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Between pond and sheepbarn, by maples and watery birches, Rebecca paces a double line of rust in a sandy trench, striding on black creosoted eight-by-eights. In nineteen-forty-three, wartrains skidded tanks, airframes, dynamos, searchlights, and troops to Montreal. She counted cars from the stopped hayrack at the endless crossing: ninety-nine, one hundred; and her grandfather Ben’s voice shaking with rage and oratory told how the mighty Boston and Maine kept the Statehouse in its pocket. Today Rebecca walks a line that vanishes, in solitude bypassed by wars and commerce. She remembers the story of the bunting’d day her great-great-great- grandmother watched the first train roll and smoke from Potter Place to Gale with fireworks, cider, and speeches. Then the long rail drove west, buzzing and humming; the hive of rolling stock extended a thousand-car’d perspective from Ohio to Oregon, where men who left stone farms rode rails toward gold. On this blue day she walks under a high jet’s glint of swooped aluminum pulling its feathery contrail westward. She sees ahead how the jet dies into junk, and highway wastes like railroad. Beside her the old creation retires, hayrack sunk like a rowboat under its fields of hay. She closes her eyes to glimpse the vertical track that rises from the underworld of graves, soul’s ascension connecting dead to unborn, rails that hum with a hymn of continual vanishing where tracks cross. For she opens her eyes to read on a solitary gravestone next to the rails the familiar names of Ruth and Matthew Bott, born in a Norfolk parish, who ventured the immigrant’s passionate Exodus westward to labor on their own land. Here love builds its mortal house, where today’s wind carries a double scent of heaven and cut hay.

sister was the wolf & could cross easily through the mountain dark to den keen & quivered with the muscular siege of slit    purse purple with hours purse purple with birthwork her sight both inward- & outward-lit on what small sparkle of pyrite in the silt or the thick smell of her own wilderness opening shit & hair & blood each little birth an astonishment of form inside its own tiny veil licked toward the air of this Other Side [Live!] then that sound from the hospital’s infant table after what seemed like years of silence     a mew which held inside it all the voices of this dream & other animals trying to begin

for elaine philip on her birthday me and you be sisters. we be the same. me and you coming from the same place. me and you be greasing our legs touching up our edges. me and you be scared of rats be stepping on roaches. me and you come running high down purdy street one time and mama laugh and shake her head at me and you. me and you got babies got thirty-five got black let our hair go back be loving ourselves be loving ourselves be sisters. only where you sing i poet.

The edge of our bed was a wide grid where your fifteen-year-old daughter was hanging gut-sprung on police wheels a cablegram nailed to the wood next to a map of the Western Reserve I could not return with you to bury the body reconstruct your nightly cardboards against the seeping Transvaal cold I could not plant the other limpet mine against a wall at the railroad station nor carry either of your souls back from the river in a calabash upon my head so I bought you a ticket to Durban on my American Express and we lay together in the first light of a new season. Now clearing roughage from my autumn garden cow sorrel    overgrown rocket gone to seed I reach for the taste of today the New York Times finally mentions your country a half-page story of the first white south african killed in the “unrest” Not of Black children massacred at Sebokeng six-year-olds imprisoned for threatening the state not of Thabo Sibeko, first grader, in his own blood on his grandmother’s parlor floor Joyce, nine, trying to crawl to him shitting through her navel not of a three-week-old infant, nameless lost under the burned beds of Tembisa my hand comes down like a brown vise over the marigolds reckless through despair we were two Black women touching our flame and we left our dead behind us I hovered    you rose    the last ritual of healing “It is spring,” you whispered “I sold the ticket for guns and sulfa I leave for home tomorrow” and wherever I touch you I lick cold from my fingers taste rage like salt from the lips of a woman who has killed too often to forget and carries each death in her eyes your mouth a parting orchid “Someday you will come to my country and we will fight side by side?” Keys jingle in the door ajar    threatening whatever is coming belongs here I reach for your sweetness but silence explodes like a pregnant belly into my face a vomit of nevers. Mmanthatisi turns away from the cloth her daughters-in-law are dyeing the baby drools milk from her breast she hands him half-asleep to his sister dresses again for war knowing the men will follow. In the intricate Maseru twilights quick    sad    vital she maps the next day’s battle dreams of Durban    sometimes visions the deep wry song of beach pebbles running after the sea.

In memory of John Ashbery (1927–2017) A girl moaning:I don’t understand “Wave.”

Three years ago, in the afternoons, I used to sit back here and try To answer the simple arithmetic of my life, But never could figure it— This object and that object Never contained the landscape nor all of its implications, This tree and that shrub Never completely satisfied the sum or quotient I took from or carried to, nor do they do so now, Though I'm back here again, looking to calculate, Looking to see what adds up. Everything comes from something, only something comes from nothing, Lao Tzu says, more or less. Eminently sensible, I say, Rubbing this tiny snail shell between my thumb and two fingers. Delicate as an earring, it carries its emptiness like a child It would be rid of. I rub it clockwise and counterclockwise, hoping for anything Resplendent in its vocabulary or disguise— But one and one make nothing, he adds, endless and everywhere, The shadow that everything casts.

I In heaven there is no more sea, and houses no longer need a widow’s walk. And no more widows, there being neither marriage nor giving in marriage. How the air hangs lower and lower on this—I hope —hottest day of summer. A faintly rotten scent the ground gives off brings to mind lilacs that have budded and blossomed. There are no more blossoms, perfume and purple gone for a year, as if forever. In heaven there are no tears, salt water wiped away entirely. One moment I breathe contentment. And then unreasoning sorrow pulses through me, an imperfect tension, as if unending. I have time on my hands. In heaven there is no more dusk, dark, dawn, meridian. And what I know now and for certain: neither the day nor the hour. II It seems clear enough that there is in the brain a particular pain-center, where sensations of every variety check in, to emerge as anguish and hurt. Thus there is not, as we might suppose, a multiplicity of pains, like an arsenal deployed against us, but one pain which puts on, as in a ritual theater, different masks. It need not, even, be a great number of masks, some few faces peopling an endless repertory. From one fairy tale to another, is not the witch the same witch, whether poisoning an apple or fattening the children? III The doctrine changes, blows here and there, hot, cold. One more notion sweeps across the state in gusts, fiercely at first, settling then into a mild rotation. It puts things in motion. It dies down, while pressure somewhere else is building. Called to, across a chasm of thin air, I shape the air to answer. My moments force themselves apart. Breathe out. Breathe in. But as long as you are alive, there is a dead space in your lungs, never emptied, never needing to be filled. The spirit there, stale and sustaining, holds open every possibility, urging none. Ghost money: money to burn. IV On the earliest known sundial, the finger of shadow moves through symbols of the cosmos, but there are no lines drawn to mark off the hours. It does not, in the modern sense, “keep” time, but celebrates its flight, its recurrence, its brightness. V Hermaphrodite, sleeping. Predominance, in the visible, of the right hand —but the eyes now closed. What could there be to dream about, for one already complete? A perfect asymmetrical stability. No need to see or even to look. To know, without having to ask. From any point on the periphery, advancing always towards the body. Both sexes. And both asleep. VI A scream from outside broke our argument and I ran to the door, rushed out onto the sidewalk almost, I thought, before the scream had ended. The night sky, above the street lamp, had a sheen of some dark metal. Sirens—which seemed this evening more frequent than usual, and more strident—state the theme, you have said, of our instant: the howl of a machine hurrying to disaster. And all day, in the violence of delivery, ordinary trucks rattle our sashes. The street lay empty, mercury lit, silence giving us no indication of which way to turn.

All that has tamed me I have learned to love and lost that wildness that was once beloved. All that was loved I’ve learned to tame and lost the beloved that once was wild. All that is wild is tamed by love— and the beloved (wildness) that once was loved.

Admit it — you wanted the end with a serpentine greed. How to negotiate that strangling mist, the fibrous whisper? To cease to exist and to die are two different things entirely. But you knew this, didn’t you? Some days you knelt on coins in those yellow hours. You lit a flame to your shadow and ate scorpions with your naked fingers. So touched by the sadness of hair in a dirty sink. The malevolent smell of soap. When instead of swallowing a fistful of white pills, you decided to shower, the palm trees nodded in agreement, a choir of crickets singing behind your swollen eyes. The masked bird turned to you with a shred of paper hanging from its beak. At dusk, hair wet and fragrant, you cupped a goat’s face and kissed his trembling horns. The ghost? It fell prostrate, passed through you like a swift and generous storm.

Thunderer     God of the turbulent sky     may my turbulent mind shape for my people rain clouds beans pumpkins and yams. East Spirit Dawn Spirit     may birds awaken in the forest of teeth whose river     your color     must say frozen mountains’ prayer that you will loosen them. Spirit of the North whose star is our white mark like the blaze we chop in the black bark where the trail home divides even in our homes we need you to guide. Spirit of the Sunset West may gray clouds hiding friends from me glow like yours that we grope toward each other through a vivid rose. Spirit of the South direction of warm wind warm rain and the winter sun like a pale painting of a morning glory help me     Spirit     that in my mind humble things a man may give to his child may grow the blue of berry orange of squash crimson of radish yellow of corn when the green of even the tallest pine is wolf tooth white. Spirit of the Earth keeper of Mother Father Sister Brother loved ones all once praying as I pray or in some other way Spirit     the black dirt is like the black cover of a book whose words are black ink I can not read but I place my brown hand on snow and pray that more than snow may melt.