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than we do when it’s all wound down. I don’t know why we settle to the sound. Somehow the regular click and chime of passing time, like water, turns a water wheel that turns a gear that turns a stone that turns upon another stone and fine and finer in between our dreams like grain are ground.

We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties. Why should the world be over-wise, In counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them only see us, while We wear the mask. We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries To thee from tortured souls arise. We sing, but oh the clay is vile Beneath our feet, and long the mile; But let the world dream otherwise, We wear the mask!

Sara, widow, 31 Henry pulled our heartwood along the rutted street that town stood beside, built two rooms and called them home. My Henry did that. There. And I lived all those days inside his love. But there is a kind of hunger that feeds on flesh. Only, let it be yearning, heaving, rising flesh. Only, let it be flesh living and loving. Alive. Let it be life. There is a kind of hunger that feeds on life. They carved into him with banquet knives, made stew of his skin and stirred it with his own bones. My Henry served: the meat and the pot to cook it in. And there was no charge against the men who made that meal.

On Tyrone Geter’s “The Basket Maker #2” Weave me closer to you with hands dyed indigo that rake oyster beds awake Smell you long before I see you Vanilla sweet Sweetgrass weaving wares that keep Yankees coming on ferries, no bridge Waters been troubled Makes you wonder who put the root on whom first with doors dyed indigo Pray the evil spirits away at the praise house Make John Hop to stave off John Deere We migrants fighting to stay put Even nomads come home for a Lowcountry boil a feast for hungry prodigal sons and daughters with hearts dyed indigo Dying for you to weave us closer

We the people, we the one times 320 million, I’m rounding up, there’s really too many grass blades to count, wheat plants to tally, just see the whole field swaying from here to that shy blue mountain. Swaying as in rocking, but also the other definition of the verb: we sway, we influence, we impress. Unless we’re asleep, the field’s asleep, more a postcard than a real field, portrait of the people unmoved. You know that shooting last week? I will admit the number dead was too low to startle me if you admit you felt the same, and the person standing by you agrees, and the person beside that person. It has to be double digits, don’t you think? To really shake up your afternoon? I’m troubled by how untroubled I felt, my mind’s humdrum regarding the total coffins, five if you care to know, five still even if you don’t. I’m angry I’m getting used to it, the daily gunned down, pop-pop on Wednesday, Thursday’s spent casings pinging on the sidewalk. It all sounds so industrial, there’s nothing metal that won’t make a noise, I’m thinking every gun should come with a microphone, each street with loudspeakers to broadcast their banging. We would never sleep, the field always awake, acres of swaying up to that shy blue mountain, no wonder why it cowers on the horizon, I mean look at us, look with the mountain’s eyes we the people putting holes in the people.

That time my grandmother dragged me through the perfume aisles at Saks, she held me up by my arm, hissing, “Stand up,” through clenched teeth, her eyes bright as a dog’s cornered in the light. She said it over and over, as if she were Jesus, and I were dead. She had been solid as a tree, a fur around her neck, a light-skinned matron whose car was parked, who walked on swirling marble and passed through brass openings—in 1945. There was not even a black elevator operator at Saks. The saleswoman had brought velvet leggings to lace me in, and cooed, as if in the service of all grandmothers. My grandmother had smiled, but not hungrily, not like my mother who hated them, but wanted to please, and they had smiled back, as if they were wearing wooden collars. When my legs gave out, my grandmother dragged me up and held me like God holds saints by the roots of the hair. I begged her to believe I couldn’t help it. Stumbling, her face white with sweat, she pushed me through the crowd, rushing away from those eyes that saw through her clothes, under her skin, all the way down to the transparent genes confessing.

How gray and hard the brown feet of the wretched of the earth. How confidently the crippled from birth push themselves through the streets, deep in their lives. How seamed with lines of fate the hands of women who sit at streetcorners offering seeds and flowers. How lively their conversation together. How much of death they know. I am tired of ‘the fine art of unhappiness.’

I.Deer Season The quiet of windows pours its sand in my ear. What, what? ask the dolls of evening though they do not wish to hear my answer. Five hens are alive in the brush, purring toward the slough. No one here has a rifle but the wind turns abruptly and returns a report. Three bright orange vests hang at the ready. The doe turns in her frame above the stove, and her season climbs like the moon into its place in the sky’s clock. The green theater with its elegant aspens goes more threadbare each week, so I’ll soon see the others, heretofore only heard. Just to the south the casino lights ride the underbellies of clouds, and further down the interstate more world twirls in its paper and drinks, while the baby throws his feet through the bars, and the father takes him like a little canoe on the billowy lake of his chest. Comes a mewling, then, from my dark, a mooing, a whine, feathered or furred I can’t divine. The girl with the flat face and bleached lips read her poems in crisp Ivy League whatnot, but I got sidetracked by the way her torso seemed stacked, pressed in layers like shale, so there was a weight to her that hung in the bottom of the eye like the bulk of a tear that never quite falls. It’s true the intelligence was clear as green ice, and just as hard, stripped of its I and heat. Her baby burbled on in the back of the room happily not in the poems. Oh little rabbit of grief on the spot where the last dog was turned under, don’t speak. I make a fire, then dream a fire: wind carries its gray rags into the woods, and the crackling in the grate enters my ducts, wakes me. When I look out, the grass along the fence is crawling with light, and the last wild asters press their blue buttons into the cold glass. II.The New Year Zero and a fine hard snow burns when it hits bare skin. A white ridge glows inside the birches across the slough where snow articulates the distance. Where water moves, where the land heaves. I haul oak chunks in a plastic sled. When I bend to stack the splits, my breasts pop and burn, and my child’s face rises like a bird razoring its shadow over the snow. Wind takes the rag of some old self and shakes it at me. The heart is only another shape the view stretches to include. Birches march out of the hardwoods with their white waists radiant, so many clones on one taproot. A jay circles the full feeders fending off smaller birds. I make this vocal gesture because self is simply one edge of me. Out here there’s only an economy of wood burned or to be burned, how much water’s left in the tank, how hard or soft the light. Degrees and drafts. This room and everything in it are mine, and though I try to be selfish and grim, my child has made me enduringly plural, more than I, but not quite we. Black-capped chickadees flee from three big jays at the feeder. Shrieking and diving in the strong winter light, the jays are not actually blue. Their feathers refract light so they appear blue. Self-luminous, hardy and belligerent as pronouns. III.Easter The kick of the screw finding purchase in pine slams my wrist bone, elbow and shoulder, but it’s in, and the panel is up. Now another and another until the wall is flush. I mark and cut each length with the small tooth of the new jigsaw my husband thought I should have. Two days apart from him and the child, I’ve forgotten the pump to empty my breasts, so the saw’s jump at the end of the cut draws the burning up. And with it a guilt as bright as the room where I drive plank after plank against the studs, each a satisfaction against the body’s wish to be elsewhere. Even into the night, I can’t put down my drill. I stoke the fire and drive more screws, loving the growl when they’re in as far as they’ll go. The mind arranging which planks and trim tomorrow, next week and spring. Even my sleep is a cutting and fastening broken by my turning on the full globes of my breasts. So toward morning I dream of parties given by women I used to know, and to which I’m not and will never be invited, trays of fancy sandwiches and petit fours, half moon glasses of seething champagne.

I used an arrow to kill the spider. I used a steamroller to flatten the worm. For the ants I called in an air strike. Bee that found its way in through the screen: blowtorch. The mammals were easier— a bucket of water for submerging the cat, a poisoned word thrown to the dog. For love, only a kitchen match. That and a stove leaking gas and waiting until the dinner was good and burned.

Amid the glare of light and song And talk that knows not when to cease, The sullen voices of the throng, My weary soul cries out for peace, Peace and the quietness of death; The wash of waters deep and cool, The wind too faint for any breath To stir oblivion’s silent pool, When all who swim against the stream, And they that laugh, and they that weep, Shall change like flowers in a dream That wither on the brows of sleep. For silence is the song sublime, And every voice at last must cease, And all the world at evening time Floats downwards through the gates of peace, Beyond the gloom of shadowy caves Where water washes on the stones, And breaks with quiet foamless waves The night’s persistent monotones; The stars are what the flowers seem, And where the sea of thought is deep, The moonlight glitters like a dream, On weary waters gone to sleep.