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Weep you no more, sad fountains; What need you flow so fast? Look how the snowy mountains Heaven’s sun doth gently waste. But my sun’s heavenly eyes View not your weeping, That now lie sleeping Softly, now softly lies Sleeping. Sleep is a reconciling, A rest that peace begets. Doth not the sun rise smiling When fair at even he sets? Rest you then, rest, sad eyes, Melt not in weeping While she lies sleeping Softly, now softly lies Sleeping.

What the scale tells you is how much the earth has missed you, body, how it wants you back again after you leave it to go forth into the light. Do you remember how earth hardly noticed you then? Others would rock you in their arms, warm in the flow that fed you, coaxed you upright. Then earth began to claim you with spots and fevers, began to lick at you with a bruised knee, a bloody shin, and finally to stoke you, body, drumming intimate coded messages through music you danced to unawares, there in your dreaming and your poems and your obedient blood. Body, how useful you became, how lucky, heavy with news and breakage, rich, and sad, sometimes, imagining that greedy zero you must have been, that promising empty sack of possibilities, never-to-come tomorrow. But look at you now, body, soft old shoe that love wears when it’s stirring, look down, look how earth wants what you weigh, needs what you know.

Often the slightest gesture is most telling, As when he reaches tenderly in passing To pluck the yellow leaf from the dark fall Of her hair, or even the absence of all gesture: The way she doesn’t need to turn to know Who, in this gathering of friends, has touched her. It was as if he dreamed some private garden. Perhaps he woke from it, mid-reach, to find His hand too near her hair in this crowded yard, And maybe even now she’s shuttering in (She’s even better than you or I at that) A storm of worry and recrimination— Did anyone notice? how could he do that here!— By seamlessly continuing to tell you About her trip to see her favorite Vermeer This morning in the Delft show at the Met: “So now they say she isn’t weighing pearls Or gold or anything—it’s just the light Gleaming off empty scales.” So much is hard To know for sure. If I confronted her, She’d say it was just a leaf—who could afford To disagree? Could we? Now she’s explaining How the girl faces a mirror we can’t see into And how behind her hangs a gloomy painting Of the Last Judgment: “Over her head God Floats in a cloud,” she says, “like a thought balloon.” But you don’t hear. You’re watching me. I nod.

to end with nothing is something Suvan Geer or to rephrase a popular Billy Preston song, “somethin’ from nothin’ is somethin’” I everyone loves the disappearing coin. a bird pulled from an empty hat. the comfort of trusting a magician’s hands. when we know we’ll get some- thing from what he takes away. II the student’s assignment— concentrate on nothing for fifteen minutes a day. she tries to empty her head but can’t figure out how. after all, she doesn’t know what nothing sounds or looks like, and the teacher won’t give the slightest clue. yet she’s got a good hunch the exercise might quiet all that shriek and clatter trapped between her ears. so like a good pupil, she devotes an entire year searching for nothing. some days she’s as still as a stone, but can’t escape the distractions of river and wind, footsteps approaching, birds calling in the trees overhead. or closing her eyes, she’ll focus on a cloudless blue sky. pillows and planes and purple sunsets keep interrupting. she silently repeats words like ocean or why, chants sounds that dwell low in her throat like maah and uhmm. at year’s end her teacher asks if she’s found nothing. she tells him she’s found everything but nothing. he smiles,you’recloser than you think

Two horses were put together in the same paddock. Night and day. In the night and in the day wet from heat and the chill of the wind on it. Muzzle to water, snorting, head swinging and the taste of bay in the shadowed air. The dignity of being. They slept that way, knowing each other always. Withers quivering for a moment, fetlock and the proud rise at the base of the tail, width of back. The volume of them, and each other’s weight. Fences were nothing compared to that. People were nothing. They slept standing, their throats curved against the other’s rump. They breathed against each other, whinnied and stomped. There are things they did that I do not know. The privacy of them had a river in it. Had our universe in it. And the way its border looks back at us with its light. This was finally their freedom. The freedom an oak tree knows. That is built at night by stars.

Everything you thought you knew must be relearned overnight. How to walk. Walk, not trip, over cords, 2x4s, used coffee cups, concrete cores. Walk, 40 pounds on your shoulder, across rebar or a wood plank; glide, not wobble, not look like the bounce beneath each bootstep scares you. How to dress yourself to work outdoors all day midwinter and keep warm, keep working, fingers moving; or midsummer, with no hint of breasts. How to climb ladders– not a stepstool or a 4-footer– ladders that stretch up two stories where someone’s impatient for that bundle of pipe. How to get coffee– hot and how they like it–to a crew spread out 10 floors; to carry muffins three blocks in a paper sack through sheets of rain. How to look. To never go back empty-handed when you’re told,Grab me a This/That from the gangbox, if all you’ve done is move things around, poke here and there; if you haven’t emptied out the full contents so the journeyman won’t shame you by finding This/That in a quick minute, after you’ve said,We don’t have any. How to be dependable but not predictable-provokable. Not the lunch break entertainment. How to read blueprints, delivery orders, the mood on the job; how long it’s okay to sit down for coffee; how early you can start rolling up cords. How to do well in school from the back row of a seats-assigned-Jim-Crow classroom How to learn tricks-of-the-trade from someone who does not like you. How to listen, to act-don’t-ask. To duck when someone motions,Duck! Or when someone tells you,Don’t talk to Zeke, to know what they mean so you don’t even look at Zeke, the ironworker who’s always first out, last in, standing there, so four times a day– start, lunch, quit–all the workers walk past him, like a sandbar, waves washing back and forth, that catches debris. How to pick up the phone and call your friend, the only one of the women not at class the night the apprenticeship director met you all at the door carrying the nervous rumor that one of the women had been raped and you all look at each other and it wasn’t any of you five. How to respond–within protocol– when someone takes your ladder or tools, imitates your voices on the loudspeaker, spraypaints Cunt on your Baker staging, urinates in your hardhat, drives to your home where you live alone with your daughter and keys your truck parked in your own driveway. Later, you’ll need the advanced skills: how–without dislodging the keystone– to humiliate a person, how to threaten a person. Deftly. So no one’s certain for absolute that’s what happened. Not even you.

A Well there is in the west country, And a clearer one never was seen; There is not a wife in the west country But has heard of the Well of St. Keyne. An oak and an elm-tree stand beside, And behind doth an ash-tree grow, And a willow from the bank above Droops to the water below. A traveller came to the Well of St. Keyne; Joyfully he drew nigh, For from the cock-crow he had been travelling, And there was not a cloud in the sky. He drank of the water so cool and clear, For thirsty and hot was he, And he sat down upon the bank Under the willow-tree. There came a man from the house hard by At the Well to fill his pail; On the Well-side he rested it, And he bade the Stranger hail. "Now art thou a bachelor, Stranger?" quoth he, "For an if thou hast a wife, The happiest draught thou hast drank this day That ever thou didst in thy life. "Or has thy good woman, if one thou hast, Ever here in Cornwall been? For an if she have, I'll venture my life She has drank of the Well of St. Keyne." "I have left a good woman who never was here." The Stranger he made reply, "But that my draught should be the better for that, I pray you answer me why?" "St. Keyne," quoth the Cornish-man, "many a time Drank of this crystal Well, And before the Angel summon'd her, She laid on the water a spell. "If the Husband of this gifted Well Shall drink before his Wife, A happy man thenceforth is he, For he shall be Master for life. "But if the Wife should drink of it first,— God help the Husband then!" The Stranger stoopt to the Well of St. Keyne, And drank of the water again. "You drank of the Well I warrant betimes?" He to the Cornish-man said: But the Cornish-man smiled as the Stranger spake, And sheepishly shook his head. "I hasten'd as soon as the wedding was done, And left my Wife in the porch; But i' faith she had been wiser than me, For she took a bottle to Church."

He went to the city and goosed all the girls With a stall on his finger for whittling the wills To a clause in his favour and Come to me Sally, One head in my chambers and one up your alley And I am as old as my master. I followed him further and lost all my friends, The grease still thick on his fistful of pens. I laced up his mutton and paddled his lake In the game of Get-off-me and Just-for-my-sake And I am as old as my master. I sang in his service a farewell to sorrow With rolled black stockings, the bone and the marrow. The Law was a devil to cheat as you pleased As we knelt on the backs of the city girls’ knees And I am as old as my master. So back to the country where birds are squawking, With possets for pensions and witless talking Of walloped starvelings and soldiers’ fortunes From his nodding bench in the smothered orchards And I am as old as my master. Age turns the cheek of a buried scandal In a nightmare of cheese and a quarter of candle. When the servant is privy he’s good as a guest, The first to be carved to and last to be pressed And I am as old as my master. Country or city, no pleasure can last: It’s farewell to the future and beckon the past. Though he that we drink with is sometimes a fool, A single grey tooth may furnish a smile And I am as old as my master.

My wife went into the pantry for peaches but came out with a baby — I hadn’t noticed the house was pregnant, she said — it was crying, so I cried back — then she cried, the woman I barely know after sixteen years — why just the other day, she told me she’d always been afraid #2 pencils might be made of what they’re named — but even crying it was cute — pink and scrunchy-eyed — like a newt balloon someone had blown up until puffy and ready to pop — it was as if the universe decided it was time to act our age — that’s when we threw all our heroin out — took the high-wire down and stopped skeet shooting in the living room — and as much as I miss yelling Pull while stoned and standing on the edge of the air, looking into the abyssal fall I sorta desperately want, someone’s gotta change the diapers and burp the thing when it fills with swamp-gas or whatever that is — the miracle, you know, of birth is that my wife and I gave up hang gliding for making the nummy sound against the belly of the beast who showed up and took over — just as once, I shot the rapids, popped out, squirmed against my mother and destroyed every other future she might have lived but one — long before I could speak, I was cruel — for a few seconds, I let my mother believe I was everything she ever wanted — and even now, decades after my few perfect seconds as a baby, if I called, at the first unexpected brush of Hey, ma against her ear, she’d still be hoodwinked by the tidal pull of my voice on the ghost of a womb they long ago ripped out, that she was holding a full moon in her arms

John F. Kennedy New York City I saw him across the lobby flight 161 St. Louis Albuquerque. Coyote looked in control cool fitting right into the city smiling when a pretty woman passed him figuring out his flight making calculations from behind the New York Times. Slick right down to his Tony Lamas Coyote I’d recognize him anywhere Copenhagen New York Gallup. People say you can dress ’em up but once a coyote always a coyote.