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I might have married a painter, Therefore his mother. A radar Detector, a snow-covered Mountain, a novel By John Grisham not even Out yet. No, I wed The cop directing my rush, Toot toot, a trainer to test Agility, a kettle calling Time to steep. Yes, But I married this bird you must Close your eyes to know At scale, to hear his trills And fancy arpeggios Come-come-hithering. His note of warning.

From a ways, the sky and your hands come to my eyes, from some distant part of you; it’s snowing out, you’re all in the white of the snow every track in the candor a wound and the field beyond the window is a body a glance that becomes a pronouncement, the heat of breath, your head adrift in sleeplessness; that’s where it returns, in a word translated into silence where the sparrows tie loose knots your palms on your eyes, chest on your knees forehead in the snow. Translated from the Italian

as the meat within the shell as the shell before the caw a bleached weed a fig dusted to sweet the skin egg albumen of peacock butterfly held to the ivory of oxen hoof pulling the space between sins                    I am as I am so the host                             on the tongue God of Bread complexion of conquest the salt of Lot as God is a crown of thorn diadem of wheat so am I the echo calling fossil back to name amaranth ash                    spread across the light

while the black oak takes coaxing. That popping and whistling? Yellow birch and red pine. Difference might for now define, but soon the whole church is chanting at the same time, flame splashing bright from the dirty bucket of the earthly, roaring likeness and only likeness into the bottomless cool of the night . . .

Of Tribulation, these are They, Denoted by the White. — Emily Dickinson

Having been blown away by a book I am in the gutter at the end of the street in little pieces like the alphabet (mother do not worry letters are not flesh though there’s meaning in them but not when they are mean my letters to you were mean I found them after you died and read them and tore them up and fed them to the wind thank you for intruding I love you now leave) Also at the end of the street there is a magnolia tree the white kind that tatters after it blooms so the tree winds up in the street Our naked shivering bodies must be at some distance missing us    come back come back they cry come home put down that book whenever you read you drift away on a raft you like your parrot more than you like me and stuff like that (dear father you always were a bore but I loved you more than interesting things and in your honor I’ve felt the same about myself and everyone I’ve ever met) I like to read in tree houses whenever I can    which is seldom and sometimes never The book that blew me away held all the problems of the world and those of being alive under my nose but I felt far away from them at the same time reading is like that (I am sorry I did not go to your funeral but like you said on the phone an insect cannot crawl to China) Here at the end of the street the insects go on living under the dome of the pacific sky If Mary and Joseph had walked the sixty miles to Bethlehem vertically they would have found themselves floating in the outer pitch of space it would have been cold no inns a long night in the dark endless and when they began to cry the whole world would think something had just been born I like to read into things as I am continually borne forward in time by the winds like the snow (dear sister you were perfect in every way like a baby please tell brother the only reason we never spoke was out of our great love for each other which made a big wind that blew us apart) I think I am coming back I feel shoulders where a parrot could land though a tree would be as good a place as any You cannot teach a tree to talk Trees can say    it is spring but not    though bright sunlight can also be very sad have you noticed?

If we meet each other in Hell it’s not Hell. — Geoffrey Hill i How is it I can never find Or call to mind One image of Christ walking slowly in the rain, In a steady, gentle rain, The kind that shapes an afterimage Just for a moment of the man Like a cloak of shadow following Or like a blank page After it’s been turned? The dead are concealed from us But not distorted by the rain. They remember our having remembered. A woman curls up on the sofa. Years before the fact she sleeps Her death and drapes it Even now, exactly as she must. Just after dawn, In the wren’s eye There are no blossoms left in the trees, And yet the sunlight blazons white New flowers onto every leaf. The wren’s eye gorges itself, Bursting the new life. The memory of a tree is the tree. Christ could fly. Impale upon him certain words Good as Greek For the impulse of the earth is to seek A language of flowers That do not die, turning A hair’s breadth toward us Even now, exactly as they must. If it was justice I saw Fall from the sun Onto boys ruining the one Flower shared between them, So be it. The woman on the sofa wears a little wing In her sleep. When she awakes, Its twin will be the wren in the dream Nearly there, nearly all the way There into the human day. Rain falls out of brilliant sunshine. For a moment, her window Fills with catastrophe, boys Torn apart and scattered, white petals Blackening the glass, Exacting recent justice. So strange that the recent past, As chaste As antiquity, as the orangery Of a blind eye, should at once appear Preposterous Yet achingly tender. Modern times are too cautious. The boyish, florid love of catastrophe Has thrust a fist into the dawn, And the scent of that fist, Whose citron betters daylight, Is wasted on modern times. Not long ago, you and I Nearly captured a wren. Christ lifted His face then, And rain fell all day until evening. ii In a corner of my garden, there is a spider’s web Entirely armored in rose petals broken off by rain. The spider will learn to eat roses, or he will starve to death. This is political economy for modern times. The planet dies. The planet starves its cruel interiors First, with a blazon of colors and soft poetry. Next, It apportions one small bird to every tree and sets fire To the trees. The rest is the cold business of the oceans Who have never forgiven us for breathing air. Homer was tempted. Loose thighs of oblivion Welcomed humanity away from itself and from life, And only one of the Bronze-Age host refused that welcome. He was the father of starvation, entirely armored In the disguise of a real man, destroyer of oceans. We have made ugly war upon distinctions. Canon bleeds a wedding into the gigue, and “when I try to imagine a faultless love or” the seedtime Of my deepest convictions — that the soul is immortal, That a woman couched upon a fragile little wing Created the creator of the universe — thought, Or rather the entire machinery of truth and terror Usurps a newborn king, i.e. imagination. Phaedrus, step down. There is a little wing wearing sunshine Like wind in the white hair of the bee you never imagined. An infinitesimal distance goes on forever. At the moment of death, the light hand of Attic stele Softly lights upon the shoulder of eternity, And thought yields to flesh and flesh yields to imagination, Sexing this or that unimaginable creation With new hair. It makes a difference. We are bound to one another And to God by harrowing, albeit helpless distinctions, Impossible to bridge, imperative to love well. We are free, but briefly. The pattern of a leaf branches Out from human hearts, and the blood spills Into the pattern a stone makes crashing into windshields. God follows. The wrist and wing of the beloved follow Close behind, and not even Hell prevails against This new extinction. Slow time is the beginning Of no time at all. The light hand of Attic stele Wrests me from the sleep I’d imagined life to be — The walking stone, the irreparable Gethsemane — And I am awake, wearing a green flesh newly fashioned From my heart. coda Should the bird outlast the blossom in the tree? Keep faith, but keep it silently, Starveling. I keenly remember there were two of us, And a stand of poplars like a kiss Quavering Upon the shade of the earth where no earth was Ready to bear the weight of us Relinquishing Soul for substance, pistil of white campion For color, continuance and one Unbelieving Substance of perfect memory. There were no trees. The sun was shining.

Arborvitae It rises in a Champaign County bog Amid bedstraw and skunk cabbage, Rises out there in an ice age River valley gorged with glacial till, And swills the moraine-filtered rainwater With the wafer ash and honeysuckle. Stalwart, set apart, and biblical — As if one of that ancient company That gave its coniferous canonical body To the tent that shuttled God Through the wilderness. • They say that cedar and cypress Are the protectors of  bones. You see them from the freeway, standing alone, Statuesque and serious, In the dead middle of and vigilant In beanfields, where farmers used to plant Their families. • Who are you like in your greatness? Consider a cedar of Lebanon, with fair boughs And forest shade, and of great height, Its top among the clouds.

First snow—I release her into it— I know, released, she won't come back. This is different from letting what, already, we count as lost go. It is nothing like that. Also, it is not like wanting to learn what losing a thing we love feels like. Oh yes: I love her. Released, she seems for a moment as if some part of me that, almost, I wouldn't mind understanding better, is that not love? She seems a part of me, and then she seems entirely like what she is: a white dog, less white suddenly, against the snow, who won't come back. I know that; and, knowing it, I release her. It's as if I release her because I know.

In winter all the singing is in the tops of the trees where the wind-bird with its white eyes shoves and pushes among the branches. Like any of us he wants to go to sleep, but he's restless— he has an idea, and slowly it unfolds from under his beating wings as long as he stays awake. But his big, round music, after all, is too breathy to last. So, it's over. In the pine-crown he makes his nest, he's done all he can. I don't know the name of this bird, I only imagine his glittering beak tucked in a white wing while the clouds— which he has summoned from the north— which he has taught to be mild, and silent— thicken, and begin to fall into the world below like stars, or the feathers of some unimaginable bird that loves us, that is asleep now, and silent— that has turned itself into snow.