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1. brett returns my mother to the wilderness I slipped them into my friend’s palm — the tiny crucifix, and dove, from off my mother’s pendant watch — and I asked her to walk them up through the brush toward timberline, and find a place to hurl them, for safekeeping. Now, she writes, “I walked up the canyon at dusk, warm, with a touch of fall blowing down the canyon, came to an outcrop, above a steep drop — far below, a seasonal creek, green willows. I stood on a boulder and held out my hand. I wished your mother all the love in the world, and I sent the talismans flying off the cliff. They were so small, and the wind was blowing, so I never saw or heard them land.” My mother is where I cannot find her, she is gone beyond recall, she lies in her sterling shapes light as the most weightless bone in the body, her stirrup bone, which was ground up and sown into the sea. I do not know what a soul is, I think of it as the smallest, the core, civil right. And she is wild now with it, she touches and is touched by no one knows — down, or droppings of a common nighthawk, root of bird’s foot fern, antenna of Hairstreak or Echo Azure, or stepped on by the huge translucent Jerusalem cricket. There was something deeply right about the physical elements — atoms, and cells, and marrow — of my mother’s body, when I was young, and now her delicate insignias receive the direct touch of the sun, and scatter it, unseen, all over her home. 2. cross and dove I had not wanted them, and I hadn’t known what to do with them, the minuscule symbols of my mother’s religion, I looked for a crack in the stone floor of the cathedral but could not find one. Then I thought of the wilderness near Desolation, and asked my friend to carry them up to a peak of granite, and let the wind take them. Since then, it has been as if my mother’s spirit matter has been returned into the great bank of matter, as her marrow had been sifted down into the ocean. It doesn’t matter, now, if I ever wanted to disassemble my mother. The sixteenth-of-an-inch- across cross, and the silver line drawing of a dove are cached, somewhere, that is nowhere to be found. Now I think of the nature of metal, and how long the soul-dolls of her trust will last in their spider-egg-sac of roots, needles, quartz, feathers, dust, snow, shed claw. Her belief she would have an eternal life was absolute, I think. It would not be good to think of my mother without her God — like a hermit howling in the moonscape of a desert. Once, when she was old — like an exquisite child playing a crone in the school play — we talked about heaven. She wasn’t sure exactly how, but she knew her father would be there, and her elder brother, and her second husband — maybe it was a heaven for four, the three men and her. It was so easy to make my mother happy in her last years, to tell her that I could just see her, as a kitten, in God’s lap, being petted. Her eyes sparkled with more beams than any other eyes I have seen. I have sent the tokens of her everlasting being into the high altitude. They will shine long after I can sing her — sing what I perceived through the distorted prisms of my vision. I don’t know if I saw my mother or did not see her. Day and night, her charms will gleam in the brush or stream, will reflect the mountain light in little pieces of unreadable language.

This misalliance follows the custom for female children To adhere to maternal practices While the atheist father presides over the prattle of the churchgoer with ironical commentary    from his arm-chair But by whichever religious route to brute reality our forebears speed us There is often a pair of idle adult accomplices in duplicity to impose upon their brood an assumed acceptance of the grace of God defamed as human megalomania seeding the Testament with inconcievable chastisement and of Christ who come with his light of toilless lilies To say “fear not   it is I” wanting us to be fearful He who bowed the ocean tossed with holy feet which supposedly dead are suspended over head neat- ly crossed in anguish wounded with red varnish From these slow-drying bloods of mysticism mysteriously the something-soul emerges miserably and instinct (of economy) in every race for reconstructing debris has planted an avenging face in outer darkness . . . The lonely peering eye of humanity looked into the Néant and turned away . . . Ova’s consciousness impulsive to commit itself to justice —to arise and walk its innate     straight way out of the accidence of circumstance— collects the levitate chattels of its will and makes for the magnetic horizon of liberty with the soul’s foreverlasting opposition to disintegration So this child of Exodus with her heritage of emigration often “sets out to seek her fortune” in her turn trusting to terms of literature dodging the breeders’ determination not to return “entities sent on consignment” by their maker Nature except in a condition of moral effacement Lest Paul and Peter never notice the creatures ever had had Fathers and Mothers They were disgraced in their duty should such spirits take an express passage through the family bodies to arrive at Eternity as lovely     as they originally promised So on whatever days she chose to “run away” the very street corners of Kilburn close in upon Ova to deliver her into the hands of her procreators Oracle of civilization ‘Thou shalt not live by dreams alone but by every discomfort that proceedeth out of legislation’

Seaside, and the fragment of one running— calves, ribs, green eyes into water. There he goes. Waves. Buoying up as into sky. And the seagulls fly, seeing it as relief, a story. Once they were there, two on a white blanket. The circumference of a shadow. Sunlight around that shadow. The relation of two: bathers, robed figures configured as one. And she touches him—tender—and it is done. (I've gone back to it. I've, I've— it's not where I am. I give it away again.) You're there. It's still in the sand. It's trying to chisel it in. How it comes forth: the story. Wanting it, carving it down to vision. Architecture, a coliseum of bent light, the beautiful scatter of broken stones. (And I can turn it into stones.) Love, love: a portico, a labyrinth. And his simple aquatics, legs and arms in the brackish, etched against white fish. The song, under there, of how he'll leave, and naturally, like all living things: animals, summer, daylight for the eves. And the buildings, all shadows and beings: block, angels, curves. With the love, memory of all loves. The pediments, these reliquaries. It's our landscape, artifact—it might hurt. (Run to, run away from it.)

Out through the fields and the woods And over the walls I have wended; I have climbed the hills of view And looked at the world, and descended; I have come by the highway home, And lo, it is ended. The leaves are all dead on the ground, Save those that the oak is keeping To ravel them one by one And let them go scraping and creeping Out over the crusted snow, When others are sleeping. And the dead leaves lie huddled and still, No longer blown hither and thither; The last lone aster is gone; The flowers of the witch hazel wither; The heart is still aching to seek, But the feet question ‘Whither?’ Ah, when to the heart of man Was it ever less than a treason To go with the drift of things, To yield with a grace to reason, And bow and accept the end Of a love or a season?

—Wuxi, China Walking out of the new cemetery, my father takes my hand, having just re-interred the remains of his own father and his father's two wives— his mother dead from T.B. by the time he was ten. He takes my hand and says,Now I can die in peace even if we didn’t get the actual bones.

It was a good idea, cutting away the vines and ivy, trimming back the chest-high thicket lazy years had let grow here. Though it wasn’t for lack of love for the trees, I’d like to point out. Years love trees in a way we can’t imagine. They just don’t use the fruit like us; they want instead the slant of sun through narrow branches, the buckshot of rain on these old cherries. And we, now that I think on it, want those things too, we just always and desperately want the sugar of the fruit, the best we’ll get from this irascible land: sweetness we can gather for years, new stains staining the stains on our hands.

After reading Ash Wednesday she looked once at the baked beans and fled. Luncheonless, poor girl, she observed a kind of poetic Lent— and I had thought I liked poetry better than she did. I do. But to me its most endearing quality is its unsuitableness; and, conversely, the chief wonder in heaven (whither I also am sometimes transported) is the kind of baggage I bring with me. Surely there is no more exquisite jointure in the anatomy of life than that at which poetry dovetails with the inevitable meal and Mrs. B. sits murmuring of avocados.

When I was young, exorcisms were quite common, a remedy not unlike ice baths. Plus, devils were shorter in those days just as people were. They hadn't eaten enough fruits or vegetables, and lacked essential vitamins and iron, grew thin and pale, fell easily into brooding depressions. They looked more like deer than sheep, and when they possessed you it was usually because they were fleeing from someone else and didn't realize where they were until it was too late. It was more a question of giving directions than driving them out. "Turn right at the hairdresser's, go straight until you get to the abandoned schoolhouse, then turn left. You should see the exit from there." "Thank you. I was completely lost." "You're welcome. Good luck." "You too, and thanks again."

Remember The days of bondage— And remembering— Do not stand still. Go to the highest hill And look down upon the town Where you are yet a slave. Look down upon any town in Carolina Or any town in Maine, for that matter, Or Africa, your homeland— And you will see what I mean for you to see— The white hand: The thieving hand. The white face: The lying face. The white power: The unscrupulous power That makes of you The hungry wretched thing you are today.

Remember me when I am gone away, Gone far away into the silent land; When you can no more hold me by the hand, Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay. Remember me when no more day by day You tell me of our future that you plann'd: Only remember me; you understand It will be late to counsel then or pray. Yet if you should forget me for a while And afterwards remember, do not grieve: For if the darkness and corruption leave A vestige of the thoughts that once I had, Better by far you should forget and smile Than that you should remember and be sad.