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Fifteen I got a job at Leggett's, stock boy, fifty cents an hour. Moved up—I come from that kind of people—to toys at Christmas, then Menswear and finally Shoes. Quit to go to college, never worked retail again, but I still really like stores, savor merchandise neatly stacked on tables, sweaters wanting my gliding palm as I walk by, mannequins weirdly sexy behind big glass windows, shoes shiny and just waiting for the right feet. So why in my seventies do Target, Lowes, and Home Depot spin me dizzy and lost, wanting my mother to find me, wipe my eyes, hold my hand all the way out to the car?

1. Even the pole bean tendrils sought out and gripped their frames within six hours of my setting them. One of the things that is breaking my heart is that I can’t trust language to express any thanks. My pole beans, my honeybees, my coyotes, my dog, all my good horses. 2. The black mare I shouldn’t have bought and bought, and once I had, should have shipped, bucked me, too, the first time I got up. But God she was a beauty. I thought if I just rode her I could ride her down. Her name was Sara and we kept it at that. All she wanted to do was run. Ears back, flat out, nose pushed into the next life. I wanted her to learn to walk. 3. After about a year of chop I turned her uphill on a good gravel road and said, “OK, you bitch, you want to run?” I let go her head and gave her the steel. I’d never been on a horse so fast. I’ve never been on one since. So fast you couldn’t count the beats in the rhythm of her gait. Suicidal. But when, after some miles, she started to flag, I said, “I thought you wanted to run,” and dug her out again. 4. The pole bean tendrils sought their frames within six hours of my setting them. They broke my heart. They gripped. 5. A patch of sunlight mottled the shade. Whether she never saw the root that snaked through the shadow or was just too far in front of herself, I’ll never know. She stumbled and fell. First on her knees then over. We rasped together down the gravel road, black mare on top of me. We rasped to a halt. She jumped to her feet. She stared at me. I could see the bone in both her knees. Ribbons of hide hanging. Blood like volunteer firemen beginning to rise to the occasion. 6. Ten years later, today, I’m riding her. I keep her reined in most of the time. She tosses her head, snaps tie-downs. She dances and whirls, doubles under and rears incessantly. She makes me the butt of ridicule: “So, uh, Jim, how old is that mare?” “She must be twenty now.” “Don’t you think it’s time she was broke?” Every once in a while I let her run and break my heart. Anyone watching stops breathing. 7. If I ever get to heaven and know who I am, I’d like to over- hear my daughter tell a story to her children. “Sometimes my dad used to ride this black mare...”

our suppers stunned on the table hold radios hold flasks of sound, sharp intensities bottled up for a time I taste your imagination, authors, and place it among cotton trees whose white stuff perches, cousins of the air if the manner could be political the high walls protect against disgust the lady of blue glass joined by Pierrot, a griffin,    papers, books, the chilled correspondence,     and another woman whose futurist shape suggests lines of the wind on my desk to awaken the traffic would have to run into the radio

The stork arrived alone one day, beak sharpened like a bayonet. All the love you’ve had turned bad! he sang, eyes boring through the dingy nets. He hopped onto the patio. Good lord! Is this a rented flat? Behind the shed, albino rats were nuzzled on a family bed. He hovered over them, wings spread. Now this is how you do it! he said. He speared a worm and sucked it down. A rented flat, my god, he said. Inside, I laid my hands around my lump, my pumpkin-up-the-jumper. I’d swapped the wine and cigarettes for goji berries, spent the summer asleep or stretched in yoga pose, Utkatasana, Dhyana... The stork came hopping round the corner scraped his claw across the door — Hello, hello? he called, polite, then screamed I will not be ignored! He had a bloody bone to pick, an oozy piece of mind to share. I was eight months gone by Halloween. Kids rang the rented bell in sheets and slime. I tried “maternal” out with chocolate limes and fizzy sweets. The bird shrieked half the witchy night: For god’s sake, are you stupid? Teeth! I waddled off to pack my case — gorillas snoozing on the onesies, pink booties, pads to catch the blood. When they tugged that baby out of me he came up laughing, blessed the midwife with a fiery arc of golden pee and through the skylight of the ward I saw the stork retreat, zigzagging up into the evening sky, a fading squawk, the beat of wings. Then they laid that baby on my chest to feed, and cut the navel string —

Thunder blossoms gorgeously above our heads, Great, hollow, bell-like flowers, Rumbling in the wind, Stretching clappers to strike our ears . . . Full-lipped flowers Bitten by the sun Bleeding rain Dripping rain like golden honey— And the sweet earth flying from the thunder.

But now it’s raining below the greener clouds of trees that were absorbent but only up to a point. And these raindrops strained by treetops should (you would think) be filtered and finer and therefore pure (and not Chinese water torture’s fatter, darker drops that always pick out of all possible bull’s-eyes your bald spot). But these are late, last drops and a little bloated like late, last poems by name your poet.

As the storm-struck oak leaned closer to the house — The remaining six-story half of the tree listing toward the glass box Of  the kitchen like someone in the first tilt of stumbling — The other half crashed into the neighbors’ yards, a massive Diagonal for which we had no visual cue save for An antler dropped by a constellation — As the ragged half   leaned nearer, the second storm of cloying snow Began pulling on the shocked, still-looming splitting, and its branches dragged Lower like ripped hems it was tripping over Until they rustled on the roof under which I Quickly made dinner, each noise a threat from a body under which we so recently Said, Thank goodness for our tree, how it has accompanied us all these years, Thank goodness for its recitation of the seasons out our windows and over The little lot of our yard, thank goodness for the birdsong and 
squirrel games Which keep us from living alone, and for its proffered shade, the crack of the bat Resounding through September when its dime-sized acorns Land on the tin awning next door. Have Mercy on us, you, the massively beautiful, now ravaged and charged With destruction. We did speak like that. As if from a book of psalms Because it took up the sky

Like people emerging from a steambath, bending over, steaming from their heads and shoulders, the ring of the mountains from the Chilkat Range to the Juneau ice field as if in steambath towels of snow flurries; at their feet are foaming white caps of sea like water thrown on rocks steaming from the heat.

People are putting up storm windows now, Or were, this morning, until the heavy rain Drove them indoors. So, coming home at noon, I saw storm windows lying on the ground, Frame-full of rain; through the water and glass I saw the crushed grass, how it seemed to stream Away in lines like seaweed on the tide Or blades of wheat leaning under the wind. The ripple and splash of rain on the blurred glass Seemed that it briefly said, as I walked by, Something I should have liked to say to you, Something ... the dry grass bent under the pane Brimful of bouncing water ... something of A swaying clarity which blindly echoes This lonely afternoon of memories And missed desires, while the wintry rain (Unspeakable, the distance in the mind!) Runs on the standing windows and away.

Some will call the suicide bomber a coward but seeing him you think only,Hungry, stumbling as he is toward you, to the tent where pilgrims stop to eat and drink. Behind you a woman in a black robe scoops rice with her fingers. Beside her a girl, restless, runs out onto the dusty two-lane road that the bomber now crosses. This is happening at the end of forty days of mourning, the anniversary a martyrdom. The girl returns breathless and the mother gives her a glass of clean water. You watch the ripple down her throat, and out of sunlight the man approaches— his eyes, like yours, are brown. Now you hear someone say,Sit, sit. It is the mother talking to the daughter. And now someone is shouting, and now there is the terrible noise. Every person is a story. You are the man who walked out as he walked in, the bomb went off, and you lived to tell.