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The calm, Cool face of the river Asked me for a kiss.

lives on an island of last-ditch attempts and ancient consolations after the shipwreck she swam ashore near naked hands scraped raw on coral bra and panties soaked through sand in her teeth lapped by aftermath lying exhausted slowly approaching the condition of music he loved her stubborn luster sure they argued sometimes the word "argue" from Latin meaning to make clear while she sat quietly in the wing chair her eyes closed police ransacked his desk the note turned up in his pocket with the letter for his sister a baseball ticket stub receipts for two "taco platters" he whose soul was bound up with mine and part of a bookmark six weeks later she looks great thin and translucent a statue of justice sans blindfold she wears beautiful blouses now peach, gold, seedling green her complexion has never been better lushness nips at the heels of destruction tonight's lurid sunset's a cocktail of too many boozes she'd like to switch it off via remote control but there's no antidote for celestial events a frantic bat takes a wrong turn from the attic veers into her living room, bounces off walls a sick flut-thud each time it hits the suicide's wife pulls out her roasting pan climbs the kitchen counter teeters and grabs for twenty minutes at last claps on the lid walks her prize outside releases the creature into the trees where the lawn peters out where the idea that at death something is liberated can flap blackly away.

I hope you’ve been taken up by Jesus though so many decades have passed, so far apart we’d grown between love transmogrifying into hate and those sad letters and phone calls and your face vanishing into a noose that I couldn’t today name the gods you at the end worshipped, if any, praise being impossible for the devoutly miserable. And screw my church who’d roast in Hell poor suffering bastards like you, unable to bear the masks of their own faces. With words you sought to shape a world alternate to the one that dared inscribe itself so ruthlessly across your eyes, for you could not, could never fully refute the actual or justify the sad heft of your body, earn your rightful space or pay for the parcels of oxygen you inherited. More than once you asked that I breathe into your lungs like the soprano in the opera I loved so my ghost might inhabit you and you ingest my belief in your otherwise-only-probable soul. I wonder does your death feel like failure to everybody who ever loved you as if our collective cpr stopped too soon, the defib paddles lost charge, the corpse punished us by never sitting up. And forgive my conviction that every suicide’s an asshole. There is a good reason I am not God, for I would cruelly smite the self-smitten. I just wanted to say ha-ha, despite your best efforts you are every second alive in a hard-gnawing way for all who breathed you deeply in, each set of lungs, those rosy implanted wings, pink balloons. We sigh you out into air and watch you rise like rain.

didn't thank didn't wave goodbye didn't flutter the air with kisses a mound of gifts unwrapped bed unmade no appetite always elsewhere though it was raining elsewhere though strangers peopled the streets though we at home slaved and baked and wept and hung ornaments and perfumed the dark did he marvel did he thank was he grateful        did he know was he human was he there always elsewhere: didn't thank didn't kiss toothbrush stiffened with unuse puppy whining in the hall car battery dead sweaters unraveled was that human? Went where?

Yes I put her away. But now life flares up As safe as China in a cup You hear the droppings of her heart. Leaves rustle on the windowpane. Three o’clock turns round again. The man in the moon grows full Of her death while earth awaits beneath To receive her ashes on the wind. Yes, earth owns the wind As I her life Whom I have never seen Nor been with Still within our hearts there lies this communion of all that dies we held in common because without it we become more common than the dust. 2. Clay cannot create her features nor mirror reveal her mouth Photograph not show her form full with self, so put away her picture from the shelf And turn instead to living woman on the couch, decked with flowers as if it were she laid out, and not Sylvia, in the woods. 3. Address to the Woman Tell her that may not rise again she sings still in our breath. Tell her that may not breathe again she moves yet beneath the moon. Tell her that may not weave again her hands are dawns within our eyes. Tell her that may not speak again Her words are warnings in the wood.

1. The Letter Everywhere the windows give up nothing but frost’s intricate veined foliage. Just engines shrilling pocked and frozen streets wailing toward some new disaster. No bright angels’ ladders going to split heaven this Chicago instant where the pier’s an iced fantastic: spiked, the glacial floes seize it greedy like a careless treasure— marquise diamonds, these round clear globes, the psychic’s crystal world spinning in her corner shop when I passed, a globe boundaried with turning silent winds and demons. Out here the pavement’s a slick graffitied strip:There’s more to life than violence.

The amities of morning and the buxom habits of birds that swing a bell-bright city in their intelligent wings; last night’s squall has drawn off like anger’s tide, the remote and muffled waters beating solitudinous rocks and murmurous in the hidden parts, ebbing and beating, of the mind as some half-forgotten name . . . the rain has withdrawn like the tents and the Greeks, like the hard-to-believe- in days of our childhood. Light moves, the whole massed flotilla of morning, kin to the upward flight of birds returning; and brutality, the hungers and the hatreds seem fabulous, seem members; the gouty rat and straggly root collaborate. Earth in wounds, deaths, decays— past hours its rutted crusts— with the billowy sky is the field- upon-field, and all one, of one master observing the various fruits: somewhere a child in a cage, inferior bodies making a passable road, a girl passionate with pain, an old man watching the earth escape like his once endless strengths, his poems head- long. And one fills with awe—as the town with morning, every cranny, the birds brimming fire- escapes and broken windows— that the earth like some wise breath never balked, a many- membered bird-flight, should include all, must be a terrible good. The eyes passing, contracted from night and war the stars undertook, finally emerge the topgallant of morning, and those eyes roam free as the Greeks: wherever a drop of water is, spindrift city of water gleaming, there is home.

Sing, cuccu, nu. Sing, cuccu. Sing, cuccu. Sing, cuccu, nu. Sumer is i-cumin in— Lhude sing, cuccu! Groweth sed and bloweth med And springth the wude nu. Sing, cuccu! Awe bleteth after lomb, Lhouth after calve cu, Bulluc sterteth, bucke verteth— Murie sing, cuccu! Cuccu, cuccu, Wel singes thu, cuccu. Ne swik thu naver nu!

And it grows, the vain summer, even for us with our bright green sins: behold the dry guest, the wind, as it stirs up quarrels among magnolia boughs and plays its serene tune on the prows of all the leaves— and then is gone, leaving the leaves still there, the tree still green, but breaking the heart of the air.

Last summer, two discrete young snakes left their skin on my small porch, two mornings in a row. Being postmodern now, I pretended as if I did not see them, nor understand what I knew to be circling inside me. Instead, every hour I told my son to stop with his incessant back-chat. I peeled a banana. And cursed God—His arrogance, His gall—to still expect our devotion after creating love. And mosquitoes. I showed my son the papery dead skins so he could know, too, what it feels like when something shows up at your door—twice—telling you what you already know.