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It’s something they carry with them – explorers  night shifts  seamen – like a good pair of binoculars or a camera case perfectly and deeply compartmented. It has a quiet patina that both absorbs and reflects like a valuable instrument you have to sign for – contract with alone – and at the end of the voyage you get to keep. Sometimes it’s very far away. Sometimes so close at first you think the person next to you is picking up  putting down a personal cup a book in another language before you realise what – when talk has moved off leaning its arms on someone else’s table – is being handed to you.

Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone; For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth, But has trouble enough of its own. Sing, and the hills will answer; Sigh, it is lost on the air; The echoes bound to a joyful sound, But shrink from voicing care. Rejoice, and men will seek you; Grieve, and they turn and go; They want full measure of all your pleasure, But they do not need your woe. Be glad, and your friends are many; Be sad, and you lose them all,— There are none to decline your nectared wine, But alone you must drink life’s gall. Feast, and your halls are crowded; Fast, and the world goes by. Succeed and give, and it helps you live, But no man can help you die. There is room in the halls of pleasure For a large and lordly train, But one by one we must all file on Through the narrow aisles of pain.

No one home. Snow packing the morning in. Much white nothing filling up. A V of birds pulling the silence until some dog across the street barks, and breaks what I call my peace. What a luxury annoyance is. It bites off and keeps just enough of what I think I want to be endless.

It was at a wine party— I lay in a drowse, knowing it not. The blown flowers fell and filled my lap. When I arose, still drunken, The birds had all gone to their nests, And there remained but few of my comrades. I went along the river—alone in the moonlight.

It seems to head from its last stop too fast, my transbay train’s strungout hoo , deep inside the tunnel, and starts to bleed into the baritone wail of that guy at platform’s end, a sort of lullaby rubbed against the wall then caught in a squall of wind darkening toward us, his whippy voice skinning its tired song off the tiled dome: he’s determined, the silky lyric says, to be independently blue , while we all wait to be chuted to car lot or home, closer to love, or farther, and sooner to loss, our bashful shoes and arms like lives crossed, every plural presence now some thing alone, thanks to our singer-man. We wait for the train, patient with hope, a hope that’s like complaint.

Born on Monday and a tiny world-containing grain of light passed through each eye like heaven through a needle. And on Tuesday he screamed for a small ear in which to hide. He rolled on Wednesday, rolled his whole body full of immense salt spaces, slowly from one horizon to the other. And on Thursday, trembling, crippled, broke beyond his given strength and crawled. And on Friday he stood upright. And on Saturday he tested a footstep and the sky came down and alit on his shoulder full of various languages in which one bird doesn’t answer to another. And on Sunday he dreamed he was flying and his mind grew gold watching the moon and he began to sing to the brink of speaking

1 The Saturday morning meadowlark came in from high up with her song gliding into tall grass still singing. How I'd like to glide around singing in the summer then to go south to where I already was and find fields full of meadowlarks in winter. But when walking my dog I want four legs to keep up with her as she thunders down the hill at top speed then belly flops into the deep pond. Lark or dog I crave the impossible. I'm just human. All too human. 2 I was nineteen and mentally infirm when I saw the prophet Isaiah. The hem of his robe was as wide as the horizon and his trunk and face were thousands of feet up in the air. Maybe he appeared because I had read him so much and opened too many ancient doors. I was cooking my life in a cracked clay pot that was leaking. I had found secrets I didn't deserve to know. When the battle for the mind is finally over it's late June, green and raining. 3 A violent windstorm the night before the solstice. The house creaked and yawned. I thought the morning might bring a bald earth, bald as a man's bald head but not shiny. But dawn was fine with a few downed trees, the yellow rosebush splendidly intact. The grass was all there dotted with Black Angus cattle. The grass is indestructible except to fire but now it's too green to burn. What did the cattle do in this storm? They stood with their butts toward the wind, erect Buddhists waiting for nothing in particular. I was in bed cringing at gusts, imagining the contents of earth all blowing north and piled up where the wind stopped, the pile sky-high. No one can climb it. A gopher comes out of a hole as if nothing happened. 4 The sun should be a couple of million miles closer today. It wouldn't hurt anything and anyway this cold rainy June is hard on me and the nesting birds. My own nest is stupidly uncomfortable, the chair of many years. The old windows don't keep the weather out, the wet wind whipping my hair. A very old robin drops dead on the lawn, a first for me. Millions of birds die but we never see it—they like privacy in this holy, fatal moment or so I think. We can't tell each other when we die. Others must carry the message to and fro. "He's gone," they'll say. While writing an average poem destined to disappear among the millions of poems written now by mortally average poets. 5 Solstice at the cabin deep in the forest. The full moon shines in the river, there are pale green northern lights. A huge thunderstorm comes slowly from the west. Lightning strikes a nearby tamarack bursting into flame. I go into the cabin feeling unworthy. At dawn the tree is still smoldering in this place the gods touched earth.

Standing in line at the SuperSave, it all falls Into place, Princess Di and the aliens and diet Tips from outer space, King Tut and King Elvis, Out of the subfusc air, the rank urgency of dusk, Among the heavy odors of differing dungs, Acrid signatures of urine, the bold perfume of musk . . . Nostradamus, this year's senate race, unforeseen Links between absolutely everything and sex, Conspiracies requiring conspiracy to be detected, From a sibilance of scattered leaves, the sudden Snap of twig, inflections of a gabbling breeze, Horizons stained with dust, the attitude of trees . . . And O my fellow shoppers waiting to check out, What appetite is this that drives such dim belief, What thirst for intercourse between these banal bits? From the cacophony of birds as from abrupt silence, Odd sounds of usual insects, subliminal presence Of added shadow, faintest trembling in the ground . . . When greed and accident stand ever ready to explain, Whence this convolvulus of tenuous connection? What need for the devious when the obvious will do? From remarkable weeds, from a slight imbalance In the normal proportion of game, from distressed bark, Out of the bewildering swirl of importunate sense . . . Attention, shoppers, there lies a veldt within us each, Its grasses rustle with intent, and on that plain Was born the fine suspicion that has carried us so far, To behold the unassuming fact and comprehend design, To look upon confusion and construct its plot and act, To leap at merest notion found floating in the mind . . . Has brought us to these sheltered aisles under thin gray light, Where in boredom and abundance we seek our narrative, Whatever tale comes now to kill us and can creep.

Its nature is ruthless, nothing as simple as loss being ruinous, those undeniable rainbows of oil, shock of bright sulphurous puddles (in goldfinch, in lemon) and now what, if that beauty's terrible plumage makes you keep looking and disturbs your despair.

From Michigan our son writes, How many elk? How many big horn sheep? It's spring, and soon they'll be gone above timberline, climbing to tundra by summer. Some boys are born to wander, my wife says, but rocky slopes with spruce and Douglas fir are home. He tried the navy, the marines, but even the army wouldn't take him, not with a foot like that. Maybe it's in the genes. I think of wild-eyed years till I was twenty, and cringe. I loved motorcycles, too dumb to say no to our son—too many switchbacks in mountains, too many icy spots in spring. Doctors stitched back his scalp, hoisted him in traction like a twisted frame. I sold the motorbike to a junkyard, but half his foot was gone. Last month, he cashed his paycheck at the Harley house, roared off with nothing but a backpack, waving his headband, leaning into a downhill curve and gone.