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After Tim Dlugos' Things I Might Do I probably didn't tell you that the last Line of your poem left me on a plane of Movement somewhere between the best of pop Culture and the longest break in your favorite pop song I probably didn't tell you that the train is going to take Way longer than you think and you were probably annoyed I probably broke the moon in pieces with my night vision Straining too hard to remember what I probably dropped in your inbox I probably should've said what I meant. You probably knew how my life didn't fix into That theory box on your shelf, so I probably Ignored you when you said hi to me near Mercer St I probably left off the most important thing But you probably didn't want to hear it I probably tried to be a good New Yorker and Work hard and play hard but it didn't work Out that way, I probably just reverted back to The Rust Belt mode—work hard, have it not mean Enough to play hard or play at all. It's probably too hard to make A dent for yourself in the Rust Belt. It's all probably said and done Your neighbor knows what you did tomorrow and what was Going on yesterday. Probably good too so you don't get in trouble With the other neighbor. But they probably don't know that you could Be in NY for a few hours and have something good and so life changing happen To you it was probably a 360 for you and probably took You years to come down to 180, probably, right?

1. Today they cut down the oak. Strong men climbed with ropes in the brittle tree. The exhaust of a gasoline saw was blue in the branches. The oak had been dead a year. I remember the great sails of its branches rolling out green, a hundred and twenty feet up, and acorns thick on the lawn. Nine cities of squirrels lived in that tree. Yet I was happy that it was coming down. "Let it come down!" I kept saying to myself with a joy that was strange to me. Though the oak was the shade of old summers, I loved the guttural saw. 2. By night a bare trunk stands up fifteen feet and cords of firewood press on the twiggy frozen grass of the yard. One man works every afternoon for a week to cut the trunk gradually down. Bluish stains spread through the wood and make it harder to cut. He says they are the nails of a trapper who dried his pelts on the oak when badgers dug in the lawn. Near the ground he hacks for two days, knuckles scraping the stiff snow. His chain saw breaks three teeth. He cannot make the trunk smooth. He leaves one night after dark. 3. Roots stiffen under the ground and the frozen street, coiled around pipes and wires. The stump is a platform of blond wood in the gray winter. It is nearly level with the snow that covers the little garden around it. It is a door into the underground of old summers, but if I bend down to it, I am lost in crags and buttes of a harsh landscape that goes on forever. When snow melts the wood darkens into the ground; rain and thawed snow move deeply into the stump, backwards along the disused tunnels. 4. The edges of the trunk turn black. In the middle there is a pale overlay, like a wash of chalk on darkness. The desert of the winter has moved inside. I do not step on it now; I am used to it, like a rock, or a bush that does not grow. There is a sailing ship beached in the cove of a small island where the warm water is turquoise. The hulk leans over, full of rain and sand, and shore flowers grow from it. Then it is under full sail in the Atlantic, on a blue day, heading for the island. She has planted sweet alyssum in the holes where the wood was rotten. It grows thick, it bulges like flowers contending from a tight vase. Now the stump sinks downward into its roots with a cargo of rain and white blossoms that last into October.

“He does not come to coo.” —Gerard Manley Hopkins Insomniac monkey-mind ponders the Dove, Symbol not only of Peace but sexual Love, the couple nestled and brooding. After coupling, the human animal needs The woman safe for nine months and more. But the man after his turbulent minute or two Is expendable. Usefully rash, reckless For defense, in his void of redundancy Willing to death and destruction. Monkey-mind envies the male Dove Who equally with the female secretes Pigeon milk for the young from his throat. For peace, send all human males between Fourteen and twenty-five to school On the Moon, or better yet Mars. But women too are capable of Unpeace, Yes, and we older men too, venom-throats. Here’s a great comic who says on our journey We choose one of two tributaries: the River Of Peace, or the River of Productivity. The current of Art he says runs not between Banks with birdsong in the fragrant shadows— No, an artist must follow the stinks and rapids Of the branch that drives the millstones and dynamos. Is peace merely a vacuum, the negative Of creation, or the absence of war? The teaching says Peace is a positive energy. Still something in me resists that sweet milk, My mind resembles my restless, inferior cousin Who fires his shit in handfuls from his cage.

I said love because it came closest said leave because you did we do this peeling off each from each each from suddenly other said come back but meant don't go I said dead and meant every one of those instances of vanishment how the dead swim away from us in time their tide their closed wooden boats I said tide but tide was never right said tide because we have no word for that kind of unforgiving away I said tether when I meant anchor when I meant stay but when I said stay one thing I meant was against confusion against yet another loss I meant two-faced Janus January's god of fallen gates of trying to look both ways and when I said farewell I meant again don't go but it was too late I was here in the hall this tunnel full of mirrors glass and strange made-up faces and when I thought funhouse I meant its opposite I meant this rusty carnival town the men so sad they paint their smiles in place they paint their faces white paint their eyes wide and full of crying

And a tenth part of Okeanos is given to dark night a tithe of the pure water    under    earth so that the clear fountains pour from rock face, tears stream from the caverns and clefts, down-running, carving woundrous ways in basalt resistance, cutting deep as they go into layers of time-layerd Gaia where She sleeps— the cold water, the black rushing gleam, the moving down-rush, wash, gush out over bed-rock, toiling the boulders in flood, purling in deeps, broad flashing in falls— And a tenth part of bright clear Okeanos his circulations— mists, rains, sheets, sheathes— lies in poisonous depths, the black water. Styx    this carver of caverns beneath us is. Styx    this black water,    this down-pouring. The well is deep.    From its stillness the words our voices speak      echo. Resonance follows resonance. Waves of this sounding come up to us. We draw the black water, pure and cold. The light of day is not as bright as this crystal flowing. Three thousand years we have recited its virtue out of Hesiod. Is it twenty-five thousand since the ice withdrew from the lands    and we came forth from the realm of caverns where the river beneath the earth    we knew we go back to. Styx pouring down in the spring from its glacial remove, from the black ice. Fifty million years—from the beginning of what we are— we knew the depth of this well to be. Fifty million years deep    —but our knowing deepens —time deepens— this still water we thirst for      in dreams we dread.

Ultimately improved by it: slant light hitting his prison obliquely near the state bird’s pointed head accentuated crest, the black-ringed bill from which wheat-wheat-wheat-wheat from which whoit cheer , whoit cheer ; cheer - cheer-cheer inspired Ronald Cotton to listen as in his head, the solitary cardinal indulged in snails which seemed like polished fossils of trophy hog tails (after prize butchery) that Ronald was able to recall, his hair a mess of replicas of them as industrious as the state whose success was poultry & eggs tobacco & soybeans as well as convictions: None as tightly knit as Jennifer’s (not even the state flag) that she could identify Cotton that cotton’s taking on appearances other than burst white of a dense localized haze from which to weave memory, following pink-petaled start, rather a satellite dish of a flower, pollen/sensor- studded antenna protruding from the center undeniably; the jury couldn’t acquit Cotton of its role in documenting and altering Jennifer’s history, many lives changed as result of consequences, sensors that boast duality of receptor and transmitter: witness: insects give and take, taint what is put out, taken in; mix it up so that interrelatedness spreads and the understandable error of metaphor becomes less erroneous over time: eleven years in prison, innocence locked up, protected although in prison, it resembled something else. If Cotton strained, he could see the top of a Ferris wheel on the horizon just a possible segment of a rainbow the length of a chain of cardinal feathers even though it wasn’t that at all. The eye witnesses all the time, even the unseeing eye is turned toward a focus on black, saturation dense as conviction; the eye processes, pulls in whole vista to a retinal speck of convergence which is to say there is some Cotton in Poole, some connection, independent shared participation in cold beer, occasional cards turkey-spread in the right hand without knowing the other sank into the seat at the cinema the same way and sampled Funnel cake at the state fair within a week of each other and more than that in common: both being men and convicted for what men really can and really do, do. Including sometimes confessions and apologies; cash reparations after the innocence is free to extend its parameters to unlocked doors, be an oversized over-zealous white bird floating down the aisle, its cottony haze lifted in order to kiss and marry Ronald’s calm delight in being able to take his time leave his longshoreman’s mark on ships that take some of him to any port in the world: durable goods such as the DNA whose precision detects human exactitude, and could build as many Ronalds as time would permit something Jennifer now desperately wants to do, restoring what was lost because it was like something else, because the fact of similarity is compelling, convincing; if connections could not be made, there’d be no havens, no fugitive status lost to fusion, no links to God, no human murmurings whose constant echoes are also the gentle silvery hum of fans praying over computer motors to cool them and also mimic motion of small wings amplified to make sound in the distance much like the electric razor preparing a head on death row clean as a light bulb. Ronald was prepared to be believed; he saw the quiet manner of his long days in court as evidence of his rationality and contemplativeness such as befits clergy; a potential propensity for order, mercy, the steadiness required to dispense blessings mostly on the undeserving without emotion or judgment selfishness or preference while he was being judged guilty for lack of emotion, for Jennifer’s incontrovertible emotional insistence on Cotton’s being the one—she had to finger him to be comfortable within her survival. No way to mistake to ever forget details documented in memory, the event relived to the point that it resculpted her brain into a Cottony bust (he was there to be the perfect model) whose reality floated away in a Poole, as only the reflection of Cotton identified as source. A situation also called (must-have) moonlight. Here’s the new & improved Cotton: eleven years in the making; enough time served to anger to ruin it; at that same room’s temperature it became doubt of clemency, pardon: peculiar butter that erupted as gratefulness for the miracle of absolute exoneration when his impossibility as rapist was proven. Even Cotton conceded that the composite sketch bore a just resemblance to Cotton, displayed a metaphor for men like Cotton, the seeds of capability in the structure of the face, the human repertoire that includes Cotton who softly consents to meet Jennifer when she asks him to funnel her regret and apologies deep into himself, accepting that she meant no malice toward him but toward the perpetrator whom many men resemble, all brothers, family of man resemblance; Cotton’s own daughter, Cotton’s own wife could be in a similar position; no offense taken, captivated by the beauty of Jennifer; her superior logic refusing to let the crime against her silence her; as sure, as certain, as dazzling about speaking up about mistaking Cotton for Poole as she was in identifying in the lineup the closest thing there to Poole the best available, the incredible likeness that memory seized, filling gaps in the recollected Poole with Cotton’s particulars. She felt better in her cotton- touched skin. Metaphor is a form of forgiveness; a short rope of it knots-up those that can’t come together any other way into being defined by the other. Strange and estranged pairings give rise to mutable truth that can yield to both dawn and twilight demands that things be seen differently. Jennifer in moonlight instead of being illuminated moon whose face was also in Emmett Till’s way, but this generation of Jennifer has another side home late after a day of good faith in which she and Cotton team up at a church to speak up about doubt as less a shadow than certainty. Memory is as accurate as metaphor, an overlay that always fits something, that like the purest most sparkling water is too naïve not to submit to any vessel into which it’s poured. Just to be guzzled. Perhaps the vessel in which cotton becomes a pool in which North Carolina is shaped like an embryo: Humanity still on the brink of infancy.

On “Sueño No. 5: Botella del mar,” a photograph by Grete Stern (1950) The woman sits clutching her knees inside a short-necked bottle on a beach, looks up smiling at a mouth above all imagined itineraries. We like to think she volunteered to be lowered into the bottle. On her own idea, even her own craftiness, lured into being enrobed with the thick glass that is the gray-blue of a ukiyo-e sky of flying cranes who breathe the steam of that bluish gray ideation and end of autumn, or a plume of smoke from a train in the middle distance. Swells of warm seawater push wet sand against spun tips of seashells that sit on the warmed strand like nobility on a plush settee. The bottle’s bottom edge lists in the hot sand, the heat of the morning sunlight penetrates the bottle walls, and foam and breeze coax a juddering creature from underneath. From inside the woman argues with herself that the horizon is another of the world’s ambitions. Those ships slipped into bottles with volition and self-responsibility, acquiesce so marvelously, like the glass fitting so smoothly around her. She is a person born to be put into this and admired as perfection from the outside, which is how we love flowers and dreams, though our desires may suffocate them.

A reflection on my students They are so beautiful, and so very young they seem almost to glitter with perfection, these creatures that I briefly move among. I never get to stay with them for long, but even so, I view them with affection: they are so beautiful, and so very young. Poised or clumsy, placid or high-strung, they're expert in the art of introspection, these creatures that I briefly move among— And if their words don't quite trip off the tongue consistently, with just the right inflection, they remain beautiful. And very young. Still, I have to tell myself it's wrong to think of them as anything but fiction, these creatures that I briefly move among— Because, like me, they're traveling headlong in that familiar, vertical direction that coarsens beautiful , blackmails young — the two delusions we all move among.

for M.B. The answer is entropy—how smell works— little bits of everything—always spinning off from where they were—flying off at random into the world—which is to say into air. There are other ways of solid to gas— they’re substance specific, like iodine, or dry ice—how I felt when I saw you— straight to a new state without passing through expected ones—as though enough of me left at the moment you appeared that I could never be whole without you—apply heat—I turn straight into ether.

Mid-sentence, we remembered the eclipse, Arguing home through our scant patch of park Still warm with barrel wine, when none too soon We checked the hour by glancing at the moon, Unphased at first by that old ruined marble Looming like a monument over the hill, So brimmed with light it seemed about to spill, Then, there! We watched the thin edge disappear— The obvious stole over us like awe, That it was our own silhouette we saw, Slow perhaps to us moon-gazing here (Reaching for each other's fingertips) But sweeping like a wing across that stark Alien surface at the speed of dark. The crickets stirred from winter sleep to warble Something out of time, confused and brief, The roosting birds sang out in disbelief, The neighborhood's stray dogs began to bark. And then the moon was gone, and in its place, A dim red planet hung just out of reach, As real as a bitter orange or ripened peach In the penumbra of a tree. At last We rose and strolled at a reflective pace Past the taverna crammed with light and smoke And people drinking, laughing at a joke, Unaware that anything had passed Outside in the night where we delayed Sheltering in the shadow we had made.