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The almighty cyclop’s-eye clouded over and the grass shook itself in the coal dust. Beaten black and blue by the night’s dreams we board the train that stops at every station and lays eggs. Almost silent. The clang of the church bells’ buckets fetching water. And someone’s inexorable cough scolding everything and everyone. A stone idol moves its lips: it’s the city. Ruled by iron-hard misunderstandings among kiosk attendants butchers metal-workers naval officers iron-hard misunderstandings, academics! How sore my eyes are! They’ve been reading by the faint glimmer of the glow-worm   lamps. November offers caramels of granite. Unpredictable! Like world history laughing at the wrong place. But we hear the clang of the church bells’ buckets fetching water every Wednesday - is it Wednesday? - so much for our Sundays!

So this is aging: the bare sun, skinned, palely bucking the dark wind, slides through the glass, crawls on the carpet, climbs the footboard, lies crosswise on the blanket, a spoiled dog waiting to be fed. Not now, dear warmth. The kindling’s in the shed, too far to fetch. Those two great logs that close together to make fire, repose apart, an old couple reminiscing on conflagrations they’re now missing: how every sunny Saturday afternoon, Hey, diddle-diddle, the dish ran away with the spoon. Not yet, dear spoon. Some hotter day, dear dish. No tidbits now. Instead, let’s make a wish, and boil fresh water for the small teapot to keep it piping hot.

Listen. . With faint dry sound, Like steps of passing ghosts, The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees And fall.

Nothing is nothing, although he would call me that,she was nothing. Those were his words, but his hand was lifting cigarettes in chains and bridges of ash-light. He said he didn't want his body to last. It wasn't a year I could argue against that kind of talk, so I cut the fowl killed on the farm a mile out—brown and silvery, wild— and put it over butter lettuce, lettuce then lime. I heated brandy in the saucepan, poured a strip of molasses slowly through the cold, slow as I'd seen a shaman pour pine tincture over the floor of my beaten house. She seemed to see my whole life by ordinance of some god who wanted me alive again. Burnt sage, blue smoke. Then sea salt shaken into the corners of violent sadness. She wrote my address across her chest to let everything listening know where my life was made. We waited, either forgetting what we were or becoming more brightly human in that pine, in her trance, in the lavender I set on the chipped sills, not a trance at all but my deliberate hand cutting from the yard part of what she required. Now wait longer, she said, and I did as I would when the molasses warmed over the pot enough to come into the brandy, to come into the night begun by small confessions— that this was just a rental, and mine just a floor, that the woman he loved was with another man, his mother mad, his apartment haunted in the crawl space. Then I told of the assault at daybreak between the houses. Heat, asphalt, all of it and my face toward the brick school where the apostolate studied first-century script and song. There must have been chanting, as it was on the hour. What we said was liturgy meant only for us and for that night. Not for anyone else to repeat, live by, believe. Never that. Our only theories were inside of our hands, flesh and land, body and prairie. I reached to smoke down his next-to-last, which he lit and made ready. The poultry like a war ration we ate all the way through. What we wished, we said. What we said, we found that night by these, and no other, means.

Some problems of self-loathing, worry: the thumbnail blotched in a bank box door grows out, three-quarter moon marrow spot filled out with white bruise travels down my thumb at regular speed, so when I glance down it's what I see left of center, not the odd breast, the malformed scruff at head, the old thought leaking pain on the pages from my brain, which ought to be gainfully occupied with rain as an emblem of loss and gain, and is not.

Out of your whole life give but one moment! All of your life that has gone before, All to come after it, – so you ignore, So you make perfect the present, – condense, In a rapture of rage, for perfection’s endowment, Thought and feeling and soul and sense – Merged in a moment which gives me at last You around me for once, you beneath me, above me – Me – sure that despite of time future, time past, – This tick of our life-time’s one moment you love me! How long such suspension may linger? Ah, Sweet – The moment eternal – just that and no more – When ecstasy’s utmost we clutch at the core While cheeks burn, arms open, eyes shut and lips meet!

for Kenward Elmslie Up from the valley now and then a chain saw rising to a shriek, subsiding to a buzz “Someone” is “cutting in his wood lot” another day shows they are not someone is two men clearing shoulders of a narrow high-crowned road stacked poles were lately sapling the leaves on the slash gone limp, unstarched, unsized one man with one fierce eye and where the other should be an ill-knit cicatrix men who don’t make much aren’t much for spending what they do on glass eyes, tooth-straightening devices (“a mouth like the back of a switchboard”), nose jobs, dewenning operations a country look prevails and a vestigial fear of the evil eye lurks “. . . my skin creeps . . .” Out of Adamant Co-op men in “overhauls” step into evening rising in long-shadowed bluish haze to gold and pink by Sodom Lake (was it that any Bible name was an OK name?) and boys stare unabashed and unaggressive not what the man on the bus fled from his one day job talking excitedly about “teen-age Puerto Rican tail-bait” and “You can have New York!” Some present you’d rather have wouldn’t you an apple tree that climbed up into keels over sad, and too bad, the best apples on Apple Hill still, it can be propped or budded on new stock or just that it once was there Driving past, driving down, driving over along the Winooski through the home of Granite City Real Ice Cream The Monument Capitol buildings of rusticated granite marred to our eyes by etched polished granite remodeled downstairs may be found by a future happily heterodox “There’s a touch of autumn— there’s another touch of autumn” and the dark tranquility of hemlocks encroaching on untilled fields “You can’t make a living plowing stones” subsistence farming is well out of style: “You can’t call it living without the margin” coveted obsolescence! a margin like that on this page a paper luxury “Collectors” the lady in the antique shop said “are snapping up silver” “Since we’re off the silver standard?” “Why, maybe so” Perhaps six 1827 Salem coin-silver spoons for $18 or what about “Have you The Pearl of Orr’s Island?” “That’s a book I’d want to read myself. I’m from here but live in Florida. Winters are too hard: 40 below. You don’t feel it though like zero in Boston. I’ll take St. Johnsbury any day over Boston.” Over St. Johnsbury the clouds shift in curds and a street goes steeply down into Frenchtown by the railroad station into which anachronistically comes a real train: yesterday’s torment of dust-exhaling plush on the backs of bare knees today’s nostalgia but not much. Curls cut out of wood, brick of a certain cut and color, a hopped-up cripple on a hill above his pond, a slattern frowning at the early-closed state liquor store, an attic window like a wink, The Scale Co., St. Johnsbury has everything Not this high hill a road going in undergrowth leads up to by walls of flat cleared-field stones so many and so long a time to take so much labor so long ago and so soon to be going back, a host to hardhack and blueberry baby steps first fallings from a sky in which the wind is moving furniture the upholstery of summer coming all unstitched the air full of flying kapok and resolutions: “remember to fetch the ax whack back pine intrusions” from the road turning down to a lower field and across the roughest one the County keeps a woman and a boy come up on heavy horses. “Morning! Had frost last night at Adamant. Might have a killing frost tonight.” Quick and clear as the water where cress grows the cold breaks on the hills to the soft crash of a waterfall beyond a beaver pond and slides on flinging imaginary fragments of cat’s ice from its edges to flash a bright reality in the night sky and it — the cold—stands, a rising pool, about Sloven’s farmhouse and he dreams of dynamite. A bog sucks at his foundations. Somewhere a deer breaks branches. The trees say Wesson. Mazola replies a frog. It doesn’t happen though the cold that is not that night. It happens all right not then when the white baneberry leans secretively where a road forks met with surprise: “Why here it is: the most beautiful thing.” The spirit of Gelett Burgess sets Mother Nature gabbing. “That’s my Actea pachypoda, dear, we call it Doll’s-Eyes.” Got up as smart as ever in muck and dank she belches —“’Scuse: just a touch of gas”— swamp maple flames and ambles over and plunks down on a dead rubber tire to contemplate smashed glass and a rusty tin and “some of my choicer bits: that I call Doctor’s Dentures. These are Little Smellies.” Not the sort you look to meet so near gold-domed, out of scale Montpelier a large-windowed kind of empty public bigness so little to show, so much to take pride in rather more than on the way to Stowe a pyrocrafted maple board in a Gyp-to-teria IF MORE MEN WERE SELF STARTERS FEWER WIVES WOULD HAVE TO CRANK. Welcome to the chair lift and cement chalet. Days of unambiguous morning when dawn peels back like a petal to disclose blue depths deep beyond all comprehending and tall field growth bends with a crushing weight of water cut into sac-shaped portions, each less than a carat and which streak an early walker’s trouser legs “You’re soaked!” crossing on a door the spill to where Nodding Ladies’ Tresses pallidly braid their fragrance and the woods emit their hum. Days when the pond holds on its steel one cloud in which thin drowned trees stand spare shapes of winter when summer is just loosening to fall and bits of ribbon from an electric typewriter patch a screen. Croquet days, scissor-and-paste nights after dinner on the better sort of ham and coffee strong enough to float a goose egg. Are those geese, that V, flying so early? Can it be so late? in the green state needles, leaves, fronds, blades, lichens and moss create Can it be so soon before the long white refrozen in frost on frost on all twigs again will flash cross cutting star streaks—the atoms dance—on a treacherous night in headlights? “Horrible Cold Night Remain at Home” “Clear and Beautiful Remain at Home”

Now goth sonne under wod: Me reweth, Marye, thy faire rode. Now goth sonne under tree: Me reweth, Marye, thy sone and thee.

Now I knew I lost her — Not that she was gone — But Remoteness travelled On her Face and Tongue. Alien, though adjoining As a Foreign Race — Traversed she though pausing Latitudeless Place. Elements Unaltered — Universe the same But Love's transmigration — Somehow this had come — Henceforth to remember Nature took the Day I had paid so much for — His is Penury Not who toils for Freedom Or for Family But the Restitution Of Idolatry.

When you hear the knives ring Turn the page. I wonder why I am not Myself of late, ridiculous glass edges Turn back on themselves And soon reveal The hand of an apprentice And godforsaken embarrassing torch, Stormy back hallways Out of the black and wooden theatres. Crystal Waters plus her driver Plus her entourage is still rolling out Of the Sands, Atlantic City On the soundtracks to shows Held over at The Fairmount She is throwing back shots With the mafia. I have learned To take apart this American Songbook And very fortunately as I would take My audience in confidence Threads of gold fall closely together Coming to break us off. At the first of the shows I sang this song And in between I saw him in the hall, What could I tell you? “Someday we’ll build on a hilltop high.”