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As the light goes, go. Be the rustling in the grass, the fall from convention's good graces: learn, or someone will have you filing files or writing writs, demonstrating cutlery or selling knowledge door to door; someone might even drop your lovely life into a factory and have you derusting rings on the coolant-spouting turntable of a vertical lathe. It's best for everyone that what you know is generally thought of as general knowledge. You can find it in pool rooms and roadside bars, in meadows as inviting as beds, in bedrooms where it whispers like a ribbon untying; you can even find it in schools. But be careful: it's dangerous, inescapable and exact down to every atom of everything there is, to every name each thing goes by and every law each thing obeys. And the best part is, you always know more than you know.

I learned from my mother how to love the living, to have plenty of vases on hand in case you have to rush to the hospital with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole grieving household, to cube home-canned pears and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point. I learned to attend viewings even if I didn’t know the deceased, to press the moist hands of the living, to look in their eyes and offer sympathy, as though I understood loss even then. I learned that whatever we say means nothing, what anyone will remember is that we came. I learned to believe I had the power to ease awful pains materially like an angel. Like a doctor, I learned to create from another’s suffering my own usefulness, and once you know how to do this, you can never refuse. To every house you enter, you must offer healing: a chocolate cake you baked yourself, the blessing of your voice, your chaste touch.

When it comes to clothes, make an allowance for the unexpected. Be sure the spare in the trunk of your station wagon with wood paneling isn’t in need of repair. A simple jean jacket says Hey, if you aren’t trying to smuggle rare Incan coins through this peaceful little town and kidnap the local orphan, I can be one heck of a mellow kinda guy. But no matter how angry a man gets, a smile and a soft stroke on his bicep can work wonders. I learned that male chests also have nipples, warm and established— green doesn’t always mean envy. It’s the meadows full of clover and chicory the Hulk seeks for rest, a return to normal. And sometimes, a woman gets to go with him, her tiny hands correcting his rumpled hair, the cuts in his hand. Green is the space between water and sun, cover for a quiet man, each rib shuttling drops of liquid light.

The white peacock roosting might have been Christ, featherd robe of Osiris, the radiant bird, a sword-flash, percht in the tree and the other,    the fumed-glass slide —were like night and day, the slit of an eye opening in time vertical to the horizon

It feels like I need To go to my dad's house And when I'm at my dad's house I want to go to my mom's house I want to be at both houses

What I would like to give them for a change is not the usual prescription with its hubris of the power to restore, to cure; what I would like to give them, ill from not enough of laying in the sun not caring what the onlookers might think while feeding some banana to their dogs— what I would like to offer them is this, not reassurance that their lungs sound fine, or that the mole they’ve noticed change is not a melanoma, but instead of fear transfigured by some doctorly advice I’d like to give them my astonishment at sudden rainfall like the whole world weeping, and how ridiculously gently it slicked down my hair; I’d like to give them that, the joy I felt while staring in your eyes as you learned epidemiology (the science of disease in populations), the night around our bed like timelessness, like comfort, like what I would give to them.

A comfort common to Southwest desert parking lots, a familiar, a messenger, an overlooked angel oiled by asphalt, consolation of the casino, supermarket spiritual guide picking at a free-today hot dog, a dropped grape or lentil, its purple-green head iridescent, its long keel of a tail. Black birds but not blackbirds with their showy epaulettes blood-red as a war field. Grackles glint like lacquered ebony, the females brunhildas, if by brunhilda you mean “brown-headed,” not the German “ready for battle.” Blind to centuries of borders, of battles, they waddle stiff-legged at your feet, a janitorial sweep to their tails, checking cart tires and light poles for moths, beetles, singing their seven songs — slides, whistles, wheezes, catcalls, chirps, murmurs, clucks — to console you for your losses: stolen cars, mortgage payments spun to mist at a roulette table, the beloved who breathed fire and scorched your wedding clothes.Folly,wreckage, they mutter, down among the packs of backerboard and spackle.We’ve fallen from Mayan temples. In a past life

capable of feeling while in contact with another? I look at the red-tiled roofs outside, at all the angles facing the white-blue cloudless sky like the creases in Bellini’s angel’s silver-blue dress, Tintoretto’s white one that’s practically transparent in his Annunciazione at the San Rocco — cloth complex as thought! Then the bells start, flood the void.

What is staying alive? To possess A great hall inside of a cell. What is it to know? The same root Underneath the branches. What is it to believe? Being a carer Until relief takes over. And to forgive? On fours through thorns To keep company to an old enemy. What is it to sing? To receive breath From the genius of creation. What's work but humming a song From wood and wheat. What are state affairs? A craft That's still only crawling? And armaments? Thrust a knife In a baby's fist. Being a nation? What can it be? A gift In the swell of the heart. And to love a country? Keeping house In a cloud of witnesses. What's the world to the all powerful? A circle spinning. And to the children of the earth? A cradle rocking.

After three weeks of hot weather and drought, we've had a week of cold and rain, just the way it ought to be here in the north, in June, a fire going in the woodstove all day long, so you can go outside in the cold and rain anytime and smell the wood smoke in the air. This is the way I love it. This is why I came here almost fifty years ago. What is June anyway without cold and rain and a fire going in the stove all day?