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“So,” she said, sipping tea from a Chinese oxblood cup, “did anything good happen because of your divorce?” “Well, my emotional palette is wider now. It includes colors like,” I paused... “like that.” I pointed to the cup. In southeast Winnemucca bypass Route 7 connects two segments of Route 2 I love you and is resigned as Route 2 although Route 7 is never erotically part of Route 2. “Quite a price to pay for a palette. But I heard Munch’s just went for $750,000 at Sotheby’s in London.” “I heard that too. I think he used a color like oxblood when he painted The Scream. I’m in better shape.”

Call me the bee buzzing in the museum. The younger sister fussing through a house still stiff with loss. The meddling goblin in the mausoleum. My dream: with three in the front seat, we drive under a bridge and halt. A huge gray bus blocks the whole road, including us, the only travelers who are left alive. It’s drizzling; the windshield wiper blades busily gesture, yet we’re nearly blind. You two seem not to mind blank windows, pulled-down shades. I mind. I want to get out and explore, to move around the deathly obstacle. “Don’t make a sound,” you say. (Who are you?) “Don’t go near that door.” Our mountain drive last month—that wasn’t dreamed. We three again. We ran a dog down. I alone looked back, alone let out a cry. I saw it lying in its blood and screamed. So tell me what these images portend. Am I a noisy bird of evil omen or just a person, apprehensive, human, moving ahead, kid sister into woman, stonewalled by death each time she rounds a bend?

I love roads: The goddesses that dwell Far along invisible Are my favorite gods. Roads go on While we forget, and are Forgotten like a star That shoots and is gone. On this earth 'tis sure We men have not made Anything that doth fade So soon, so long endure: The hill road wet with rain In the sun would not gleam Like a winding stream If we trod it not again. They are lonely While we sleep, lonelier For lack of the traveller Who is now a dream only. From dawn's twilight And all the clouds like sheep On the mountains of sleep They wind into the night. The next turn may reveal Heaven: upon the crest The close pine clump, at rest Ancl black, may Hell conceal. Often footsore, never Yet of the road I weary, Though long and steep and dreary, As it winds on for ever. Helen of the roads, The mountain ways of Wales And the Mabinogion tales, Is one of the true gods, Abiding in the trees, The threes and fours so wise, The larger companies, That by the roadside be, And beneath the rafter Else uninhabited Excepting by the dead; And it is her laughter At morn and night I hear When the thrush cock sings Bright irrelevant things, And when the chanticleer Calls back to their own night Troops that make loneliness With their light footsteps’ press, As Helen’s own are light. Now all roads lead to France And heavy is the tread Of the living; but the dead Returning lightly dance: Whatever the road bring To me or take from me, They keep me company With their pattering, Crowding the solitude Of the loops over the downs, Hushing the roar of towns and their brief multitude.

No one can draw fast enough To capture the cut Iris before its form falls From its former self. But when we passed a patch In the ditch, She told me to stop and she stepped Down, opening her clasp Knife. She spared one iris With an impressionistic Cocoon on its stem And cut the flower beside it. Once home She rendered in a careful hurry. She drew into the night as the iris died. I woke grafted to her In a vague, translucent hammock of dread.

Red ambulance flicker, curbstone, wheels, a gurney. Down the breezeway a baby, crying out among the gawk-mouthed heads. Knifed, sliced, the man bleeding through the gauze and onto his belly. It reminds me of the night when my mother and I slept in our LTD while the cops surrounded our apartment complex. I remember someone standing near the yellow tape saying 2A had robbed the market across the street, that the manager was shot twice— once in the arm, once in the shoulder—and that the gunmen were held up in their apartment, squealing threats from their window. When I think of it now, the danger, the eventual gunshots echoing off gray brick, I remember the panicked yells of inquiry, a girl crying her daddy was shot. But the knifed man, now under gauze and tubing, hadn’t robbed a store, and the baby, now on its mother’s hip, was quiet and drooling. When the cops searched 2A, they found money stuffed in the couches, in posts and pans, in the pages of storybooks, and as each officer, one by one, emerged from the apartment holding pistols and rifles, my mother told me to go back to sleep. I don’t remember her carrying me to my bed, only waking the next day when the girl who cried daddy, knocked at our door, asked if I could come out and play. Now when I look at her, that same girl, with a busted eye and lip, I wonder: if when she stabbed was she stabbing the boyfriend who beat her for burning supper or was it her dad for wrenching his arm around her neck, prodding a pistol at her head on that balmy night of echo and threat. For a second I think of asking her, “Whatever happened to your dad? Is he still in jail?” But I realize it may not even be the same girl, though I want it to be. For some reason I think if she kills that man, if he bleeds to death before the ambulance can make it to the hospital, somehow the brief triumph of metal over flesh would rid my memory of the deafening crack of gunpowder, and its long shout in the night.

I think there are poems greater and stranger than any I have known. I would like to find them. They are not on the greying paper of old books or chanted on obscure lips. They are not in the language of mermaids or the sharp-tongued adjectives of vanishing. They run like torn threads along paving stones. They are cracked as the skull of an old man. They stir in the mirror at fifty, at eighty. My ear keeps trying to hear them but the seafront is cold. The tide moves in. They migrate like crows at a cricket ground. They knock at the door when I am out. I have done with craft. How can I front ghosts with cleverness, the slick glide of paradox and rhyme that transforms prejudice to brittle gems of seeming wisdom? Though I bury all I own or hold close though my skin outlives the trees though the lines fall shattering the stone I cannot catch them. They have the lilting accent of a house I saw but never entered. They are the sounds a child hears – the water, the afternoon, the sky. I watch them now trickling through the open mirror. Sometimes, but almost never we touch what we desire.

Hard to picture, but these Goliath trees are taller still than Robeson. Outside vast plate windows in this lecture hall, I imagine him running down autumn fields, see his black thighs pumping that machinery across chalk-painted lines. He loved the woman in the lab, Eslanda, who saw order in swimming circles on inch-wide slides, who made photographs. I picture her standing in darkness, led by red light, bathing paper in broth, extracting images. Did this woman smile to watch white paper darken, to pull wet from the chemicals Paul Robeson’s totem face?

TO A FRIEND No! those days are gone away And their hours are old and gray, And their minutes buried all Under the down-trodden pall Of the leaves of many years: Many times have winter's shears, Frozen North, and chilling East, Sounded tempests to the feast Of the forest's whispering fleeces, Since men knew nor rent nor leases. No, the bugle sounds no more, And the twanging bow no more; Silent is the ivory shrill Past the heath and up the hill; There is no mid-forest laugh, Where lone Echo gives the half To some wight, amaz'd to hear Jesting, deep in forest drear. On the fairest time of June You may go, with sun or moon, Or the seven stars to light you, Or the polar ray to right you; But you never may behold Little John, or Robin bold; Never one, of all the clan, Thrumming on an empty can Some old hunting ditty, while He doth his green way beguile To fair hostess Merriment, Down beside the pasture Trent; For he left the merry tale Messenger for spicy ale. Gone, the merry morris din; Gone, the song of Gamelyn; Gone, the tough-belted outlaw Idling in the "grenè shawe"; All are gone away and past! And if Robin should be cast Sudden from his turfed grave, And if Marian should have Once again her forest days, She would weep, and he would craze: He would swear, for all his oaks, Fall'n beneath the dockyard strokes, Have rotted on the briny seas; She would weep that her wild bees Sang not to her—strange! that honey Can't be got without hard money! So it is: yet let us sing, Honour to the old bow-string! Honour to the bugle-horn! Honour to the woods unshorn! Honour to the Lincoln green! Honour to the archer keen! Honour to tight little John, And the horse he rode upon! Honour to bold Robin Hood, Sleeping in the underwood! Honour to maid Marian, And to all the Sherwood-clan! Though their days have hurried by Let us two a burden try.

12 foxes thumping; rechristened people. The Elizabethan Underworld as a precursor to the furnished. In the year of the calm fox, girls. The heavyweight watch just to see the mechanics of victory, that is, as above, a precursor to a tradition, changed into a cartoon. The furry, soon to be protected from insults, or humor at their expense, in law. The drawn fox, the heavy hippo. Ambush, false witness, poor translation. In the pressure going down, blood, bicep cuff. Correction, the neighbor is ill, a shame about the lion but there remain frequent accounts of premature burials and lack of perspective so unforgivable to transform.

The robin makes a laughing sound. It makes me stop and look around to see just what the robin sees— fresh new leaves on twigs of trees, a strong, high branch on which to rest, a safe dry ledge to hold its nest. The robin makes a laughing sound. I stop. I always look around.