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The day I learned my wife was dying I told myself if anyone said, Well, she had a good life, I’d punch him in the nose. How much life represents a good life? Maybe a hundred years, which would give us nearly forty more to visit Oslo and take the train to Vladivostok, learn German to read Thomas Mann in the original. Even more baseball games, more days at the beach and the baking of more walnut cakes for family birthdays. How much time is enough time? How much is needed for all these unspent kisses, those slow walks along cobbled streets?

There is a man who circles the perimeter with a baby in his arms unmoving. Locusts burn with the silhouettes of saints at dusk. Saints are in the cloud. We are in a dry storm. The man extends his circles pulling the baby through the cactus scrub. Look at his melting trainers in the heat, they aren’t what he asked for. There are black leather skids on the dry stone wall. People in black cloaks run out of the corner of your eye. A pig turns on a spit. The prairie is a terrarium for the blaze but the edge is dry of fire. It is the height of one season, bushes burn. A burnt five-year-old without eyelids turns quick cartwheels through the heat wave under the big pale sky, black and blue.

Unreasonable lenses refract the sensitive rabbit holes, mole dwellings and snake climes where twist burrow and sneeze a native species into houses corresponding to hemispheric requests of flatness euphemistically, sentimentally termed prairie. On the earth exerting a willful pressure something like a stethoscope against the breast only permanent. Selective engineering architectural submissiveness and rendering of necessity in regard to height, eschewment of climate exposure, elemental understandings, constructive adjustments to vale and storm historical reconstruction of early earthworks and admiration for later even oriental modelling for a glimpse of baronial burdening we see it in the rafters and the staircase heaviness a surprise yet acting as ballast surely the heavens strike hard on prairies. Regard its hard-mouthed houses with their robust nipples the gossamer hair.

The night’s turned everything to junipers shagged & spooked with cerulean chalk-fruit, weird berries whiffing of Martians in rut. I forget this isn’t my universe sometimes. Sometimes I think I was falling most of my life to land here, a lone skirl in the immaculate hush. In my world I waltzed with my ink-self, my black shantung. Owls swallow vowels in stilled trees. It’s not sleeplessness, it’s fear of what the dark will do if I don’t keep a close eye on it. Blue minutes leak from the pricked stars’ prisms, seep into the earth unchecked. Just as well— I’ve hardly enough arms to gather them.

Would I miss the way a breeze dimples the butter-colored curtains on Sunday mornings, or nights gnashed by cicadas and thunderstorms? The leaning gossip, the half-alive ripple of sunflowers, sagging eternities of corn and sorghum, September preaching yellow, yellow in all directions, the windowsills swelling with Mason jars, the blue sky bluest borne through tinted glass above the milled grains? The dust, the heat, distrusted, the screen door slapping as the slat-backed porch swing sighs, the hatch of houseflies, the furlongs of freight trains, and how they sing this routine, so sure, so sure— the rote grace of every tempered life?

These are the gardens of the Desert, these The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful, For which the speech of England has no name— The Prairies. I behold them for the first, And my heart swells, while the dilated sight Takes in the encircling vastness. Lo! they stretch, In airy undulations, far away, As if the ocean, in his gentlest swell, Stood still, with all his rounded billows fixed, And motionless forever. —Motionless?— No—they are all unchained again. The clouds Sweep over with their shadows, and, beneath, The surface rolls and fluctuates to the eye; Dark hollows seem to glide along and chase The sunny ridges. Breezes of the South! Who toss the golden and the flame-like flowers, And pass the prairie-hawk that, poised on high, Flaps his broad wings, yet moves not—ye have played Among the palms of Mexico and vines Of Texas, and have crisped the limpid brooks That from the fountains of Sonora glide Into the calm Pacific—have ye fanned A nobler or a lovelier scene than this? Man hath no power in all this glorious work: The hand that built the firmament hath heaved And smoothed these verdant swells, and sown their slopes With herbage, planted them with island groves, And hedged them round with forests. Fitting floor For this magnificent temple of the sky— With flowers whose glory and whose multitude Rival the constellations! The great heavens Seem to stoop down upon the scene in love,— A nearer vault, and of a tenderer blue, Than that which bends above our eastern hills. As o’er the verdant waste I guide my steed, Among the high rank grass that sweeps his sides The hollow beating of his footsteps seems A sacrilegious sound. I think of those Upon whose rest he tramples. Are they here— The dead of other days?—and did the dust Of these fair solitudes once stir with life And burn with passion? Let the mighty mounds That overlook the rivers, or that rise In the dim forest crowded with old oaks, Answer. A race, that long has passed away, Built them;—a disciplined and populous race Heaped, with long toil, the earth, while yet the Greek Was hewing the Pentelicus to forms Of symmetry, and rearing on its rock The glittering Parthenon. These ample fields Nourished their harvest, here their herds were fed, When haply by their stalls the bison lowed, And bowed his maned shoulder to the yoke. All day this desert murmured with their toils, Till twilight blushed, and lovers walked, and wooed In a forgotten language, and old tunes, From instruments of unremembered form, Gave the soft winds a voice. The red man came— The roaming hunter tribes, warlike and fierce, And the mound-builders vanished from the earth. The solitude of centuries untold Has settled where they dwelt. The prairie-wolf Hunts in their meadows, and his fresh-dug den Yawns by my path. The gopher mines the ground Where stood their swarming cities. All is gone; All—save the piles of earth that hold their bones, The platforms where they worshipped unknown gods, The barriers which they builded from the soil To keep the foe at bay—till o’er the walls The wild beleaguerers broke, and, one by one, The strongholds of the plain were forced, and heaped With corpses. The brown vultures of the wood Flocked to those vast uncovered sepulchres, And sat unscared and silent at their feast. Haply some solitary fugitive, Lurking in marsh and forest, till the sense Of desolation and of fear became Bitterer than death, yielded himself to die. Man’s better nature triumphed then. Kind words Welcomed and soothed him; the rude conquerors Seated the captive with their chiefs; he chose A bride among their maidens, and at length Seemed to forget—yet ne’er forgot—the wife Of his first love, and her sweet little ones, Butchered, amid their shrieks, with all his race. Thus change the forms of being. Thus arise Races of living things, glorious in strength, And perish, as the quickening breath of God Fills them, or is withdrawn. The red man, too, Has left the blooming wilds he ranged so long, And, nearer to the Rocky Mountains, sought A wilder hunting-ground. The beaver builds No longer by these streams, but far away, On waters whose blue surface ne’er gave back The white man’s face—among Missouri’s springs, And pools whose issues swell the Oregon— He rears his little Venice. In these plains The bison feeds no more. Twice twenty leagues Beyond remotest smoke of hunter’s camp, Roams the majestic brute, in herds that shake The earth with thundering steps—yet here I meet His ancient footprints stamped beside the pool. Still this great solitude is quick with life. Myriads of insects, gaudy as the flowers They flutter over, gentle quadrupeds, And birds, that scarce have learned the fear of man, Are here, and sliding reptiles of the ground, Startlingly beautiful. The graceful deer Bounds to the wood at my approach. The bee, A more adventurous colonist than man, With whom he came across the eastern deep, Fills the savannas with his murmurings, And hides his sweets, as in the golden age, Within the hollow oak. I listen long To his domestic hum, and think I hear The sound of that advancing multitude Which soon shall fill these deserts. From the ground Comes up the laugh of children, the soft voice Of maidens, and the sweet and solemn hymn Of Sabbath worshippers. The low of herds Blends with the rustling of the heavy grain Over the dark brown furrows. All at once A fresher winds sweeps by, and breaks my dream, And I am in the wilderness alone.

Prais’d be Diana’s fair and harmless light; Prais’d be the dews wherewith she moists the ground; Prais’d be her beams, the glory of the night; Prais’d be her power by which all powers abound. Prais’d be her nymphs with whom she decks the woods, Prais’d be her knights in whom true honour lives; Prais’d be that force by which she moves the floods; Let that Diana shine which all these gives. In heaven queen she is among the spheres; In aye she mistress-like makes all things pure; Eternity in her oft change she bears; She beauty is; by her the fair endure. Time wears her not: she doth his chariot guide; Mortality below her orb is plac’d; By her the virtue of the stars down slide; In her is virtue’s perfect image cast. A knowledge pure it is her worth to know: With Circes let them dwell that think not so.

for Yehuda Amichai 1. Snow clouds shadow the bay, on the ice the odd fallen gull. I try to keep my friend from dying by remembering his childhood of praise to God, who needs us all. Würzburg: the grownups are inside saying prayers for the dead, the children are sent out to play—their laughter more sacred than prayer. After dark his father blesses and kisses him Güttenacht. He wakes to go to school with children who stayed behind and were murdered before promotion. Now his wife lies beside him. He may die with her head on his pillow. He sings in his sleep: “Her breasts are white sheep that appear on the mountain, her belly is like a heap of wheat set about with lilies.” Awake, he says, as if telling me a secret: “When metaphor and reality come together, death occurs.” His life is a light, fresh snow blowing across the bay. 2. A year later in Jerusalem, he carries a fallen soldier on his back, himself. The text for the day begins: “He slew a lion in the pit in a time of snow” Seconds, minutes, hours are flesh, he tells me he is being cut to pieces— if they had not made him turn in his rifle … He sees I can not bear more of that. Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of hands in sleep and we drink to life. Chilled in desert heat, what keeps him alive: soldiers—his wife, his son and daughter, perhaps the ashes of a girl he loved in childhood. Outside their window a Sun Bird and Dead Sea Sparrow fly from everlasting to everlasting. Later he covers my head with his hands, blessing me, later unable to walk alone he holds onto my hand with so much strength he comforts me.

When the trees were guilty, hugged up to history & locked in a cross-brace with Whitman's Louisiana live oak, you went into that mossy weather. Did you witness the shotguns at Angola riding on horseback through the tall sway of sugarcane, the glint of blue steel in the bloodred strawberry fields? Silence was backed up in the cypress, but you could hear the birds of woe singing praise where the almost broken- through sorrow rose from the deep woods & walked out into moonshine as the brave ones. You went among those who had half a voice, whose ancestors mastered quicksand by disappearing. Maybe our paths crossed ghosts hogtied in the wounded night, but it is only now I say this: Galway, thanks for going down into our fierce hush at the crossroads to look fear in the eye.

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