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As in green,vert, a royal demesne stocked with deer.Invert as in tipped as a snow globe, going nowhere in circles but not lost, not bereft as the wood without deer, waiting for the white antlered buck, or his does, or any slim yearling to step along the berm, return.Vertigo as in whirling round,swimming in the head, unanchored by the long spring, the horse cantering, the meadow dropping like an elevator into the earth, falling like Persephone through a crevice, a swiveling crack, a loose screw, a lost way.Disordered as in death lasts, my brother’s not coming back. The spin of it continuous as in looking down from height, and then it stops, the spinning just slows, a chariot wheel stilled in grass. The world is the same, but it isn’t. The tipped views of trees when hanging from your knees. The deer in twos and threes watching.

Last time I fell in a shower room I bled like a tumbril dandy and the hotel longed to be rid of me. Taken to the town clinic, I described how I tripped on a steel rim and found my head in the wardrobe. Scalp-sewn and knotted and flagged I thanked the Frau Doktor and fled, wishing the grab-bar of age might be bolted to all civilization and thinking of Rome’s eighth hill heaped up out of broken amphorae. When, anytime after sixty, or anytime before, you stumble over two stairs and club your forehead on rake or hoe, bricks or fuel-drums, that’s the time to call the purveyor of steel pipe and indoor railings, and soon you’ll be grasping up landings having left your balance in the car from which please God you’ll never see the launchway of tires off a brink. Later comes the sunny day when street detail whitens blindly to mauve and people hurry you, or wait, quiet.

After D.H.L. Your first thought when the light snaps on and the black wings clatter about the kitchen       is a bat the clear part of  your mind considers rabies       the other part does not consider       knows only to startle and cower away from the slap of  its wings       though it is soon clearly not a bat but a moth       and harmless still you are shy of it       it clings to the hood of the stove not black but brown       its orange eyes sparkle like televisions       its leg  joints are large enough to count how could you kill it       where would you hide the body a creature so solid must have room for a soul and if  this is so       why not in a creature half  its size       or half its size again       and so on down to the ants       clearly it must be saved caught in a shopping bag and rushed to the front door afraid to crush it       feeling the plastic rattle loosened into the night air       it batters the porch light throwing fitful shadows around the landing That was a really big moth is all you can say to the doorman who has watched your whole performance with a smile the half-compassion and half-horror we feel for the creatures we want not to hurt       and prefer not to touch

I seem to wake and sleep ambiguously, to see and misconceive, to feel on the brink of something that doesn’t end, beauty that is more than beautiful, meaning that is more. The present is all around me, dreams, a panoply of crimes, smudges of erasure, memory made of clouds, camels, weasels and the unlikelihood of somewhere within and beyond this world. Here’s light, angular, ubiquitous with the milky pigments of belief. Here’s plodding time, breathing hard. Birds fly up, perch on branches, peck seed from the grass, (tug worms from the soil). I am not what I imagined, here I am the illusionist and dupe of my illusions, making the angels disappear, wishing them back again. Stories that shifted in the telling once were true: a virgin birth, a resurrection, a tiger who regained his human form, a crocodile who didn’t. I’m pitching words against the sea, it drags them out, flings them back again still freighted with my weight. The waves are red with blood, brown with shit, yellow with the sickly light, anything but blue and green. I am an insistent fizz and drone, deft, adroit, as elastic as necessity and chance, one more clay figurine with beseeching hollows where the eyes should be, as different from the others as I am the same, no more evolved than a roach, no better than a rat, happy as a labrador in the sun. This is grace, the rest is commentary and I would let it go: in millennia I’ll chatter metaphysics with a chimpanzee, now my thoughts are the antlers of the Irish elk, the wings of flightless birds, peptides spelling out the phrase very like a whale. Most organisms produce more offspring than can possibly survive. Nothing can follow that. Something will. Blunt heads of rain, faithless wind, the stricken sun at dusk, knock-kneed girls somersaulting on the beach, the commonplace surprise of making love face to face, the heart breaking apart, an instrumental eye and instrumental mind rejoicing, a last cacophony of birds.

Amant in bed, dreaming. There are no borders to this miniature. B moves Bateau across the night. It is all the loops can do to let their gilding bulge with what is there. One light on the wide sea. The bones of stars. No other country is so curiously watered. From the estuaries to the very sources of its inwardtending channels, it rises in fogs which are themselves arterial. For its earth has more than once been seen quite early in the morning to lighten and give way. At the gate to the garden, Fair Welcome. She raises her hand. Salutare: to greet and to save. Leisures of tendrils are on all sides, winding with the snails through white acanthus and discarded badges of pilgrims. You may assign to the nineteen portholes in these borders whatever you like. The sand is of such fineness and the flow so singly clear that nothing seems to pass through, golden, and with all its lights. Water makes very much the best portable horizon. While its reflections are fainter than those in the speculum, their angles may be measured accurately and the differences from a true meridian reckoned by the clock. These sightings should be taken at least three hours before and after noon. Two liveried falconers, the jesses and bells, the gloves. Amant with the dove’s neck-ring, The lady in her chamber. Winter trees, rooks in the white branches, hounds, the dying boar. On the top of a mountain a lion waving his tail. The general course of the river straightens, and is moderately timbered. Scattered islands covered w/willow. Across from a single, long bluff of open rock, the plain to the S. is higher, extending quite to the mountains which contain still great quantities of snow. A small creek falls in from this side. Pursued its bottom for perhaps 4 m. Cottonwood. Much evidence of beaver. Now all of this is to be understood in a spiritual manner. Let us cover the nakedness of our fathers with the cloak of a favorable interpretation. Under a dry stalk of burdock, iron-brown latches and fittings, a few nails. The bulls are eating apples. Thick grasses sweat through the whole pasture. Dame Reason with her chaplet of apothegms. He should put his heart in a single place only. The truest things about bodies are their shadows. Pleas put me back in the water I am Paddle-to-the-Sea She has done this before. She wades into the current to the one point where the current lounges at her hips. She stands there. With all the time in the world, steadily, she kneels steadily deeper, to her shoulders, smiling, her hair cupped in both hands behind her neck. The Familiar gives Its first lesson to the lover. A new order is one that is renewed hourly. A drove of geese in its tall, while file plucks home through the wet fallow. Hedges darken between the fields. Along the wolds for miles in level tracts, haze from the lime-kilns. All quarters of the sky are wintry, huge. We could no longer be sure that we had passed the Préveranges. Freshets from the little stream poured onto the lane, filling ruts and drainages. In the dusk, and with our shoes soaked, we set off through a meadow, and another, and found soon an abandoned cottage of some old forester. We determined that I should stay and secure it as an outpost. Meaulnes went on alone. At an earlier hour, the ground at the wood’s edge illumines to some thousand footcandles, fades under the canopies, the layers of trees, of shrubs and herbs, under the dark itself, brighter by as many eyes as are buried there. Tied to a washboard, submerged, the panes of glass chime like clean ice. they are dangers harebells and just where the fall goes over they lean into the spray so far and bob so on their stems they thrill and a hammer rings carillon down the cows spine feel it there it goes again Death hath its seat close to the entrance of delight. —Gudique Sifting over porches and limp hibiscus, rust from the canvas awnings, its red spores dull in a moon that shows everything, houses and driveways, fishponds, all of them hiding from their insides, forgetting, looking around. there is no way to lie down and not lie in the same way that someone has had to lie thinking of how far it is to the places no one goes or to any place this far from the beds where the dying cry into the night this far Deacons and presbyters. The Laying On of Hands. In a vial, juice from the wild cucumber, powdered glass, the divine Endura.

A man and a woman pretend to be white ice Three men at the lavender door are closed in by the storm With strong prejudice and money to buy the green pines One weekend fisherman and blue painters watch The vivid violet winds blow visibility from the mountain Beyond the black valley. That means or then you know You’re in a big cloud of it, it’s brilliant white mid-February A week or two left on distracting black trees Before the brownish buds obscure your view of the valley again. Looking for company four dark men and a burnt sienna woman Come in for three minutes, then bye-bye like a gold watch left on the chair Or part of the sum of what big white families think up To store for long yellow Sundays to eat for brown ecological company. At some point later gorgeous red adventure stops, did you forget To turn it down and laugh in the face of the fearful white storm anyway Or picture it brilliant blue for a further Sunday memory In a coloring book, you talk as lightly as you can Refusing a big pink kiss, you burned the Sunday sauce Of crushed red tomatoes, you turn it down to just an orange glow. This particular storm, considering the pause and the greenish thaw before it Reminds me in its mildness of imitating a sea-green memory that is actually In the future, I imitate an imagined trumpet sound Or the brilliant purple words of a man or woman I haven’t met yet Or perhaps it’s a grey-haired man I already know who said some- thing yesterday To a mutual friend who will give me the whole story in black and white tomorrow Or the day after, just as the big orange plows for the local businesses Go to work to push away the rest of the white snow that will fall tonight.

I love to watch them sheathe themselves mid-air, shut wings and ride the light’s poor spine to earth, to touch down in gutters, in the rainbowed urine of suicides, just outside Bellevue’s walls. From in there the ransacked cadavers are carried up the East River to Potter’s Field as if they were an inheritance, gleaned of saveable parts, their diseases jarred and labeled, or incinerated, the ashes of metastisized vision professing the virus that lives beyond the flesh in air ... The first time I saw the inside of anything alive, a downed bird opened cleanly under my heel. I knelt to watch the spectral innards shine and quicken, the heart-whir magnify. And though I can’t say now what kind of bird it was, nor the season, spring or autumn, what dangerous transition, I have identified so many times that sudden earnest spasm of the throat in children, or in the jaundiced faces of the dying, the lower eye-lids straining upward. Fear needs its metaphors. I’ve read small helplessnesses make us maternal. Even the sparrows feel it, nesting this evening in traffic lights. They must have remembered, long enough to mate, woods they’ve never seen, but woods inbred up the long light of instinct, the streaked siennas of a forest floor born now into the city, the oak umbers, and the white tuft of tail feathers like a milkweed meadow in which their song, as Burroughs heard it, could be distinguished: come-come-where-where-all-together- down-the-hill ...

In your extended absence, you permit me use of earth, anticipating some return on investment. I must report failure in my assignment, principally regarding the tomato plants. I think I should not be encouraged to grow tomatoes. Or, if I am, you should withhold the heavy rains, the cold nights that come so often here, while other regions get twelve weeks of summer. All this belongs to you: on the other hand, I planted the seeds, I watched the first shoots like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart broken by the blight, the black spot so quickly multiplying in the rows. I doubt you have a heart, in our understanding of that term. You who do not discriminate between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence, immune to foreshadowing, you may not know how much terror we bear, the spotted leaf, the red leaves of the maple falling even in August, in early darkness: I am responsible for these vines.

Once I believed in you; I planted a fig tree. Here, in Vermont, country of no summer. It was a test: if the tree lived, it would mean you existed. By this logic, you do not exist. Or you exist exclusively in warmer climates, in fervent Sicily and Mexico and California, where are grown the unimaginable apricot and fragile peach. Perhaps they see your face in Sicily; here we barely see the hem of your garment. I have to discipline myself to share with John and Noah the tomato crop. If there is justice in some other world, those like myself, whom nature forces into lives of abstinence, should get the lion's share of all things, all objects of hunger, greed being praise of you. And no one praises more intensely than I, with more painfully checked desire, or more deserves to sit at your right hand, if it exists, partaking of the perishable, the immortal fig, which does not travel.

Branching the way blind fingers splay across The face they’re reading, trees trace the backyard Ditch sop that their shadows drop off into Space, an abyss where I hear a neighbor boy’s Voice cursing an exhilarated, out of its mind, Unappeasably inventive flow of “Fuck fuck motherfuck” ecstasy that maybe He imagines the neighborhood can't hear?— or is his tongue wired To some source of inspired but as yet unknown Intelligence that radiates from all of us and he Is its mouthpiece, speaking it to the trees That screen him from me listening to his Unrelenting arias, predestined like birdsong Flowing unbidden, of four-letter almost Erotic keening over something I know too, Everybody knows?— and even if all it is Is the “fuck fuck motherfuck” ecstasy Of April budding in his mouth and sending down Roots to some anti-self that sprouts and shadows Him as it croons and shouts the song of its difference— Even then, this Billy whom I don’t think twice about When we meet in the alley and slap palms Or I see him playing alone on the swings of big kids’ slide, Even then is he the vessel of some signal that uses us, Down in the abyss irradiating him so that just this instant Whatever that other uses him for he can’t resist: His voice an instrument of blissed-out torment Until that grip flings him loose— Who knows which of us it chooses to penetrate Next, making us suddenly sweat or shiver, That influence bathing everything budding in profane rays.