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1 Shep. Tell me, thou gentle shepherd swain, Who’s yonder in the vale is set? 2 Shep. Oh, it is she, whose sweets do stain The lily, rose, the violet! 1 Shep. Why doth the sun against his kind, Fix his bright chariot in the skies? 2 Shep. Because the sun is stricken blind With looking on her heavenly eyes. 1 Shep. Why do thy flocks forbear their food, Which sometime were thy chief delight? 2 Shep. Because they need no other good That live in presence of her sight. 1 Shep. Why look these flowers so pale and ill, That once attired this goodly heath? 2 Shep. She hath robb’d Nature of her skill, And sweetens all things with her breath. 1 Shep. Why slide these brooks so slow away, Whose bubbling murmur pleased thine ear? 2 Shep. Oh, marvel not although they stay, When they her heavenly voice do hear! 1 Shep. From whence come all these shepherd swains, And lovely nymphs attired in green? 2 Shep. From gathering garlands on the plains, To crown our fair the shepherds’ queen. Both. The sun that lights this world below, Flocks, flowers, and brooks will witness bear: These nymphs and shepherds all do know, That it is she is only fair.

So you see why it could not have been a more humble moment. If there was any outward sign of regalia It might have been the twilight crowning of the day, just then, A perfect moment of dusk, but changing, as a wave does Even as you admire it. Because the southbound stop Mirrors the one northbound where we so often find ourselves At the beginning, southbound’s return holds the memory Of northbound’s setting-out, and the grassy median between With its undisturbed trees defines an elusive strip of the present Where no one lives. After twenty-eight years of the trip, It’s like two beakers of colored water — one green, one blue — Have poured themselves back and forth, because On one side we are tinted by remembering the other. But this aspect of the journey, at least, we know we will repeat. As dusk cohered that moment — aquas, pinks, violets — Just at that moment as I was returning to the car A woman came the other way, her two young daughters Holding her hands, and the gloaming sparkled around them So that I froze, as they were backlit, starry, They were the southbound reminder of who I had been beginning The trip. She didn’t look like me, but what I did recognize Was her clarity of purpose, in what Sharon Olds called the days of great usefulness, making life as nice As she could for them, always writing the best story, And also, beneath her skin, living with delight as quiet As the shoots anchoring grass beneath the earth. I walked back to my car. My husband sat in the driver’s seat, Our weekend’s luggage thrown in back. Tell me we really had those girls, I said, and that they held my hands like that. When I got home I pictured her helping them each into bed — I knew it was Later than she had hoped — then reading Each section of the paper’s terrible news, finally alone.

A Route of Evanescence, With a revolving Wheel – A Resonance of Emerald A Rush of Cochineal – And every Blossom on the Bush Adjusts it’s tumbled Head – The Mail from Tunis – probably, An easy Morning’s Ride –

They had asked me— a worthy friend and a loving brother— to “stop shouldering the world’s troubles,” —one meaning Africa, the other women— “learn to laugh and live!” I grow hot: thinking that laughing? That’s easy: it’s all we do instead of crying. And since there’s so much to cry about we laugh and laugh and laugh. But living? You could tell them that’s not easy. In a real life in a real world perhaps. But here where on a bare belly for less than a cedi, you gathered in single pieces and carried ten bushels of solid stones your four-month-old baby straddled on your back, slipped, fell broke your arm—? Laughing we do for fear of crying. Living we don’t discuss here.

They moved across the screen like a computer simulation. They moved across the screen like complex models & we learned to call this a nature show. Animals but set in gray shades for video capture with a lighter area for the face. Almost white they moved across the screen like a compressed meditation. But the song was never familiar. Because this was the only room this was the only room where we undressed—: that was the plot. They moved across the screen across the room but it was not happening to us. The image burning in. Coated with hair & then a lighter area for the face meaning exposed skin. We have learned to wear the architecture despite the sky’s numerous advances. All these things—the speed & the music & the room—happened but not enough. We undressed in the room we could not take off where I handcuffed you to the story. This is the work of the brain—itself a bloody spring or electric wire wrapped in ripe gray gauze— you like it. (2 lobes resembling the holy tablets delivered into the veldt’s dry speed—the Laws prefigured in the neutral network’s burning thicket.) They moved across the screen howling but the sound turned down. This happened over & over again—the blue light leaking into the room like sand. Burning into the brain in a finery of filamental fire. The Laws which do not unravel into noise & make a kind of story of kinked plot which can’t be straightened like a motel wire hanger looped around your wrists. The loop like a computer simulation—the thought of the thought— the image burning in now. We began to understand what they were—: the Thou& the shalt& the not

"I gave birth to a princess," her mother once told me, and I thought of my son pouring his Grape-Nuts in the garage so as not to wake her, of the moment her baby, seeing her now a separate entity, seemed not to breathe, refused to blink her sapphire eyes. I remembered again last night as she and I crossed a Florida street, the caution light running gold streamers over the dark sweep of her hair, when a young man coming toward us halted midway a moment, stunned, before moving on. So what is this Divine Right—less than bloodlines, or more? More than symmetry of face or a silver necklace nestled at a flawless throat, the nerve to send back bad food in restaurants, more than the big, loopy handwriting of the generous spirit? Call it bravery, that eager readiness in the eyes, the quality of the light shining there. Call it blessed assurance. Today, pony-tailed, she luxuriates in sun, opulent in a hot pink bikini. In deference the ocean leans away, a backdrop. I find myself bent, studying the shore for perfect shells to lay at her feet—cat's paw, prickly cockle, angel wing. Call it homage, more or less.

The shoemaker’s wife ran preschool With a fist made not so much of iron But wire bristles on a wooden brush. She made us recite and learn by rote. Our trick was to mouth words, sound As if we knew what we would one day Come to know, what would dawn On us as sure as a centipede knows What to do with its myriad legs. She made us settle our feet on the mud Floor of her daub and wattle hut and she Wielded a cane cut from wood that bit Into the palm of the hand and left a burn That resonated up the arm for an age After its smart swing and crisp contact. Worst of all was the shoe cupboard Where the old man stored his wire Brushes: a cold, dark, narrow place, Replete with brushes hung on nails Covering every square inch and said To come alive when a child was locked In with them so that they scrubbed Flesh off that child’s bones. She said We would end up there if we did not Concentrate, so we stilled our feet And spoke the words in the right order For colors in a rainbow until the very Thing took her place in front of us Arranged in cuneiform, polished, Brandishing a window to climb out.

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, A Jug of Wine, A Loaf of Bread—and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness— Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

It’s a simple resistance between the pull of springs and struggle of joints: two coiled silver muscles working in the lamp against blue washers and pivot plates, locking nut coolly swiveling loose with age. In the arm it’s done with blood: tissues plumped then promptly deflated. What else am I supposed to start with? Not the light bulb, to which this whole narrative yearns, loving the glass envelope sizzling with light, grasshopper antennae scrubbed with electricity until each filament’s turned to fire. No, I have to start with the arm first, the mint-blue lamp, then maybe light itself to specify what startles me about you, globe of hot fruit, Christ heart throbbing in the open chest; curtains of robe parted just enough to see what afterglow defines us, waits for us, rubbing its slow music out into the wet dark— Tonight, I’m counting out my seeds of waiting for you through a current that is silent and might always be, though it thrums in every gesture: like this white eye burning within the metal shade I carefully adjust over a plate of orange slices each evening.

They've flown south now and one Great Egret fishes the pond as broad-winged hawks begin their migrations, kenneling on thermal currents of wind off above yellowing mountains. Now, snakeweed blooms along the trail choking white and purple asters. A few bleeding leaves fall amidst wilting greenery. Poison Ivy turns red with warning. My eighty-three-year-old mother still argues with my father, twelve years dead. Their hatred reverberates in a back room of my head, rattling memories of my lonely childhood. Their loathing for each other colors all my days with pain. I loved him because he loved me best, but I look like her, my face and spirit tear at each other. Am I the child of hate? A wounded love sprouts like a weed from watery depths, uncultivated, flowers, white and purple, bloom, even in these days of dying leaves. Beyond winter, no one grieves.