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1. THE GARDEN Poco sostenuto in A major The laving tide of inarticulate air. Vivace in A major The iris people dance. 2. THE POOL Allegretto in A minor Cool-hearted dim familiar of the dove. 3. THE BIRDS Presto in F major I keep a frequent tryst. Presto meno assai The blossom-powdered orangeitree. 4. TO THE MOON Allegro con brio in A major Moon that shone on Babylon. TO MOZART What junipers are these, inlaid With flame of the pomegranate tree? The god of gardens must have made This still unrumored place for thee To rest from immortality, And dream within the splendid shade Some more elusive symphony Than orchestra has ever played.

In the new century, we lose the art of many things. For example, at the beep, I communicate using the wrong machine. I called to say we have two lives and only one of them is real. When the phone rings: you could be anybody. In the evening: you are homeless and hunting for good light, as safe a place as any to make a bed for the night. In both my lives, my nerves go bust. I’m certain that I’m not as I appear, that I’m a figment and you’re not really here. The struggle is authenticity. I have a message. You must believe me.

The Doctor is glimpsed among his mulberry trees. The dark fruits disfigure the sward like contusions. He is at once aloof, timid, intolerant Of all banalities of village life, And yet is stupefied by loneliness. Continually he dreams of the company he craves for, But he challenges it and bores it to tears whenever It swims uncertainly into his narrow orbit. Meetings, however relished in their prospect, Seem only to be arrangements for departures. Exemplum: the spruce Captain and his vampire wife With her token fur hat and veil, like a bandage Extemporised by a bat. It seems that exercise Keeps the Captain’s horse in a permanent lather. The wife suffers from a disabling ennui. What more likely than a harmless liaison? At their first meeting the scenario is as obvious As a cheese. Her eyes, half-lidded, turn away, The cup lifted to her lips. The Captain has questions About the flooding of the water-meadow. A furious but undirected energy governs her soul, Listless as she seems on the surface. It is A libido on auto-destruct. Opportunities Occur, but the Doctor, in complacent rectitude, Bows himself off the stage of further meetings. He devotes himself to his patients. They, however, Begin to avoid him as if he has some dreadful disease. When the Captain is lost on the glacier, his horse Riderless, returning to graze on the bowling-green, The Doctor is suspected. It is most unfair. Meanwhile, his orphaned cousins go ahead With their threatened law-suit. At first he is amused. He meets their legal representative over A schnapps in the Bahnhof Buffet, and is compromised By the leather luggage of the absconding wife. He claims to have found a cure for the epidemic of goitres But only succeeds in killing two maids and a barley farmer. The Captain’s wife is staying at Interlaken With the Schoolmaster’s wastrel son. Her insane letters Are read out in court, evidence of the Doctor’s malpractice. Only his good old Nurse refuses to disbelieve him. On her death-bed she grips his fingers tightly And mutters inaudibly about the lost diaries. There is nothing now to prevent the red-haired cousins From taking complete control of his estate. The Doctor has lost everything and gained nothing. At the back of his mind there is still the slight hope That time will explain to him his crucial role. He becomes a cutter of peat, and realises That it is never quite easy enough to disappear.

What objects may be in themselves, and apart from all this receptivity of our sensibility, remains completely unknown to us. We know nothing but our mode of perceiving them. . . . With this alone have we any concern. —Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason At a church rummage sale, I study the perfection of shadows in a painting by Caravaggio, although what I hold is only a small print of Christ—its frame broken—dining at Emmaus with three of the Apostles. And because the table is dramatically, if not unbelievably, lit, the bowls & pitcher & loaves send their dark crescents onto the immaculate white cloth. When the Savior raises his hand to offer a blessing, its shade deepens further his crimson smock.Tenebrosus: that rich, convincing darkness. As though the master understood that the obscured world only seems to us somehow even more familiar, as though our sense of our own unknowing had at last been made visible—even if what we do not know cannot itself be seen. The future’s drape, the carnival fortunetellers of my childhood might have called it, but also the now’s, displayed as it is—so many unmatched cups & saucers, old coats & wicker baskets—all around us. At a party last week, someone said verisimilitude. We were huddled on a tiny porch. It was the first cool night & the wine had no conclusion. The talk turned quickly to shepherds & the pastoral & then, to opera, before someone recalled a horror film he’d watched late one night with his brother. In black & white vignettes, an evil tree stump possessed by the spirit of an executed prince hunts the scheming tribal elders who have destroyed him. A former pro wrestler in a costume of wire & rubber bark & wearing a permanent scowl lumbers after vengeance in the confusion & fear of 1957 on a half-dozen root-legs, driving his victims into quicksand or toppling himself over upon him. Though here the point is the teller’s small brother & the boy’s allegiance, even in a state of suspended disbelief, to what we call sense. How, he wanted to know, suddenly unusually earnest, did the tree manage to get itself up again? Yesterday I spoke to a friend who is despairing: back home, waiting tables, he’s dating a woman whose marriage has only just come to an end. When he wakes, he discovers he does not recognize himself. One afternoon, walking home from school, I hit my best friend in the face with a book. It may well be that she hit me. Thin pages flew out into the street. More punches were thrown & I came away bruised. In that book, a novel by Emily Brontë, the land is violent & unjust & we are violent & unjust upon it. Even worse, our greatest passions change nothing at all. Before one of us hit the other, there must have been a cause, but I can’t recall it, which makes it seem nonlinear now, &, thus, apocryphal, both impossible & impossibly real. I failed, though I tried, to offer comfort. It’s not that our lives don’t resemble our lives. I’ve been alone so often lately I sometimes catch myself watching myself— breathing in the fresh spears of rosemary or admiring the shallots, peeling their translucent wrappers away, centering one on the board, making the first careful cut, lifting the purple halves. Before stories, we were too busy for stories, too busy hunting & suffering to invent the tales of our own resurrections. Caught out in the kitchen’s brightness last night, the handle of the skillet cast its simple, perfected form across the stove—pierced, like the eye of the needle, so that it can be hung from a hook, as pans, presumably, have always been. Outside the wind picked up. Thunder. The dog trotted off, hid her head beneath the chair. But today: a charity sale at Trinity Chapel & sun on the tar of the buckled walks. In the cracks, beads of water spin into light. Tell yourself it’s simple: this is where it’s been heading all along. Tell yourself something you have no faith in has already begun to occur.

Orpheus liked the glad personal quality Of the things beneath the sky. Of course, Eurydice was a part Of this. Then one day, everything changed. He rends Rocks into fissures with lament. Gullies, hummocks Can’t withstand it. The sky shudders from one horizon To the other, almost ready to give up wholeness. Then Apollo quietly told him: “Leave it all on earth. Your lute, what point? Why pick at a dull pavan few care to Follow, except a few birds of dusty feather, Not vivid performances of the past.” But why not? All other things must change too. The seasons are no longer what they once were, But it is the nature of things to be seen only once, As they happen along, bumping into other things, getting along Somehow. That’s where Orpheus made his mistake. Of course Eurydice vanished into the shade; She would have even if he hadn’t turned around. No use standing there like a gray stone toga as the whole wheel Of recorded history flashes past, struck dumb, unable to utter an intelligent Comment on the most thought-provoking element in its train. Only love stays on the brain, and something these people, These other ones, call life. Singing accurately So that the notes mount straight up out of the well of Dim noon and rival the tiny, sparkling yellow flowers Growing around the brink of the quarry, encapsulates The different weights of the things. But it isn’t enough To just go on singing. Orpheus realized this And didn’t mind so much about his reward being in heaven After the Bacchantes had torn him apart, driven Half out of their minds by his music, what it was doing to them. Some say it was for his treatment of Eurydice. But probably the music had more to do with it, and The way music passes, emblematic Of life and how you cannot isolate a note of it And say it is good or bad. You must Wait till it’s over. “The end crowns all,” Meaning also that the “tableau” Is wrong. For although memories, of a season, for example, Melt into a single snapshot, one cannot guard, treasure That stalled moment. It too is flowing, fleeting; It is a picture of flowing, scenery, though living, mortal, Over which an abstract action is laid out in blunt, Harsh strokes. And to ask more than this Is to become the tossing reeds of that slow, Powerful stream, the trailing grasses Playfully tugged at, but to participate in the action No more than this. Then in the lowering gentian sky Electric twitches are faintly apparent first, then burst forth Into a shower of fixed, cream-colored flares. The horses Have each seen a share of the truth, though each thinks, “I’m a maverick. Nothing of this is happening to me, Though I can understand the language of birds, and The itinerary of the lights caught in the storm is fully apparent to me. Their jousting ends in music much As trees move more easily in the wind after a summer storm And is happening in lacy shadows of shore-trees, now, day after day.” But how late to be regretting all this, even Bearing in mind that regrets are always late, too late! To which Orpheus, a bluish cloud with white contours, Replies that these are of course not regrets at all, Merely a careful, scholarly setting down of Unquestioned facts, a record of pebbles along the way. And no matter how all this disappeared, Or got where it was going, it is no longer Material for a poem. Its subject Matters too much, and not enough, standing there helplessly While the poem streaked by, its tail afire, a bad Comet screaming hate and disaster, but so turned inward That the meaning, good or other, can never Become known. The singer thinks Constructively, builds up his chant in progressive stages Like a skyscraper, but at the last minute turns away. The song is engulfed in an instant in blackness Which must in turn flood the whole continent With blackness, for it cannot see. The singer Must then pass out of sight, not even relieved Of the evil burthen of the words. Stellification Is for the few, and comes about much later When all record of these people and their lives Has disappeared into libraries, onto microfilm. A few are still interested in them. “But what about So-and-so?” is still asked on occasion. But they lie Frozen and out of touch until an arbitrary chorus Speaks of a totally different incident with a similar name In whose tale are hidden syllables Of what happened so long before that In some small town, one indifferent summer.

Off with the wristwatch, the Reeboks, the belt. My laptop's in a bin. I dig out the keys from my jeans and do my best Midwestern grin. At O'Hare, at Atlanta, at Dallas/Fort Worth, it happens every trip, at LaGuardia, Logan, and Washington Dulles, the customary strip is never enough for  a young brown male whose name comes up at random. Lest the randomness of it be doubted, observe how Myrtle's searched in tandem, how Doris's six-pack of Boost has been seized and Ethel gets the wand. How polite of the screeners to sham paranoia when what they really want is to pick out the swarthiest, scruffiest of us and pat us top to toe, my fellow Ahmeds and my alien Alis, Mohammed alias Mo— my buddies from med school, my doubles partners, my dark unshaven brothers whose names overlap with the crazies and God fiends, ourselves the goateed other.

Castaways, we hit the forest — our camping stove turned low, I gripped my tent close for its trial in virgin attitudes of stiffness while lamps fluttered on the dark. My roof sank wave on wave accordion-like, the only sin we knew; and soon the Jameson appeared. I’d burned one back and by the third she laid her hand on mine, like a napkin ... Later, I caught those tiny gasps from Joan and Michael’s tent where he slipped into her like (this I thought) a frog à la Bashō; those dark rippling walls where she kept center, held her breath, so I had to puzzle how one could leave and neither be alone.

Hope fills me this morning as I fashion letters into a tree that sighs, that stays put yet moves, reaching to its limits, swaying and settling, a compass pointing to its place on earth where every morning it blocks the sun for me, at work in my studio, where I scratch and scrawl and loop letters into shapes so I can enter the Tabernacle of their bodies and hear each foot, each syllable sending its roots to a depth as great as that tree’s, which has been standing and rooting and swaying long before I came to memorize its plain mystery, its wide-bodied hull open to stars at night, each a point that I lengthen into a letter and each letter into a word, and with the words build a Tabernacle for the ten most broken and the ten most resonant words. I will place them in an inner sanctum enclosed by hanging carpets, and outside it, another space enclosed by carpets, and outside it, another, so that those who wish to read the words, to say them out loud, must first pull one curtain back and step inside, and then another, and another until they arrive in a hushed space, a soundproofed, heavy quiet where they come to know that which makes all things day after day, and out of which the earth was made. Stepping behind each curtain they learn that the mystery of making is not a secret hidden within but a series of moves, a sequence of steps, outlined on a blueprint with notes and call-outs, white on black, constellations in the night sky, the primordial living Torah, circulating in the letters as trees circulate light, capturing it with their leaves, caching it within the soil, then drawing it back up, watering the tallest branches with the radiant dark.

I Said the Table to the Chair, 'You can hardly be aware, 'How I suffer from the heat, 'And from chilblains on my feet! 'If we took a little walk, 'We might have a little talk! 'Pray let us take the air!' Said the Table to the Chair. II Said the Chair unto the Table, 'Now you know we are not able! 'How foolishly you talk, 'When you know we cannot walk!' Said the Table, with a sigh, 'It can do no harm to try, 'I've as many legs as you, 'Why can't we walk on two?' III So they both went slowly down, And walked about the town With a cheerful bumpy sound, As they toddled round and round. And everybody cried, As they hastened to their side, 'See! the Table and the Chair 'Have come out to take the air!' IV But in going down an alley, To a castle in a valley, They completely lost their way, And wandered all the day, Till, to see them safely back, They paid a Ducky-quack, And a Beetle, and a Mouse, Who took them to their house. V Then they whispered to each other, 'O delightful little brother! 'What a lovely walk we've taken! 'Let us dine on Beans and Bacon!' So the Ducky, and the leetle Browny-Mousy and the Beetle Dined, and danced upon their heads Till they toddled to their beds.

1. Somewhere Indians are walking across America. One is a woman caught in stride between two white birches, her eyes on the ground, her mouth biting open a word while the wind shreds the lake behind her. 2. A boy wakes alone in cold New England air. From his window he watches his father’s breath mix with the steam from cows’ urine. A white blanket of sheep has unrolled across the hill, and the yellow dogs who ran and ran have now disappeared. 3. A glass necklace floats on her white breast just as she herself floats inside his lens while he watches from under the dark hood— her small black eardrops hang perfectly still, her long white neck and cleavage ready to be frozen forever by the touch of his finger. 4. As the deer ate from the deep lawn and the fish jumped near the willow trees, the big white ferry paused briefly before sliding back again across the lake, completely unaware of its brightness and its beauty.