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Timing’s everything. The vapor rises high in the sky, tossing to and fro, then freezes, suddenly, and crystalizes into a perfect flake of miraculous snow. For countless miles, drifting east above the world, whirling about in a swirling free- for-all, appearing aimless, just like love, but sensing, seeking out, its destiny. Falling to where the two young skaters stand, hand in hand, then flips and dips and whips itself about to ever-so-gently land, a miracle, across her unkissed lips: as he blocks the wind raging from the south, leaning forward to kiss her lovely mouth.

for Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Kurt Brown 1. RETREAT The sailor dreamt of loss, but it was I who dreamt the sailor. I was landlocked, sea-poor. The sailor dreamt of a woman who stared at the sea, then tired of it, advertised her freedom. She said to her friend: I want all the fire one can have without being consumed by it. Clearly, I dreamt the woman too. I was surrounded by mountains suddenly green after a long winter, a chosen uprootedness, soul shake-up, every day a lesson about the vastness between ecstasy and repose. I drank coffee called Black Forest at the local cafe. I took long walks and tried to love the earth and hate its desecrations. All the Golden Retrievers wore red bandannas on those muttless streets. All the birches, I think, were aspens. I do not often remember my dreams, or dream of dreamers in them. To be without some of the things you want, a wise man said, is an indispensable part of happiness. 2. MOUNTAIN, SKY I’ve been paying attention to the sky again. I’ve seen a ravine up there, and a narrow, black gorge. Not to worry, I tell myself, about tricks the mind plays, as long as you know they’re tricks. If the rich are casually cruel perhaps it’s because they can stare at the sky and never see an indictment in the shape of clouds. The frown, for example, in a thunderhead. The fist. That big mountain I’ve been looking at— I love how it borrows purple from the filtered light, sometimes red. Like any of us it’s all of its appearances. It’s good that the rich have to die, a peasant saying goes, otherwise they’d live forever. Here in this rented house, high up, I understand. I’m one of the rich for a while. The earth feels mine and the air I breathe is rarefied, if thin. Dusk now is making its last claim. I love the confluence of dark mountain, dark sky. Soon I won’t know the beginning from the end. 3. HIM Those empty celebrations of the half-believer along for the ride. Those secret words repeated in mirrors— someone’s personal fog. A man’s heart ransomed for comfort or a few extra bucks, his soul in rags. I have been him and him and him. Was it nobility or senility when my old grandmother tried to drown artificial flowers in the bathtub? Can only saints carry the load without talking about the burden? I want to lean into life, catch the faintest perfume. In every boy child an old man is dying. By middle age he begins to stink, complain. I want to have gifts for him when we finally meet. I want him to go out like an ancient Egyptian, surrounded by what is his, desiring nothing. 4. DELINEATION AT DUSK A lost hour, and that animal lassitude after a vanished afternoon. Outside: joggers, cyclists. Motion, the great purifier, is theirs. If this were Europe someone in a tower might be ringing a bell. People hearing it would know similar truths, might even know exactly who they are. It’s getting near drinking time. It’s getting near getting near; a person alone conjures rules or can liquefy, fall apart. That woman with the bouffant— chewing gum, waiting for the bus— someone thinks she’s beautiful. It’s beautiful someone does. The sky’s murmuring, the storm that calls you up, makes promises, never comes. Somewhere else, no doubt, a happy man slicing a tomato, a woman with a measuring cup. Somewhere else: the foreclosure of a feeling or a promise, followed by silence or shouts. Here, the slow dance of contingency, an afternoon connected to an evening by a slender wish. Sometimes absence makes the heart grow sluggish and desire only one person, or one thing. I am closing the curtains. I am helping the night. 5. SOLITUDE A few days ago I stopped looking at the photographs clustered on the wall, nudes, which had become dull to me, like a tourist’s collection of smooth rocks. I turned away from the view and conjured a plague of starlings. Oh how they darkened the landscape. Surely such beauty had been waiting for its elegy. I felt like crushing a rhododendron. Now and again I feel the astonishment of being alive like this, in this body, the ventricles and the small bones in the hand, the intricacies of digestion .... When the radio said parents in California gave birth to another child so that their older child might have a bone-marrow transplant and live, I found myself weeping for such complicated beauty. How wonderful the radio and its distant, human voices. The rain now is quite without consequence coming down. I suppose I’ve come to the limits of my paltry resources, this hankering for people and for massive disturbance, then high pressure, the sequence that’s been promised for days. I will long to be alone when my friends arrive. 6. THE BODY WIDENS The body widens, and people are welcomed into it, many at a time. This must be what happens when we learn to be generous when we’re not in love, or otherwise charmed. I’ve been examining yesterday’s ashes. I’ve visited my own candleless altar. Little by little, the old selfish parts of me are loosening. I have a plan for becoming lean: to use all my fat in service of expansion. Have women always known this? Loveliness and fear when they open and let in and give away? The mountains here pierce the sky, and the sky, bountiful, closes in around them. 7. A NEW MOUTH Give me a new mouth; I want to talk. I’ve been watching the spider mend its web. I think I’ve learned something about architecture from a swallow. Excuse me while I separate the nettles from the flowers, while I put my nose to the black moist smell of earth and come up smiling. Somewhere in the world is the secret name for God, many-lettered, unpronounceable. There’s a speakable grace in the fields and even in the cities. The grapes ripen, someone refuses to become a machine. And yet I want to talk about the worn-out husks of men and women returning from the factories, the venereal streets, the bruise history passes down to its forlorn children. I need a new mouth to acknowledge that piety will keep us small, imprisoned, that it’s all right to be ridiculous and sway first to the left, then to the right, in order to find our balance. I’ve been watching an evening star quiver. I’ve been trying to identify the word before its utterance. Give me a new mouth and I’ll be a guardian against forgetfulness. I’ve noticed the wind doesn’t discriminate between sycamore and cypress. I want to find the cool, precise language for how passion gives rise to passion. 8. STRANGER The wind gone. I can hear my breathing. I can hear the lateness of the hour by what isn’t moving. Woodrun Slope. Snowmass Village. These are winter names, and it’s summer. The water from the mountains rushes down man-made gullies. Serious phantoms with their black tears are out tonight. I’m close—my other delusion goes— to the heart of things. A young man with a young man’s itch would rise and go out prowling. Tomorrow I’ll choose a mountain that’s a hill, take the slowest horse at the Lazy-7, slow and old, sure to know its trail. I knew a man who said he could dominate solitude. In other ways, too, he was a fool. Once I wanted to be one of those fabulous strangers who appear and disappear. Now I arrive only by invitation, stay long enough to earn my fare. Outside my window, clouds from the west erasing the stars. A coyote howling its singular news. At whatever pace, isn’t there an imperative to live? Before a person dies he should experience the double fire, of what he wants and shouldn’t have.

My ancestor, a man of Himalayan snow, came to Kashmir from Samarkand, carrying a bag of whale bones: heirlooms from sea funerals. His skeleton carved from glaciers, his breath arctic, he froze women in his embrace. His wife thawed into stony water, her old age a clear evaporation. This heirloom, his skeleton under my skin, passed from son to grandson, generations of snowmen on my back. They tap every year on my window, their voices hushed to ice. No, they won’t let me out of winter, and I’ve promised myself, even if I’m the last snowman, that I’ll ride into spring on their melting shoulders.

love lasts by not lasting —Jack Gilbert I’m mapping this new year’s vanishings: lover, yellow house, the knowledge of surfaces. This is not a story of return. There are times I wish I could erase the mind’s lucidity, the difficulty of Sundays, my fervor to be touched by a woman two Februarys gone. What brings the body back, grieved and cloven, tromping these woods with nothing to confide in? New snow reassumes the circleting trees, the bridge above the creek where I stand like a stranger to my life. There is no single moment of loss, there is an amassing. The disbeliever sleeps at an angle in the bed. The orchard is a graveyard. Is this the real end? Someone shoveling her way out with cold intention? Someone naming her missing?

A castaway blown south from the arctic tundra sits on a stump in an abandoned farmer’s field. Beyond the dunes cattails toss and bend as snappy as the surf, rushing and crashing down the jetty. His head a swivel of round glances, his eyes a deeper yellow than the winter sun, he wonders if the spot two hundred feet away is a mouse on the crawl from mud hole to deer-grass patch. An hour of wind and sleet whips the air, nothing darts or passes but the river underground. A North Pole creature shows us how to last. The wind ruffles his feathers from crown to claw while he gazes into zeroes the salt-slick rain. As a double-rainbow before us arcs sky and owl, we leave him surrendering to the echo of his white refrain.

They have left behind the established cave with its well-worn floor. Scholarship impels them in hundreds, but generally one by one, to find an unknown passage or scrape out their own. Proto-Semitic linguistic theory, Hittite stratigraphic anomalies, microclimatic economics. "What do you see?" invisible followers ask in their ears, and they whisper "Wonderful things" as they quarry a grain of rock at a time, or examine a fleck of ore, or measure the acidity of a trickle of water. See! Behold! Look! Lo! they cry in season, rapt, in love, chipping away with their pocketknives, pencils, rulers, fingernails, but some have tunneled so narrowly and deep that those behind see nothing but slivers of light around an excavator's haunches. A battered piece of a tablet is all that remains of the so-called Singer of Nab. Circa 1200 BCE, he impressed, or had impressed, some words in clay. He may have composed a religious hymn, praise to the king, a poem of love, an inventory of cattle. (He may have been she, but this is unlikely.) The lines we have could be the beginning or the middle; there may have been ten more, or hundreds. The word before this gap, in fact, means "hundreds." Hundreds led in battle, hundreds slain? A thousand times beloved, nine hundred sheep? And the standard translation of this word, here, is either "desire" or "need." But did he write of a boundless yearning, or mercantile requirements? Was he a "singer"? The scholars who care disagree. Look at them, crouched in a long tunnel dug by means of argument over an antique syntax, warming their hands at a chunk of brick baked maybe in the time of the Trojan War, broken some moment between then and now— peering at it with penlights, squandering eyesight. They know they may crawl out hungry, mumbling, aged and gray, clutching a secret message of small import or nothing, nothing. They seem lost. They seem happy.

to Doug & Jan Oliver “I order you to operate, I was not made to suffer.” Probing for old wills, and friendships, for to free to New York City, to be in History, New York City being History at that time.” “And I traded my nights for Intensity; & I barter my right to Gold; & I’d traded my eyes much earlier, when I was circa say seven years old for ears to hear Who was speaking, & just exactly who was being told….” & I’m glad I hear your words so clearly & I would not have done it differently & I’m amused at such simplicity, even so, inside each & every door. And now I’m with you, instantly, & I’ll see you tomorrow night, and I see you constantly, hopefully though one or the other of us is often, to the body-mind’s own self more or less out of sight! Taking walks down any streets, High Street, Main Street, walk past my doors! Newtown; Nymph Rd (on the Mesa); Waveland Meeting House Lane, in old Southampton; or BelleVue Road in England, etcetera Other roads; Manhattan; see them there where open or shut up behind “I’ve traded sweet lines for answers …” They don’t serve me anymore.” They still serve me on the floor. Or, as now, as floor. Now we look out the windows, go in & out the doors. The Door. (That front door which was but & then at that time My door). I closed it On the wooing of Helen. “And so we left schools for her.” For She is not one bit fiction; & she is easy to see; & she leaves me small room For contradiction. And she is not alone; & she is not one bit lonely in the large high room, & invention is just vanity, which is plain. She is the heart’s own body, the body’s own mind in itself self-contained. & she talks like you; & she has created truly not single-handedly Our tragic thing, America. And though I would be I am not afraid of her, & you also not. You, yourself, I, Me, myself, me. And no, we certainly have not pulled down our vanity: but We wear it lightly here, here where I traded evenly, & even gladly health, for sanity; here where we live day-by-day on the same spot. My English friends, whom I love & miss, we talk to ourselves here, & we two rarely fail to remember, although we write seldom, & so must seem gone forever. In the stained sky over this morning the clouds seem about to burst What is being remembering Is how we are, together. Like you we are always bothered, except by the worst; & we are living as with you we also were fired, only, mostly, by changes in the weather. For Oh dear hearts, When precious baby blows her fuse / it’s just our way of keeping amused. That we offer of & as excuse. Here’s to you. All the very best. What’s your pleasure? Cheers.

Simplicity so graven hurts the sense. The monumental and the simple break And the great tablets shatter down in deed. Every year the quick particular jig Of unresolved event moves in the mind, And there's the trick simplicity has to win.

That marsh hawk, its blown-leaf flight across Tomales Bay fog, summer’s abraded light, the Pacific tide pressuring and squeezing wave on wave into the bay’s pinched inlet. . . We feel somehow between us still water crushed by that sea, so constant it seems not to be. The hawk, a circus, tumbles, stops, stands upon the air, beats its wings as if to shoo the sun’s drenched veils, and its clapping wings stop our unstoppable argument, that love goes, who knows why, and delivers us from pain to pain, air with teeth that seems to eat more air. Northern harrier, owl face, they sea-changed your name, who listens with your face and shows not love but want, speed, life in flight toward, forever toward, pausing at every chance to use what ocean-born bayside air sustains you by resisting you. We thank your sunken head bones and wild close-to-water seeking that somehow speaks to us, delivers us to another amazed agonized place.

goodbye city. goodbye stoop. goodbye rush hour traffic plume. goodbye feminist qpoc weed delivery group. goodbye cheap noodle spot on the corner. goodbye drag bar next door serving the messy deep into the dead eggplant evening. goodbye drunks screaming about literally nothing below my window. goodbye window & all it’s seen & forgiven. goodbye urine stains talking shit between parked cars. goodbye stars erased from the polluted heavens. goodbye getting my steps in. goodbye highway streaked red & white with shipments of grapefruit trucked in by the refrigerated crateful. goodbye angels dressed in thrifted robes. goodbye locusts — i’ll see you in a decade or so. i’m beguiled by & guided by goodbyes : meaning go ye with god : meaning ghost-flushed & godless : meaning guided by some guy away. who cares who? some new charon who smiles big as a river. who rivers big as i ferry with him toward death. the city you’re in now will never be the city you live in again. the ferryman with his good bile smiles good with his good will toward men. with his good guiding arm. no need for goodbyes when i got this phone where i can visit both my living and my dead. good grief. what’s my root for all this avoidance? for never saying peace to anyone’s living face? for this foolish and footloose decree? my casual excuses for slipping out the back door before the party gets lit? must be the  jew in me. this blood doctrine. my family who survived what i cannot write, never said goodbye, only,i’ll see you again soon. the stories we carried are the only country i’ll pledge my sword to, guiding me even now toward the safety of strange men’s rooms through cruisy city parks. exile is an heirloom. plant your sneakers in the garden so as not to bury your children in the backyard. goodbye park bench. goodbye best friends. goodbye graffiti at union & metropolitan that reads godbye krewl world written moments before that poor girl leapt out into the electric commuter dark. when god closes a door, he bolts it — god the comptroller : god the poorly contoured : god the slumlord. boards up the building before you can flee the house. gone the orator. gone the forest. gone the morgan stop bookshop before i even moved here. everywhere was better before humans came and gave it language. god the skyline’s remarkable this time of day — light tricked through the carbon in the atmosphere. god even the leaves are changing and going away. god the rivers flooded with factory waste and the air’s been replaced with arrogance. my therapist wants closure, but i ghost the session. i text, transition from one state of matter to the next. goodbye city. goodbye stoop. when i moved you were already gone. a simulacrum. a worn photocopy of what brought us in by the refrigerated crateful and when i return you’ll be even further distorted, disoriented organism, a fourth mortgage, an organ exhausted by fingers, yet still at night anyone who sleeps in you’s bathed in gold. to all my dead, i’ll see you again soon. to all my living, let bygones be gone by the time you take this next breath. let’s live instead here, in this transitional state. the instant water evaporates. riding the trains below the city.