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“Gwawnowwdat,” said Turnbull, “and take a good look at the pain in a horse’s eyes. If you’d a pair of dragging hooves on you, it’s short work they’d make of the smile on your face.” You could see that he understood, and his fellow-feeling for the pain in the horse’s eyes; and that dwelling on it so long he’d finally stolen into the innermost space of   the horse’s pain that I saw, too, trying to plumb the depths of  pain that it felt; until it was Turnbull’s eyes I saw starting out from that suffering horse’s pelt. I looked at Turnbull and saw set under his brow as I looked him up and down twice the two, too-big eyes that were speechless with sorrow: the horse’s eyes. Translated from the Irish

My fingertips marveled at the silvery shimmer, already less silver, less shimmery than when it lived. I never again should cause flesh this beautiful to be less beautiful, I thought. At supper —swordfish—my brother offered up his neighbor for conversation. He'd shotgunned every TV in his house, even the puny black-and-white on the kitchen counter. Buckshot shattered black granite and splintered yards of Golden Oak. It wasn't election time or football season. Maybe his kids had watched Debbie do Dallas. In the unexpected hush as we considered slaughtered appliances, my brother's drinking buddy told my girlfriend she was a pretty lady, a real pretty lady. She looked like a dream. One day she'd make a real man really happy. I barked three hard flat laughs. The lit friend winced as each blast turned his cheeks a richer red. My girlfriend closed her eyes and opened them, her azure eyelids shimmering with jade.

Across a space peopled with stars I am laughing while my sides ache for existence it turns out is profound though the profound because of time it turns out is an illusion and all of this is infinitely improbable given the space, for which I gratefully lie in three feet of snow making a shallow grave I would have called an angel otherwise and think of my own rapturous escape from living only as dust and dirt, little sister.

I never much liked forsythia, never liked yellow, but liked the sounds: for     syth       i       a for Kythera for sight for sky for Sylvia. Forsythia made an okay divider between our place and hers. Sylvia used to trod through it to see us too often so we let all of it grow massive and dense hoping she’d go blind in it then hop aboard a bumblebee who’d follow his lovely great queen as she flew to her dream isle of Kythera.

The magnolia before it blooms stands bare as a statue from antiquity or a shaved puss, it flowers first then greens. A pissed off dyke climbs into the branches to be held by an ancient indifference and both were me. Yet it’s possible I am a short bald man. That I am neither a big-bosomed wide-hipped pretty nor a short bald man. An antelope, an elk, a deer on this rug, a twiggy tree. The genderless squat figure, solo, blurry, hands on hips, that repeats. A plush life of winter and summer colors of flowers alongside tight checkered bands edging the broad green center where we look for each other, a woods, a pasture, a park, a yard, a median of grass set in a concrete mold situated within a pay lot. How it feels to stand outside a house at night whose lights are on. Whose lights are on.

To this man, to his boned shoulders Came the descent of pain. All kinds, Cruel, blind, dear, horrid, hallowed, Rained, again, again. To this small white blind boned face, Wherever it was, Descended The blows of pain, it took as it were blinded, As it were made for this. We were there. We uneasy Did not know if it were. Knew neither The reason nor the man nor whether To share, or to beware.

Whose table is that, left on three legs? If there’s been a mistake, it may be in assuming less vulnerability as one fills the vase— whose buoyant comfort exaggerates at the sight of his own proffered, sympathetic hand, striking him so clean in comparison gloved white, magician—for a sec he even sees the calla lily’s furl in the gesture of voilà!

No but come closer. Come a little Closer. Let the wall-eyed hornyhanded Panhandler hit you for a dime Sir and shiver. Snow like this Drives its pelting shadows over Bremen, Over sad Louvain and the eastern Marshes, the black wold. It sighs Into the cold sea of the north, That vast contemptuous revery between Antiquity and you. Turn up your collar, Pull your hatbrim down. Commune Briefly with your ignorant heart For those bewildered raging children Europe surrenders her old gentry to. All their eyes turn in the night from Your fretfulness and forgetfulness, Your talk; they turn away, friend. Their eyes dilated with dreams of power Fix on the image of the mob wet With blood scaling the gates of order. Anarchist and incendiary Caesar bind that brotherhood To use and crush the civil guard, Debauch the debauché, level Tenement and court with soaring Sideslipping squadrons and hard regiments, Stripped for the smoking levée of the Howitzer, thunderstruck under the net. The great mouth of hunger closes On swineherd and princess, on the air Of jongleur and forest bell; Grendel Swims from the foul deep again. Deputy, cartelist, academician Question in haste any plumeless captain Before the peremptory descent Of mankind, flattered and proud. With whitening morning on the waste You may discern through binoculars A long line of the shawled and frozen, Moving yet motionless, as if those Were populations whom the sun failed And the malicious moon enchanted To wander and be still forever The prey of wolves and bestial mazes.

If you’d seen the Gaillardots’ mullein in the Cedars of the Shouf; if you’d seen the Aleppo dock, red with iron, in Bcharre where the Adonis River’s said to run as red with what was thought his blood; if you’d seen the bearded oat in Burjein, the rayed white horehound in Tripoli; or maybe the milkwort in Ehden, as often I saw the strigose bellflower and the cyclamen, you might have been the more awed by a mallow-leaved bindweed in Aley on your way to the brunnera in Baalbek. The Mediterranean poppy in Nabatieh, Beirut mullein in nearby Baabda, connate Alexanders in Qadisha, fodder vetch in Zgharta, white rocket in Sour, Gypsywort in Marjeyoun, headed Ziziphora in Baakleen, bladder skullcap in Barouk. The viscid catchfly, ah, vying with bats at evening in Zahle—for these the earth of continuous habitation since the Chalcolithic Age salivates at dawn. But not a reed grows where no grave is. In Sacandaga Valley, two thousand bodies were trans-buried by the boneyard gang. They ceded the pitted ground to the dentist gang, whose jackhammers drilled the rock beneath. Powder monkeys tamped the holes with dynamite. The beaver-tooth gang’s axes and cross-cut saws cleared the trees. Bush burners followed. The fires burned for two years. The patience of dam builders built a force equal to the water: It flooded the ashes, the railroad station, and a train, which I saw transposed in the steely swells, or so it seemed. But iron turns a torrent red.

Thousands lavishing, thousands starving; intrigues, war, flatteries, envyings, hypocrisies, lying vanities, hollow amusements, exhaustion, dissipation, death—and giddiness and laughter, from the first scene to the last. —Samuel Palmer, 1858 I. Pan Awakes: Summer Marches In Pan’s spring rain “drives his victims out to the animals with whom they become as one”— pain and paeans, hung in the mouth, to be sung II. What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me June 6, 1857, Thoreau in his Journal: A year is made up of a certain series and number of sensations and thoughts which have their language in nature… Now I am ice, now I am sorrel. Or, Clare, 1840, Epping Forest: I found the poems in the fields And only wrote them down and The book I love is everywhere And not in idle words John,claritas tell us the words are not idle, the syllables are able to turn plantains into quatrains, tune raceme to cyme, panicle and umbel to form corollas in light clusters of tones… Sam Palmer hit it: “Milton, by one epithet draws an oak of the largest girth I ever saw, ‘Pine and monumental oak’: I have just been trying to draw a large one in Lullingstone; but the poet’s tree is huger than any in the park.” Muse in a meadow, compose in a mind! III.What the Animals in the Forest Tell Me Harris’s Sparrow— 103 species seen by the Georgia Ornithological Society in Rabun Gap, including Harris’s Sparrow, with its black crown, face, and bib encircling a pink bill It was, I think, the third sighting in Georgia, and I should have been there instead of reading Clare, listening to catbirds and worrying about Turdus migratorious that flew directly into the Volkswagen and bounced into a ditch Friend Robin, I cannot figure it, if I’d been going 40 you might be whistling in some grass. 10 tepid people got 10 stale letters one day earlier, I cannot be happy about that. IV.What the Night Tells Me the dark drones on in the southern wheat fields and the hop flowers open before the sun’s beckoning the end is ripeness, the wind rises, and the dawn says yes YES! it says “yes” V.What the Morning Bells Tell Me Sounds, and sweet aires that give delight and hurt not— that, let Shakespeare’s delectation bear us VI.What Love Tells Me Anton Bruckner counts the 877th leaf on a linden tree in the countryside near Wien and prays: Dear God, Sweet Jesus, Save Us, Save Us… the Light in the Grass, the Wind on the Hill, are in my head, the world cannot be heard Leaves obliterate my  heart, we touch each other far apart… Let us count into the Darkness