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Some may have blamed you that you took away The verses that could move them on the day When, the ears being deafened, the sight of the eyes blind With lightning, you went from me, and I could find Nothing to make a song about but kings, Helmets, and swords, and half-forgotten things That were like memories of you—but now We'll out, for the world lives as long ago; And while we're in our laughing, weeping fit, Hurl helmets, crowns, and swords into the pit. But, dear, cling close to me; since you were gone, My barren thoughts have chilled me to the bone.

Record no oiled tongue, diary— Note my lantern bruises the low Clouds with light the evening We talked. Almonds in a bowl; She ate none. I did Not bid her remove her dark Gloves as sometime before she had done. Her dress not so clean as before. A last brand not rescued to flame— No billow but breath, and breath Too short a line to twine Our hands in marriage: I left A last time. Her in widow’s silk— My lantern clothed in morning Dawns on this road so late tonight The white birches I believe, I believe I could have loved Her, her white wrists White the birch trees by lantern bared, Black gloves pulled off at night Become the night . . . . Do you hear? That pulse? The deer wander Between her hands, glean fallen Seed at hand, bed down in fallen Needles and grass. Those green discs Afloat in the night are their eyes Caught in lantern light. Can it be So many wake the forest glows With sight? See and am seen. A pulse At the stump is breath and rest And breath again. Infinite In store the game of this land. Note the plumage of the turkey. Note the thick meat at breast. Sap: syrup. Pine: plank. A copse Of wood is cord for furnace. A copse Is cottage, too. The owl in the hollow Tree screeches because I am too close To truth. Note the almond Tree overmuch with fruit. The almond Pressed is oil sweet. The almond bit Is a smoky meat that leaves—note it: The tongue bathed in oil.

The first person in recorded history struck by a comet slept on her couch across the road from the Comet Drive-In and the comet found her roof, her sadness, her knee, and woke her. Everything that hurts hurt before, she said. Showing at the drive-in, a documentary on tightrope-walking: a young man frustrated that his dream, the World Trade Center, was not yet built so he practiced for years in a meadow crossing intended sky, intent like a pillowcase sweetening him, no harm . . . Here let the towers go, let them write his crossing, cursive, back and forth his name steadying our tongues . . . Famous, overcoat floating down without him, the idea that we stand where we mean to stand, 1974, a distraction from my parents’ morning commute. At 59th Street they split. The poems I was writing were no longer poems of their divorce, my father’s sweeping gestures or his pain, the old Volkswagen and garden hose—all of that had washed from my poems and instead an imaginary family arrived in borrowed gardens, their son stillborn—even as I grew heavy with my own son I wrote poem after poem holding this imagined horror close.

Coming together it is easier to work after our bodies meet paper and pen neither care nor profit whether we write or not but as your body moves under my hands charged and waiting we cut the leash you create me against your thighs hilly with images moving through our word countries my body writes into your flesh the poem you make of me. Touching you I catch midnight as moon fires set in my throat I love you flesh into blossom I made you and take you made into me.

We were very tired, we were very merry— We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry. It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable— But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table, We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon; And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon. We were very tired, we were very merry— We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry; And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear, From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere; And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold, And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold. We were very tired, we were very merry, We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry. We hailed, “Good morrow, mother!” to a shawl-covered head, And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read; And she wept, “God bless you!” for the apples and pears, And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.

Do not look for illumination. Mostly there is the twitch that precedes gesture, the button’s resistance as you try to slide it into the too-small aperture slashed in a finger-width of cloth. And yes, I know it is hard to disregard how tiny and even the stitches are, how they ring the space that had to be opened first to make way for the fastening. Don’t feel betrayed if there is only silence in the trees, months of near continuous rain. Thoughts sometimes rush to collect at the bottom of the drain pipe. Other times they vaporize in the heat, fall for the voices warbling discontent. When it rains, I am oddly comforted. The rain soaks through, asks me to give up a little of myself. Asks me not to be so hard.

The voice, because of its austerity, will often cause dust to rise. The voice, because of its austerity, will sometimes attempt the representation of dust. Someone will say, I can’t breathe—as if choking on dust. The voice ages with the body. It will say, I was shaped by light escaping from a keyhole. Or, I am the shape of that light. It will say, For the body to breathe, a layer must be peeled away. It will say, What follows is a picture of how things are for me now. It will say, The rose is red, twice two is four—as if another were present. The dust rises in spirals. It will say, The distance from Cairo to anywhere is not that great. As if one had altered the adjustment of a microscope. Or examined its working parts. Possibly an instrument covered with dust and forgotten on a shelf. Beside a hatbox and a pair of weathered boots. The voice will expand to fill a given space. As if to say, This space is not immeasurable. This space is not immeasurable. When held before your eyes. And which voice is it says (or claims to say), Last night I dreamt of walls and courses of brick, last night I dreamt of limbs. As you dream—always unwillingly—of a writing not visible and voices muffled by walls. As if the question: lovers, prisoners, visitors. The voice, as an act of discipline or play, will imitate other voices. This is what I am doing now. This is what I’m doing now. The clock behind my back, its Fusée mechanism. Voice one recognizes from years before. Beneath water, hidden by a spark. Here at the heart of winter, or let’s say spring. Voice with a history before its eyes. With a blue dot before its eyes. History of dust before its eyes. It will say, as if remembering, The letter S stands for a slow match burning. On the table before me. No numbers on this watch. And I live in a red house that once was brown. A paper house, sort of falling down. Such is the history of this house. It looks like this. Looks just like this. We think to say in some language.

In memory of Dorothy Burns i. troppo allegro Remember seasons? Seem to recall those once were easier. Reasonably sequenced, regal of tempo and temper, Reliable change flipped heads-over-tails each quarter, Recovering the hemisphere with four fine suits, knock-off designer. Recently, someone shuffled, cut the deck into disorder: Relapse, tic, hiccup, snap, weeks reissued like hipster Rediscoveries    ...    join the club! No closer Reading required to diagnose this crazy weather: Record highs, flourishing lows. April even crueler Recapitulated each fortnight. Spring hailing like a howitzer. Reek of summer tickling autumn’s automatic sprinkler. Redder-neck sunbathers burnt by November’s toaster. A warbler Retweeting Keats, well into winter. A death for Easter. ii. funeral: march Remember: misremembering that fishy Faulkner Remark,the dead are never passed. Ask: will this chapter Retain familiar cycles? Lather, rinse, repeat. Swelter, Reins, release. Welter, ruins, reseed. Seconds per Revolution: top-heavy spinning, simian moods over- Reaching from swing to swing. For reveler, Read revelator: elevator going upper, downer, Results of a heart dialed three degrees warmer. Remedial Ecclesiastes: a time for X, and a-whole-nother Reciprocal time for X’s refrain, a dinner Reservation for six — make that five — and an altogether Regrettable time for the long and short divisions of disaster. Remainder:only a matter of time. No more time to matter. iii. scherzo: presto chango “Remember, the world’s stage was not set for your metaphor, Christopher Rex, tragicomic motherfucker: Recognize, why don’t you, your relish for the realish, for hinter-gatherer Relationships between the dank diamond mine of  your inner Resources and the Real World (remember that?), our fixer-upper Residence imperiled enough without your cheesier Regrets stinking up the joint — shoulda, coulda, woulda, Gouda. Character Reassessment sure is fun, but don’t run down the theater. Regards, Responsive Reader / Longtime Listener / Other: _______ ” (Re: that critique, one childhood scene I’ll offer: Relatives teasingly wondered why my “gatekeeper,” Regulator of mind and mouth, would wander Regularly away from his post. Still no answer.) iv. finale: re-fugue Remember with me (it’s not all mine to remember), Remind me, under this never-better weather, whether, if ever, “Real time” and its dead-ahead march to an unlucky number Really feel right as a royal flush, since time seems so much fairer Rewound — recoiling counterclockwise, the seasons’ order Restoring, entropy decreasing, days un creasing — now faster, Regress infinitely, till the Spaide family tree, our off-kilter Calder, Recollects its fallen leaves — relief, pains, laughter, Reverse it,past, even, it’s not— trust I tamper Respectfully, gatekeeper, but why not even further, Reductio ad absurdum, back to the very scene I enter Rehearsal, ninety-nine degrees, summer-hot, set to simmer, Ready or not, on the twenty-first day of December?

How did the valentines age so fast? Most of the names are forgotten. Billy, Billy, Billy, Jill I think strangers sent them out like advertising hoping I'd surrender. But Jill, Jill, Jill and Billy Bill, shared memories aren't easily kept. Secrets wash out of the ocean blank all over. I am sitting on a beach chair somewhere in the middle of the century, pretending I remember a garden of broken banjos and butterflies, old movies. Valentines from Valentino, Notes from Norma. Worms and spiders thrown at waves. Box of my names, shut up.

The labeled bins on the California hillside catch the glint and quarter-glint of passing cars. Families pull up with their interesting trash and start unloading: Here, sweetheart, this goes over in Newspaper. The bundle hits with a thud. Diet soda cans spin almost noiselessly down, and the sun- permitting bottles from a day’s pleasure are tossed into Mixed Glass by the children who like to hear the smash, unknowable, chaotic, as matter greets itself and starts to change. What mystery is inside a thing! If we peered into the bin, we could see it waiting there, could believe everything is alive and specific and personal, could tell by the tilt of one bottle against the next that it’s difficult to be singular, to have identity, to keep an outline safe in the terrors of space. Even the child knows this. Bye, bottle! she shouts, tossing it in; and the bottle lies there in the two o’clock position, temporarily itself, before being swept into the destiny of mixture. . . And what if some don’t want to. What if some items in the piles of paper, the orange and blue envelopes from a magazine sweepstakes, numbers pressing through the cloudy windows with our names, some among those pale sheets curled with moisture, would rather stay as they are. It’s spring; we’ve thrown away mistakes— tax forms, recipes, tennis-ball-sized drafts of poems—that which was blank shall be made blank again—but what if that failed letter wants to be a failure, not go back to pulp, and thought .. . Or across the parking lot, where light insists on changing the dull cans, a few cans don’t want to be changed, though they should want to, shouldn’t they, should want to be changed by light, light which is called sweet reason, honeyed, spectra, magnitude, light that goes from the parking lot looking helpless though it is matter that has been betrayed. . . All afternoon the bins are carried off by those who know about where things should go, who are used to the clatter the cans make, pouring out; and the families, who believed change would heal them are pulling away in their vans, slightly embarrassed by that which refused . . . The bins fill again with hard substances, the hills bear down with their fugitive gold, the pampas grass bending low to protect what was briefly certain and alive with hope.