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Thank you whoever tuned the radio to rain, thank you who spilled the strong-willed wine for not being me so I’m not to blame. I’m glad I’m not that broken tree although it looks sublime. And glad I’m not taking a test and running out of time. What’s a tetrahedron anyway? What’s the sublime, 3,483 divided by 9, the tenth amendment, the ferryman’s name on the River Styx? We’re all missing more and more tricks, losing our grips, guilty of crimes we didn’t commit. The horse rears and races then moves no more, the sports coupe grinds to a stop, beginning a new life as rot, beaten to shit, Whitman grass stain, consciousness swamp gas, the bones and brain, protoplasm and liver, ground down like stones in a river. Or does the heart’s cinder wash up as delta froth out of which hops frog spawn, dog song, the next rhyming grind, next kid literati? Maybe the world’s just a bubble, all philosophy ants in a muddle, an engine inside an elk’s skull on a pole. Maybe an angel’s long overdue and we’re all in trouble. Meanwhile thanks whoever for the dial turned to green downpour, thanks for feathery conniptions at the seashore and moth-minded, match-flash breath. Thank you for whatever’s left.

Here comes the powdered milk I drank as a child, and the money it saved. Here come the papers I delivered, the spotted dog in heat that followed me home and the dogs that followed her. Here comes a load of white laundry from basketball practice, and sheets with their watermarks of semen. And here comes snow, a language in which no word is ever repeated, love is impossible, and remorse. . . . Yet childhood doesn’t end, but accumulates, each memory knit to the next, and the fields become one field. If to die is to lose all detail, then death is not so distinguished, but a profusion of detail, a last gossip, character passed wholly into fate and fate in flecks, like dust, like flour, like snow.

A kind of counter- blossoming, diversionary, doomed, and like the needle with its drop of blood a little too transparently in love with doom, takes issue with the season: Not (the serviceberry bright with explanation) not (the redbud unspooling its silks) I know I've read the book but not (the lilac, the larch) quite yet, I still have one more card to play. Behold a six-hour wonder: six new inches bedecking the railing, the bench, the top of the circular table like a risen cake. The saplings made (who little thought what beauty weighs) to bow before their elders. The moment bears more than the usual signs of its own demise, but isn't that the bravery? Built on nothing but the self- same knots of air and ice. Already the lip of it riddled with flaws, a sort of vascular lesion that betokens—what? betokens the gathering return to elementals. (She was frightened for a minute, who had planned to be so calm.) A dripline scoring the edge of the walk. The cotton batting blown against the screen begun to pill and molt. (Who clothed them out of mercy in the skins of beasts.) And even as the last of the lightness continues to fall, the seepage underneath has gained momentum. (So that there must have been a death before the death we call the first or what became of them, the ones whose skins were taken.) Now the more- of-casting-backward-than-of- forward part, which must have happened while I wasn't looking or was looking at the skinning knives. I think I'll call this mercy too.

the green of Jesus is breaking the ground and the sweet smell of delicious Jesus is opening the house and the dance of Jesus music has hold of the air and the world is turning in the body of Jesus and the future is possible

As my eyes search the prairie I feel the summer in the spring.

“stooped to truth and moralized his song” Spring pricks a little. I get out the maps. Time to demoralize my song, high time. Vernal a little. Primavera. First Green, first truth and last. High time, high time. A high old time we had of it last summer? I overstate. But getting out the maps… Look! Up the valley of the Brenne, Louise de la Vallière… Syntax collapses. High time for that, high time. To Château-Renault, the tannery town whose marquis Rooke and James Butler whipped in Vigo Bay Or so the song says, an amoral song Like Ronsard’s where we go today Perhaps, perhaps tomorrow. Tomorrow and tomorrow and… Get well! Philip’s black-sailed familiar, avaunt Or some word as ridiculous, the whole Diction kit begins to fall apart. High time it did, high time. High time and a long time yet, my love! Get out that blessed map. Ageing, you take your glasses off to read it. Stooping to truth, we potter to Montoire. High time, my love. High time and a long time yet.

Now that the winter's gone, the earth hath lost Her snow-white robes, and now no more the frost Candies the grass, or casts an icy cream Upon the silver lake or crystal stream; But the warm sun thaws the benumbed earth, And makes it tender; gives a sacred birth To the dead swallow; wakes in hollow tree The drowsy cuckoo, and the humble-bee. Now do a choir of chirping minstrels bring In triumph to the world the youthful Spring. The valleys, hills, and woods in rich array Welcome the coming of the long'd-for May. Now all things smile, only my love doth lour; Nor hath the scalding noonday sun the power To melt that marble ice, which still doth hold Her heart congeal'd, and makes her pity cold. The ox, which lately did for shelter fly Into the stall, doth now securely lie In open fields; and love no more is made By the fireside, but in the cooler shade Amyntas now doth with his Chloris sleep Under a sycamore, and all things keep Time with the season; only she doth carry June in her eyes, in her heart January.

Spring, the sweet spring, is the year’s pleasant king, Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring, Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing: Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo! The palm and may make country houses gay, Lambs frisk and play, the shepherds pipe all day, And we hear aye birds tune this merry lay: Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo! The fields breathe sweet, the daisies kiss our feet, Young lovers meet, old wives a-sunning sit, In every street these tunes our ears do greet: Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to witta-woo! Spring, the sweet spring!

I carry my spikes and step on the field an hour ahead of the others. Last day of March with April offering tickets for the new season. I'm full of sun on wet grass, in love with blistered benches. A sparrow sits on the backstop, watching, ready to dart if I catch its eye. I drop my bag on home plate and swirl my foot in the dust the way my cousin does with his fingers on the skin of a drum head. Next year he'll be released with the others who spent mornings breaking windows and trashing vacation homes like drunks in the right field bleachers. Here, I'm alone with a sparrow and the smell of a baseball morning settling around me like a comforter. I start trotting to first base, the ankles loosening, then the knees, as the dust begins to lift into the breaking light. Around second and third I stretch my arms in a rotary motion ready to fly. A hand waves back from a passing car, someone who knows me or remembers rising one morning when the game of who you are is played out in your mind, and around you a stadium full of fans begs you to do what you usually do in the clutch. The bat I pull from the bag for the first time is my father's Louisville Slugger, thirty-three inches, wood barrel. I thought enough time had passed, the attic dust hard in the grooves. I stroke it slowly like a weapon you love to touch but would never use. He hit .304 at Omaha the season he was drafted, all-star rookie-of-the-year. He said we'd join him soon. Then that other draft. He would have been here. I swear he would. The silence feels oppressive now. I dig for a scuffed ball and throw it up, shoulder high, but let it fall. A natural hitter, my father said, holding my hands. I grip the tar-stained handle. Tears blur the wall that's so far away it looks warped. I aim for marrow deep inside, April hungry for the kill.

All these years I overlooked them in the racket of the rest, this symbiotic splash of plant and fungus feeding on rock, on sun, a little moisture, air — tiny acid-factories dissolving salt from living rocks and eating them. Here they are, blooming! Trail rock, talus and scree, all dusted with it: rust, ivory, brilliant yellow-green, and cliffs like murals! Huge panels streaked and patched, quietly with shooting-stars and lupine at the base. Closer, with the glass, a city of cups! Clumps of mushrooms and where do the plants begin? Why are they doing this? In this big sky and all around me peaks & the melting glaciers, why am I made to kneel and peer at Tiny? These are the stamps of the final envelope. How can the poisons reach them? In such thin air, how can they care for the loss of a million breaths? What, possibly, could make their ground more bare? Let it all die. The hushed globe will wait and wait for what is now so small and slow to open it again. As now, indeed, it opens it again, this scentless velvet, crumbler-of-the-rocks, this Lichen!