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Unfathomable Sea! whose waves are years, Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe Are brackish with the salt of human tears! Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow Claspest the limits of mortality! And sick of prey, yet howling on for more, Vomitest thy wrecks on its inhospitable shore; Treacherous in calm, and terrible in storm, Who shall put forth on thee, Unfathomable Sea?

Why is it eternity lasts a moment a moment eternity? Are you quiet enough to hear horned owls at dawn? I hear voices rustle in the leaves after they are gone. New mice burst into life.   Small raccoons bear tiny chains around their wrists.

My neighbor, 87, rings the doorbell to ask if I might have seen her clipping shears that went missing a decade ago, with a little red paint on their shaft, or the iron turkey bank and the porcelain coffee cup that disappeared a while back when her friend, now dead, called the police to break in to see if she were ill, and have we had trouble with our phone line, hers is dead and her car and driver’s license are missing though she can drive perfectly well, just memory problems, and her son is coming this morning to take her up to Sheboygan, where she was born and where the family has its burial lots, to wait on assisted living space, and she just wanted to say we’d been good neighbors all these how many? years, and how lucky I am to have found such a nice man and could she borrow a screwdriver, the door lock to her house is jammed.

The problem— it’s not been written yet, the omens: the headless owl, the bobcat struck, the red wolf where she could not be. None of it done and yet it’s over. Nothing yet of night     when she called me closer asked me to bring her crow painting to stay straight across from her feet so she could waken into it, remember her friend. Of Old Chief alongside her shoulder still watching over her just as the mountain had done throughout her Alberta childhood. The Pendleton shroud bearing our braids, her figure in flaming pyre. The cards, the notes, the tasks the things undone,     not done and she with us        faraway as this has always been    and ever will continue. We meet we leave we meld and vaporize from whatever it was that held us human in this life. And all the beautiful things that lead our thoughts and give us reason remain despite the leaving and all I know         is what you know when it is over said and done it was a time and there was never enough of it.

After Cyndi Lauper I’m in the barricade hearing the clock thickening you. Autumn encircles a confusion that’s nothing new. Flash back to warring eyes almost letting me drown. Out of which, a picture of me walking in a foreign head. I can’t hear what you said. Then you say: Cold room, the second that life unwinds. A tinctured vase returns to grass. Secrets doled out deep inside a drum beat out of time. Whatever you said was ghostly slow like a second hand unwinding by match light. Lying back to the wheel, I shirked confusion. You already knew. Suitcases surround me. You picture me too far ahead. Yet I can’t hear what you’ve said. You say: Doldrums, some secondhand wine. Love, you knew my precincts. The stone house turned out black, the scenic tunics were deep inside. Who said home? Oh, I fall behind. That very secret height blinds. Lying like a diamond, the cock-thickening of you: hunchbacked arms, eyes left behind. You’ll picture me walking far, far ahead. I hear what you’ve done. You said: Go slow. I feebly bleed out. Matthew’s sermon turned out to be glass. I wander in windows soft as Sour Patch. No rewind. But something is out of touch and you, you’re Sinbad. That second date totally mine. Lying in a vacuum, the thickening plot thinks of you. The future’s not new. touchdown . Lights. All those celebrity behinds. A suitcase full of weeds. You picture me coming to. You: too close to me to hear what you’ve already said. Then you say: The second wind unwinds. Doves whistle, halving their dovely backs, watching out windows to see if I’m okay. See it, the dulcet moment? I’m like thicket tinkering for you. Fusion nothing you knew. Flash back to seagull-beguiled eyes. Sometimes talking to a barren lad. Such music so unbearably droll. The hand is mine. Random picture frames off the darkness. A Turing machine? Scotch-taping through windows, stolen from deep inside rum-beaded thyme. You say also: Behind sequins & hinds . . . And I’m in the barricade hearing the clock thickening you. Clematis enclosures, walking with news, pollinated by a secondary grief, while something reminds you of our love.

The spring has darkened with activity. The future gathers in vine, bush, and tree: Persimmon, walnut, loquat, fig, and grape, Degrees and kinds of color, taste, and shape. These will advance in their due series, space The season like a tranquil dwelling-place. And yet excitement swells me, vein by vein: I long to crowd the little garden, gain Its sweetness in my hand and crush it small And taste it in a moment, time and all! These trees, whose slow growth measures off my years, I would expand to greatness. No one hears, And I am still retarded in duress! And this is like that other restlessness To seize the greatness not yet fairly earned, One which the tougher poets have discerned— Gascoigne, Ben Jonson, Greville, Raleigh, Donne, Poets who wrote great poems, one by one, And spaced by many years, each line an act Through which few labor, which no men retract. This passion is the scholar’s heritage, The imposition of a busy age, The passion to condense from book to book Unbroken wisdom in a single look, Though we know well that when this fix the head, The mind’s immortal, but the man is dead.

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied Who told me time would ease me of my pain! I miss him in the weeping of the rain; I want him at the shrinking of the tide; The old snows melt from every mountain-side, And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane; But last year’s bitter loving must remain Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide. There are a hundred places where I fear To go,—so with his memory they brim. And entering with relief some quiet place Where never fell his foot or shone his face I say, “There is no memory of him here!” And so stand stricken, so remembering him.

Sam paused on the stairs. He had forgotten a thing. In Leland’s room a copy of Thomas Merton lay on the floor. The air was full of gnats of possibility. What was the story? Sam looked at the clock twice. The day was dropping softly away while Sam’s sneakers made the wood stairs creak. The wood was sure it was wood. Alice got home from the store. The bags had to be unloaded as the day went and went. Then the sundown kitchen grew quiet. Sam crossed his legs one way, then the other way. He had chosen purple corduroys. They were pants of the day; one possibility. On the tilted table sat the damaged typewriter. What about Thomas Merton? Did he know the central story? Someone was quietly reading by the fireplace but not Sam. Next day there was badminton with the troubled carpenter and the story of an awful egg salad, causing laughter; but Sam had forgotten some thing. Then Alice brought in the brownies and minor pleasure colored the house and there went the evening. J.J. came downstairs all gleamy from her bath. She had three reasons to get downtown fast. Sam picked up a novel by Sukenick. The clue must be nearby. Between Sam and the page swarmed the gnats of possibility. Leland stowed his bicycle in the basement and came upstairs with a point about capitalism. Look at the time said someone. Where was J.J. now? Where was the story? Under the red chair lay the newspaper whose relevance was all mystery or not mystery enough. Then Alice went out to see a movie. Some man meets some woman with big eyes on a jet and changes his whole life for her, disastrously but thrillingly. Alice told about it briefly, and went to make tea. Sam paused on the hard wooden stairs. J.J. was gone. She was gone. Leland was eating yogurt at midnight. The whole brown house was floating, gliding very smoothly for some reason with Sam not clear whether the gliding was a story and if so was it central and was it his?

Like the ghost of a dear friend dead Is Time long past. A tone which is now forever fled, A hope which is now forever past, A love so sweet it could not last, Was Time long past. There were sweet dreams in the night Of Time long past: And, was it sadness or delight, Each day a shadow onward cast Which made us wish it yet might last— That Time long past. There is regret, almost remorse, For Time long past. 'Tis like a child's belovèd corse A father watches, till at last Beauty is like remembrance, cast From Time long past.

Love is never strong enough to find the words befitting it. CAMUS All day my husband pounds on the upstairs porch. Screeches and grunts of wood as the wall is opened keep the whole house tormented. He is trying to reach the bees, he is after bees. This is the climax, an end to two summers of small operations with sprays and ladders. Last June on the porch floor I found them dead, a sprinkle of dusty bugs, and next day a still worse death, until, like falling in love, bee-haunted, I swept up bigger and bigger loads of some hatch, I thought, sickened, and sickening me, from what origin? My life centered on bees, all floors were suspect. The search was hopeless. Windows were shut. I never find where anything comes from. But in June my husband’s fierce sallies began, inspections, cracks located and sealed, insecticides shot; outside, the bees’ course watched, charted; books on bees read. I tell you I swept up bodies every day on the porch. Then they’d stop, the problem was solved; then they were there again, as the feelings make themselves known again, as they beseech sleepers who live innocently in will and mind. It is no surprise to those who walk with their tigers that the bees were back, no surprise to me. But they had left themselves so lack-luster, their black and gold furs so deathly faded. Gray bugs that the broom hunted were like a thousand little stops when some great lurch of heart takes place, or a great shift of season. November it came to an end. No bees. And I could watch the floor, clean and cool, and, from windows, the cold land. But this spring the thing began again, and his curse went upstairs again, and his tinkering and reasoning and pride. It is the man who takes hold. I lived from bees, but his force went out after bees and found them in the wall where they hid. And now in July he is tearing out the wall, and each board ripped brings them closer to his hunting hand. It is quiet, has been quiet for a while. He calls me, and I march from a dream of bees to see them, winged and unwinged, such a mess of interrupted life dumped on newspapers— dirty clots of grubs, sawdust, stuck fliers, all smeared together with old honey, they writhe, some of them, but who cares? They go to the garbage, it is over, everything has been said. But there is more. Wouldn’t you think the bees had suffered enough? This evening we go to a party, the breeze dies, late, we are sticky in our old friendships and light-headed. We tell our funny story about the bees. At two in the morning we come home, and a friend, a scientist, comes with us, in his car. We’re going to save the idea of the thing, a hundred bees, if we can find so many unrotted, still warm but harmless, and leave the rest. We hope that the neighbors are safe in bed, taking no note of these private catastrophes. He wants an enzyme in the flight-wing muscle. Not a bad thing to look into. In the night we rattle and raise the lid of the garbage can. Flashlights in hand, we open newspapers, and the men reach in a salve of happenings. I can’t touch it. I hate the self-examined who’ve killed the self. The dead are darker, but the others have moved in the ooze toward the next moment. My God one half-worm gets its wings right before our eyes. Searching fingers sort and lay bare, they need the idea of bees—and yet, under their touch, the craze for life gets stronger in the squirming, whitish kind. The men do it. Making a claim on the future, as love makes a claim on the future, grasping. And I, underhand, I feel it start, a terrible, lifelong heave taking direction. Unpleading, the men prod till all that grubby softness wants to give,to give.