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The dragonfly at rest on the doorbell— too weak to ring and glad of it, but well mannered and cautious, thinking it best to observe us quietly before flying in, and who knows if he will find the way out? Cautious of traps, this one. A winged cross, plain, the body straight as a thermometer, the old glass kind that could kill us with mercury if our teeth did not respect its brittle body. Slim as an eel but a solitary glider, a pilot without bombs or weapons, and wings clear and small as a wish to see over our heads, to see the whole picture. And when our gaze grazes over it and moves on, the dragonfly changes its clothes, sheds its old skin, shriveled like laundry, and steps forth, polished black, with two circles buttoned like epaulettes taking the last space at the edge of its eyes.

1 The old watch: their thick eyes puff and foreclose by the moon. The young, heads trailed by the beginnings of necks, shiver, in the guarantee they shall be bodies. In the frog pond the vapor trail of a SAC bomber creeps, I hear its drone, drifting, high up in immaculate ozone. 2 And I hear, coming over the hills, America singing, her varied carols I hear: crack of deputies' rifles practicing their aim on stray dogs at night, sput of cattleprod, TV going on about the smells of the human body, curses of the soldier as he poisons, burns, grinds, and stabs the rice of the world, with open mouth, crying strong, hysterical curses. 3 And by paddies in Asia bones wearing a few shadows walk down a dirt road, smashed bloodsuckers on their heel, knowing flesh thrown down in the sunshine dogs shall eat and flesh flung into the air shall be seized by birds, shoulder blades smooth, unmarked by old feather-holes, hands rivered by blue, erratic wanderings of the blood, eyes crinkled shut at almost seeing the drifting sun that gives us our lives.

A charm, a dream of protection. Gurgles hold the night light’s glow. A stream of clouds misting the branching tubes. Water, in fog, a tub, plug to wire in the wall saying Okay, it’s okay all night. *    *    * School, a door closing he opens: haze of playground French, the five names for different kinds of marbles, games, bullies he wandered among while I was staring at the sea. Shut off, not my past, nothing I could do— I keep making up all the world he lived. His new name, intricate drawings of aliens, long tunnel of lunch (Mais il ne mange rien monsieur)— school hours shadows that smother my days. *    *    * Burnt-out hills: char and velvety ash along the dropped limbs, magpies, new gullies. A dry time clears the ground. He was standing where the road split, arms spread, a small x straddling the crack. That bird call a slash, then, on the edge of things. He was standing, behind him the green blue of ocean, the white blue of sky. *    *    * The house of childhood sold, or razed— not lost but softened, distended: diaphanous linked chambers springing from a lightshaft or a varnish smell, the way a floorboard aches, a scrap of wallpaper tunnels the heart. *    *    * A film of “events”— tiny collisions, tracks of light in the bubble chamber—you’d scan for hours (smell of formica, rock headsets, eyes going furry near four AM). This celluloid memory now your memory, coursing chemical fissures in the brain. Matter split like time, thinner and thinner parings— Anything that happens is too fast to see *    *    * There the sky kept reeling as she ran— wisps, then puffy clumps, then rain— the park spread low beneath the blanketing. Who could have worn that purple coat cartwheeling in the grass? It grows as I look at it, puts on pillowy layers. Now the coat wears memory, warms a ghost. *    *    * Wind off the world’s top, whipped clouds over hedgerows: Girton, that one year twenty years away. He learned to walk, she started school, read, slowly, the first book Red. Moss edging the garden wall, little flags on the clothesline.

Half-ended melodies are purer. To no longer perform in broad daylight, the apple’s a radish for it, the winter chill a living thing. But take your brother into later learning: Let the girls who will smell the buried cloves there. So I am only beginning to learn what I from time to time forget. But throw away these childish things! Barney’s coffin disappeared, and luckily you said the right thing for the sky mentioned for the last time. The little master of small talk is really the seducer of your every move, taking you into his confidence the way a cat his mouse. And still young Lycidas cannot express himself fully. And: “Everyone is the same,” even down to his jockey shorts,dolce far niente, as they say.

Will death be like this? Like waking from a long dream still held—grounded— in the body disremembered? Spinning ceiling, close call? Foolish beating heart? Those trembling aftershocks of some electric message where bone met motion, clamoring in ligaments, that lingering tremolo singing in the ears like doubt, maybe the echo of some unrecognized once-familiar name. Estranged touch of wind over skin, on damp arms the hair not yet laid down . . . Breath's sour fluctuations not quite tamed. Cheeks' flush loosening, a displaced temperature sensed, unseasonal. Flash of light burning against walls, image after image, an eye, a frame, missing there. Where, searching, searchless, you can't point to or put a finger on, nevertheless an urge surging in raised fingers. A circle discontinuous, once rounded out by mouth. Throbbing inside the brow, no accessible thought. Specifically no memory arising from follicles still tingling, the dulling skull heedless, singed with salty pores. What if it's like this, only without the body?

Borne forward by extended increments. Crawling waterward from this weed wilted shore. Like small furred voles skittering inward, taking little grounded, mirrored steps: Like this, intervals of ice ridge and rime the pond rim. By night. As if by dreaming ice might cast its million limbs over that surface above. Its frozen tincture outfolding farther, farther unfurling across. By dawn: The moonspread scales then a foregone conclusion. Constructed, transmutable truth: All day ice shrinking from the light, reconsidering. And still, in leaving, leaving its lingering doubt, pale shadow of wingspan edgebound. Near. Then again in dark the cold falling, fallen to glow on the meniscus, ice groping forward with more sliding white. Ice: Its own logic, growing: Its horizontal precipice. Its glass carapace. Night's cold and hoary frost. Vaster still till all its heirs' outstretched tips interslip, imprint with their ferny whorls an entire span between lands. To travel that unthinkably far! And then, having reached to cry out more room!—crack like a shell, heave between its crushing shores. But which pressing which? And what boundary divides water from ice, what self solidifies against self, which is water—host or whore? Ice now in spring dissolving, dissolute reversal by increments retreating. Not I, alive, here mudnudged under eaves, forming my young egg by egg, mother's lasting bequest. To nest once in heat. To hatch and be born.

Sometimes it’s the shoes, the tying and untying, the bending of the heart to put them on, take them off, the rush of blood between the head and feet, my face, sometimes, if I could see it, astonished. Other times the stairs, three, four stages at the most, “flights” we call them, in honor of the wings we’ll never have, the fifth floor the one that kills the breath, where the bird in the building flies to first. Love, too, a leveler, a dying all its own, the parts left behind not to be replaced, a loss ongoing, and every day increased, like rising in the night, at 3:00 am, to watch the snow or the dead leaf fall, the rings around the streetlight in the rain, and then the rain, the red fist in the heart opening and closing almost without me. “ — Yesterday brought to today so lightly!” The morning, more and more, like evening. When I bend to tie my shoes and the blood fills the cup, it’s as if I see into the hidden earth, see the sunburned path on which I pass in shoes that look like sandals and arrive at a house where my feet are washed and wiped with my mother’s hair and anointed with the autumn oils of wildflowers.

I worry much about the suffering of Machado. I was only one when he carried his mother across the border from Spain to France in a rainstorm. She died and so did he a few days later in a rooming house along a dry canal. To carry Mother he abandoned a satchel holding his last few years of poetry. I've traveled to Collioure several times to search for Machado's lost satchel. The French fed him but couldn't save him. There's no true path to a death — we discover the path by walking. We turn a corner on no road and there's a house on a green hill with a thousand colorful birds sweeping in a circle. Are the poems in the basement of the house on the hill? We'll find out if we remember earth at all.

I. Le Bonheur dogwood flakes what is green the petals from the apple blow on the road mourning doves mark the sway of the afternoon, bees dig the plum blossoms the morning stands up straight, the night is blue from the full of the April moon iris and lilac, birds birds, yellow flowers white flowers, the Diesel does not let up dragging the plow as the whippoorwill, the night’s tractor, grinds his song and no other birds but us are as busy (O saisons, O chateaux! Délires! What soul is without fault? Nobody studies happiness Every time the cock crows I salute him I have no longer any excuse for envy. My life has been given its orders: the seasons seize the soul and the body, and make mock of any dispersed effort. The hour of death is the only trespass II. The Charge dogwood flakes the green the petals from the apple-trees fall for the feet to walk on the birds are so many they are loud, in the afternoon they distract, as so many bees do suddenly all over the place With spring one knows today to see that in the morning each thing is separate but by noon they have melted into each other and by night only crazy things like the full moon and the whippoorwill and us, are busy. We are busy if we can get by that whiskered bird, that nightjar, and get across, the moon is our conversation, she will say what soul isn’t in default? can you afford not to make the magical study which happiness is? do you hear the cock when he crows? do you know the charge, that you shall have no envy, that your life has its orders, that the seasons seize you too, that no body and soul are one if they are not wrought in this retort? that otherwise efforts are efforts? And that the hour of your flight will be the hour of your death? III. Spring The dogwood lights up the day. The April moon flakes the night. Birds, suddenly, are a multitude The flowers are ravined by bees, the fruit blossoms are thrown to the ground, the wind the rain forces everything. Noise— even the night is drummed by whippoorwills, and we get as busy, we plow, we move, we break out, we love. The secret which got lost neither hides nor reveals itself, it shows forth tokens. And we rush to catch up. The body whips the soul. In its great desire it demands the elixir In the roar of spring, transmutations. Envy drags herself off. The fault of the body and the soul —that they are not one— the matutinal cock clangs and singleness: we salute you season of no bungling

Me moriré en Paris con aguacero ... I will die in Miami in the sun, On a day when the sun is very bright, A day like the days I remember, a day like other days, A day that nobody knows or remembers yet, And the sun will be bright then on the dark glasses of strangers And in the eyes of a few friends from my childhood And of the surviving cousins by the graveside, While the diggers, standing apart, in the still shade of the palms, Rest on their shovels, and smoke, Speaking in Spanish softly, out of respect. I think it will be on a Sunday like today, Except that the sun will be out, the rain will have stopped, And the wind that today made all the little shrubs kneel down; And I think it will be a Sunday because today, When I took out this paper and began to write, Never before had anything looked so blank, My life, these words, the paper, the gray Sunday; And my dog, quivering under a table because of the storm, Looked up at me, not understanding, And my son read on without speaking, and my wife slept. Donald Justice is dead. One Sunday the sun came out, It shone on the bay, it shone on the white buildings, The cars moved down the street slowly as always, so many, Some with their headlights on in spite of the sun, And after awhile the diggers with their shovels Walked back to the graveside through the sunlight, And one of them put his blade into the earth To lift a few clods of dirt, the black marl of Miami, And scattered the dirt, and spat, Turning away abruptly, out of respect.