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In the road, a dog. Days dead, that dog. Liliana was walking beside me awhile (I am sure) and I was almost not crying but then found what I was looking for. She heaved it for me—all of it, the stench, the weight— in her thin arms until it was too much. Tired, she dragged the thing by its wasted paws all the way home. Her dress was stained. This is how I learned about love. She did not mind at all the silent, steady distance I placed between us.

I remember a square of New York’s Hudson River glinting between warehouses. Difficult to approach the water below the pier Swirling, covered with oil the ship at the pier A steel wall: tons in the water, Width. The hand for holding, Legs for walking, The eye sees! It floods in on us from here to Jersey tangled in the grey bright air! Become the realm of nations. My love, my love, We are endangered Totally at last. Look Anywhere to the sight’s limit: space Which is viviparous: Place of the mind And eye. Which can destroy us, Re-arrange itself, assert Its own stone chain reaction.

The time of youth is to be spent But vice in it should be forfent. Pastimes there be, I nought truly, Which one may use and vice deny. And they be pleasant to God and man, Those should we covet, win who can, As feats of arms and such other Whereby activeness one may utter. Comparisons in them may lawfully be set, For thereby courage is surely out fet. Virtue it is then youth for to spend In good disports which it doth fend.

The old wooden steps to the front door where I was sitting that fall morning when you came downstairs, just awake, and my joy at sight of you (emerging into golden day— the dew almost frost) pulled me to my feet to tell you how much I loved you: those wooden steps are gone now, decayed replaced with granite, hard, gray, and handsome. The old steps live only in me: my feet and thighs remember them, and my hands still feel their splinters. Everything else about and around that house brings memories of others—of marriage, of my son. And the steps do too: I recall sitting there with my friend and her little son who died, or was it the second one who lives and thrives? And sitting there ‘in my life,’ often, alone or with my husband. Yet that one instant, your cheerful, unafraid, youthful, ‘I love you too,’ the quiet broken by no bird, no cricket, gold leaves spinning in silence down without any breeze to blow them, is what twines itself in my head and body across those slabs of wood that were warm, ancient, and now wait somewhere to be burnt.

The problem of time.          Of there not being enough of it. My girl came to the study and said Help me; I told her I had a time problem which meant: I would die for you but I don’t have ten minutes. Numbers hung in the math book like motel coathangers. The Lean Cuisine was burning like an ancient city: black at the edges, bubbly earth tones in the center. The latest thing they’re saying is lack of time might be a “woman’s problem.” She sat there with her math book sobbing— (turned out to be prime factoring: whole numbers dangle in little nooses) Hawking says if you back up far enough it’s not even an issue, time falls away into 'the curve' which is finite, boundaryless. Appointment book, soprano telephone— (beep End beep went the microwave) The hands fell off my watch in the night. I spoke to the spirit who took them, told her: Time is the funniest thing they invented. Had wakened from a big dream of love in a boat No time to get the watch fixed so the blank face lived for months in my dresser, no arrows for hands, just quartz intentions, just the pinocchio nose         (before the lie) left in the center;            the watch didn’t have twenty minutes; neither did I. My girl was doing her gym clothes by herself;         (red leaked toward black, then into the white insignia)                  I was grading papers, heard her call from the laundry room: Mama? Hawking says there are two types of it, real and imaginary (imaginary time must be like decaf), says it’s meaningless to decide which is which but I say: there was tomorrow- and-a-half when I started thinking about it; now there’s less than a day. More done. That’s the thing that keeps being said. I thought I could get more done as in: fish stew from a book. As in: Versateller archon, then push-push-push the tired-tired around the track like a planet. Legs, remember him? Our love—when we stagger—lies down inside us. . . Hawking says there are little folds in time (actually he calls them wormholes) but I say: there’s a universe beyond where they’re hammering the brass cut-outs .. . Push us out in the boat and leave time here— (because: where in the plan was it written, You’ll be too busy to close parentheses, the snapdragon’s bunchy mouth needs water, even the caterpillar will hurry past you? Pulled the travel alarm to my face: the black behind the phosphorous argument kept the dark from being ruined. Opened the art book —saw the languorous wrists of the lady in Tissot’s “Summer Evening.” Relaxed. Turning gently. The glove (just slightly—but still:) “aghast”; opened Hawking, he says, time gets smoothed into a fourth dimension but I say space thought it up, as in: Let’s make a baby space, and then it missed. Were seconds born early, and why didn’t things unhappen also, such as the tree became Daphne. . . At the beginning of harvest, we felt the seven directions. Time did not visit us. We slept till noon. With one voice I called him, with one voice I let him sleep, remembering summer years ago, I had come to visit him in the house of last straws and when he returned above the garden of pears, he said our weeping caused the dew. . . I have borrowed the little boat and I say to him Come into the little boat, you were happy there; the evening reverses itself, we’ll push out onto the pond, or onto the reflection of the pond, whichever one is eternal

a man and his dog what fun chasing twigs into the water! young girls bicycle by in pairs and plaid shorts a wind so soft one’s whole back tingles with cilia a gentle lake the sun boils at the center, radiates the zone for man and lays a healing pad across his nape an airplane small and flat as a paper model roars behind the Virgilian scene an old man tips his straw hat down to shade his eyes, pulls up his fishline and moves on to a new spot the poor small wood louse crawls along the bark ridge for his life

Now is before he was born. Days of air shaken by bees, crow song probing eaves and quays. Maker of the future a perfect terra-cotta tense, a tense which sings. The absence of push in his education was unpresaged by the door’s lack of wired Sesame. He waits and waits for egress. The door needs only his touch. Its only desire is to swing. He waits for it to open itself, as the cloud opens for the melting press of the sun. He is ready to rot where he leans, leaving a breeze-blown blemish long after he has arrived. Long before he has come into being.

We have orgies at home. Tonight, it’s The Book of Mormon.

Time is crying upon the backs of lizards, Through the white stone of the medieval city They dash. The houses that are walking up the stairs, Flowers out of ruins, Further into the fortress, The sounds of a language registers In our dreams. Words which are my hat in the city, Coming through the bamboo The shadows of lost meaning— Tilted light making slivers Through the forest of the mambo Behind the eyes. Time will shine your head into skull The circle song will come again and again, If we forget how to lay out a village, Just open a guayaba in half, These seeds are perfect, And can guide you back, Your hands the electric of the ghosts. In the Persia of shining alfombras, A belly button silks upon a horse, Enters a tent of rhythms, Makes the trees dance into shape, Rubén Darío saw them in the river, Bathing in the echoes of the castles, His Indio head, Clean enough to measure The tempo of a camel, The first string that vibrated The Rock of Gibraltar, To sway Greco-Roman lips, Arising fire of Gypsy song, Was making Castile dress and undress, With the sounds that were hitting the moon And falling down unto earth as colors. Of boats that were my shoes. Atlantic chachachá. Splicing through 101st Street brick. Which covered dancing verdure green Rectangular mangos, Cylindric bananas Sounds in the sky blue tropic: mind. Trees are making maracas That will soon make you dance. Water is their god of cadence, As I sea walk through coconut heights, Legs of tamarind, Purple orchids arranged like syllables, Insects of the morning dew sting verses on café. In embroidery of Italians, Garcilaso came to José Martí, Who ducked Spanish spies In Manhattan And hugged Walt Whitman’s beard in Philadelphia As the Cuban Habaneras’ Shango Made it south to tango. Boats are ages sailing on water, Parrots are flying out of castanets, Flamenco peeling pineapples That go up the river, The water that became El Quijote’s language, As a cane field disappears into a bottle, To awake in a little town With molasses orbiting the cathedral, A wooden saint slicing through the Mountain full of potassium radiation, Slanted plátanos pointing into medieval Liturgy, Bongo and ocean waves carving Phantasmal antiquity Through the fabulous language That has taken the shape of An Andalusian rhyming door, One after the other. Perfume pagano Sailing out of the archways, As Ricardo Ray turns into a centipede, Marching across a Brooklyn piano, For dancers to Sanskrit their Gypsy feet, Upon Albaicín ceramic tile. Caribbean sun melts the caramel, Making our first national flag: White skirts waving  in the air. Machetes taking off like helicopters Chopping off branches for timbale sticks, The hands of the sun hitting the Moon like a drum— Making the atmosphere of moisture Heat up, For the chorus of the song To come back down upon us polinizando The carnival flower, A serenade walkilipiando. Sliding upon seashells, That disappear into the foam of time, One age living next to another, We are both living things at once, We are the cadaver that is About to be born.

He could have stayed in the city, photographed the cheese and oyster boys after the war, opal-colored orphans or ladies of unfortunate standing, back when tall buildings still believed in America, back when concrete was still a thing of splendor. Instead he went West to rehabilitate his grief. Always the white sky. Always the dark figures lost in an immense world full of danger and disaster, starvation and storms of mosquitoes thick enough to snuff out candles. Provisions lost in a blazing sun that watched constantly. Twice hit by shell fragments, once by tuberculosis. Dead at 42. The fortunate thing about his camera was its ability to stray— to put things in that didn’t belong, like footprints in the sand. Here is the photographer and his party exploring the great canyons of the West while their clothes dry on the line.