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Kant says time is neither event nor thing. Well, I think. That’s that. But then Teresa calls. She’s found my old letters. There are dead dogs in them, old boyfriends; the miscarriage is happening (has happened) and I have to catch a plane. The plane has      (not yet) taken off. Sundials, T squares, heartbeats, and the equinox. In places of worship, incense burns. All to mark no thing. Here, wind moves water in one direction, then another. Some mornings, nothing ripples, not leaves, not iridescence on birdwing, beetle back. Some mornings, both: stillness, unrest. Last season’s loon calls. And sometimes? I can’t remember the lake where I first heard that sound, though the vision of it rises through a paint-flecked pane. On my morning walk: a hawk perched on a telephone wire above what used to be a hayfield: rusted New Holland baler, bobolinks and meadowlarks saved from the mower. That was a generation ago, dead farmers, dead cows. Now is not the time, moles, voles, mice, to dart into the light. Nothing stops in stillness except solstice when the sun stands still in declination. I should tell someone this, that we are not propelled beyond a moment of observation, even loss, into something else: field edge, lakeside, motherhood. But that, instead, we are always on our way. On my return, the wire’s empty. The hawk has hunted or not, is sated or continues, hungry. Hunger, at least, returns. Once, in different water, my daughters waded naked after mussels. Appendages, these daughters were. I was accustomed to the creases behind their knees where I kept their pulse. Keep these, too: ships’ bells and steeple chimes, an hourglass, the pharaoh’s water clock. Now, on a floating dock, my daughters sun themselves, swing limbs above water that soon enough will be ice. These days, you can lift saliva off the back of a stamp, determine who licked it. And that woman? That sender? She will have stopped and she will not yet have stopped        and she will still be bleeding.

something scrambled out of me at least I thought it was out of me it could have been into me very fast very sly dirty breath’d assassin spiders ants                earthworms I witnessed being dissected by my brothers and crane flies I tried but never managed to capture whole   such fey stupid wings and legs left drifting on walls mostly I was a witness mostly I’ve kept out of  the way with my hood zipped up to my chin what is the surest thing we know? that as we grow older we think less of killing things and more of coming back who knows where we acquire our knowledge from our mothers   aunts perhaps they pass it on like a candle through an ancient pockmarked door something parenthetic like a clasp broken     useless as a rotten wick a spider climbing the sublime coast of  your shoulders walking through those rooms again a web breaking on the back of  your hand

Written in Germany If I had but two little wings And were a little feathery bird, To you I'd fly, my dear! But thoughts like these are idle things, And I stay here. But in my sleep to you I fly: I'm always with you in my sleep! The world is all one's own. But then one wakes, and where am I? All, all alone. Sleep stays not, though a monarch bids: So I love to wake ere break of day: For though my sleep be gone, Yet while 'tis dark, one shuts one's lids, And still dreams on.

Something I learned about agape when I was young: the Iliad tells us fellow-feeling is finite in communities. Brotherly love becomes a number that has to be divided among persons—so if you’re too kind to others, that might explain your neighbor’s graft. I sometimes wonder if perception is the same; if the quantity of percepts, or our trove of eidetic things, is not limitless but rather constant: the measure, say, of a sunlit field. So if we dip like deep-sea divers to the world, we’ll have to use a purse-seine to sieve our sense impressions. We’re hoarding the image at our peril. That bluest scilla smeared by a finger writing in the grass? Endangered. Poetry’s work is not to ravish, but diminish.

I wanted to have a poem and I was pregnant. I was very thin. As if I’d lived on air. A poet must be able to live on air, but a mother must not attempt it. My mother wanted me to buy a set of matching pots, Wearever aluminum, like the ones she had. They were heavy and had well fitting lids so my suppers wouldn’t burn. My husband wanted me to give dinner parties. John F. Kennedy was running for office. I sensed danger. Kennedy wasn’t against the Bomb or for nuclear disarmament. I joined SANE at its inception. Also Concerned Scientists. I spoke with Linus Pauling and encouraged my husband to help his partner organize Physicians for Social Responsibility. There was a baby in my belly. I wanted to write poems. I had a crazy idea that a woman could write a real novel, the kind that shook the world. I hallucinated that a woman could be a poet, but she would have to be free. I couldn’t imagine that freedom for myself even though I could see it in Isla Negra when I followed Pablo Neruda. I could see it in the way he walked. Even if he were walking inside a dictatorship, among guns, soldiers and spies, there was nothing between him and his vision. Anything he saw, he was able to take into himself–there was no sight, no image, no vision to which he didn’t feel entitled. In his heart, everything–everything–belonged to him. Pablo Neruda was–more than anything–a poet, and so he was an entitled man. I was a woman and entitled to nothing. I had nothing except a husband, a rented house, a set of pots, living room furniture, a frenzy of obligations, credit cards, anxious relatives, too many acquaintances, a gift of future diaper service, two telephones, no time to read, a plastic wrapped cookbook of recipes gleaned from the pages of the New York Times, and a hunger, a terrible hunger for the unimaginable, unlimited freedom of being a poet, and a baby in my belly. I would have called Pablo long distance if I had the courage, if I had the ability to speak Spanish fluently, if we had ever talked about real things. But, what would a man know about a baby in the belly? And what did it matter if there were to be one poet more or less in the world when so many in his country were dying? I woke up one morning and thought–I can’t have this child. My husband said, “You’ll have to get a job after it’s born so we can buy a house. You’ll need an advanced degree so you can do something.” I thought, I can’t. I have to write poems. My mother found a crib. Someone painted it white. A friend sent a pastel mobile with tame wood animals. I thought about blue curtains, making bedspreads, and abortions. Pablo was silent. He was walking so far from me, I couldn’t hear him. My husband objected to donating more free medical care to the Black Panthers. I tried to make dolmades from scratch and located grape leaves preserved in brine at the Boys’ Market twenty miles away. I organized a write-in campaign for peace to challenge JFK. My husband thought it would be nice to have teatime with the children and romantic dinners by ourselves. The new formula bottles lined up on the sink like tiny bombs. The U.S. was pursuing over ground testing; I was afraid the radiation would cross the milk barrier. I had a poem in me howling for real life but no language to write in. The fog came in thick, flapping about my feet like blankets unraveling. I became afraid to have a daughter. I called Pablo Neruda in the middle of the night as he walked underwater by Isla Negra. He moved like a dream porpoise. He seemed pregnant with words. They came out of his penis in long miraculous strings. The sea creatures quivered with joy. I said, “Pablo, I want to know how to bear the child in my belly onto this bed of uranium and I want to know if a woman can a be a poet.” He was large as a whale. He drank the sea and spouted it in glistening odes, black and shiny. I said, “I can’t have this child,” and he laughed as if he had never done anything but carry and birth children. So I packed my little bag as if I were going to the hospital and I left a note and the Wearever pots and sterilized nipples upon the glass missiles, and took the cradle board than an American Indian friend had given me for the baby and that had made my husband snort– “You’re not going to carry the thing on your back, are you?” I took some money, the car, some books, paper and pens, my walking shoes, an unwieldly IBM electric typewriter, my pregnant belly and a dozen cloth diapers, and I went out. I knew how to carry a baby and how to carry a poem and I would learn how to have a baby and even how to have a poem. I would have enough milk for both. I would learn how to walk with them. But I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to know, how to have a husband and a matched set of Wearever pots.

I follow locusts. I think they’re loyal, but it’s a story. In morning’s bleached streets and nights of tungsten glinting, their fretted steel legs ticker the minutes. What do I know, except I need a thing to walk behind. The lot tagged The Devil, red spray paint, two concrete steps. This is where I go when the heat comes, when no one alive can tell me how to make the day move on. She lies there, the bitch, in a bed convex from her weight. Though it’s dusk, I see she is the color of dirt. Though fleas open new roads through her hair, she is asleep. I hear thunder. Some days it rumbles dry, no rain. I’m tired. The air here, it’s like breathing gasoline. I lie down, too. A razor, a latex glove turned inside out. I curl my body close to hers, my lips, nose to her spine. I close my eyes. I want the mites to leave without me, but they don’t.

I adore you: you’re a harrowing event. I like you very ugly, condensed to one deep green pang. You cannot ask the simplest question, your hold is all clutch and sinker. Cannibal old me, with my heart up my throat, blasting on all sides with my hundred red states. Hidden little striver. How not to know it, the waist-deep trance of you, the cursing, coursing say of you. Embarrassing today. Curiouser and curiouser, your body is a mouth, is a night of travel, your body is tripling the sideways insouciance. The muscle in you knows gorgeous, in you knows tornadoes. In an instant’s compass, your blood flees you like a cry. You put on my heat, (that’s the way you work) I’m a bandit gripping hard on the steal. The substitutions come swiftly, hungering down the valley, no one question to cover all of living. I arrange myself in the order of my use. You’re wrong and right at the same time, a breathless deluxe and a devouring chopping down the back door. You slap my attention all over the dark. What’s in me like a chime? Sometimes, sometimes, I come to you for the surprise.

No one knew the secret of my flutes, and I laugh now because some said I was enlightened. But the truth is I’m only a gardener who before the War was a dirt farmer and learned how to grow the bamboo in ditches next to the fields, how to leave things alone and let the silt build up until it was deep enough to stink bad as night soil, bad as the long, witch-grey hair of a ghost. No secret in that. My land was no good, rocky, and so dry I had to sneak water from the whites, hacksaw the locks off the chutes at night, and blame Mexicans, Filipinos, or else some wicked spirit of a migrant, murdered in his sleep by sheriffs and wanting revenge. Even though they never believed me, it didn’t matter—no witnesses, and my land was never thick with rice, only the bamboo growing lush as old melodies and whispering like brush strokes against the fine scroll of wind. I found some string in the shed or else took a few stalks and stripped off their skins, wove the fibers, the floss, into cords I could bind around the feet, ankles, and throats of only the best bamboos. I used an ice pick for an awl, a fish knife to carve finger holes, and a scythe to shape the mouthpiece. I had my flutes. * When the War came, I told myself I lost nothing. My land, which was barren, was not actually mine but leased (we could not own property) and the shacks didn’t matter. What did were the power lines nearby and that sabotage was suspected. What mattered to me were the flutes I burned in a small fire by the bath house. * All through Relocation, in the desert where they put us, at night when the stars talked and the sky came down and drummed against the mesas, I could hear my flutes wail like fists of wind whistling through the barracks. I came out of Camp, a blanket slung over my shoulder, found land next to this swamp, planted strawberries and beanplants, planted the dwarf pines and tended them, got rich enough to quit and leave things alone, let the ditches clog with silt again and the bamboo grow thick as history. * So, when it’s bad now, when I can’t remember what’s lost and all I have for the world to take means nothing, I go out back of the greenhouse at the far end of my land where the grasses go wild and the arroyos come up with cat’s-claw and giant dahlias, where the children of my neighbors consult with the wise heads of sunflowers, huge against the sky, where the rivers of weather and the charred ghosts of old melodies converge to flood my land and sustain the one thicket of memory that calls for me to come and sit among the tall canes and shape full-throated songs out of wind, out of bamboo, out of a voice that only whispers.

How many times should I look at you and should I change my life? Monarch you make your orange assent to death. And how much dexterity can you really teach me? Does your courage even map onto these worldly obligations to friends, my job, desire for a little affection in the late hours of the evening, etc.? I can't put myself ever in your head. But I can lie on your wing, with my left eye letting my right dart forward as you do. Don't ask something with a lifespan how to change your life. Ask something you can't believe ever lived.

Sometime during eternity some guys show up and one of them who shows up real late is a kind of carpenter from some square-type place like Galilee and he starts wailing and claiming he is hip to who made heaven and earth and that the cat who really laid it on us is his Dad And moreover he adds It’s all writ down on some scroll-type parchments which some henchmen leave lying around the Dead Sea somewheres a long time ago and which you won’t even find for a coupla thousand years or so or at least for nineteen hundred and fortyseven of them to be exact and even then nobody really believes them or me for that matter You’re hot they tell him And they cool him They stretch him on the Tree to cool And everybody after that is always making models of this Tree with Him hung up and always crooning His name and calling Him to come down and sit in on their combo as if he is the king cat who’s got to blow or they can’t quite make it Only he don’t come down from His Tree Him just hang there on His Tree looking real Petered out and real cool and also according to a roundup of late world news from the usual unreliable sources real dead