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1 I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer. I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do and its wooden beams were so inviting. 2 We laughed at the hollyhocks together and then I sprayed them with lye. Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing. 3 I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the next ten years. The man who asked for it was shabby and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold. 4 Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg. Forgive me. I was clumsy, and I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!

Robins in the cottonwoods, holding still as the thin snow comes. The sun seems to flood them with blood. They have settled in the empty branches while the storm-lamps spit in your limbs, red evening swinging across the sky then dropping, ragged, into your frame to stay with you as you move and smile and have opinions. Then a woman’s torso white with dawn— their rich perch is yours, there is nothing you need to expect or retrieve, like warm fields floating toward an invisible moon. A person learns stone-throated composures and barters for days of calm weather, like a man in a dream who understands the answering pressure of eyes—you ask too much. But the birds are not reckless. Every minute their fat shapes are filling with sun, and I apprentice myself to their candor. Their bodies drift on the moving branches, solid— they are not taking and keeping. They are not torn papers in a rumor of wind, their small backs brown fields holding thunderclouds up. Inside their bodies, nothing falls to the earth and dies.

And move and hold back entering by the highroad through the words and fall like a person hit by sleep arriving at the place without light And fall like a dead body falls and find there the great enemy and come to a tower all of stones such that through it the earth opens We pass between the martyrs and the high walls even up there water is pouring out then turning and fording again sling the noose from the roof of the house And each and every vapor spent over winning and not losing in which it stands caught out fleet then catapults like a stone Filling our view whereupon another valley is revealed

Various stars. Various kings. Various sunsets, signs, cursory insights. Many minute attentions, many knowledgeable watchers, Much cold, much overbearing darkness. Various long midwinter Glooms. Various Solitary and Terrible Stars. Many Frosty Nights, many previously Unseen Sky-flowers. Many people setting out (some of them kings) all clutching at stars. More than one North Star, more than one South Star. Several billion elliptical galaxies, bubble nebulae, binary systems, Various dust lanes, various routes through varying thicknesses of Dark, Many tunnels into deep space, minds going back and forth. Many visions, many digitally enhanced heavens, All kinds of glistenings being gathered into telescopes: Fireworks, gasworks, white-streaked works of Dusk, Works of wonder and/or water, snowflakes, stars of frost . . . Various dazed astronomers dilating their eyes, Various astronauts setting out into laughterless earthlessness, Various 5,000-year-old moon maps, Various blindmen feeling across the heavens in braille. Various gods making beautiful works in bronze, Brooches, crowns, triangles, cups and chains, And all sorts of drystone stars put together without mortar. Many Wisemen remarking the irregular weather. Many exile energies, many low-voiced followers, Watches of wisp of various glowing spindles, Soothsayers, hunters in the High Country of the Zodiac, Seafarers tossing, tied to a star . . . Various people coming home (some of them kings). Various headlights. Two or three children standing or sitting on the low wall. Various winds, the Sea Wind, the sound-laden Winds of Evening Blowing the stars towards them, bringing snow.

There was a vase that held the world’s riches, but it wasn’t cheap. It cost a dime — and this in a time and place when dimes were sizable, especially for a girl of eight whose construction-worker father was unemployed. The old metaphor was literal in this case and she counted her pennies till there were ten — then embarked on a mission of great secrecy, a purchase whose joys ran so deep, seventy years later, as she told the tale again, her face flushed. It was a birthday gift for her mother. There was a race of people heretofore glimpsed only on hanging scrolls in library books. They were on the vase — the smallest whole figures imaginable, purposeful and industrious as they fished or planted rice or hiked a hill whose spiral trail led to a temple perched upon a crag between cloud and waterfall. They were a vision exported from Japan — a country far as the moon, and far more beautiful, whose artists grasped an eight-year-old girl’s soul’s need for the minutely amplitudinous. There was a place (Detroit, the thirties) now slipped from sight, though here and there I’ll catch some holdover trace — maybe the grille on an old apartment door, or a slumped block of  houses, draped in torn sheets of rain, apparently posing for black-and-white photographs. Even the out- of-a-job, men like my grandfather, donned hats back then before leaving the house — to circle endlessly about, as if a lost job were a lost coin that might yet be found on the street where it had been dropped, making them whole again. There was a face, rucked with care, that would dreamily soften if  talk floated off toward some remote someplace beyond the seas. My grandmother had a yen for the faraway (which she imparted to her daughter), even as her life was tethered between a gray icy motionless Midwestern city — stalled like a car with a frozen ignition — and a Tennessee farm without electricity. (She did once see Washington — cherry season — and often spoke of  those long pink walkways beside the water that were  Japan’s gift to a grateful nation.) There is a vase — a piece of gimcrack that somehow made its way to a crowded curio case in a small souvenir shop in Detroit, seventy-plus years ago — which today stands atop the mantel in the apartment in DC where my fading mother is now living. When she was eight, in 1933, she gave it to my grandmother, who for all her poverty bequeathed her daughter so rich a bounty, including a taste for giving: the gift of grace. It seems a little miracle almost — that it’s intact, the little vase, conveying what its makers set out to convey: an inward island spared by Time, by the times. These days, she can scarcely say who she gave it to, or on what occasion. A — birthday? The pilgrim climbs the winding hill forever, station by station, and “Isn’t it beautiful?” she asks. “You bought it for a dime,” I tell her. It holds the world’s riches still.

Lavenderish dusk strapped for stays, pomegranates under the rubberband chucked for a glass Oz, letdown splayed by the pillar-shelves to page upon the Ottoman: his talk has wrought suit amid citrus gapes and pall dunked in the bowl and grated sage or cleaved clear paleo-pines. Postgeist, upcast California upon weed, what banker yields so fragrant a cant as this vagrant cant?

After the steaming bodies swept through the hungry streets of swollen cities; after the vast pink spawning of family poisoned the rivers and ravaged the prairies; after the gamble of latex and diaphragms and pills; I invoked the white robes, gleaming blades ready for blood, and, feeling the scourge of Increase and Multiply, made affirmation:Yes, deliver us from complicity. And after the precision of scalpels, I woke to a landscape of sunshine where the catbird mates for life and maps trace out no alibis—stepped into a morning of naked truth, where acts mean what they really are: the purity of loving for the sake of love.

In a life below decks in a great ship, windowless, butterflies in lamplight are moving as they move. Fish swim indifferently inside their bowl, two men toss a ball, each to each, as the ship speeds, head- long ahead, and nothing's driven back to the stern since to go with this motion is to be moored in port. From the tallest mountain at the mind’s white pole a cannon fires its charges into space, progressive speed, till one ball, by falling, flies, by flying, falls. Now the surfer catches a wave of frozen light and rides it motionless to an impossible shore where he reckons sand the particles of his path: and twins, one traveled from earthbound earth, the other staying home, meet again after years, each to the other younger from when he left. The cat in its dire box keeps equally live and dead, the poison released, should hammer shatter flask when the atom decays, which it may not, or it may. You, who chose two ways equally at once, circuit the conferences, meetings fueled by enigma, mixing with the eminent and their sidereal regard, your morning Masses before library and lab. All outcomes must be possible in the system—Schrödinger. In your life's chosen box, this con-celebration.

Roaring roast cake with bean base spareribs for me, carottes é touff é es medium rare, I like them a tad undercooked, still red with sap, tea leaves in olive oil, strawberry sushi flummoxed to the point of deliquescence, or better still, freshly picked cucumber rolls to match the lettuce steak, mesquite broiled to a crunchy andante, with all organic granola salsa, nuts nutritious to the max, and then of course the soypork casserole with legs of boletus, and tofu chops on a platter of tomato paste base salmon with a sprinkling of beet juice droplets, all served with a rich broccoli broth.

there was a frozen tree that I wanted to paint but the shells came down and in Vegas looking across at a green sunshade at 3:30 in the morning, I died without nails, without a copy of the Atlantic Monthly, the windows screamed like doves moaning the bombing of Milan and I went out to live with the rats but the lights were too bright and I thought maybe I'd better go back and sit in a poetry class: a marvelous description of a gazelle is hell; the cross sits like a fly on my window, my mother’s breath stirs small leaves in my mind; and I hitch-hiked back to L.A. through hangover clouds and I pulled a letter from my pocket and read it and the truckdriver said, what’s that? and I said, there's some gal up North who used to sleep with Pound, she's trying to tell me that H.D. was our greatest scribe; well, Hilda gave us a few pink Grecian gods in with the chinaware, but after reading her I still have 140 icicles hanging from my bones. I'm not going all the way to L.A., the truckdriver said. it's all right, I said, the calla lilies nod to our minds and someday we’ll all go home together. in fact, he said, this is as far as we go. so I let him have it; old withered whore of time your breasts taste the sour cream of dreaming . . . he let me out in the middle of the desert; to die is to die is to die, old phonographs in cellars, joe di maggio, magazines in with the onions . . . an old Ford picked me up 45 minutes later and, this time, I kept my mouth shut.