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Where you are tender, you speak your plural. Roland Barthes 1 One version of the story is I wish you back— that I used each evening evening out what all day spent wrinkling. I bought a dress that was so extravagantly feminine you could see my ovaries through it. This is how I thought I would seduce you. This is how frantic I hollowed out. 2 Another way of telling it is to hire some kind of gnarled and symbolic troll to make a tape recording. Of plastic beads coming unglued from a child’s jewelry box. This might be an important sound, like serotonin or mighty mitochondria, so your body hears about how you stole the ring made from a glittery opiate and the locket that held candy. 3 It’s only fair that I present yet another side, as insidious as it is, because two sides hold up nothing but each other. A tentacled skepticism, a suspended contempt, such fancies and toxins form a third wall. A mean way to end and I never dreamed we meant it. 4 Another way of putting it is like slathering jam on a scrape. Do sweets soothe pain or simply make it stick? Which is the worst! So much technology and no fix for sticky if you can’t taste it. I mean there’s no relief unless. So I’m coming, all this excitement, to your house. To a place where there’s no room for play. It is possible you’ll lock me out and I’ll finally focus on making mudcakes look solid in the rain. 5 In some cultures the story told is slightly different— in that it is set in an aquarium and the audience participates as various fish. The twist comes when it is revealed that the most personally attractive fish have eyes only on one side and repel each other like magnets. The starfish is the size of an eraser and does as much damage. Starfish, the eponymous and still unlikely hero, has those five pink moving suckerpads that allow endless permutations so no solid memory, no recent history, nothing better, left unsaid. 6 The story exists even when there are no witnesses, kissers, tellers. Because secrets secrete, and these versions tend to be slapstick, as if in a candy factory the chocolate belted down the conveyor too fast or everyone turned sideways at the same time by accident. This little tale tries so hard to be humorous, wants so badly to win affection and to lodge. Because nothing is truly forgotten and loved. 7 Three million Richards can’t be wrong. So when they levy a critique of an undertaking which, in their view, overtakes, I take it seriously. They think one may start a tale off whingy and wretched in a regular voice. But when one strikes out whimsically, as if meta-is-better, as if it isn’t you, as if this story is happening to nobody it is only who you are fooling that’s nobody. The Richards believe you cannot privately jettison into the sky, just for fun. You must stack stories from the foundation up. From the sad heart and the feet tired of supporting it. Language is architecture, after all, not an air capsule, not a hang glide. This is real life. So don’t invite anyone to a house that hasn’t been built. Because no one unbuilds meticulously and meticulosity is what allows hearing. Three million Richards make one point. I hear it in order to make others. Mistake. 8 As it turns out, there is a wrong way to tell this story. I was wrong to tell you how muti-true everything is, when it would be truer to say nothing. I’ve invented so much and prevented more. But, I’d like to talk with you about other things, in absolute quiet. In extreme context. To see you again, isn’t love revision? It could have gone so many ways. This just one of the ways it went. Tell me another.

Yellow pines    No ever    no green    except where stems brown needles green    I walk on the wooden train    The fall’s water you swam in one cold morning    What you braved    That ice path    A horse fence    Where fences are horses with long hair    I braid the tale of the fall of stables Four paws touch dirt    stirring a flirt of sky a bundle of rare    You bundle into stables    I open with sandy tongue taste the grain of barkwater I look at myself in a mirror of weather Rain trenzas    Dirt cups us    We drink & spin like tornillos    A swallow’s nest    like an adobe tornado    Shit & mud & feathers & forming pitchfork claws Eggshells gone    We rest in the ocean smalls the pink throat The back door is also the front    The only smoke hole    Feathers rise & we follow

Coleman Hawkins doing that thing with his sax: high and lonely as a kestrel twirls on thermals, sorting files of sound with a singular finger,now alighting in pools of light, hovering then fixed like whirring wings of the insect glazed in serous amber but dreaming of oxygen: Sound leading a mind into that sobriety of thought which poises the heart. Sound like that, holding and giving out never. Sound quickened with desire. Sound the benefit of nature in taut bolts of time, rich polychrome threads, count: Two-sixty. Sound blots out the violence of affliction bringing it home lonely but good, letting it bend:We had much more reason being winged ones to recollect than forget.

One’s-Self I sing, a simple separate person, Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse. Of physiology from top to toe I sing, Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse, I say the Form complete is worthier far, The Female equally with the Male I sing. Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power, Cheerful, for freest action form’d under the laws divine, The Modern Man I sing.

I swear my way now will be to continue without plan or hope, to accept the drift of things, to shift from endless effort to joy in, say, that robin, plunging into the mossy shallows of my bird bath and splashing madly till the air shines with spray. Joy it will be, say, in Nancy, pretty in pink and rumpled T-shirt, rubbing sleep from her eyes, or joy even in just this breathing, free of fright and clutch, knowing how one’s ship comes in with each such breath.

Home from town the two of them sit looking over what they have bought spread out on the kitchen table like gifts to themselves. She holds a card of buttons against the new dress material and asks if they match. The hay is dry enough to rake, but he watches her empty the grocery bag. He reads the label on a grape jelly glass and tries on the new straw hat again.

Is anything central? Orchards flung out on the land, Urban forests, rustic plantations, knee-high hills? Are place names central? Elm Grove, Adcock Corner, Story Book Farm? As they concur with a rush at eye level Beating themselves into eyes which have had enough Thank you, no more thank you. And they come on like scenery mingled with darkness The damp plains, overgrown suburbs, Places of known civic pride, of civil obscurity. These are connected to my version of America But the juice is elsewhere. This morning as I walked out of your room After breakfast crosshatched with Backward and forward glances, backward into light, Forward into unfamiliar light, Was it our doing, and was it The material, the lumber of life, or of lives We were measuring, counting? A mood soon to be forgotten In crossed girders of light, cool downtown shadow In this morning that has seized us again? I know that I braid too much on my own Snapped-off perceptions of things as they come to me. They are private and always will be. Where then are the private turns of event Destined to bloom later like golden chimes Released over a city from a highest tower? The quirky things that happen to me, and I tell you, And you know instantly what I mean? What remote orchard reached by winding roads Hides them? Where are these roots? It is the lumps and trials That tell us whether we shall be known And whether our fate can be exemplary, like a star. All the rest is waiting For a letter that never arrives, Day after day, the exasperation Until finally you have ripped it open not knowing what it is, The two envelope halves lying on a plate. The message was wise, and seemingly Dictated a long time ago, but its time has still Not arrived, telling of danger, and the mostly limited Steps that can be taken against danger Now and in the future, in cool yards, In quiet small houses in the country, Our country, in fenced areas, in cool shady streets.

Baltazár went to the market and came home with a parrot. Thursdays in this town were always just so: What should have been four big potatoes and some white cheese Came home in a cage filled with green feathers and two wings. The mathematics of exchange in this world, the stomach or the heart— Which of these, how much of one for the other, Friday would have to sort out. On a Thursday afternoon The world sang, a full dinner this way coming through the air.

(sign at a railroad crossing in Kenya) In a poem, one line may hide another line, As at a crossing, one train may hide another train. That is, if you are waiting to cross The tracks, wait to do it for one moment at Least after the first train is gone. And so when you read Wait until you have read the next line— Then it is safe to go on reading. In a family one sister may conceal another, So, when you are courting, it's best to have them all in view Otherwise in coming to find one you may love another. One father or one brother may hide the man, If you are a woman, whom you have been waiting to love. So always standing in front of something the other As words stand in front of objects, feelings, and ideas. One wish may hide another. And one person's reputation may hide The reputation of another. One dog may conceal another On a lawn, so if you escape the first one you're not necessarily safe; One lilac may hide another and then a lot of lilacs and on the Appia Antica one tomb May hide a number of other tombs. In love, one reproach may hide another, One small complaint may hide a great one. One injustice may hide another—one colonial may hide another, One blaring red uniform another, and another, a whole column. One bath may hide another bath As when, after bathing, one walks out into the rain. One idea may hide another: Life is simple Hide Life is incredibly complex, as in the prose of Gertrude Stein One sentence hides another and is another as well. And in the laboratory One invention may hide another invention, One evening may hide another, one shadow, a nest of shadows. One dark red, or one blue, or one purple—this is a painting By someone after Matisse. One waits at the tracks until they pass, These hidden doubles or, sometimes, likenesses. One identical twin May hide the other. And there may be even more in there! The obstetrician Gazes at the Valley of the Var. We used to live there, my wife and I, but One life hid another life. And now she is gone and I am here. A vivacious mother hides a gawky daughter. The daughter hides Her own vivacious daughter in turn. They are in A railway station and the daughter is holding a bag Bigger than her mother's bag and successfully hides it. In offering to pick up the daughter's bag one finds oneself confronted by the mother's And has to carry that one, too. So one hitchhiker May deliberately hide another and one cup of coffee Another, too, until one is over-excited. One love may hide another love or the same love As when "I love you" suddenly rings false and one discovers The better love fingering behind, as when "I'm full of doubts" Hides "I'm certain about something and it is that" And one dream may hide another as is well known, always, too. In the Garden of Eden Adam and Eve may hide the real Adam and Eve. Jerusalem may hide another Jerusalem. When you come to something, stop to let it pass So you can see what else is there. At home, no matter where, Internal tracks pose dangers, too: one memory Certainly hides another, that being what memory is all about, The eternal reverse succession of contemplated entities. Reading A Sentimental Journey look around When you have finished, for Tristram Shandy, to see If it is standing there, it should be, stronger And more profound and theretofore hidden as Santa Maria Maggiore May be hidden by similar churches inside Rome. One sidewalk May hide another, as when you're asleep there, and One song hide another song; a pounding upstairs Hide the beating of drums. One friend may hide another, you sit at the foot of a tree With one and when you get up to leave there is another Whom you'd have preferred to talk to all along. One teacher, One doctor, one ecstasy, one illness, one woman, one man May hide another. Pause to let the first one pass. You think, Now it is safe to cross and you are hit by the next one. It can be important To have waited at least a moment to see what was already there.

Maybe the light from a small window Tucked at the utmost eave of the barn Could be misunderstood; if only I had pulled In by the other way or not looked up Against such darkness. The animal I brought Into this no longer mine, the task Each day was to confine enough, from harm Or from each other as night loosens Over the assemblage. But in the pasture One wrong step was taken. And those who remain Are weary, heads low, torment nowhere To be seen, not even in the illumination Of men who have come to help, Who behind the double doors keep watch By the body so it does not become Anything for those who scavenge, to follow back The acts of blood right up to the locked stall And light where each shaft lands precisely again Through the again. The horse was in the snow, The rock was underfoot; all the unknowables Made whole and apparent by one who stumbled.