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They sit together on the porch, the dark Almost fallen, the house behind them dark. Their supper done with, they have washed and dried The dishes–only two plates now, two glasses, Two knives, two forks, two spoons–small work for two. She sits with her hands folded in her lap, At rest. He smokes his pipe. They do not speak, And when they speak at last it is to say What each one knows the other knows. They have One mind between them, now, that finally For all its knowing will not exactly know Which one goes first through the dark doorway, bidding Goodnight, and which sits on a while alone.

They said to me no, don’t take any, no, don’t touch, that is burning hot. No, don’t try to touch, to hold, that weighs too much, that hurts. They said to me: Read, write. And I tried, I took up a word, but it struggled, it clucked like a frightened hen, wounded, in a cage of black straw, spotted with old traces of   blood. Translated from the French

I Should I take this time, while the children are in school, to untrim the tree? Standing in the dish we let go dry, it looks well-preserved, as if Christmas were still in our future; would it spare their feelings if I dismantle piece by piece its grandeur, or will I amplify their sense of loss, to de-jewel it without ritual? Epiphany, we drove by a painted camel on a church lawn — or what, after hard freeze, is lawn’s avatar. No magus, Jefferson Davis brought camel brawn to Texas to aid in the Civil War. Now they’re gone except in these tableaux where Balthazar, with all his diamonds, kneels before the Paragon. We were coming back from a weekend getaway before the holiday’s official end. I took the dog, went out on the beach, but the length of South Padre was swept by a long wind; dunes went astray; thin snakes of sand grains slithered; I couldn’t jog; the Gulf went from glaucous to cauldron gray. As in a Bedouin poem a gown of white sand eternally receded before me; the snakes raced. The profile of the island was changing, and despite the fury in my heart this tempest fanned, the beloved’s encampment can never be retraced: all texts are unwritten by the same hand. Boxes of baubles for yearly display we haul faithfully from house to house no nomad, I realize, could conscion. Your hem’s circumference all you know of enclosure. The open stall. Patterns are starting to emerge to my wondering eyes — on my skin, even. Up close, the epidermal Alhambra of triangles, stars. Back of wrist. Kneecap. Gypsies that named the lines on palms don’t look at soles, like yours, that close the lovelorn gap between the territory and (yes, yes) the map. Our tree is still in its vise. The road we took (don’t turn) is riddled with needles. Dried sap. II The boys are lighting fireworks on the ground. (Recall, this is a country called Illyria; even stars are upside down.) Toby and Andrew name the kinds of deliria: jumping jack, blooming flower, black cat    ... What rose-green shower — or umbrella — is that? The empty lot Toby and Andrew bring us to where crab-like diggers squat inertly in the champagne-cold, is impromptu beach, with all the night sky for sea. Juiced- up Roman candles discharge into it. Loosed, frantic, spinners change color like salamanders: spry Viola jumps back, goosed; but Feste jokes about motley, and ganders at the tracers that shroud us in gunsmoke. (Perhaps it’s just another carnival joke — your hand on the small of my back? Like blooms in the sky?) The New Year spoke by spoke nears, but with a breath of tombs the moment Feste, feeling insolently gay, heckles a rather elderly personage: “Pray you go out on your toes — or comatose.” I hear Malvolio say to Olivia holding her sparkler overly close, “Back off — you’re wearing too much hairspray.” III Speaking of ground flowers: Epiphany. The resorts are dead but for the foreign powers that raise pistils in a yellow head crouching on a Cypriot beach. A rough, hairy pod — surprise! — jumps at my touch and squirts seed at my eyes. Because I hear the wind rush against the palm-palms with which our balcony is flush; sky cloud over with qualms; memories blur. Psyche’s actuaries beg to take the measure of our folded white Januaries with sleep’s ruled erasure. IV Do I have to be mailed in bubbles or toiling over bouillabaisse, frisées, port glaze for Sir Omnivore; protagonist of a page-turner, Haze mére or fille; people-pleaser, cocktease, she-bear, in niqab, in getup, in stays; having taken St. Paul’s advice to seize the gold ring: Who groks the paradox? Though one would sooner burn than freeze    ... I’ve taken to the dark stuff since you left: a stovetop espresso maker with the heft of a campfire kettle to express more strongly my mettle.

They travel in threes, usually in station waggons or utes, often have dogs, and eat out of cans in country motels, always the one on the edge of town – near the truckstop with good hamburgers – I remember the Isis Motel in Guyra They drive old cars, or horses made of wind, whose manes are streamers of wind. They tend to wear black. I have met them as young as fourteen – Beck’s friend Kristin had written her autobiography already, it was called ‘These Days’ but it was stuck in her computer somewhere, in the shed at her mother’s. Her mother and the girlfriend, they were also storm spirits. They taught swimming and they were kind at first, often charming After watching the birds’ mating rituals on the forest floor at the bottom of the steep train, under the speckled trees, we decide to go north. We borrow Beck’s sister Jade’s car, and Alecto gets her licence first go. We hear the Sibyl is staying at the Isis Motel. This time there’s no bush festival, no whip-plaiter, the pumpkins from the scarecrow bellies have all been eaten in baked dinners cooked for the Lamb and Potato Festival. That will be fifty-three dollars. The others shower and go to bed, I’m as usual awake. At night across the road, five types of frogs set up their orchestra, and the Mother of Ducks lagoon throbs around the gazebo – tree frogs like the ones at home chaka-chaka, chaka-chaka I go out and unroll my sleeping bag on the picnic table suspended over the lagoon, and watch the sun come up over the railway line. In the distance across a golf course, I see smoke and walking I come to a woman in black near a tent. The Cumaean Sibyl, I presume? I say. She laughs in her mantle, invites me in. – So you’ve left the infernal regions too, I say and she laughs again, going out and poking kindling under the damp logs. I notice a laptop on her sleeping-bag. She’s written a book about birds in New England which she shows me. No one reads it, she says, except ornithologists. She’s now writing a manual for editors. When she goes out to the fire I look at her hand-written page ‘Parts of a publication: sections and paras, signposts and transitions, running heads and feet.’ Any news from home? I ask. The singer is failing to get his wife back, she says. The ferry man batted him back with an oar. I prophecy he’ll be torn to pieces, she says, and offers to cook me some kidney. Where are your sisters? she asks. I say they’re at the motel. Well, they won’t be getting kidney, she says. Our New England holiday over, and no other prophecies from the Sibyl, we’re drive south through the Moonbi Hills and down past the Emirates’ horse stud at Murrurrundi through bull-dozed mountains the Sibyl says you once went round, past the cones of a giant power station and the sign: Muswellbrook – City of Power. And on to the Newcastle freeway. Back in Sydney at the hostel, the girl at the front desk leans forward: Have we heard? About Beck? She’s sorry, Beck has been killed in a car accident near Bulahdelah. Automatically I touch my dreads and groan.

O F my city the worst that men will ever say is this: You took little children away from the sun and the dew, And the glimmers that played in the grass under the great sky, And the reckless rain; you put them between walls To work, broken and smothered, for bread and wages, To eat dust in their throats and die empty-hearted For a little handful of pay on a few Saturday nights.

We come gnawed by need on hands and knees. As a creature (nosing) grubble-seeks a spring. As bendy-spined as bandy snakes through saltshrub yaupon needle-brake. For darkling green; for thorn-surround. This absorbing quaggy crample-ground. Of   briar-canes (intervolved with kudzu-mesh) and mold. Of   these convoluted vines we grasp to suck. To taste the pith — the lumen the cell-sap pulse. To try to know some (soursharp) something about something. Lumen is as lumen does. ‘A little room for turmoil to grow lucid in.’

I am not saying “mark my words,” as the thief says early each winter. He leaves nothing of value. He too wants. A brute with language, he has a fondness for preaching. I am bathed to luster. Memories move musically through my bones. He sings above, vaults off a horse with feigned kindness, lands so fancy. Letting go of this, sitting with tropical leaves the size of men in a terrarium, I am beautiful. He means well, admonishing women. He is lucky with the show of crankiness. What does it mean to let go the envy? I sometimes hope stars don’t spread themselves over New York’s lights. Performing for himself, glasses glittering, he reads stories of poverty, claims them all as his own. Here in Colorado irises of all colors unfold outwards to the half-hidden sun. On the cracked cement, chilly before rain, I see perpetual beginnings. I’m going to forget him: lock him in a box in my head, lock him in the haunt of violins, let go what’s his in the hurl of breath of my groans.

It's true: I have it though I hardly approve of anything it does. Supposed bend of light or smudge where two odd angles cross. I hardly see— can hardly do a thing with it. White zone of no flesh pressing into no. So low, I can’t scale or measure it. I used to think:OK! A clean sharp place to keep. Or:I'll grow a thing! to keep, for me! But no. It's just a ward to mark & mount, a loop I lope around with, so I count myself a realm of realms. I vote & vote. Turns out, we agree with everything we do, almost. We sweep the precincts of ourselves: the rooms between each rib & under them till we reach the fat red condo where our blood leans in. We live here now. Half heart, half townhouse. Come on down. Turn on that sweet TV. Our mise en place, our rugs & nooks: we’re full of stuff. We paint the furniture we couldn’t live without. It’s true at last: we have it all though we hardly know what any of it does.

How anything is known is so thin— a skin of ice over a pond only birds might confidently walk upon. A bird's worth of weight or one bird-weight of Wordsworth.

from Sonnets, Third Series IV Thin little leaves of wood fern, ribbed and toothed, Long curved sail needles of the green pitch pine, With common sandgrass, skirt the horizon line, And over these the incorruptible blue! Here let me gently lie and softly view All world asperities, lightly touched and smoothed As by his gracious hand, the great Bestower. What though the year be late? some colors run Yet through the dry, some links of melody. Still let me be, by such, assuaged and soothed And happier made, as when, our schoolday done, We hunted on from flower to frosty flower, Tattered and dim, the last red butterfly, Or the old grasshopper molasses-mouthed.