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(variations on the testimony and excommunication of Anne Hutchinson, Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1637-1638) I. Given to sweet motion the wilderness believes one fair one of flowers to be a moral blossom. We go so far. Walks now, only legend remaining. "I came afterwards to the window when you was writing." But in their documents her judges had written "Insolent." In its branches spirit shelters air with wailing. The air thunders unavailingly there. "Fear is a snare. Why should I be afraid." If I was in error but not mistaken, if my glass was gone but not broken (defaced) 2. My path illuminates all the interior of a dusky mirror, the left shoulder higher than the right is in memory's intricate. We must study distinctions aftertimes will adore. if the glass be taken away, we shall see more. God is going. Walks now, only God remaining. (wanting) an immediate promise He will deliver them (wanting)         in a day of trouble These emotions she retained in the universal heart, in a new eye: rational charity active piety appearing as blindness appears in the face in bright sunlight exactly like a smile. 3. "Here is a great stir about graces and looking to hearts, but give me Christ. Tell me not of meditations and duties, but tell me of Christ." Christ is one thing. The soul is another the wild outskirt of the earth will prove the ruin of. And mischief, the poor babe, grew in the forest. (defaced) A stick a bunch of rags a flower need no transformation. The hour given to sweet motion is a soul. I came to the window when God was going. In low condition, little number and remoteness things outbreaks of temper had a kind of value and even a comfort. 4. A memory a promise or a flower sheared away was not made but taken from a bush of wild roses. Seeing them, she began to cry out for a red rose. "God has left me to distinguish between the voice of my Beloved and John Baptist and Antichrist." But daybreak unites what belongs together, and there are two kinds of distinction. There are (something wanting) "What he declares he does not know himself." I know a day of small and a day of infancy. At the window vividly just now and entirely inarticulate the form given to sweet motion broke apart and there's colors all kinds all round. 5. Of realities surrounding us, their pith and substance was wasted wronged misplaced. "I desire to speak to our teacher." In a state of desire, what belongs together ignores the barriers. Daybreak have you any word your own or I one fair one remaining? God is gone, only a window and a wilderness remaining, not made but taken, thinnest fantasy of beginnings taken from a bush of wild red roses.

We were up late and everyone had been drinking, and someone said, Hey, is that God’s head on the boil? We didn’t know where to look or what to think, it was obviously some sort of perverse joke, or not, right? And the conversation went on for days, sober, drunk, asleep, awake, what did it matter? Some of us felt the real time was for something, but what? And the questions kept coming, once they started, my favorite one being two strung together, What makes art “modern” and what does “urgent” mean now? Where was the greater good? That was another one bandied about, followed by Where was the common tent? which gave a feeling of empathy for a minute and then grief because, well, where was it? Will you arm, hoard seeds, go hungry? Those terrified me because, after all, who will repair things when the end is pale or dark? Where will you hide out when capital runs out, when water? Which will be greater, the heat or the cold? Wait, did God’s boiling head just say something? Cry out Go to hell from a giant lobster pot? Tantalizing us with where to go next? Are phosphorescent lamps to mark escape paths? Not that it’s not a great party, but whose place is this? Igniting quail in banana leaves, sons bandaged, who invited us? Why are the emerald bleeding and the ivory weeping? (Lower the freaking music.) Does anyone have the time?

Do you know what whole fields are? They are fields with a dog and a moon. Do you know the answer — for the many? Except there would be vineyards. Meaning there would, as usual, be commerce. Money, and a game of sorts to play it. Meanwhile — Emma lost in the cover-crop. Top of her head bobbing through mustard-flower. It is, after all, still here — The real world, the outstretched earth, Rain, soil, copper for pennies.

There is a singer everyone has heard, Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird, Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again. He says that leaves are old and that for flowers Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten. He says the early petal-fall is past When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers On sunny days a moment overcast; And comes that other fall we name the fall. He says the highway dust is over all. The bird would cease and be as other birds But that he knows in singing not to sing. The question that he frames in all but words Is what to make of a diminished thing.

Stuck on the fridge, our favorite pin-up girl is anorexic. On the radio we have a riff of Muzak sax, and on the mind a self-help book. We sprawl all evening, all alone, in the unraised ranch; all day the company we kept kept on incorporating. As for the world of poverty, we did our best, thanks to a fund of Christian feeling and mementos from Amelia, the foster child, who has the rags and seven photogenic sisters we prefer in someone to be saved. She's proof Americans have got a heart to go with all that happy acumen you read about. We're known to love a million little prettinesses, decency, and ribbons on the cockapoo. (But who will study alphabets for hands? Who gives a damn what patience goes into a good wheelchair? Who lugs the rice from its umpteen stores to the ends of the earth, to even one dead-end? Not we.) Our constitutional pursuit is happiness, i.e. somebody nice, and not too fat, we can have for our personal friend.

Over a cup of coffee or sitting on a park bench or walking the dog, he would recall some incident from his youth—nothing significant—climbing a tree in his backyard, waiting in left field for a batter's swing, sitting in a parked car with a girl whose face he no longer remembered, his hand on her breast and his body electric; memories to look at with curiosity, the harmless behavior of a stranger, with nothing to regret or elicit particular joy. And although he had no sense of being on a journey, such memories made him realize how far he had traveled, which, in turn, made him ask how he would look back on the person he was now, this person who seemed so substantial. These images, it was like looking at a book of old photographs, recognizing a forehead, the narrow chin, and perhaps recalling the story of an older second cousin, how he had left long ago to try his luck in Argentina or Australia. And he saw that he was becoming like such a person, that the day might arrive when he would look back on his present self as on a distant relative who had drifted off into uncharted lands.

So sexy to slide under- neath a river, to sit inside this snakelike sub- marine-like subway car and freely imagine the world above— the Brooklyn Bridge invisibly trembling with the weight of its own beauty, the East River still guided by the grooves Walt Whitman's eyes wore in it, the bulldog tug- boats pushing the passively impressive broad-bottomed barges around, and the double- decker orange and black Staten Island ferries, with their aura of overworked pack-mule mournfulness, and beyond them the Atlantic Ocean which I lately learned was brought here by ice comets three billion years ago, which explains a few things, like why everybody feels so alienated, and of course the thoughts being thought by every person in New York City at this moment— vast schools of undulating fish curving and rising in the cloud-swirling wind-waved sky, surrounded by the vaster emptiness of non-thought which holds them and which they try not to think about and you lying in bed in your sixth-floor walk-up sublet on St. Mark's Place— such a breath- taking ascension! imagining me rising now to meet you.

A current like a noise machine through sleep. Blue lichen fields. Mossed boulders. Waking up to ice cubes cracking in a plastic cup and voices (“awesome for the Hong Kong branch . . . well, most of all we miss our daughter . . . ”) I still see it: the climb up slate as runnels spill from some bare misted summit like a source. Whatever sense this dream might make to others. And whatever when they wake they also have been dreaming. Rivers of faces down hallways, merging, as desires mesh and fissure. Cash for clothes or arms or flesh. And if there is no towering sublime where all comes clear to all, no final climb through cloud, like some old Bible illustration: how could that ever stop the current flowing out of the glass at jfk : skin glowing plumb and peach as we walk inside the sun.

Some(where a) woman wears the face once given. Possessions scarce we go halves on slant of eye & span of palm with cousin & other ghosts. Where is the man with the face lent mother? Fathers rare;infant found at Shinkyo police station box—official shoes careened around fortune of Name & birth, pin & note. Elsewhere (Norway, Australia) another Korean National bears the imprint of my din. Cribs, nurse, hands, rice-milk powder, down & rocked—carefully dated checks. American/Father asks Why. We don’t speak. Years burn to decades, this permanent occupation.

The truck grinds by and pumps out grit; the road glints and goes still. The barn owl that had not finished here returns. But with its fill of scavenges, face ruffled in mulch, the vole is lost and safe so the silent specter flits away, its moon face to the moon and rears unknown against a copse, claws tipped for the strafe and something dies too soon.