said, come down and get me, I can’t stand this place. I drove on down there, walked into the hospital, walked up to his bed and said, let’s go Mike. they wouldn’t give him his clothes so Mike walked to the elevator in his gown. we got on and there was a kid driving the elevator and eating a popsicle. nobody’s allowed to leave here in a gown, he said. you just drive this thing, kid, I said, we’ll worry about the gown. Mike was all puffed-up, triple size but I got him into the car somehow and gave him a cigarette. I stopped at the liquor store for 2 six packs then went on in. I drank with Mike and his wife until 11 p.m. then went upstairs . . . where’s Mike? I asked his wife 3 days later, you know he said he was going to wax my car. Mike died, she said, he’s gone. you mean he died? I asked. yes, he died, she said. I’m sorry, I said, I’m very sorry it rained for a week after that and I figured the only way I’d get the 5 back was to go to bed with his wife but you know she moved out 2 weeks later an old guy with white hair moved in there and he had one blind eye and played the French Horn. there was no way I could make it with him.

Todd’s Hardware was dust and a monkey— a real one, on the second floor— and Mrs. Todd there behind the glass cases. We stepped over buckets of nails and lawnmowers to get to the candy counter in the back, and pointed at the red wax lips, and Mary Janes, and straws full of purple sugar. Said goodbye to Mrs. Todd, she white-faced and silent, and walked the streets of Beaver, our teeth sunk hard in the wax, and big red lips worth kissing.

The whole trick of this thing    ...    is to get out of your own light. — Marianne Faithfull She said she sang very close to the mike to change the space. And I changed the space by striding down the Boulevard Raspail at dusk in tight jeans until an Algerian engineer plucked the pen from my back pocket. As if you’re inside my head and you’re hearing the song from in there. He came from the desert, I came from green suburbs. We understood nothing of one another over glasses of metallic red wine. I was playing Girl. He played Man. Several plots were afoot, all misfiring. One had to do with my skimpy black shirt and light hair, his broad shoulders and hunger after months on an oil rig. Another was untranslatable. Apollinaire burned his fingers on June’s smoldering lyre but I had lost my pen. The engineer read only construction manuals. His room was dim and narrow and no, the story didn’t slide that way though there are many ways to throw oneself away. One singer did it by living by a broken wall until she shredded her voice but still she offered each song, she said, like an Appalachian artifact. Like trash along the riverbank chafing at the quay plastic bottles a torn shirt fractured dolls through which the current chortles an intimate tune.

There were words I had to leave behind, moonlight, backward ponies. Leaving flowers out seemed safest. Trying for something surreal, A trouble free rise of smoke and lavender. No not lavender. Any shade of purple is best left alone. Perhaps a jaundiced smoke rising in my poetry would be best, although I like violet haze. Many a summer morning, while other folks are eating bagels, lox, cinnamon rolls, I rummage through old cider houses, find words like obdurate, bipolar, manic, cold heeled. But writing about love, well, not even searches to junkyards as far away as Peking turn up the slightest unused vowel. So, I make words up, create my own language. You Chinese me in the roofy mornings. You Japanese my legs in the spidery evenings. Our children are the leggy offspring of centipede afternoons. Our bedroom is the Acropolis. You temple me backward. I could bless you all the way to shadowland. If we were not already steepled there, our undergarments ruffianed off onto chairs. You catapulted silence, dogkissed, catlicked my paws held my squeaks and rattles. Where the rest had said, What’s this? You said, it’s mine.

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”