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I felt both pleasure and a shiver as we undressed on the slippery bank and then plunged into the wild river. I waded in; she entered as a diver. Watching her pale flanks slice the dark I felt both pleasure and a shiver. Was this a source of the lake we sought, giver of itself to that vast, blue expanse? We’d learn by plunging into the wild river and letting the current take us wherever it willed. I had that yielding to thank for how I felt both pleasure and a shiver. But what she felt and saw I’ll never know: separate bodies taking the same risk by plunging together into the wild river. Later, past the rapids, we paused to consider if chance or destiny had brought us here; whether it was more than pleasure and a shiver we’d found by plunging into the wild river.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

The dog stops barking after Robinson has gone. His act is over. The world is a gray world, Not without violence, and he kicks under the grand piano, The nightmare chase well under way. The mirror from Mexico, stuck to the wall, Reflects nothing at all. The glass is black. Robinson alone provides the image Robinsonian. Which is all of the room—walls, curtains, Shelves, bed, the tinted photograph of Robinson’s first wife, Rugs, vases, panatellas in a humidor. They would fill the room if Robinson came in. The pages in the books are blank, The books that Robinson has read. That is his favorite chair, Or where the chair would be if Robinson were here. All day the phone rings. It could be Robinson Calling. It never rings when he is here. Outside, white buildings yellow in the sun. Outside, the birds circle continuously Where trees are actual and take no holiday.

The wind was high—it gave to your hair a lift in equal parts gradual, steep, disarming— I love a storm, and said so; by I have always loved better the wreckage after, I did not mean instead of, but a preference. To the air, an edge anyone would call arctic—isn't that why we left it nameless? To your face, a look I'd admired before in the bodies of those who seem not so much indifferent as made ignorant, or stunned as if by sudden luck, or else repentant and in payment, somehow, for what all price falls like an irrelevance, a stole, an expensive sail in a calm away from. Sex as a space available where neither loss nor regret figures—imagine that. Or not having, finally, to take anything away—in the form of photographs of the mostly ice that the harbor's water, the shore past that, the street after had become; or as words like those that came to me:green, kind of, lit almost, by as if from within in places, a spill but an arrested one, less force than the idea of it, block and edge like the chance for pattern, but spent now or only, from the very start, false —false and singing. The wind was high; it exaggerated what you were already, a man returning toward shelter he can't see yet, but believes just ahead exists, the sort of man for whom to doubt at all is treason. By not unfaithful, I understood I could mean both things: I'd do nothing I'd promised not to— Also, there is nothing I'll forget.

Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode, The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road. A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire, And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire; A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head. I knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire, And for to fight the Frenchman I did not much desire; But I did bash their baggonets because they came arrayed To straighten out the crooked road an English drunkard made, Where you and I went down the lane with ale-mugs in our hands, The night we went to Glastonbury by way of Goodwin Sands. His sins they were forgiven him; or why do flowers run Behind him; and the hedges all strengthening in the sun? The wild thing went from left to right and knew not which was which, But the wild rose was above him when they found him in the ditch. God pardon us, nor harden us; we did not see so clear The night we went to Bannockburn by way of Brighton Pier. My friends, we will not go again or ape an ancient rage, Or stretch the folly of our youth to be the shame of age, But walk with clearer eyes and ears this path that wandereth, And see undrugged in evening light the decent inn of death; For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen, Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.

I saw a child set down her binder like a wall through the candy bin at the Corner Luncheonette so she could scoop out gum while she spoke to the clerk— and from that moment was in love:Oh theft. College was supposed to straighten me like a bent tree strangled by a wire, but being done with sweetness I could not resist the lure of meat. How the red muscle gleamed in its shiny wrap, a wedge that had once been the thigh or the loin of a slow brute’s body, sugar-dirt and clotted grass to be snatched in an instant and zipped into the crone-y-est of pocketbooks. Radiance housed in rawhide again, as when it was living. A steak can be stuck in your jeans when you’re skinny, a rump roast is right for a puffy down coat, small chops will fit under a thin peasant blouse where it falls off the breasts like a woodland rive with a limestone amphitheater underneath. Ancient city, ancient sublet, ancient wooden fire escape— with my other bandits I learned to say how-de-do in French. We were yanking on the cord that would start the motor of our lives though we did not have the choke adjusted yet. Sometimes it seemed I floated in the dregs like a tea bag bloating up with facts. Until a girl ran in the door, panting hard, face red, slab thudding from her snowflake-damasked waist onto the table, and we stood around it gawking at the way it seemed to breathe.

Now that I’m fifty, let me take my showers at night, no light, eyes closed. And let me swim in cover-ups. My skin’s tattooed with hours and days and decades, head to foot, and slim is just a faded photograph. It’s strange how people look away who once would look. I didn’t know I’d undergo this change and be the unseen cover of a book whose plot, though swift, just keeps on getting thicker. One reaches for the pleasures of the mind and heart to counteract the loss of quicker knowledge. One feels old urgencies unwind, although I still pluck chin hairs with a tweezer, in case I might attract another geezer.

Then I realized I hadn’t secured the boat. Then I realized my friend had lied to me. Then I realized my dog was gone no matter how much I called in the rain. All was change. Then I realized I was surrounded by aliens disguised as orthodontists having a convention at the hotel breakfast bar. Then I could see into the life of things, that systems seek only to reproduce the conditions of their own reproduction. If I had to pick between shadows and essences, I’d pick shadows. They’re better dancers. They always sing their telegrams. Their old gods do not die. Then I realized the very futility was salvation in this greeny entanglement of  breaths. Yeah, as if. Then I realized even when you catch the mechanism, the trick still works. Then I came to in Texas and realized rockabilly would never go away. Then I realized I’d been drugged. We were all chasing nothing which left no choice but to intensify the chase. I came to handcuffed and gagged. I came to intubated and packed in some kind of foam. This too is how ash moves through water. And all this time the side doors unlocked. Then I realized repetition could be an ending. Then I realized repetition could be an ending.

At four o’clock in the gun-metal blue dark we hear the first crow of the first cock just below the gun-metal blue window and immediately there is an echo off in the distance, then one from the backyard fence, then one, with horrible insistence, grates like a wet match from the broccoli patch, flares, and all over town begins to catch. Cries galore come from the water-closet door, from the dropping-plastered henhouse floor, where in the blue blur their rustling wives admire, the roosters brace their cruel feet and glare with stupid eyes while from their beaks there rise the uncontrolled, traditional cries. Deep from protruding chests in green-gold medals dressed, planned to command and terrorize the rest, the many wives who lead hens’ lives of being courted and despised; deep from raw throats a senseless order floats all over town. A rooster gloats over our beds from rusty iron sheds and fences made from old bedsteads, over our churches where the tin rooster perches, over our little wooden northern houses, making sallies from all the muddy alleys, marking out maps like Rand McNally’s: glass-headed pins, oil-golds and copper greens, anthracite blues, alizarins, each one an active displacement in perspective; each screaming, “This is where I live!” Each screaming “Get up! Stop dreaming!” Roosters, what are you projecting? You, whom the Greeks elected to shoot at on a post, who struggled when sacrificed, you whom they labeled “Very combative ...” what right have you to give commands and tell us how to live, cry “Here!” and “Here!” and wake us here where are unwanted love, conceit and war? The crown of red set on your little head is charged with all your fighting blood. Yes, that excrescence makes a most virile presence, plus all that vulgar beauty of iridescence. Now in mid-air by twos they fight each other. Down comes a first flame-feather, and one is flying, with raging heroism defying even the sensation of dying. And one has fallen, but still above the town his torn-out, bloodied feathers drift down; and what he sung no matter. He is flung on the gray ash-heap, lies in dung with his dead wives with open, bloody eyes, while those metallic feathers oxidize. St. Peter’s sin was worse than that of Magdalen whose sin was of the flesh alone; of spirit, Peter’s, falling, beneath the flares, among the “servants and officers.” Old holy sculpture could set it all together in one small scene, past and future: Christ stands amazed, Peter, two fingers raised to surprised lips, both as if dazed. But in between a little cock is seen carved on a dim column in the travertine, explained by gallus canit; flet Petrus underneath it. There is inescapable hope, the pivot; yes, and there Peter’s tears run down our chanticleer’s sides and gem his spurs. Tear-encrusted thick as a medieval relic he waits. Poor Peter, heart-sick, still cannot guess those cock-a-doodles yet might bless, his dreadful rooster come to mean forgiveness, a new weathervane on basilica and barn, and that outside the Lateran there would always be a bronze cock on a porphyry pillar so the people and the Pope might see that even the Prince of the Apostles long since had been forgiven, and to convince all the assembly that “Deny deny deny” is not all the roosters cry. In the morning a low light is floating in the backyard, and gilding from underneath the broccoli, leaf by leaf; how could the night have come to grief? gilding the tiny floating swallow’s belly and lines of pink cloud in the sky, the day’s preamble like wandering lines in marble. The cocks are now almost inaudible. The sun climbs in, following “to see the end,” faithful as enemy, or friend.

Mendota, Illinois It's easy to believe you can go back Whenever you desire, jump in the car And drive, arrive at dusk—the hour You recall most vividly—and walk Among the buildings spread across the farm, Out toward the pastures, woods, and fields. There is music in the leaves, in the dense Columns of green corn. The wind lays down The tune. You can play it, too, simply By walking with eyes closed, arms Stretched out, lightly striking the stalks. Who wouldn't desire, like the children Lost in so many similar fields, To sit down on the turned earth and drift Away on the rhythms of his own First possible death? Rescuing Voices come closer, veer off. Flashlight beams Strobe over your head. You do not care. Each building you remember—hen house, Sheep shed, corn crib, barn—caved in upon itself, The walls and roofs collapsing with a final Percussive clap, since you last walked those fields. No one you will ever know works that land now. It is as green as Eden. Life rises in the roots, in the leaves.