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When I tell you I love the song “Edelweiss” you have to understand that even though I too am a sophisticate who scorns musicals, I was once a little girl who stood in my grand- father’s living room singing,Cuckoo! Cuckoo! while he sipped his scotch and laughed at my preciosity. And when I sing the lyrics in your ear—Small and bright, clean and white, you look happy to meet me — you have to understand my grandfather only ever had one friend, a jeweler who also drank scotch, and left his $10,000 Rolex to my grandfather, who wore it even though it turned his wrist green, wore it to the funeral, where the daughter sang in her ethereal voice.Blossom of snow may you bloom and grow, bloom and grow forever. She couldn’t take her eyes off the casket. You have to understand that my grandfather kept spinning that heavy gold around his wrist, and when he raised his voice to join in, he cried to sing it.Edelweiss, edelweiss, bless my homeland forever.

Through the window screen I can see an angle of grey roof and the silence that spreads in the branches of the pecan tree as the sun goes down. I am waiting for a lover. I am alone in a solitude that vibrates like the cicada in hot midmorning, that waits like the lobed sassafras leaf just before its dark green turns into red, that waits like the honeybee in the mouth of the purple lobelia. While I wait, I can hear the random clink of one fork against a plate. The woman next door is eating supper alone. She is sixty, perhaps, and for many years has eaten by herself the tomatoes, the corn and okra that she grows in her backyard garden. Her small metallic sound persists, as quiet almost as the windless silence, persists like the steady random click of a redbird cracking a few more seeds before the sun gets too low. She does not hurry, she does not linger. Her younger neighbors think that she is lonely. But I know what sufficiency she may possess. I know what can be gathered from year to year, gathered from what is near to hand, as I do elderberries that bend in damp thickets by the road, gathered and preserved, jars and jars shining in rows of claret red, made at times with help, a friend or a lover, but consumed long after, long after they are gone and I sit alone at the kitchen table. And when I sit in the last heat of Sunday, afternoons on the porch steps in the acid breath of the boxwoods, I also know desolation. The week is over, the coming night will not lift. I am exhausted from making each day. My family, my children live in other states, the women I love in other towns. I would rather be here than with them in the old ways, but when all that’s left of the sunset is the red reflection underneath the clouds, when I get up and come in to fix supper, in the darkened kitchen I am often lonely for them. In the morning and the evening we are by ourselves, the woman next door and I. Still, we persist. I open the drawer to get out the silverware. She goes to her garden to pull weeds and pick the crookneck squash that turn yellow with late summer. I walk down to the pond in the morning to watch and wait for the blue heron who comes at first light to feed on minnows that swim through her shadow in the water. She stays until the day grows so bright that she cannot endure it and leaves with her hunger unsatisfied. She bows her wings and slowly lifts into flight, grey and slate blue against a paler sky. I know she will come back. I see the light create a russet curve of land on the farther bank, where the wild rice bends heavy and ripe under the first blackbirds. I know she will come back. I see the light curve in the fall and rise of her wing.

It makes one all right, though you hadn’t thought of it, A sound like the sound of the sky on fire, like Armageddon, Whistling and crackling, the explosions of sunlight booming As the huge mass of gas rages into the emptiness around it. It isn’t a sound you are often aware of, though the light speeds To us in seconds, each dawn leaping easily across a chasm Of space that swallows the sound of that sphere, but If you listen closely some morning, when the sun swells Over the horizon and the world is still and still asleep, You might hear it, a faint noise so far inside your mind That it must come from somewhere, from light rushing to darkness, Energy burning towards entropy, towards a peaceful solution, Burning brilliantly, spontaneously, in the middle of nowhere, And you, too, must make a sound that is somewhat like it, Though that, of course, you have no way of hearing at all.

I wonder about the trees. Why do we wish to bear Forever the noise of these More than another noise So close to our dwelling place? We suffer them by the day Till we lose all measure of pace, And fixity in our joys, And acquire a listening air. They are that that talks of going But never gets away; And that talks no less for knowing, As it grows wiser and older, That now it means to stay. My feet tug at the floor And my head sways to my shoulder Sometimes when I watch trees sway, From the window or the door. I shall set forth for somewhere, I shall make the reckless choice Some day when they are in voice And tossing so as to scare The white clouds over them on. I shall have less to say, But I shall be gone.

Nice spring day off big white cloud At Inspiration Point escaping time wars Poet takes book & wine bottle up into Mist Mountains Since only available agenda is rhyming with silence Seeking window of opportunity on a wall I disguise what I have to say by sounding Chinese Such as stars are now darker and farther away They take deeper drinks because space is Drying out afraid to think own thoughts Administered citizen achieving condition of robot In public mind things not so good these days Nor in wrong run will it matter to Tu Fu

The birdhouse made from a gourd is wired to a flanged loop of steel and screwed to the southeast post of the shack. Two holes at the top—near where the stem was, for a thong of leather to hang it by, which long ago broke— are now the fingerholes of the mournful wind instrument it’s become. The broad round bowl of it makes a sort of birdly basso profundo that pearls through the steel, into the post, the floor joists and walls in two notes: a slightly sharp D and an equally sharp F, says the guitar tuner, which explains why all my thinking these days is in B-flat, a difficult key for all but the clarinet and this sudden covey of nuthatches, whose collective woe makes it a minor chord I am in the middle of. Nothing to do but hoist such silks as the luff of limbs and needles suggests, and sail on, the barely-escaped-from-the-cat chipmunk chattering like a gull, and the mountain’s last drift of snow resembling the back of a sounding whale. Hear the thrum of the rigging, Daggoo? Hear its profoundest woo, its sensible gobbledy-goo and doo-wop, the boo-hoos of the spheres, by vectors and veers, by tacks and refractal jabberings, taking us deeper into the weirdness of the ghost sea those prairie hills were the bottom of once, this nowhere we shall not be returning from. Draw the lines! Assume the crow’s nest, Pip. This ship sails on music and wind, and away with birds.

1. At the Walking Dunes, Eastern Long Island That a bent piece of straw made a circle in the sand. That it represents the true direction of the wind. Beach grass, tousled phragmite. Bone-white dishes, scoops and bowls, glaring without seeing. An accordion of creases on the downhill, sand drapery. The cranberry bushes biting down to survive. And the wind’s needlework athwart the eyeless Atlantic. And the earless roaring in the shape of a sphere. A baritone wind, tuned to the breath of the clouds. Pushing sand that made a hilly prison of time. For wind and water both move inland. Abrading scrub — the stunted, the dwarfed, the bantam. A fine sandpaper, an eraser as wide as the horizon. Itself made of galaxies, billions against the grain. Sand: the mortal infinitude of a single rock. 2. Walking in the Drowning Forest Pitch pine, thirty-five-foot oaks to their necks in sand. That the ocean signals the lighthouse. Gull feathers call to the fox that left them behind. Impressions of deer feet, dog feet and gull claws. The piping plover in seclusion. Somewhere the blind owl to be healed at sunset. Here is artistry beyond self-flattery. A rootworks wiser than the ball of yarn we call the brain. A mindless, eyeless, earless skin-sense. To which the crab comes sideways. With which the sunken ship shares its secrets. From which no harness can protect one, nor anchor fix one. He knows, who has paddled an hour with one oar. He knows, who has worn the whitecaps. Who has slipped from the ferry or leaped from the bridge. To be spoken of, though no one knows.

Two bedtimes ago, through my window, I heard a cat get eaten. As the cat split, it sounded like a balloon string put to scissors to make curls so the birthday boy would smile extra wide. Last night, by the same window, I heard mostly my breath, inside of which was a small baby suckling my air for his milk. When I bolted upright, the baby grew up into a carpenter, nailing his brains into the side of my lung to babyproof the light switch. Flip the switch and it lights a picture of my emaciated, sore-ridden bum for my breath to laugh at. Why is my breath so unlike yours? My ears? Why do I only hear such unnatural things? Although, come to think of it, death is completely natural. I’m just exasperated. Everywhere life-sounds swarm this, our shared pond, like mating turtles. Cars whoosh, schmoozers hum, snakes spit poison, Martin and Martina say yes and sob and hold, but my ears fill up instead with eggshells cracked by the bumbling parents. I cleaned my left ear out, but my nail cut the drum. It filled with water and is deaf for now. I’m leaving the right one dirty. No sudden changes. Keep everything dry. Let it figure out a way to heal itself. And me:  just practice living with yourself  deaf. Sometimes your brain is as unwelcome as muscles or guns. It’s obvious to others. Maybe even everyone. Don’t wish for anything. Don’t get organized. Don’t buy a book. Don’t go to bed early. Seek out beige, in foodstuffs and landscapes. Chew gum if  you’re overwhelmed. You’re in this alone. That means there’s nobody to stop you. You’re almost at the finish line. But first, you have to pick a finish line.

“Feed Fred and sit with him and mind he doesn’t walk about. He falls. Tell him his ute is safe back home. Thinks someone’s pinched it, peers around the carpark all the time. His family brought him in it and he thinks it’s gone. He was a farmer once . . .” I take the tray. The ice-cream’s almost melted round the crumbled orange jelly and the soup’s too hot. I know I’ll have to blow on it. Hunched, trapped behind a tray, he glances sideways, face as brown and caverned as the land itself, long thin lips droop ironic at the corners, gaunt nose. The blue and white pajamas cage the restless rangy legs. In and out they go, the feet in cotton socks feeling for the ground. “Are you a foreigner?” “Not exactly. Just a little sunburnt,” and I put the jelly down. I musn’t feel a thing: my smile has come unstuck. I place a paper napkin on his lap. He winces. “You’re a foreigner all right,” he says. “OK,” I say. What’s one displacement more or less, wishing I were a hearty flat-faced Fenian with a perm and nothing doing in the belfry. Someone like his mother. Or a wife who spared him the sorrow of himself. Now he grabs the spoon. “I’ll do it.” “Right,” I say, “You go ahead. Just ask me if you want some help.” The tone’s not right. I watch the trembling progress of the spoon for what seems years, paralysed with pity for his pride. How does a dark-faced woman give a man called Fred who cropped a farm and drove a battered ute a meal of soup and jelly? Outside the window, clouds are swelling into growing darkness and there’s a man hard on his knees planting something in the rain.

The source I thought was Arctic the good Platonic Up the pole was soaked film an electric elevation onto a fishy platform and waves on two sides greenly welcoming The sunwater poured on holy atheism It was light that powered out my ego or my heart before ending with a letter