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Every tripod- toting birder knows it never nests on urban girders. Even fences set its scalded-crimson head askew, its waddle swinging, wings akimbo. Few have got it on their lists and fewer still have caught it singing, this endangered North American candor, cousin of the done-in dodo, big-eyed Big Sur tremor- tenor — only ten or twenty hang glide over Modoc County, humbly numbered (as their days are) for us crazy crown- and throat- and belly-gazers. Any niche as fragile as a candor’s renders its extinction certain. We can sabotage its habitat with half a laugh or quarter murmur, fluster coveys worth of candors off their branches, which, abandoned, soon are little more than snarking- grounds for minor birds, the common snipe, the yellow- bellied bittern.

You were in bed. You heard your mother working in the kitchen. It was still light, the birds were bickering, the waterfall behind the house was falling. Its rushing lulled you, you loved the moment you lay in, and you counted the time from this instant to this, and put it away to be lived on another night, your wedding night or some other night that needed all the luck, all the saved-up minutes you could bring it. Later you filled bottles in the stream and dated them and stored them in a cupboard. Months after, you retrieved them to stare at what time had done. You were eight, but already you knew it was working on you, each minute you passed through was gone. You didn’t want to give up your old clothes. You’d watch your mother wrap your dresses in a box for another girl and know that where their stripes and buttons went what you’d lived in them followed. But those minutes in bed, minutes of utter safety, you heard the water falling and didn’t want it to fall. You wanted to keep it, you saved yourself that minute. I don’t know if you still have it or if you’ve had to spend it on you or on me. But I know you still save minutes I used to think went unwatched into our account in time that allows no withdrawals. You hold onto the slippers and letters, things that are leaving, things we’ve left, evidence we’re judged unfairly by. You have the picture, you and Pam in blue fishing in the stream below the pool, staring back at the camera half-abashed. Your jacket is still in the closet. You never wear it, you don’t even remember when you did, but it’s here to testify the picture doesn’t lie —though the color’s different, your hair is shorter now, and the water in the pool is long gone downstream.

I strip the porch roof, pick out the used nails, and toss the shingles down onto a drop cloth, remembering when I shingled my grandmother's roof fifty years ago: the tar smell, the brackets, planks, and ladders all the same, but level now with hemlock limbs instead of locust. I lug four shingles up the ladder, kneel and drive the old nails home, slide another shingle into place, pound, toes bent, knees creaking.Miserliness, a friend jokes about the nails, but I call it caring, thinking of the man who gave us this land on the cove, the cottage, the boat- house full of boats. The only time I saw him he was at his work bench, a rich man straightening nails, moving from the bent can to the anvil to the straight.

The earth builds on the earth Castles and towers; The earth saith of the earth: All shall be ours. Yea, though they plan and reap The rye and the corn, Lo, they were bond to Sleep Ere they were born. Yea, though the blind earth sows For the fruit and the sheaf, They shall harvest the leaf of the rose And the dust of the leaf. Pride of the sword and power Are theirs at their need Who shall rule but the root of the flower The fall of the seed. They who follow the flesh In splendour and tears, They shall rest and clothe them afresh In the fulness of years. From the dream of the dust they came As the dawn set free. They shall pass as the flower of the flame Or the foam of the sea. The earth builds on the earth Castles and towers. The earth saith of the earth: All shall be ours.

In my country our shamans were women and our gods multiple until white people brought an ecstasy of rosaries and our cities today glow with crosses like graveyards. As a child in Sunday school I was told I’d go to hell if I didn’t believe in God. Our teacher was a woman whose daughters wanted to be nuns and I asked What about babies and what about Buddha, and she said They’re in hell too and so I memorized prayers and recited them in front of women I did not believe in.Deliver us from evil. O sweet Virgin Mary, amen

Say not the struggle nought availeth, The labour and the wounds are vain, The enemy faints not, nor faileth, And as things have been they remain. If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars; It may be, in yon smoke concealed, Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers, And, but for you, possess the field. For while the tired waves, vainly breaking Seem here no painful inch to gain, Far back through creeks and inlets making, Comes silent, flooding in, the main. And not by eastern windows only, When daylight comes, comes in the light, In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly, But westward, look, the land is bright.

At the last turn in the path “goodbye—” —bending, bowing, (moss and a bit of wild bird-) down. Daitoku-ji Monastery

They will not be the same next time. The sayings so cute, just slightly off, will be corrected. Their eyes will be more skeptical, plugged in the more securely to the worldly buzz of television, alphabet, and street talk, culture polluting their gazes' pure blue. It makes you see at last the value of those boring aunts and neighbors (their smells of summer sweat and cigarettes, their faces like shapes of sky between shade-giving leaves) who knew you from the start, when you were zero, cooing their nothings before you could be bored or knew a name, not even your own, or how this world brave with hellos turns all goodbye.

for my mother the living 1. After Independence Day all our toys began to tear up, school growing sweet on our tongues. We had already cut & hoed the cotton into rows, weeds piled useless as Confederate bills. September meant picking & half-days at Springfield, us colored grades let off at noon to pick the valuable white till nightfall. My hands, civil & slow, didn’t even deserve my behind on the picking truck, but Unc Chock ran the thing & Mama would’ve killed him dead if he’d dreamt of trying to get salty. The money was bad like all money then, not near as green or wide. Three dollars for a hundred pounds, better part of a day. I barely kept up, hands swole up like unpicked fruit. No matter when she started, Frankie plucked fifteen pounds more, food for two, a new Easter dress. Summers I turned so black & bent, all because I’d rather pick with friends than sling weeds alone, than stuff my mattress green. 2. Winters, when the white king had gone, we slept like fish, still moving. We walked back home for lunch & retraced after school, changing into our other pair of drawers before we chored the stove’s ash. No one got gas till after the War. Each November brought a boxcar from the Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe; for a share, Lopez balanced it home on his flatbed, a whale from the hunt. Once full of hobos, that bell we burnt kept us from freezing all season long. Before tossing each board in, I would run my hands across the wood speech of burns, carvings warning Unfriendly Conductor, Town of No Sleep. Leftover wood turned to toys; three boards & somebody’s old rollerskate became a summer scooter. Bored, what was that? We were too busy being poor in that house air-conditioned all winter, too busy sharing everything, even bathwater evenings by the pipe stove. No plumbing, no rats, only mice thick enough to believe we had more than they did.

On the threshold of half a house in the Land of Israel my father stood pointing to the sides and saying: Upon these ruins one day we will build a kitchen to cook in it a Leviathan’s tail and a wild bull, upon these ruins we will build a corner for prayer to make room for a bit of holiness. My father remained on the threshold and I, my entire life, have been erecting scaffolding reaching up to the sky. Translated from the Hebrew