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The sun used to shine while we two walked Slowly together, paused and started Again, and sometimes mused, sometimes talked As either pleased, and cheerfully parted Each night. We never disagreed Which gate to rest on. The to be And the late past we gave small heed. We turned from men or poetry To rumours of the war remote Only till both stood disinclined For aught but the yellow flavorous coat Of an apple wasps had undermined; Or a sentry of dark betonies, The stateliest of small flowers on earth, At the forest verge; or crocuses Pale purple as if they had their birth In sunless Hades fields. The war Came back to mind with the moonrise Which soldiers in the east afar Beheld then. Nevertheless, our eyes Could as well imagine the Crusades Or Caesar's battles. Everything To faintness like those rumours fade— Like the brook's water glittering Under the moonlight—like those walks Now—like us two that took them, and The fallen apples, all the talks And silence—like memory's sand When the tide covers it late or soon, And other men through other flowers In those fields under the same moon Go talking and have easy hours.

i early morning The rain, gray god with its huge hands has shredded the roses, and clapping, kept us up all night, the bridge washed out, the troll waiting to gobble a goat. How long has he been there, wet and cold, impatient, starving, his coat rent with welts and matted with mist? Father, thundering, his voice full of  bracken and leaves, leaves that in the autumn clogged the gutters.Who goes over the bridge? Who goes there?

You are the start of the week or the end of it, and according to The Beatles you creep in like a nun. You're the second full day the kids have been away with their father, the second full day of an empty house. Sunday, I've missed you. I've been sitting in the backyard with a glass of Pinot waiting for your arrival. Did you know the first Sweet 100s are turning red in the garden, but the lettuce has grown too bitter to eat. I am looking up at the bluest sky I have ever seen, cerulean blue, a heaven sky no one would believe I was under. You are my witness. No day is promised. You are absolution. You are my unwritten to-do list, my dishes in the sink, my brownie breakfast, my braless day.

Madison, Wisconsin, 1996 Here is a genial congregation, well fed and rosy with health and appetite, robust children in tow. They have come and all the generations of them, to be fed, their old ones too who are eligible now for a small discount, having lived to a ripe age. Over the heaped and steaming plates, one by one, heads bow, eyes close; the blessings are said. Here there is good will; here peace on earth, among the leafy greens, among the fruits of the gardens of America's heartland. Here is abundance, here is the promised land of milk and honey, out of which a flank of the fatted calf, thick still on its socket and bone, rises like a benediction over the loaves of bread and the little fishes, belly-up in butter.

The nurse calls to tell me on Sunday evenings how he’s doing. How he’s holding his own in front of the window with a thousand channels behind the one that saves his screen with snow, fish houses, and eagles. How the days hang above the ice as vast recycled pages on which he writes in invisible ink. How the sun arcs across the sky, then breaks like a plate above the horizon. How the temperature drops below zero at dusk, then continues to fall till morning. In this way she teaches me how to speak to him in his sleep at his home in Minnesota, which is the same, she says, as talking to a friend you’ve never met, but grown close to nonetheless from hearing his voice. I hear the snow falling as she holds the phone outside the window. Silence is the sound of snow falling on snow, I think as I listen to the flakes inside the air before she closes the window. “I’m thinking of walleye in their sleep,” I tell my father. “Of catching them as they dream, then throwing them back in the hole I drilled by hand with the auger you gave me as a child, whose handle is stained with blood from my turning it so many times into the ice of Bad Medicine.” I wait for her voice to return, then say, “Just this for now since any more would disappear the lake inside his head on which he builds a house for us to fish throughout the winter.”

Across the bridge, where in the morning blow The wrinkled tide turns homeward, and is fain Homeward to drag the black sea-goer’s chain, And the long yards by Dowgate dipping low; Across dispeopled ways, patient and slow, Saint Magnus and Saint Dunstan call in vain: From Wren’s forgotten belfries, in the rain, Down the blank wharves the dropping octaves go. Forbid not these! Tho’ no man heed, they shower A subtle beauty on the empty hour, From all their dark throats aching and outblown; Aye in the prayerless places welcome most, Like the last gull that up a naked coast Deploys her white and steady wing, alone.

Sometimes after the flight show when my father flew in formation with the other pilots, diving and somersaulting in his Cessna, he took us up. The crowd was driving off, the windsocks disappeared. We flew above the empty air strip, past the silver hangar, the ballpark, then the bridge, beyond the school; and then, if there was fuel enough, we flew to Hidden Lake where, just below us, Grandpa was fishing in his rowboat, looking up, waving his hat, and Grandma hurried out, wearing her yellow apron. Oh, if only we could go down and fish for perch with Grandpa! But it was nearly sunset, and we flew back over woods and highways toward the town, and finally there we were above our block, our house, my Kool-Aid stand, my brother's blue two-wheeler in the drive. How small it was— how strange it seemed to look down on your life from somewhere else. And suddenly I was sick with loneliness. But we were all together: my brother with my father up in front, Mother beside me in the back. And yet we must be small from there: our empty yard, the Thompsons on their porch, the Barton's Airedale trying to climb the fence, and Mother's clothesline, my sweater hung to dry. Just then, if I had seen myself on the swing set, I would not have been surprised.

XXXVIII Over the cliffs of the hillside: the sun then below in the valley the earth covered with flowers Zurita enamored friend takes in the sun of photosynthesis Zurita will now never again be friend since 7 P.M. it's been getting dark Night is the insane asylum of the plants XLII Enclosed with the four walls of a bathroom: I looked up at the ceiling and began to clean the walls and the floor the sink   all of it You see: Outside the sky was God and he was sucking at my soul —believe me! I wiped my weeping eyes LVII In the narrow broken bed restless all night like a spent candle lit again I thought I saw Buddha many times At my side I felt a woman's gasp for air but Buddha was only the pillows and the woman is sleeping the eternal dream LXIII Today I dreamed that I was King they were dressing me in black-and-white spotted pelts Today I moo with my head about to fall as the church bells' mournful clanging says that milk goes to market LXXXV They've shaved my head they've dressed me in these gray wool rags —Mom keeps on smoking I am Joan of Arc They catalog me on microfilm XCII The glass is transparent like water Dread of prisms and glass I circle the light so as not to lose myself in them

I

The bugle sounds the measured call to prayers, The band starts bravely with a clarion hymn, From every side, singly, in groups, in pairs, Each to his kind of service comes to worship Him. Our faces washed, our hearts in the right place, We kneel or stand or listen from our tents; Half-naked natives with their kind of grace Move down the road with balanced staffs like mendicants. And over the hill the guns bang like a door And planes repeat their mission in the heights. The jungle outmaneuvers creeping war And crawls within the circle of our sacred rites. I long for our disheveled Sundays home, Breakfast, the comics, news of latest crimes, Talk without reference, and palindromes, Sleep and the Philharmonic and the ponderous Times . I long for lounging in the afternoons Of clean intelligent warmth, my brother’s mind, Books and thin plates and flowers and shining spoons, And your love’s presence, snowy, beautiful, and kind.