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Today a celebrity chimpanzee went postal, tearing up a woman’s face in Connecticut. And as the Taliban were given the suburbs of Swat in which to stone to death women taken in adultery, a Muslim in New York whose radio station promoted Islam as the most humane religion cut off his wife’s head. Tomorrow, of course, will be another day, but we live one day at a time. Yesterday I uncovered the ribbon snake in the woodpile, stiff and cold in its winter sleep. A new urgency for spring: I put the split log back and took my wood from the farther end of the last stack. What’s with the chimp? I wondered, driving between filthy snowbanks past stark trees like bony hands clawing up out of the frozen earth to grab a gray heaven. My wife thinks it’s all that wireless buzz hissing unbeknownst through everyone’s brains. I lean more toward toilet training. For sure, it began to go bad one unknown day before history when the last man was browbeaten to step beyond a globe of golden firelight to drain his dragon in outer darkness. But we can’t dwell in the past, can we? “To spring out on” we call hereabouts the firewood we wade through crusted snow to cut in March. Someone just might have to wake up early this year. But, then, let’s just try to stay in the day, shall we?

A slow news day, but I did like the obit about the butcher who kept the same store for fifty years.   People remembered when his street was sweetly roaring, aproned with flower stalls and fish stands. The stock market wandered, spooked by presidential winks, by micro-winds and the shadows of earnings.   News was stationed around the horizon, ready as summer clouds to thunder-- but it moved off and we covered the committee meeting at the back of the statehouse, sat around on our desks, then went home early.   The birds were still singing, the sun just going down.   Working these long hours, you forget how beautiful the early evening can be, the big houses like ships turning into the night, their rooms piled high with silence.

Well I guess that’s all locked up tight Says Sam who guards the mall at night. Sam’s a puppet! He can’t use his eyes. His body is an excellent disguise. I’m Muffy the Mouse! I’m condemned to rhyme Until the Christmas special end of time. That’s Jodi, my human friend. The world goes on and on and will not end Hiya there Jodi. Oh hi Sam. Jodi straightens Jeffrey’s magic tam. Everything’s safe here let’s go upstairs Sam says through a moustache Props repairs. Jodi is so pretty. I hate her. She carries Jeffrey up the escalator To the kid’s department every night Where he turns into space and starlight When I say the magic rhyme. Jeff’s a mannequin Until the mall goes dark. Then he’s a man again.

One Sunday morning, instead of studying The Illiad, I escaped with Bino to Florence, to see what miracles the aviator Manissero would perform. Whether he would demonstrate the art of Daedalus or the folly of Icarus. We found the whole city festooned with banners on which was written:Today We Fly. They were everywhere: Via Cerretani, Via Cavour, Via Calzaioli, along the embankments. There was even one stretched across the Arno with an enormous red Today We Fly reflected in the yellow water like the famous In Hoc Signo Vinces of Ponte Milvio. We almost expected that Florence itself would lift off, with its towers, its statues, its red roofs, with its cathedral's nodding cupola rising slowly through the clouds like a balloon. Every window, doorway and marketplace was crammed with upturned faces, scanning the sky for some sign of the direction the wind might take, and whether there would come with it the smell of rain. We were most afraid of the wind from Bologna, proud enemy to the north. Almost as bad would have been the wind from the south, from Empoli, called the scirocco; or Petrarch's east wind from Arezzo, with its Grecian-accented gusts. But even a soft westerly breeze from Pistoia— even that sweet breath from the ballads of Cino, full of dolce stil novo— would have spelled disaster. Luckily the sky that Sunday was clear, and the air was still. The leaves on the trees around the parade ground stood at ease, and the outlines of the hills were crisp, sharply etched in the crystalline air. Just wait. Today we really will fly, said Bino with a smile. For overnight Today We Fly had become a catchphrase, fit for every occasion: for a straw hat rolling along the pavement; for a parasol blown around the corner; for a dress tangled up between the knees, or blown flapping like a flag around rounded hips. It was the happy time of the first aeroplanes, before the War when it was fashionable for women to wear enormous hairdos as wide as their dresses were narrow. And those gigantic wings of hair, which were the objects of so many of our teenage jokes, have remained braided together in my heart with the fluttering Today We Fly: maliciously good-natured mementos of my adolescence. We hurried over the parade grounds, and there was Manissero crouched in the cockpit of his machine: a contraption of woven reeds and papery cloth, with a motor so small it made you think a horsefly was pinned to the frame behind his shoulders. The crowd had assembled, holding its breath, waiting for the miracle to happen, when suddenly the leaves began to tremble, and the blades of grass of nod. A few tiny white clouds sprouted like windowsills on Monte Morello, and the women's wings of hair began to come untucked from their padded nests of false braids. Manissero jumped out of his cockpit at the first sign of this unfortunate breeze, waved amicably to the crowd with a gloved hand, and yanked off his leather helmet while a banner was unfurled above the grandstands: Because of Unsettled Weather, Today We Will Not Fly. It was hard to imagine anything more settled than the weather that day: a magnificent, paradisiacal Sunday in spring. But all it took was this delicate breeze, this perfumed zephyr from Pistoia, to spoil everything. We returned to Prato with heavy hearts, and I took up my study of the abandoned Illiad, quiet and discouraged. Thursday morning the rumor began to spread that the following Sunday, if the weather was favorable, Manissero would attempt to fly from Florence to Prato and back: thirty kilometers round trip! By Saturday, Via Magnolfi, the Corso, Via del'Oche, Via Firenzuola—all the streets of Prato were crisscrossed with white banners carrying those fateful words: Today We Fly. By noon Sunday rivers of people from the surrounding the countryside were flooding into the city through its five gates, and by three o'clock the cathedral square was awash with a restless and noisy crowd, pale, perspiring, noses in the air. I stood among them with my classmates, all of us impatient, barely kept in check by the stern gaze of our principal and the softer reprimands of the teachers. We began to hear a new word: Velivolo! dancing above the buzz of the crowd. But that name for aeroplane, recently coined by d'Annunzio, seemed too delicate for the gaping mouths of dumbstruck farmers: it was still fresh, still smelled of varnish, and was as sweet and sharp in the mouth as mint candy. Velivolo! Suddenly a white wing appeared in the blue sky and the reed-and-paper bird grew larger, came closer, hovered over the cathedral square. A cry, only one, but from a thousand throats; a cry more of fear than joy: then sudden silence, bursting with anguish. Manissero was perhaps two hundred meters above our heads, and it seemed miraculous. Miraculous not just because he was flying, but because he was flying over Prato, in the virgin sky of Prato! which only the kites of children had dared to caress until today. As long as the flying was over Florence, things were fine: certain facts, in Florence, are understandable, are legitimate, and fit within in the logic of history. But over Prato! Over Prato where for centuries now nothing miraculous had happened. Not on the ground, and not in the sky. Especially not in the sky. Over Prato! Where it seemed that miracles had become impossible, caught as we were between the historic pride of Florence and the ancient jealousy of Pistoia. Sacrificed, reduced to poor relations, robbed not only of everything that we had, which would have been bad enough, but of everything we might have wanted to have. Yet here was Manissero flying in our sky, in the neglected sky of Prato. And he was flying, or so it seemed, better than he might have flown in the sky of Florence. Better than in any other sky in Tuscany! After a moment, though, the suspicion began to grow that he might fly as far as Pistoia. Everyone held their breath, balanced on one foot, hearts stopped between beats: The treacherous sky of Pistoia! Some us took out our keys, ready to rattle them against such a betrayal. The rest of us set our lips to whistle in defiance. But Manissero veered to the right, and after a wide turn over Prato he headed back toward Florence. The city detonated with joy. I lost myself in the crowd, beyond thought, proud citizen of Prato to my bones. It wouldn't be too much to say that all of us, that day, felt we held a piece of sky in our hands. That night, in my dreams, the Achaean army, assembling beneath the walls of Troy, came to a halt, astonished at what lay before them: stretching from tower to tower immense white banners on which great red letters spelled out: Today We Fly. And then Troy, the city of Priam— which from a distance resembled nothing more than Prato— detached itself gently from the earth, hovered with its banners snapping in the breeze, and drifted away into the clear sky, swinging gently from side to side. Maddened Achilles ran along below, commanding: Stop! Stop! And from the buzz of his accent you might have thought he was from Pistoia. Beloved Priam, from the top of the Trojan gates. answered sweetly: Too Late. Too Late. And his voice had all soft accents of Prato, taking flight.

Arnica, eyebright, the draft from the well with the star-die on top, in the Hütte, written in the book —whose name did it record before mine?—, in this book the line about a hope, today, for a thinker's word to come, in the heart, forest sward, unleveled, orchis and orchis, singly, raw exchanges, later, while driving, clearly, he who drives us, the mensch, he also hears it, the half- trod log- trails on the highmoor, humidity, much.

All my life I was face to face with her, at meal-times, by the fire, even in the ultimate intimacies of the bed. You could have asked, then, for information about her? There was a room apart she kept herself in, teasing me by leading me to its glass door, only to confront me with my reflection. I learned from her even so. Walking her shore I found things cast up from her depths that spoke to me of another order, worshipper as I was of untamed nature. She fetched her treasures from art’s storehouse: pieces of old lace, delicate as frost; china from a forgotten period; a purse more valuable than anything it could contain. Coming in from the fields with my offering of flowers I found her garden had forestalled me in providing civilities for my desk. ‘Tell me about life,’ I would say, ‘you who were its messenger in the delivery of our child.’ Her eyes had a fine shame, remembering her privacy being invaded from further off than she expected. ‘Do you think death is the end?’ frivolously I would ask her. I recall now the swiftness of its arrival wrenching her lip down, and how the upper remained firm, reticent as the bud that is the precursor of the flower.

The water closing over us and the going down is all. Gills are given. We convert in a town of broken hulls and green doubloons. O you dead pirates hear us! There is no salvage. All you know is the color of warm caramel. All is salt. See how our eyes have migrated to the uphill side? Now we are new round mouths and no spines letting the water cover. It happens over and over, me in your body and you in mine.

I opened the window so I could hear people. Last night we were together and by ourselves. You. You look and look at Diver for Crane by  Johns and want to say something. In the water you are a child without eyes. Yesterday there was nothing on the beach and no one knows where it came from. There’s a small animal lodged somewhere inside us. There are minutes of peace. Just the feel.   Just this once. Where does the past, where should the period go? What is under the earth followed them home. The branch broke. It broke by itself. It did break, James. We were there and on silent. We were delete, shift, command. Slow— in black — on an orange street sign. Missing everywhere and unwritten — suddenly — all at once. Him. He misses a person and he is still living. I haven’t missed you for long and you are so gone. Then he stepped away from the poem midsentence    . . . we must have been lonely people to say those things then. But there are rooms for us now and sculptures to look at. In the perfect field someone has left everything including themselves. You. You should stay here. It’s a brutal and beautiful autumn. With his hands in the sand, on the earth, under time he touched something else. People are mostly what they can’t keep and keeps them. And inside the circular cage of the Ferris wheel you saw the world. In the steam, on the mirror: you wrote so so so. . . so if   you’re looking for answers you’re looking at every water tower around here. Why does the sea hold what it loves most below? Fear. Hopeless money. All the news and the non-news. How could anyone anywhere know us? What did we make? And the leather of   your chair   . . .    it has me marked so good luck forgetting. The world was a home. It was cruel. It was true. It was not realistic. Make sure you date and sign here then save all the soft things. Because everyone wants to know when it was, how it happened — say something about it. How the night hail made imprints all over. Our things. Our charming and singular things.

Someone says Tristan & Isolde, the shared cup & broken vows binding them, & someone else says Romeo & Juliet, a lyre & Jew’s harp sighing a forbidden oath, but I say a midnight horn & a voice with a moody angel inside, the two married rib to rib, note for note. Of course, I am thinking of those Tuesdays or Thursdays at Billy Berg’s in LA when Lana Turner would say, “Please sing ‘Strange Fruit’ for me,”& then her dancing nightlong with Mel Torme, as if she knew what it took to make brass & flesh say yes beneath the clandestine stars & a spinning that is so fast we can’t feel the planet moving. Is this why some of us fall in & out of love? Did Lady Day & Prez ever hold each other & plead to those notorious gods? I don’t know. But I do know even if a horn & voice plumb the unknown, what remains unsaid coalesces around an old blues & begs with a hawk’s yellow eyes.

My lady fair with soft arms, what can I say to you—words, words as if all worlds were there.