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This inwardness, this ice, this wide boreal whiteness into which he's come with a crawling sort of care for the sky's severer blue, the edge on the air, trusting his own lightness and the feel as feeling goes; this discipline, this glaze, this cold opacity of days begins to crack. No marks, not one scar, no sign of where they are, these weaknesses rumoring through, growing loud if he stays, louder if he turns back. Nothing to do but move. Nowhere to go but on, to creep, and breathe, and learn a blue beyond belief, an air too sharp to pause, this distance, this burn, this element of flaws that winces as it gives. Nothing to do but live. Nowhere to be but gone.

This is a letter to the worm-threaded earth. This is a letter to November, its gray bowl of sky riven by black-branched trees. A letter to split-tomato skins, overripe apples, & a flock of fruit flies lifting from the blueing clementines’ wood crate. To the broken confetti of late fall leaves. This is a letter to rosemary. This is a letter to the floor’s sink & creak, the bedroom door’s torn hinge moaning its good-night. This is to the unshaven cheek. To cedar, mothballs, camphor, & last winter’s unwashed wool. This is a letter to the rediscovered, to mulch, pine needles, the moon, frost, flats of pansies, the backyard, hunger, night, the unseen. This is a letter to soil, thrumming as it waits to be turned. This is a letter to compost, eggshell’s bone-ash chips, fruit rinds curved like fingernails, & stale chunks of bread. A letter to the intimate dark—mouth-warm & damp as a bed. This is a letter to the planet’s scavenging lips.

the grapes remind me of the whales gathering salt for the ocean this is a poem about my life you've interrupted my life and death schedule which gives me that poetic look each day this is a poem about my life where was I before I met you? I was eroding on my way to work and slept a lot deep in the subways this is a poem about my life then I met your lips on that windy day I stopped poisoning my life on Monday mornings this is a poem about my life when I met you you were undressed like a stone in the rain I swam after utterly naked this is a poem about my life before you leave me to heal I will find you someone to love who will be shaped like a box this is a poem about my life before you leave me to heal I will become an apple and hide in a clock this is a poem about my life I will plant these wild lines they will grow into honey and weep in the spring for you 2.14.94

All alone, you use kitchen to investigate wall and tendency to twerk and so on spotify channel called little ditties for strumpets metal, and make room a petal, shake doom and bevel

It is my emotions that early me through Lambertville, New Jersey, sheer feeling—and an obscure detour—that brings me to a coffee shop called “This Is It” and a small New Jersey clapboard with a charming fake sign announcing it to be the first condemned building in the United States and an old obese collie sitting on the cement steps of the front porch begging forgiveness with his red eyes. I talk to the coughing lady for five minutes, admire her sign, her antique flag, her dog, and share her grief over the loss of the house next door, boarded up forever, tied up in estates, surrounded by grass, doomed to an early fire. Everyone is into my myth! The whole countryside is studying weeds, collecting sadness, dreaming of odd connections and no place more than Lambertville will do for ghosts to go through your body or people to live out their lives with a blurred vision. The old woman is still talking. She tells me about her youth, she tells me about her mother’s ganglia and how the doctor slammed a heavy Bible down on her watery wrist, scattering spoons and bread crumbs and turning over little tin containers of alyssum and snapdragon. She tells me about the curved green glass that is gone forever. She tells me about her dog and its monotonous existence. Ah, but for sadness there are very few towns like Lambertville. It drips with grief, it almost sags from the weight. I know Frackville, Pa., and Sandusky, Ohio, and I know coal chutes, empty stores and rusty rivers but Lambertville is special, it is a wooden stage set, a dream-ridden carcass where people live out serious lives with other people’s secrets, trying to touch with their hands and eat with their cold forks, and open houses with their keys; and sometimes, on a damp Sunday, they leave the papers on the front porch to walk down York Street or Buttonwood Street past abandoned factories and wooden garages, past the cannon with balls and the new band shell, past the downtown churches and the antique shops, and even across the metal plates on the Delaware River to stinking New Hope, where all their deep longing is reduced to an hour and a half of greedy buying. I crawl across the street to have my coffee at the low counter, to listen to the noise of the saws drifting through the open window and to study the strange spirit of this tar paper café stuck on a residential street three or four blocks from Main and Bridge where except for the sudden windfall of the looping detour it would be relegated forever to the quiet company of three or four close friends and the unexpected attention of a bored crossing guard or exhausted meter man or truck driver. I listen to the plans of the three teen-age businessmen about to make their fortune in this rotting shack and walk—periodically—past the stainless steel sink to take my piss in the misplaced men’s room. I watch the bright happy girls organize their futures over and around the silent muscular boys and I wait, like a peaceful man, hours on end, for the truck out back to start, for the collie to die, for the flies to come, for the summer to bring its reckoning.

I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold

This is no case of petty right or wrong That politicians or philosophers Can judge. I hate not Germans, nor grow hot With love of Englishmen, to please newspapers. Beside my hate for one fat patriot My hatred of the Kaiser is love true:— A kind of god he is, banging a gong. But I have not to choose between the two, Or between justice and injustice. Dinned With war and argument I read no more Than in the storm smoking along the wind Athwart the wood. Two witches' cauldrons roar. From one the weather shall rise clear and gay; Out of the other an England beautiful And like her mother that died yesterday.

Colleen, this is the time of grasshoppers and all that I see is dying except for my virulent love for you. The Cowturdville Star-Times, which usually has a typo in every damn column, says the grasshoppers this year “are as big as Buicks” and that’s not bad, but then we get two eight-point pages of who had dinner with whom at the bowling alley café and who went shopping at Target in Rapid City and thus the high church of Adrian the Obscure is sacked. Even my old Dylan tapes are fading, becoming near-comic antiques. The grasshoppers are destroying our yard and they’re as big as my middle finger saluting God. The grass is yellow. The trees look like Agent Orange has hit but it’s only the jaw-work of those drab armored insects who dance in profusion and pure destruction. Sweet woman, dear love of my life, when you’re not angry and sputtering at everything and everyone, you become so childlike, so pure. Your voice seems to have grown higher recently, almost a little-girl pitch. Today, like most days, I have you home for your two-hour reprieve from the nursing home prison. We’re sitting at the picnic table in the backyard staring at the defoliation of lilacs, brain matter, and honeysuckle. You’re eating a Hershey Bar and a crystal glob of snot is hanging from your nose. I reach over, pinch it off, and wipe it on my jeans. You thrust the last bite of chocolate into my mouth as a demented grasshopper jumps onto your ear. You scream. I howl with laughter until you do too. Happiness comes with a price. This is the times of grasshoppers and all that I see is dying except for my swarming love for you. Last night on PBS some lesioned guy being screwed to death by legions of viral invisibility blurted the great cliché of regret: I wish I could be twenty again and know what I know now … My own regrets are equally foolish. And, I wonder, how the hell is it I’ve reached a place where I’d give what’s left of my allotment of sunsets and frozen dinners for some unholy replay of just one hour in some nearly forgotten time and place? Darling, in the baked soil of the far west, I first saw the ant lions, those hairy little bugs who dug funnel traps for ants in the dry earth. At twelve, looking over the edge of one such funnel surrounded by a circle of tiny stones in the sand, I aimed a beam of white light from my magnifying glass and found I could re-create a hell of my own accord. Poverty and boredom made me cruel early on. The next summer while digging postholes I found a cache of those grotesque yellow bugs we called Children of the Earth so I piled matches atop them and barbecued their ugliness. I was at war with insects. In my fifteenth summer I got covered with ticks in the sagebrush and that fall I nervously lost my cherry in a cathouse called the Green Front and got cursed with crabs but that’s not what I want to sing about at all… come on now. This is no bug progression. This ain’t no insect sonata. This is only misdirection, a sleight of hand upon the keys and the unholy replay of just one hour in some nearly forgotten time and place that I’d like to return to will remain myth or maybe a holy, tumescent mystery. And let’s not call these bloodwords POETRY or a winter count of desperate dreams when reality is much simpler. Colleen, I swear to Christ this is the time of grasshoppers and all that I see is dying except for my sparkling love for you.

English Composition at South Middlesex Correctional Center. Julie reads out loud, and I praise her super thesis, then show how her paragraphs veer away from it, just summarize. And is she pissed! Too pissed to listen when her classmates try to help. Amanda offers Act 2 Scene 1—"Now I do love her too"—as evidence of Iago's state of mind. But Julie's shutting down, frowning at her handwritten draft, writing that took her weeks.Hey Julie, I say. Julie doesn't look up. Says What. Says I hate this stupid paper now. So I say Hey Julie.Amanda's helping you—write down what she's saying. She says I'm aggravated. I think they take classes on naming their feelings. I say I know it but you need to pull it together,or you'll end up screwing yourself.This is your chance. We're all quiet, breathing together, willing her to break out of this. Then: a little miracle. I look around the room and see that everyone is beautiful. Each did something special with her hair.Hey, I say, again. I say hey a lot in prison. Hey wait a minute.What's up with everybody's hair? Mabel got a haircut. Ellie's hair is long and black and gleaming down her back, Amanda's in French braids. Julie's freshly blonde, down to the roots.You guys all look great! They laugh. They're happy I noticed. Thank god I noticed; now, for a minute, we are women in a room, talking about their hair. Julie says Amanda did her highlights, and Sandy blew it out.Good job, guys; she looks great. And then I say,Julie.Look at you all pissed off over your paper when you're so lucky! Look at all these good friends you have.Helping with your paper, doing your hair. . . She nods. She looks me in the eye, back with us, back on track. I know, she says.I need to work on my gratitude.

Is unwritten, though it has lived in violence. First the factory stood, quiet as an asylum. Then the annihilating mallee with its red fists of blossoms and the mountain ash creeping over it like a stain. I have no proof, but I tell you there were leadlight windows here once, barred. They cast a little striped light on the women. Now in scrub and yellow broom I stand on a history braided and unbraided by stiff Irish wrists. The rope and span and carded wool are unpicked as are their faces and names. Londonderry, Cork, Galway, Kildare— as I say the words they are sucked away to a hemisphere in darkness. I will not presume to say what suffering is or how it was meted out in this place. At what point it breaks a body I cannot tell. But this morning I saw a young rabbit hunched in brush and shadow. I saw its lesioned face, its legs too thin to scramble, the blood-berry red and pink scab of its eye. It had caught the disease we brought here for it and wanted a quiet place to die. And it was lucky, or as lucky as it would get— there was time and light, the hawks and dogs had not been written yet, and were still out of sight.