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A network of branches crazes the sky like cracks in the glaze of a Chinese cup. Dawn, a poised dropper. History poised also. A man on the steet corner waves his sign: Germany 1934. So cold, elbows of trees creak when something flaps by— the craw craw craw— Would I be able to recognize places in Latvia by my father's absence— farmyard littered with dented milk cans, mattresses leaking straw, table set for a meal that never happened? Every morning I look out a window at a scene he wouldn't recognize, blue tide of sunrise spreading west obliterating tracks of satellites, gray tide of inlet shoring up the wrack-line. My father steps through his window. He's put on his SS uniform. He stands on a dirt road, staring toward the vanishing point where the past is rectified. The first thing I heard this morning—three harsh cries—was the black crow veering past his head.History, welcome back, it said. I watch to see what he does next. —12.8.2012

No one wants another paean to a rosy dawn, so it's good this one's bluish, baby-shade at the horizon, bleeding up into midnight like a botched dye job. And having enough of the old world—larks, crakes, nightingales, storks—this space is populated by one fly crabbing across a notebook page. He seems, like me, honey-slowed by winter's shortest days, clumsy and isolated. My love bought a black-and-white photo once, close-up of a birch trunk, fly crawling up the curled paper bark, marring the purity of the image. You don't notice the fly until you do, and then you can't stop. No one wants a fly in art, but there it is, elegantly framed. And we're over the epic, so here, first thing this morning, a pedestrian quarrel. Years ago, I flew across a mountain range in black coat and black boots to secretly meet him in the city. How many dawns did it take to arrive at this particular? At 9:30 the sky flares not like flame—a paper fan you buy in Chinatown for a dollar. A sudden breeze sways the Tibetan flags strung along the eaves. I never noticed how thin the fabric. You can see right through the printed prayers to the thermometer— five degrees—and beyond, birches leaning all to windward. Sun bleaches out the last mysterious. Now we pray to the real. —11.29.2012

for Asja In predawn dark, a rat falling from a rafter is a dollop, wind a whir, and suddenly I'm remembering my mother teaching me to bake her hot water sponge cake. How we whipped the egg whites with the electric mixer until stiff peaks formed. How she warned me not to allow a single thread of yolk to taint the white, or the cake would fail. To fold white into yolk-sugar-flour was slow, patient. She let me carve a wedge with the rubber spatula, drop it to the batter's surface, then lift from the bowl's bottom up and over the dollop, turning it in. Warned me never to beat or mix or even stir—the cake would fall. Once, dinking around, I stuck a wooden spoon into the still-whirring beaters, bent the metal, splintered the spoon into the batter. Once I cut her grandmother's precious lace for a doll's clothes, and she cried, the savaged pieces draped across her wrists. So many times I tried to shove my peasant feet into her dainty pumps, hand into her evening gloves. One spoon at a time, that first thin layer drawn across the airy white forming a little hill. Folding only just enough. The batter growing lighter by increments. It was mostly space we folded in, taming down the cloy. It was never so good as then, licked off the finer, the cake itself, to me, disappointing, layers smeared with homemade jam, topped with a stiff merengue. Never so good as then, her instructing, trying to domesticate my impertinence, teach me a little grace, me resisting, the sweet on my tongue dissolving so easily in that state of matter. Never so good as straight from the Pyrex bowl. Never so gentle as the slide of batter into an angel food pan. The rest up to her, what she created from the baked version, brown on top and bottom. Here I am, decades later sitting uner the halogen of a full moon, and that moment, which was many folded into one, is so pure and specific, the sugar sharp on my tongue, the spatula pushing as if through an undertow. My mother taught me to fold. Never so sweet as now. We were incorporating lightness into a deep bowl. As some bird—probably an owl out hunting—chacks its was across the lawn, sounding like a key chain, and now the garden sprinkler comes on, so I know it's 6:00 a.m. There's the first hint of dawn slow-dissolving one more night. This is a fifty- year-old love. It's heavy, so I fold in moonlight, the sound of water spattered on leaves. Dim stars, bright moon— our lives. The cake imperfect, but finished. —12.17.2013

Bless something small but infinite and quiet. There are senses make an object in their simple feeling for one. Originally appeared in the February 1966 issue of Poetry magazine.

Every half century, the synchronous flowering of bamboo causes famine in parts of India. May we blossom every fifty years without afflicting the people. May our seedpods nourish rodents who roam our groves without rebuking lands with famine. May sweet potatoes and rice save us. May ginger and turmeric flourish to the bitter distaste of rats while tresses of bamboo flowers changeling white wasps load the groves with seed in rare perennial synchrony. May our sisters flower en masse hundreds of square miles apart in the pale night. May our shoots pray a silent vision of healing, our rhizome-laden memories: Yes, we share our hunger only once on this earth, my love. Let us bless our fruit and multiply.

On a damp June Saturday, as colorless As cellar stone, the working classes from Dun Laoghaire spread their picnic blankets, tins, And soda bread along the coastal cliffs. Two hundred feet below, the ocean knocks Debris and timber on the rock, and near The precipice, I watch a father swing His daughter out, as though to loose her on That long descent, past rookeries of gulls As intricate as mosques, through casual Alliances of mist and fog, and toward The cowlicked Irish Sea, as fathomless And bitter as their history. With each Return, the young girl cries out her delight, Then girds once more against the peril there: As though she knows no child is desired wholly; That there is not a mother, dreading birth, Who does not sometime curse her recklessness, Nor father, yoked to press or forklift truck, Who has not brooded on the chance of some Untimely accident. Pray God that such Black thoughts do not now reach like beggar’s mitts Into his mind, or better pray that he Has vowed, despite them all, not to permit His difficult and gnarled grip to give.

What was it we wanted to say anyhow, like today when there were all the letters in my alphabet soup and suddenly the ‘j’ rises to the surface. The ‘j’, a letter that might be great for Scrabble, but not really used for much else, unless we need to jump for joy, and then all of a sudden it’s there and ready to help us soar and to open up our hearts at the same time, this simple line with a curved bottom, an upside down cane that helps us walk in a new way into this forest of language, where all the letters are beginning to speak, finding each other in just the right combination to be understood.

Once more the storm is howling, and half hid Under this cradle-hood and coverlid My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle But Gregory's Wood and one bare hill Whereby the haystack and roof-levelling wind, Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed; And for an hour I have walked and prayed Because of the great gloom that is in my mind. I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour, And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower, And under the arches of the bridge, and scream In the elms above the flooded stream; Imagining in excited reverie That the future years had come Dancing to a frenzied drum Out of the murderous innocence of the sea. May she be granted beauty, and yet not Beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught, Or hers before a looking-glass; for such, Being made beautiful overmuch, Consider beauty a sufficient end, Lose natural kindness, and maybe The heart-revealing intimacy That chooses right, and never find a friend. Helen, being chosen, found life flat and dull, And later had much trouble from a fool; While that great Queen that rose out of the spray, Being fatherless, could have her way, Yet chose a bandy-leggèd smith for man. It's certain that fine women eat A crazy salad with their meat Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone. In courtesy I'd have her chiefly learned; Hearts are not had as a gift, but hearts are earned By those that are not entirely beautiful. Yet many, that have played the fool For beauty's very self, has charm made wise; And many a poor man that has roved, Loved and thought himself beloved, From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes. May she become a flourishing hidden tree, That all her thoughts may like the linnet be, And have no business but dispensing round Their magnanimities of sound; Nor but in merriment begin a chase, Nor but in merriment a quarrel. Oh, may she live like some green laurel Rooted in one dear perpetual place. My mind, because the minds that I have loved, The sort of beauty that I have approved, Prosper but little, has dried up of late, Yet knows that to be choked with hate May well be of all evil chances chief. If there's no hatred in a mind Assault and battery of the wind Can never tear the linnet from the leaf. An intellectual hatred is the worst, So let her think opinions are accursed. Have I not seen the loveliest woman born Out of the mouth of Plenty's horn, Because of her opinionated mind Barter that horn and every good By quiet natures understood For an old bellows full of angry wind? Considering that, all hatred driven hence, The soul recovers radical innocence And learns at last that it is self-delighting, Self-appeasing, self-affrighting, And that its own sweet will is heaven's will, She can, though every face should scowl And every windy quarter howl Or every bellows burst, be happy still. And may her bridegroom bring her to a house Where all's accustomed, ceremonious; For arrogance and hatred are the wares Peddled in the thoroughfares. How but in custom and in ceremony Are innocence and beauty born? Ceremony's a name for the rich horn, And custom for the spreading laurel tree.

Your head is still restless, rolling east and west. That body in you insisting on living is the old hawk for whom the world darkens. If I am not with you when you die, that is just. It is all right. That part of you cleaned my bones more than once. But I will meet you in the young hawk whom I see inside both you and me; he will guide you to the Lord of Night, who will give you the tenderness you wanted here.

Let it come down: these thicknesses of air have long enough walled love away from love; stillness has hardened until words despair of their high leaps and kisses shut themselves back into wishing. Crippled lovers lie against a weather which holds out on them, waiting, awaiting some shrill sign, some cry, some screaming cat that smells a sacrifice and spells them thunder. Start the mumbling lips, syllable by monotonous syllable, that wash away the sullen griefs of love and drown out knowledge of an ancient war— o, ill-willed dark, give with the sound of rain, let love be brought to ignorance again. Originally appeared in the March 1964 issue of Poetry magazine.