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Said a blade of grass to an autumn leaf, “You make such a noise falling!  You scatter all my winter dreams.” Said the leaf indignant, “Low-born and low-dwelling!  Songless, peevish thing!  You live not in the upper air and you cannot tell the sound of singing.” Then the autumn leaf lay down upon the earth and slept.  And when spring came she waked again—and she was a blade of grass. And when it was autumn and her winter sleep was upon her, and above her through all the air the leaves were falling, she muttered to herself, “O these autumn leaves!  They make such noise!  They scatter all my winter dreams.”

B.D. was a decent poet but difficult to define or for himself to self-divine, a follower, a “gift” the way one seeker, loose but selective, identified himself to an intoxication reading obnubilating poems in a brick-and-river town: a generous, ecstatic overnight. A present, or an absence needing to be present, who tailed me, who mailed women years ago when he was free with his attention, a fixation that he felt attended him. Sometimes several times a week then several times a day he’d write me, for he was free to borrow books, go to the mailbox at 3 a.m., for it was urgent that he send a bride issue of Vogue,Bazaar, (not Seventeen, but Glamour, but not Ms.) from the Heartland where (Don’t forget our wedding date!) he bubble wrapped some trinkets, snapshots — poses of his parakeet beside his own long head meeting at an angle in a steely mirror. His wife, from her wheelchair, had made their camera flash. He tried to kill his wife with a little hammer

I was really in a muddle looking over a mud puddle 'cause I didn't have a paddle or a twig to ride the reef. But I said, Oh, fiddle-faddle, this is just a little piddle of a second fiddle puddle so I saddled up a leaf. I set sail on the puddle, but I reached the muddy middle and I rocked the leaf a little, then I gave it all I had. And I solved the mighty riddle of the whole caboodle puddle when I hopped up on the middle of a beetle launching pad.

[ February 1954 ] Your nurse could only speak Italian, but after twenty minutes I could imagine your final week, and tears ran down my cheeks.... When I embarked from Italy with my Mother’s body, the whole shoreline of the Golfo di Genova was breaking into fiery flower. The crazy yellow and azure sea-sleds blasting like jack-hammers across the spumante-bubbling wake of our liner, recalled the clashing colors of my Ford. Mother traveled first-class in the hold; her Risorgimento black and gold casket was like Napoleon’s at the Invalides.... While the passengers were tanning on the Mediterranean in deck-chairs, our family cemetery in Dunbarton lay under the White Mountains in the sub-zero weather. The graveyard’s soil was changing to stone— so many of its deaths had been midwinter. Dour and dark against the blinding snowdrifts, its black brook and fir trunks were as smooth as masts. A fence of iron spear-hafts black-bordered its mostly Colonial grave-slates. The only “unhistoric” soul to come here was Father, now buried beneath his recent unweathered pink-veined slice of marble. Even the Latin of his Lowell motto: Occasionem cognosce, seemed too businesslike and pushing here, where the burning cold illuminated the hewn inscriptions of Mother’s relatives: twenty or thirty Winslows and Starks. Frost had given their names a diamond edge.... In the grandiloquent lettering on Mother’s coffin, Lowell had been misspelled LOVEL. The corpse was wrapped like panettone in Italian tinfoil.

Alexandria, 1956 The rugs had been rolled up and islands of them Floated in the centers of every room, And now, on the bare wood floors, My sister and I were skimming among them In the boats we’d made from newspaper, Sheets of them pinned to each other, Dhows, gondolas, clippers, arks. There was a mule outside on the street Braying under a load of figs, though mostly There was quiet, a wind from the desert Was putting the city to sleep, But we were too far adrift, the air Was scurfy and wet, the currents tricking Our bows against reef and coral And hulls shearing under the weight of cargo. “Ahoy and belay!” I called to my sister, “Avast, avast!” she yelled back from her rigging, And neither of us knew what we were saying But the words came to us as from a movie, Cinemascopic, American. “Richard Widmark,” I said. “Clark Gable, Bogie,” she said, “Yo-ho-ho.” We had passed Cyprus And now there was Crete or Sardinia Maybe something larger further off. The horizon was everywhere I turned, The waters were becoming turgid, They were roiling, weeks had passed. “America, America, land-ho!” I yelled directionless. “Gibraltar,” my sister said, “Heave to,” And signalling a right, her arm straight out, She turned and bravely set our course North-by-northwest for the New World. Did we arrive? Years later, yes. By plane, suddenly. With suitcases And something as hazy as a future. The November sun was pale and far off, The air was colder than we’d ever felt, And already these were wonders to us As much as snow would be or evergreens, And it would take me a long time Before I’d ever remember Boats made of paper, islands of wool, And my sister’s voice, as in a fog, Calling out the hazards, Leading me on, getting us there.

Out of the winds' and the waves' riot, Out of the loud foam, He has put in to a great quiet And a still home. Here he may lie at ease and wonder Why the old ship waits, And hark for the surge and the strong thunder Of the full Straits, And look for the fishing fleet at morning, Shadows like lost souls, Slide through the fog where the seal's warning Betrays the shoals, And watch for the deep-sea liner climbing Out of the bright West, With a salmon-sky and her wake shining Like a tern's breast, — And never know he is done for ever With the old sea's pride, Borne from the fight and the full endeavour On an ebb tide.

Along the campo, Manin’s bronze winged lion prowled among the tanned intruders, licking their hands. Pools of iridescent shellfish lay open in the restaurant window, a shop of otherworldly opals, the mussels’ sheen the skies of a closed heaven, crabs flat on their backs, their armor intricate trapped plates and escapements. The squid slumped in its own ink, the octopus appalled in its slime. Many and ingenious are the postures of death. But look! There, in a corner, beneath a willowware plate, a lone crab clicked its claws, creeping over a casket of walleyed fish, through a valley of oysters keeping their counsel, only to shift warily under the shadow of a wine bottle. Which saint, O saints, watches over the saintly crab? The man of forks and spears, the man of arrows? In the Ca’ d’Oro, the stiffened Sebastian takes each arrow through his flesh like a skewer. He wears a little napkin around his middle. Saint, watch over the fragile boat of the runaway crab. Let him steal his way back to the green lagoon, go floating down the Grand Canal on his own motoscafo. Let him take second life, a later martyrdom. Let him wave his bent claws in a mockery of farewell, lest we eat in his hollow shell his captive meat.

The bud stands for all things, even for those things that don’t flower, for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing; though sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness, to put a hand on its brow of the flower and retell it in words and in touch it is lovely until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing; as Saint Francis put his hand on the creased forehead of the sow, and told her in words and in touch blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow began remembering all down her thick length, from the earthen snout all the way through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail, from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine down through the great broken heart to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them: the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

The View The plain’s hatching now after rainless months. A dust devil rips through a peach orchard down there, a seam snuffed by falling dust-fruit. Behind the vine rows’ shriveled abundance a low fire runs ragged by the ditch, flaying the pale sod. The voided skins wave. September, thirsting, sings our Hosannah, shrieks red poverties to old heaven’s eye. * * * 1944 You want February? Snow and sleet came down hard, heaven’s post-Christmas gift to freeze our eyelids shut. Walking the icy ground, our shoes all shot with holes, we did the Alexander’s Army Ragtime Dance, stomping snow off bones safely packed in newspapers. From down below, we must have looked crazy happy, dancing like Hollywood Indians, though who had anything to eat? We dreamed lard. So the wolves came, not straight into town, not into the piazza, but near the outcrop behind the church. God’s design, the best, the way they study the tired world makes them next to human, or more. They’re waiting while they move. I’d worship that expectancy. If I could talk to one, just a few minutes, he’d teach me hunger’s secrets. So one awful night I wrapped my legs and feet, stuffed more papers inside my pants and shirt, then danced my way behind the church. Faint gray writing on the snow. Skin and bones, sneezes, frost feathers, drifting away. Two of them walked back, canny bigshot archbishop warrior types. They said: The moon’s blue, we know you want secrets, help, advice, news from this side. Our truth is: Forget likenesses, live inside your carbon soul, the moon’s black and blue, in the soul’s time the world’s one winter together. * * * Renunciation The snowy poplar seeds are everywhere, balling against curbs and car wheels, sifting through gates, doorways, kitchen windows, snagged by white blossoms shaken loose from the nodding horse-chestnut leaves. We stand in their shadows—our springtime’s dark. The debris scrapes our cheeks, clings an instant to our lashes, chokes the soft breath before tumbling off the near precipice. We want divine uncertainty. O give us the Judas tree’s blood shadows, make us sick with rank pear blossoms, blind us with earth’s random pieces engorged with broom’s milky fallen-sun flesh.

Live jazz at El Fresco is one guy, electric plinks, until he turns off the switch, closes his eyes, and warbles a boy’s tenor, wood-flute tones, pure séance hymns from before Christians. Rowdies at the bar stop fighting and stare as seawater washes through the room, seeping through floorboards to serpent dens. The chorus stirs spirits from family lore. Desmond, Big Miller, James MackGehee— all rise from steerage and sing with the lords. Next performance is a poet reciting, “The Luck of the Irish,” blue eyes snapping: “Once I journeyed to the Cliffs of Moher.” I follow him to a rocky precipice, pause, then jump to dizzy foam tides below, fall, keep falling into this slow, heartbreaking solo.