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Two women on a train sit beside me. I am young and the world is flying and I am watching. One of them is frosty. The other turns like a leaf to hand me something — it looked for all the world like a page. I thought at the time that it needed me and I was right. The letters fell into place and simple flowers grew. Now it talks unceasingly in long white verses as if at a wedding, something women understand and gently want and then regift. I myself agree with Herbert, who in a dark mood conjured the mushrooms underfoot unseen by bride or groom and with him I say, Perhaps the world is unimportant after all, though this is not what one discusses with women on a train, no matter how long the journey, or untroubled the land.

Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable, ' vaulty, voluminous, . . . stupendous Evening strains to be time’s vást, ' womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night. Her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west, ' her wild hollow hoarlight hung to the height Waste; her earliest stars, earl-stars, ' stárs principal, overbend us, Fíre-féaturing heaven. For earth ' her being as unbound, her dapple is at an end, as- tray or aswarm, all throughther, in throngs; ' self ín self steepèd and páshed – quite Disremembering, dísmémbering, ' áll now. Heart, you round me right With: Óur évening is over us; óur night ' whélms, whélms, ánd will end us. Only the beak-leaved boughs dragonish ' damask the tool-smooth bleak light; black, Ever so black on it. Óur tale, O óur oracle! ' Lét life, wáned, ah lét life wind Off hér once skéined stained véined varíety ' upon áll on twó spools; párt, pen, páck Now her áll in twó flocks, twó folds – black, white; ' right, wrong; reckon but, reck but, mind But thése two; wáre of a wórld where bút these ' twó tell, each off the óther; of a rack Where, selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless, ' thóughts agaínst thoughts ín groans grínd.

Suffer as in allow. List as in want. Listless as in transcending desire, or not rising to greet it. To list is to lean, dangerously, to one side. Have you forgotten? Spent as in exhausted.

Housed in a boom of blubber & bone, harpooned six times, the giant grew into a dynamo hitched to six taut rope-lines skipping the boat across waves toward the blurry lighthouse. It bled out a long silence but men in oilskins labored with hydraulics of light on water, walked its flank, & tore it down to a storeroom of Nantucket scrimshaw. Ballast stone or sledge? They bashed in the skull & lowered down the boy to haul up buckets of oil for candles that burned a slow, clean, white glow. At ten, he was almost a man whose feet sank into the waxy muck of ambergris. His sweat dripped into a long hour. Big as a barrel, the head echoed a temple nave.

You can’t imagine the goats who were my only friends as a child how they tore at my underwear, hitting their heads into my legs, playfully throwing me into the air. How their snores rattled the night. How their milk tasted sweet and thick and altogether wild. How they followed me through the orchard and up into the rocky fields above and ate blueberries through the afternoon. How at twilight I’d walk down, a hand on two goats’ backs and they’d talk me all the way down. How many times I was beaten about the face and shoulders and back. How the goat smell kept me from properly experiencing food. How I crept out to the goats in the night and slept very well there the goats licking my bruises as though I were sacred and wounded and divine.

The spider, juiced crystal and Milky Way, drifts on his web through the night sky And looks down, waiting for us to ascend ... At dawn he is still there, invisible, short of breath, mending his net. All morning we look for the white face to rise from the lake like a tiny star. And when it does, we lie back in our watery hair and rock.

I The spider expects the cold of winter. When the shadows fall in long Autumn He congeals in a nest of paper, prepares The least and minimal existence, Obedient to nature. No other course Is his; no other availed him when In high summer he spun and furled The gaudy catches. I am that spider, Caught in nature, summer and winter. You are the symbol of the seasons too. II Now to expatiate and temporize This artful brag. I never saw so quieting A sight as the dawn, dew-clenched foot- Wide web hung on summer barn-eaves, spangled. It moves to zephyrs that is tough as steel. I never saw so finely-legged a creature Walk so accurate a stretch as he, Proud, capable, patient, confident. To the eye he gave close penetration Into real myth, the myth of you, of me. III Yet, by moving eyesight off from this There is another dimension. Near the barn, Down meadow to shingle, no place for spiders, The sea in large blue breathes in brainstorm tides, Pirates itself away to ancient Spain, Pirouettes past Purgatory to Paradise. Do I feed deeper on a spider, A close-hauled view upon windless meaning, Or deeper a day or dance or doom bestride On ocean’s long reach, on parables of God?

I’ve a friend in possession of a philosophic spin; if should I speak of art, theology, the universe, or whim, he thinks I speak of him. This enduring tic, indicative of universal spins, theology, art and whim, nonetheless makes conversation grim.

I hold my two-year-old son under his arms and start to twirl. His feet sway away from me and the day becomes a blur. Everything I own is flying into space: yard toys, sandbox, tools, garage and house, and, finally, the years of my life. When we stop, my son is a grown man, and I am very old. We stagger back into each other's arms one last time, two lost friends heavy with drink, remembering the good old days.

These years lift over coldly now: Aprils and Augusts are gifted to ice, or sprawl into mid-summers or year ends—pillars of lesser standing. Still come no replies to boyish queries, how the belly sleeper buoys, begins again, becomes poor soul or bull of appetite; why when the pearls drop, no spool dares connect the ripples.