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This isn’t maths — perhaps it is a collapse of certainties. Perhaps it can’t configure planes, yet it can cloud our blue remains so when we fall as rain will do, nothing fails to carry through.

I was just getting to that. But first, old age. If you could just let me finish. Once it was I who rudely interrupted proceedings: the chair rapped & called to order, but I seized from pending approval the minutes & ran off with the handsome mustachioed night watch. Matching wits we wound up jangling on a motel bureau in simultaneous alarm & ran down together to silence, Bide-a-Wee’s appointed guest in his sleep deceased so far from home he didn’t know a soul. A what? We heard Gideons rustling in the drawer, & as we rifled the fellow’s bags before we fled, & fled, his time flew too, from his cuffs &collars flapping ahead.

Not one star, not even the half moon on the night you were born Not the flash of salmon nor ridges on blue snow Not the flicker of raven’s never-still eye Not breath frozen in fine hairs beading the bull moose’s nostril Not one hand under flannel warming before reaching Not burbot at home under Tanana ice not burbot pulled up into failing light Not the knife blade honed, not the leather sheath Not raw bawling in the dog yard when the musher barks gee Not the gnawed ends of wrist-thick sticks mounded over beaver dens Not solar flares scouring the earth over China Not rime crystals bearding a sleek cheek of snow Not six minutes more of darkness each day Not air water food words touch Not art Not anything we expect Not anything we expect to keep Not anything we expect to keep us alive Not the center of the sea Not the birthplace of the waves Not the compass too close to true north to guide us Then with no warning flukes of three orcas rise, arc clear of sea water

Places we leave slick our bodies with silky air or foam we feel faithful and tickly (even somehow taste) but can't clearly see. We wear its weight like atmosphere— runs, blots of what we've done in and with each place —what to do with it now?— and what it does to us still.

• Phone your local police station. They have a 24-hour answering service. Please note your message will be used for training purposes. Your voice print will be added to their database. • Access Hobbit Rescue (HR) on the Hobbit Rescue app (type in Hobbit Rescue). Type your address in the required box. Wait for assistance to arrive. • Do not touch the Hobbit. Warner Bros. can recycle most parts of a Hobbit. Interference with any part of a dead Hobbit is a crime. Remember: you will be liable! • Do not Facebook your Friends. Some of your Friends may not be Friends. Australian Unionists are known Trollers. Be vigilant. Unionists have no part in our film industry. • When Hobbit Rescue arrives they will ask you questions. You are required to answer. Hobbits are an integral platform in our 
national economy. Withholding information from a private company in pursuit of its legitimate profit can be deemed a treasonable act. • Remember Hobbits are our friends. They were born here. This is their home. They represent our way of life. Do you want to lose that way of life?

I. Only now, in spring, can the place be named: tulip poplar, daffodil, crab apple, dogwood, budding pink-green, white-green, yellow on my knowing.   All winter I was lost. Fall, I found myself here, with no texture my fingers know.   Then, worse, the white longing that downed us deep three months.   No flower heat. That was winter.   But now, in spring, the buds flock our trees.   Ten million exquisite buds, tiny and loud, flaring their petalled wings, bellowing from ashen branches vibrant keys, the chords of spring’s triumph: fisted heart, dogwood; grail, poplar; wine spray, crab apple. The song is drink, is color.   Come.   Now.   Taste. II. The song is drink, is color.   Come now, taste what the world has to offer.   When you eat you will know that music comes in guises— bold of crepe myrtle, sweet of daffodil— beyond sound, guises they never told you could be true.   And they aren’t.   Except they are so real now, this spring, you know them, taste them. Green as kale, the songs of spring, bright as wine, the music.   Faces of this season grin with clobbering wantonness—see the smiles open on each branch?—until you, too, smile. Wide carnival of color, carnival of scent.   We’re all lurching down streets, drunk now from the poplar’s grail.   Wine spray: crab apple. III. From the poplar’s grail, wine spray.   Crab apple brightens jealously to compete.   But by the crab apple’s deep stain, the tulip tree learns modesty.   Only blush, poplar learns, lightly.   Never burn such a dark-hued fire to the core.   Tulip poplar wants herself light under leaf, never, like crab apple, heavy under tart fruit.   Never laden. So the poplar pours just a hint of wine in her cup, while the crab apple, wild one, acts as if her body were a fountain. She would pour wine onto you, just let her. Shameless, she plants herself, and delivers, down anyone’s street, bright invitations. IV. Down anyone’s street-bright invitations. Suck ‘em.   Swallow ‘em.   Eat them whole.   That’s right, be greedy about it.   The brightness calls and you follow because you want to taste, because you want to be welcomed inside the code of that color: red for thirst; green for hunger; pink, a kiss; and white, stain me now.   Soil me with touching.   Is that right? No?   That’s not, you say, what you meant.   Not what you meant at all?   Pardon.   Excuse me, please. Your hand was reaching, tugging at this shirt of flowers and I thought, I guess I thought you were hungry for something beautiful. Come now.   The brightness here might fill you up. V. Come.   Now the brightness here might fill you up, but tomorrow?   Who can know what the next day will bring.   It is like that, here, in spring. Four days ago, the dogwood was a fist in protest.   Now look.   Even she unfurls to the pleasure of the season.   Don’t be ashamed of yourself.   Don’t be.    This happens to us all.   We have thrown back the blanket. We’re naked and we’ve grown to love ourselves. I tell you, do not be ashamed.   Who is more wanton than the dancing crepe myrtle? Is she ashamed?   Why, even the dogwood, that righteous tree of God’s, is full of lust exploding into brightness every spring. VI. Exploding into brightness every spring, I draw you close.   I wonder, do you know how long I’ve wanted to be here?   Each year you grasp me, lift me, carry me inside. Glee is the body of the daffodil reaching tubed fingers through the day, feeling her own trumpeted passion choiring air with hot, colored song.   This is a texture I love.   This is life.   And, too, you love me, inhale my whole being every spring.   Gone winter, heavy clod whose icy body fell into my bed.   I must leave you, but I’ll wait through heat, fall, freeze to hear you cry: Daffodils are up.   My God, what beauty! VII. Daffodils are up, my God!   What beauty concerted down on us last night.   And if I sleep again, I’ll wake to a louder blossoming, the symphony smashing down hothouse walls, and into the world: music. Something like the birds’ return, each morning’s crescendo rising toward its brightest pitch, colors unfurling, petals alluring. The song, the color, the rising ecstasy of spring.   My God.   This beauty.   This, this is what I’ve hoped for.   All my life is here in the unnamed core—dogwood, daffodil, tulip poplar, crab apple, crepe myrtle— only now, in spring, can the place be named.

Terrible are the rose names ... Stakeholders in a tradition of “Grande Amore” and “True Love” (one carmine, the other blush ... ), their aims are, for the most part, scattershot. “Mothersday” and “Playboy,” “Senior Prom” and “Let’s Enjoy” vie with a lyrical “Lady of Shalott,” while a flyweight “Pink Knockout” comes “Outta the Blue” to mock “Honey Perfume,” “Pillow Talk” — jock Cupid wielding clout. Then maybe a puckish curator pairs “Las Vegas” with “Nearly Wild,” “Buttercream” with “Julia Child,” “Aloha” with “Hello, Neighbor ... ” • Misenus, son of Aeolus, god of the wind, don’t you think it’s bad form to practice trumpet on this platform, what with the dentistry squeal at construction site decibel levels of braking blade shaving molar steel, dropped-in blare of delays and arrivals squelched against granite, at close intervals, while you riff on “Over the Rainbow” — ? You received some negative attention from Triton, after blowing his conch so loud you inadvertently entered yourself in an unwinnable contest; now, stuck in a twenty-first-century translation of hell, you press the stops, and for an obol prepare our burial in an infinite axial scroll with a tinier and tinier turning radius, as if we were those hordes, the unsanctified, who shoved one another along the Cocytus, none led on to the golden bough by Venus’s semaphore, the unloved rock doves, whom Virgil treats so gently in the Aeneid.

Why speak of hate, when I do bleed for love? Not hate, my love, but Love doth bite my tongue Till I taste stuff that makes my rhyming rough So flatter I my fever for the one For whom I inly mourn, though seem to shun. A rose is arrows is eros, so what If I confuse the shade that I’ve become With winedark substance in a lover’s cup? But stop my tonguely wound, I’ve bled enough. If I be fair, or false, or freaked with fear If I my tongue in lockèd box immure Blame not me, for I am sick with love. Yet would I be your friend most willingly Since friendship would infect me killingly.

When I was a boy In Looziana, We wore blue jeans And a red bandanna. My folks moved up To the state of Maine, We wore duck shoes In slicker-suit rain. My folks moved down To the state of Texas, We wore brand names Like Lazy X’s. Now that we’re living It up in Vermont, We wear pretty much Whatever we want.

I was eating my dinner alone, sitting on the living-room couch watching a movie on TV for company when the forces your covetous presence prevents slowly crawled out in fibrous droves. Without you to follow me with your clipboard, or record the game my face plays, masquerading as a cryptic territory and your field of study, the energy maggots turned the furniture into an ectoplasmic mass with the weight of iron: soft but resistant, a taut balloon against the hand. Hypnotized by the atmosphere I fell asleep, and the chair took revenge on my psyche. I could not scream, so I focused my will on pushing back against the animate matter. I was near failing when I managed to utter the word "dove," and then you shook me awake. "Stop," stop fighting with the furniture, you said. Yet something I could not see pushed hard against me, and it was not a force for good. My vocal chords were paralyzed and the language of the living was the only way to stop it.