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1 I will cry to regret and slaughter my heart on a desolate rock in the steppe and run in the wilderness run in their illusions in the mirrors of bullets while shooing victory and defeat and also the dead with war's twig 2 I will arch my back like a noble wolf and howl in the plains until the plains go mad and the god of soldiers spots me lifeless in war's meanness I'd be pleased yet angry and forlorn of seas that have tolled for thirty centuries they come and go 3 I call to my friend and leave him standing in speech I call to my lover and leave her insomniac

She dances to the wheeze of my lungs. Were she taller, or had she both hind legs, she would lick my aching knees. There’s nothing like practice I firmly believe. Practice makes the heart grow fond. When the graft heals, you’ve apples on a cherry tree, delicious domestic freaks. I had a splendid grandmother, I might have made her up. She wore cotton dresses, usually blue, and glasses with thin gold frames and plastic cushions for the nose. The plastic was slightly pink, intended to blend with the flesh. She never raised her voice. Her knuckles enlarged, her goiter enlarged. There are ways within ways. A man will go down displaying himself in a nursing home. The mystery left, and there’s more than when we began, has nothing to do with reticence, or safety.

The three little kittens, they lost their mittens, And they began to cry, "Oh, mother dear, we sadly fear, That we have lost our mittens." "What!   Lost your mittens, you naughty kittens! Then you shall have no pie." "Meow, meow, meow." "Then you shall have no pie." The three little kittens, they found their mittens, And they began to cry, "Oh, mother dear, see here, see here, For we have found our mittens." "Put on your mittens, you silly kittens, And you shall have some pie." "Purr, purr, purr, Oh, let us have some pie." The three little kittens put on their mittens, And soon ate up the pie, "Oh, mother dear, we greatly fear, That we have soiled our mittens." "What, soiled your mittens, you naughty kittens!" Then they began to sigh, "Meow, meow, meow," Then they began to sigh. The three little kittens, they washed their mittens, And hung them out to dry, "Oh, mother dear, do you not hear, That we have washed our mittens?" "What, washed your mittens, then you're good kittens, But I smell a rat close by." "Meow, meow, meow, We smell a rat close by."

They remember the dead who died in the resistance. It is in sweet tones that they speak of them. They shake their heads, still, after the dinner Walking back to the car, while an evening snow That has started windlessly, white from pearl-gray, Falls into streets that are already slushy. They shake their heads, as we do when there is something Too strange to believe, Or as a beast does, stunned by a blow. “To die in the resistance,”   they say, “is to fail To turn into slush, to escape this ugliness. It is at once to leap, a creamy swan, Upward.”   Three voices: oboe, piano, cello. The high one wishes to be pleasing, the middle To be practical, the deep to persevere. A movie theater lobby in front of them Throws its light on the sidewalk, like a woman Swiftly emptying a bucket of water: The flakes are falling in its yellow light. Then they pass a café, its light red neon, Then a closed pharmacy. —They pull sharp air Into their lungs, a pain that is a pleasure. “Try to live as if there were no God,” They don’t say, but they mean. A recollection of purity, a clean Handkerchief each man feels in his own pocket, Perturbs them, slows their pace down. Now they have seen A yellow stain on a pile of old snow Between two parked cars, where a man has peed: The resistance. The falling flakes, falling On the men’s hats. And now The snow grows heavier, falls on their stooping shoulders.

The fields are infertile as far as I can tell. Their winter systems sparkle like the diamonds that pelt Neptune. Limpid silvers reflect in the dark museums and theaters back in town. To them we run to elevate our eyes to a well-shaped ethics. Colors are supplied by our nervous minds. • Towards a just and invisible image behind each substance and its place in a sentence you must have been walking. Well-defended, best when lost from wanting. Be like grass, she told me, lie flat, spring up. • We drop the shadows where they are then return to them when the light has grown heavy. You’ll take your time lugging the weight into our room. Or stand over there in the shade. We’ve never been too sure that we exist as the earth does. We’re most at home in water that soaks up the letters in our brains. It could be we have been dry too long. A spirit is a mess when excess spoils it. • I see them through the slats and crack of the open window. A cold rain. Leaves flipped and palsied. The river is brown near the sand, loose banks and twigs stick at the edge and a lilac’s silhouette of a child I love. How in the dark hole can I hide if   I can’t get outside? Then I won’t remember what I did to deserve it. That arch and bridge will form a shape of repentance. If  I’m hanging, then judgment has been passed. And I am hanging upside down head swinging towards the moon. Years of  inversion. A face in a mirror displaced by its position outside silver. And so? Next will come muscle, a little grief   but no shoulder. • You’re learning how to be a unit with an infinite in its attic. It’s not difficult. Light is the last message. White streaks like oil paint are the first to appear along the wet railing. Next similar colors correspond by chance. We would rather be (die) with total strangers than with partial ones we realized in the elevator going down. It was the only time that day that we were as alone as we were awake. Sensing a just and impartial ghost close to each living thing I could see the genius of  institutional religion. Examine your conscience. Confess in darkness and take away a task. Soon you’ll wash off flesh scented by its parallel past. What were your feet thinking in their hurry to connect the parts? Get the children to the other side! What children? You were the one running. There was never any other.

That slow person you left behind when, finally, you mastered the world, and scaled the heights you now command, where is he while you walk around the shaved lawn in your plus fours, organizing with an electric clipboard your big push to tomorrow? Oh, I’ve come across him, yes I have, more than once, coaxing his battered grocery cart down the freeway meridian. Others see in you sundry mythic types distinguished not just in themselves but by the stories we put them in, with beginnings, ends, surprises: the baby Oedipus on the hillside with his broken feet or the dog whose barking saves the grandmother flailing in the millpond beyond the weir, dragged down by her woolen skirt. He doesn’t see you as a story, though. He feels you as his atmosphere. When your sun shines, he chortles. When your barometric pressure drops and the thunderheads gather, he huddles under the overpass and writes me long letters with the stubby little pencils he steals from the public library. He asks me to look out for you.

REVERSALS There are graves under the houses and houses under the graves and linking the three a broad stone staircase where the dead go up and the living go down. They pass one another wordlessly which might mean they don’t know, or else they’re pretending not to know. You can smell the orange grove on the hill; you can hear children bowling barrel hoops down the street. Two women gossip as they fill their jug at the spring. Their secrets cloud the water. Later they walk back through an avenue of   cypresses, carrying the jug like a bastard child. TRAPPED In the house across the street, in a room directly opposite his, was a long mirror. When he looked out of   his window, he would see himself   in the room like a thief caught in a trap. He threw a stone. His neighbor ran in to the sound of   breaking glass, then came to the window and shouted across: “Thank God for that: whenever I looked in my mirror there you were, doing something shifty behind my back.” The first man turned away. The long mirror in his room brought him face to face with his neighbor, knife in hand. THE ACCUSED Just as he locked the door, as he pocketed the key, as he glanced over his shoulder, they arrested him. They tortured him until they tired of   it. “Look,” they said, “the key is your key, the house is your house, we accept that now; but why did you put the key in your pocket as if to hide it from us?” They let him go, but his name is still on a list.

walking to the hospital How the autumn dawn burned through the misty broods and settled down in fire; how quickly the sun glittered my shadow, how my shadow cried, a moment, with joy. A light frost, a vision of light crackling down the maples, down the tinder ash. I was the good thief. I held my Love’s sweet breath, his beautiful, intelligent gaze. I closed my eyes and he woke inside me. When I saw, he saw the inflamed world. A bird sang deeply from the gutter eaves. When I closed my eyes I was elsewhere. I walked through the fire of his sleep. leaving early My Love, tonight Fionnuala is your nurse. You’ll hear her voice sing-song around the ward lifting a wing at the shore of your darkness. I heard that, in another life, she too journeyed through a storm, a kind of curse, with the ocean rising darkly around her, fierce with cold, and no resting place, only the frozen rocks that tore her feet, the light on her shoulders. And no cure there but to wait it out. If, while I’m gone, your fever comes down— if the small, salt-laden shapes of her song appear as a first glimmer of earth-light, follow the sweet, hopeful voice of that landing. She will keep you safe beneath her wing. in your sleep After “The Lark Ascending” by Ralph Vaughan Williams The moment the lark finally vanishes into the spread green sky of the forest is the moment you suddenly lift your bruised arm up, over your body, as though to show me the wing’s eclipse, or the wing, or the season of your dream. And even as your hand lapses silent onto your chest, and your breath goes sluggish, I am already watching your feet prepare their slow first step under the sheet as the last notes of sunlight fall quiet, and you do not move again. My love, are you a bird reviving in a summer field? Was it the lark ascending that you heard, a ghost among its shy-hearted tunes? Yes. I heard the lark escaping, too.

Based on Epictetus APPROACH LIFE AS IF IT WERE A BANQUET Your rightful portion averts your ireful potion: Caress what can’t be blessed, cup shadows under breasts. Let pass what’s out of   ken: lover, job, riches, a ripe peach until it reaches you. Bring salt for your honey, lime for your grenadine. Money’s not your fault. You’re a feathered peahen preening for marzipan men. Impeccable models, often peccable, drop their pants at inopportune instants. Implore no more for what is, is no more. EVERYTHING HAS TWO HANDLES Whether to grapple the hurt or hold the calm: Can reason spread where ire infests the mind? The handle you refuse to grasp proclaims you more than one you lurch to reach. Why mire in the right/wrong amphora song. No vigilance in this choir of one. No fast hook in the urn’s broken-off arm. Vie with hot verities. The pie is getting cold. OUR DUTIES ARE IN RELATION TO ONE ANOTHER Feel unique in roiling solitude? Oh, you are not alone though you may feel fallen, snow up your nose. Join with others in your dank reclusion. How do you find something worth saying? How do you find desire to find desire to find something worth saying? And yes. That is where you might be: twice — or is it thrice — removed in a receding mirror of acedia. Finding a way to find a way to want to find a way back in to conversation. This is what negative numbers (a negative soul) feel like: You want to want to want ... If   you go back far enough — lateral excavation — will you hit bone? So many converging lines yakking to themselves over a haywire switchboard you used to find out who you were through cookie crumbs tossed down your own path. Now that you have no crumbs, don’t even have pockets to turn out—only the memory of such acts, such things. How weary, stale, and profligate it seems to be to plasticize these lines. You’re in a hamless state of mind. Now get out and talk to anyone your age: Like you they’ve all got Death studded on the tongue, which livelies up the talk they walk.

turtles generate poems No wonder they move so slowly— Somebody in there is Trying to write.