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* If sound, then why not the full reach of mind, and if that cantilever then why not the whole keyboard with its totality of partials? But then one meets the dragon, pipes up a bright disciple,whose two dramas, lieber Meister, are suicide and the founding of the state. My name is a household word

Softly pummeled overnight, the lower limbs of our Norway spruce flexed and the deepening snow held them. Windless sunlight now, so I go out wearing hip waders and carrying not a fly rod but a garden hoe. I begin worrying the snow for the holdfast of a branch that’s so far down a wren’s nest floats above it like a buoy. I work the hoe, not chopping but cradling, then pull straight up. A current of air as the needles loft their burden over my head. Those grace notes of the snowfall, crystals giving off copper, green, rose—watching them I stumble over a branch, go down and my gloves fill with snow. Ah, I find my father here: I remember as a child how flames touched my hand the time I added wood to the stove in our ice-fishing shanty, how he plunged that hand through the hole into the river, teaching me one kind of burning can ease another. The branch bobs then tapers into place and composes itself, looking unchanged though all summer it will bring up this day from underfoot.

The last two sherpas were the strongest, faithful companions, their faces wind-peeled, streaked with soot and glacier-light on the snowfield below the summit where we stopped to rest. The first was my body, snug in its cap of lynx- fur, smelling of yak butter and fine mineral dirt, agile, impetuous, broad-shouldered, alive to the frozen bite of oxygen in the larynx. The second was my intellect, dour and thirsty, furrowing its fox-like brow, my calculating brain searching for some cairn or chasm to explain my decision to send them back without me. Looking down from the next, ax-cleft serac I saw them turn and dwindle and felt unafraid. Blind as a diamond, sun-pure and rarefied, whatever I was then, there was no turning back.

God’s own best will bide the test And God’s own worst will fall; But, best or worst or last or first, He ordereth it all. For all is good, if understood, (Ah, could we understand!) And right and ill are tools of skill Held in His either hand. The harlot and the anchorite, The martyr and the rake, Deftly He fashions each aright, Its vital part to take. Wisdom He makes to form the fruit Where the high blossoms be; And Lust to kill the weaker shoot, And Drink to trim the tree. And Holiness that so the bole Be solid at the core; And Plague and Fever, that the whole Be changing evermore. He strews the microbes in the lung, The blood-clot in the brain; With test and test He picks the best, Then test them once again. He tests the body and the mind, He rings them o’er and o’er; And if they crack, He throws them back, And fashions them once more. He chokes the infant throat with slime, He sets the ferment free; He builds the tiny tube of lime That blocks the artery. He lets the youthful dreamer store Great projects in his brain, Until He drops the fungus spore That smears them out again. He stores the milk that feeds the babe, He dulls the tortured nerve; He gives a hundred joys of sense Where few or none might serve. And still He trains the branch of good Where the high blossoms be, And wieldeth still the shears of ill To prune and prune His tree.

They flee from me, that sometime did me seek With naked foot, stalking in my chamber. I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek, That now are wild, and do not remember That sometime they put themselves in danger To take bread at my hand; and now they range Busily seeking with a continual change. Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise Twenty times better; but once, in special, In thin array, after a pleasant guise, When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall, And she me caught in her arms long and small; Therewith all sweetly did me kiss, And softly said, ‘Dear heart, how like you this?’ It was no dream: I lay broad waking: But all is turned, thorough my gentleness, Into a strange fashion of forsaking; And I have leave to go of her goodness, And she also to use newfangleness. But since that I so kindly am served, I would fain know what she hath deserved.

And this my hand, against my self uprear. — William Shakespeare I took the crooked, arcade-overshadowed road off the main square built by de Chirico and chanced upon a watch repairer’s shop which might have been painted by Bhupen Khakhar for whose summer show the London weeklies have just prepared such a frosty welcome. Wait. Is this ekphrastic or oneiric? The site Bologna or Bombay? Are the hanging watches, so sure of their gender, Bulgari or Janata? Too early to tell. But there he sat at his workbench working at what looked like tiny jeweled bits of time laid out under his eye loupe in magnolia light. These fragments he seemed to be reassembling into a perfect circle, or a sphere seen from above — it was like a miracle obligingly performed in slow motion, or the flight of an arrow broken down into ever smaller fractions of advancement. He took his time, and my time, to acknowledge me — clearly he didn’t crave an audience, as though the slow work that so ravished him required if not secrecy at least discretion. Could he mend, I wondered, the cracked glass on my watch before I had to leave tomorrow? His black eyes rested on the old Omega as though bemused such a watch should belong to someone so importunate, then he cleared the air with a lenient, experienced smile. Certo. But it will have a different bombatura not quite as fine as this one was. Though the word was unfamiliar, it conjured up at once light skating the rim of a sheer bevel. Va bene. So long, I thought, as I can tell the time, and don’t have to squint through cracks as I had since fending off a drunken punch which I’d provoked myself enough to throw. I would have paid extra to watch him clean the face with the wad of turquoise putty he had to hand, paid double to have Devanagari numerals replace the Roman, but he wanted me out. A domani allora. Then as I left he said it needed una revisione completa before it got too late. A watch like this deserves — he changed the tense — deserved a lot more care.

For one thing, there’s no more snow to watch from an evening window, and no armfuls of logs to carry into the house so cumbersome you have to touch the latch with an elbow, and once inside, no iron stove waiting like an old woman for her early dinner of wood. No hexagrams of frost to study carefully on the cold glass pages of the bathroom. And there’s no black sweater to pull over my head while I wait for the coffee to brew. Instead, I walk around in children’s clothes— shorts and a T-shirt with the name of a band lettered on the front, announcing me to nobody. The sun never fails to arrive early and refuses to leave the party even after I go from room to room, turning out all the lights, and making a face. And the birds with those long white necks? All they do is swivel their heads to look at me as I walk past as if they all knew my password and the name of the city where I was born.

All the Sioux were defeated. Our clan got poor, but a few got richer. They fought two wars. I did not take part. No one remembers your vision or even your real name. Now the children go to town and like loud music. I married a Christian. Crazy Horse, it is not fair to hide a new vision from you. In our schools we are learning to take aim when we talk, and we have found out our enemies. They shift when words do; they even change and hide in every person. A teacher here says hurt or scorned people are places where real enemies hide. He says we should not hurt or scorn anyone, but help them. And I will tell you in a brave way, the way Crazy Horse talked: that teacher is right. I will tell you a strange thing: at the rodeo, close to the grandstand, I saw a farm lady scared by a blown piece of paper; and at that place horses and policemen were no longer frightening, but suffering faces were, and the hunched-over backs of the old. Crazy Horse, tell me if I am right: these are the things we thought we were doing something about. In your life you saw many strange things, and I will tell you another: now I salute the white man’s flag. But when I salute I hold my hand alertly on the heartbeat and remember all of us and how we depend on a steady pulse together. There are those who salute because they fear other flags or mean to use ours to chase them: I must not allow my part of saluting to mean this. All of our promises, our generous sayings to each other, our honorable intentions—those I affirm when I salute. At these times it is like shutting my eyes and joining a religious colony at prayer in the gray dawn in the deep aisles of a church. Now I have told you about new times. Yes, I know others will report different things. They have been caught by weak ways. I tell you straight the way it is now, and it is our way, the way we were trying to find. The chokecherries along our valley still bear a bright fruit. There is good pottery clay north of here. I remember our old places. When I pass the Musselshell I run my hand along those old grooves in the rock.

soon, industry and agriculture converged and the combustion engine sowed the dirtclod truck farms green with onion tops and chicory mowed the hay, fed the swine and mutton through belts and chutes cleared the blue oak and the chaparral chipping the wood for mulch back-filled the marshes replacing buckbean with dent corn removed the unsavory foliage of quag made the land into a production made it produce, pistoned and oiled and forged against its own nature and—with enterprise—built silos stockyards, warehouses, processing plants abattoirs, walk-in refrigerators, canneries, mills & centers of distribution it meant something—in spite of machinery— to say the country, to say apple season though what it meant was a kind of nose-thumbing and a kind of sweetness as when one says how quaint knowing that a refined listener understands the doubleness and the leveling of the land, enduing it in sameness, cured malaria as the standing water in low glades disappeared, as the muskegs drained typhoid and yellow fever decreased even milksickness abated thanks to the rise of the feeding pen cattle no longer grazing on white snakeroot vanquished:    the germs that bedeviled the rural areas the rural areas also vanquished:    made monochromatic and mechanized, made suburban now, the illnesses we contract are chronic illnesses:    dyspepsia, arthritis heart disease, kidney disease, high blood pressure, asthma chronic pain, allergies, anxiety, emphysema diabetes, cirrhosis, lyme disease, aids chronic fatigue syndrome, malnutrition, morbid obesity hypertension, cancers of the various kinds:    bladder bone eye lymph mouth ovary thyroid liver colon bileduct lung breast throat & sundry areas of the brain we are no better in accounting for death, and no worse:       we still die we carry our uninhabited mortal frames back to the land cover them in sod, we take the land to the brink of our dying:    it stands watch, dutifully, artfully enriched with sewer sludge and urea to green against eternity of green hocus-pocus:    here is a pig in a farrowing crate eating its own feces human in its ability to litter inside a cage to nest, to grow gravid and to throw its young I know I should be mindful of dangerous analogy: the pig is only the pig and we aren't merely the wide-open field flattened to a space resembling nothing you want me to tell you the marvels of invention?    that we persevere that the time of flourishing is at hand?    I should like to think it meanwhile, where have I put the notebook on which I was scribbling it began like: "the smell of droppings and that narrow country road . . ."

You that are dear, O you above the rest! Forgive him his evasive moods and cold; The absence that belied him oft of old, The war upon sad speech, the desperate jest, And pity’s wildest gush but half-confessed, Forgive him! Let your gentle memories hold Some written word once tender and once bold, Or service done shamefacedly at best, Whereby to judge him. All his days he spent, Like one who with an angel wrestled well, O’ermastering Love with show of light disdain; And whatso’er your spirits underwent, He, wounded for you, worked no miracle To make his heart’s allegiance wholly plain.