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I have no idea what priests dream of on Christmas Eve, what prayer a crippled dog might whine before the shotgun. I have no more sense of what is sacred than a monk might have, sweeping the temple floor, slow gestures of honor to the left, the right. Maybe the leaf of grass tells us what is worthwhile. Maybe it tells us nothing. Perhaps a sacred moment is a photograph you look at over and over again, the one of you and her, hands lightly clasped like you did before prayer became necessary, the one with the sinking cathedral in Mexico City rising up behind you and a limping man frozen in time to the right of you, the moment when she touched your bare arm for the first time, her fingers like cool flashes of heaven.

The field is filled with what we see without sleep. Never completely closed, it quickly erodes when tilled before rain. If clogged with boulders it won’t be razed and once burdened cannot quicken under flocks. The field reveals glint and holds leaning, pulls twist from taut knots of buds. We watch the field for stirring, wait for stems to spring back from sparrows. We hope for a swell in its middle so we can say we saw the sway that comes from noticing. Water meanders to prairie potholes, throws cordgrass into switchbacks as we push past bramble and scare a whistling wheel of geese into air. The field draws hawks and sides of trains, cradles pools from storms where ducks plumb for water snails. We trample light between us, no way to lope in parting the swales. We must flatten to fill the space with all the rolling wrapped up in us. Before home, the gabled barn across the road throws the brightest rise we’ve ever seen the field try on. The field is not in rows, is not a faded saw-songed croon. It pushes green a mist above mud, shows how we make do. We wonder what we’re not in the field. What scours, cuts, or knocks. If we could stay and still feel full the low line rounding out a spread of subtle slope.

What is the sound of sounds sounding indefinite fist in face again and sound of the surprise of it coming from nowhere, of breaking the arm on a small fall in your own house, a respiratory failure, wound opening like a little mouth. We inhabit the brutal. We are shattered everyday. We look askew. Head broken floor array, light array, great distances, life goals. Staked upon every border, guardians. Protections have many faces. Misuse of the face as a streaming desire. Solution posted: “Get rid of all the niggers.” The state exacts its controls. That the pepper spray happens against kneeling children— That the search for the secret leaker is unyielding— If you want, you can make a myopic focus, concentrate on a shone shadow or drift off into space.

What is this about losing respect? Do I have to talk about it? He said he feared what I might write about him when he was gone, and I told him not to worry. He worried about the “streak of morbidity” in your work. He was a man of God, not of imagination. And it wasn’t his fault if he got the shakes. It was a familial tremor, not nerves. And it first happened at a gravesite. Near where Brigham Young did his number—“this is the place.” He called him Friggin Young. Well, during his bleak tenure in Greenville, his congregants would tell nigger jokes and he would force a smile—afraid now to rock the boat— a mere exercise in stretching the corners of his lips— a fake grin he would have noted on another face—false faces being one of the things we loved to laugh about when together we observed congregants’ idiosyncracies, their ruses, their guises, like one temple president, the son of the “richest Jew in Salt Lake” who, seated in the pulpit’s other red velvet wing chair, would expose the holes in the soles of his shoes while he batted his eyelashes to wake himself up— (though I owe him one: “Rosencavalier” didn’t turn me in for copying the wrong answers from Mary Weinstein on our “final exam” in Sunday school prior to       confirmation. He was ashamed for me, young Rosencavalier. He could hardly disguise the curled lips and downcast eyes of his contempt for this lawless “Rabbi’s son” whether or not my name was Strome or Rudman, but where teaching Judaism was concerned his plodding methodical reading to keep up each week was a pathetic substitution for Sidney’s well-wrought, impromptu riffs. So there!) Marty was ashamed of me. I left town. As night was falling? * In Utah you can drive at fifteen so by age fourteen a lot of our talk was hard core car talk and somehow the word Volkswagen came up after confirmation class (it was no GTO but you could drive so far on so little gas...) and Marty’s father—a redhead like his son— made his way up the driveway’s ice, smoke billowing from the exhaust of whatever sleek black foreign car he drove. Pulling on his elegant pigskin gloves he announced he’d “never buy a Kraut    car.” I was    bewildered (what, hold against a country now something that happened so long    ago?) and he held my gaze and I shivered inside the shiver I felt from the cold    I thought he would transmogrify into a southern sheriff and ask “what kind of    Jew are you    boy” but he didn’t have to say another word. * In other words you were ready to leave town. I’d had it with Utah. But you wanted to stay in the west, against your father’s wishes? Yes. Unequivocally? Yes. Yes. Yes. But you did submit to psychiatrists and interviews with the heads of schools during your sojourn in the east that summer?

And if all those who meet or even hear of you become witness to what you are— a white country of blight beneath the last snows of spring. Could we remain quiet on earth and bear it, the war we make inside what is—it’s a long time to be here, to be still, to feel the rot inside now—bone-scrap, char, sheets of stars at the edge of a field where we are once again taken from ourselves. Could we remain here, witness to grief, one last bright dire call-and-reply, each birdsong or siren extinguished where some trueness abides, some portion we have lost our right to claim or know. It comes into any mind that would perceive it, leaf-rot, speech-rot, the deliberate ribcage of the deer, these abrupt chalk cliffs over which the confused animals fling themselves, and you, obscure, receive no response that is not suffered as the days grow long and distortions come to seem the natural course of things— what trees whose creatures stray into space— and they find they cannot land though the eyelid struggles open—no answer, no resolution— a window opened to the mute green world, weedy and driftless, a wind drilling rain, dirt, the parameters of uncertainty, of hope, what we might be against what we have done, bees crawling through the lips of the one who would say the earth turned into sour flesh— What strange rooms, what soundless movement of sky over desert where the flesh again is beaten and the emptiness extends itself while some old man looks on, a raptor in waiting, the sand-field around them blown thinly toward sun—no longer ourselves in the afternoons, evenings, weak, vague, clutched at the mouth— because we did nothing, because we lost count.

Let us tunnel Through the rubble, Through the thrum. Let us rut through the sum Of who we were, Or are, Or will be in the years to come: A couple Of someones Who used to be in love.

Dear Ol' Dirty Bastard: I too like it raw, I don't especially care for Duke Ellington at a birthday party. I care less and less about the shapes of shapes because forms change and nothing is more durable than feeling. My uncle used the money I gave him to buy a few vials of what looked like candy after the party where my grandma sang in an outfit that was obviously made for a West African king. My motto is Never mistake what it is for what it looks like. My generosity, for example, is mostly a form of vanity. A bandanna is a useful handkerchief, but a handkerchief is a useless-ass bandanna. This only looks like a footnote in my report concerning the party.Trill stands for what is truly real though it may be hidden by the houses just over the hills between us, by the hands on the bars between us. That picture of my grandmother with my uncle when he was a baby is not trill. What it is is the feeling felt seeing garbagemen drift along the predawn avenues, a sloppy slow rain taking its time to the coast. Milquetoast is not trill, nor is bouillabaisse.Bakku-shan is Japanese for a woman who is beautiful only when viewed from behind. Like I was saying, my motto is Never mistake what it looks like for what it is

All these great barns out here in the outskirts, black creosote boards knee-deep in the bluegrass. They look so beautifully abandoned, even in use. You say they look like arks after the sea’s dried up, I say they look like pirate ships, and I think of that walk in the valley where J said, You don’t believe in God? And I said, No. I believe in this connection we all have to nature, to each other, to the universe. And she said, Yeah, God. And how we stood there, low beasts among the white oaks, Spanish moss, and spider webs, obsidian shards stuck in our pockets, woodpecker flurry, and I refused to call it so. So instead, we looked up at the unruly sky, its clouds in simple animal shapes we could name though we knew they were really just clouds— disorderly, and marvelous, and ours.

As grains sort inside a schist An ancient woodland indicator called dark dog’s mercury River like liquid shale And white-tipped black lizard-turds on the blue wall For a loss that every other loss fits inside Picking a mole until it bleeds As the day heaves forward on faked determinations If it’s not all juxtaposition, she asked, what is the binding agent? Creepy always to want to pin words on “the emotional experience” Azure hoplia cockchafer, the caddisworm, the bee-louse, blister beetle, assassin bug The recriminations swarm around sunset When it was otherwise quiet all the way around You who were given a life, what did you make of it?

If they ask what it was like, say it was like the sea rolling barrels of itself at you in the shadowless light of the shore, say it was like a spider, black as night, large as a campesino’s hand, a deepness that could balance a small world of dirt as easily as a gift of gleaming red tomatoes held out to you eight at a time. If they ask you how it felt, say solitary, at first the ease of sleeping alone, warm without even a sheet, then the nonchalance of a dirt road leading down the hill, its dust raised and re-raised in plumes as each guest departed, and later, say it was like the blind cat that came out of nowhere to lie on your tile floor, lifting its face to stare with white marble eyes. If they ask what you heard, tell them the single note of the watchman, who coughed his one syllable when you went to bed, and at the end of every dream when you woke with a simple plea— stay, go—again, the cough of the watchman. If they ask about thirst, tell them no one could carry water as far as it had to go, so that when it was time to rest, people went to the spigot at the edge of the train tracks and cupped their hands under the water, lowering their faces to drink. Tell them a man could stand at noon in the park wearing nothing but underwear and beg for hours with his cup empty. Tell them you could sit quietly while phrases you didn't know you knew rose up in the language there and on an undisturbed lake in your mind you could back float—that weightless prayer that prays Let me die with my toes pointing up at the sun. When they ask what people will eventually get around to asking, How was the food? Tell them batata, mamón, guanábana, maní, indigenous crops exchanging places with hunger, giving up to the dark store window whose inventory is one hand of bananas sold one banana at a time, giving up to little pyramids of limes by the side of the road and the kids who tend them, dreaming of a few coins tossed down in the dirt.