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It's hard to tell that the face of the moon is as much like a man's as god's. Out yonder, in the world without us, who's to say? — Either we get in the way, or things make use of us. Half-way around the globe from where they started, the static sound of starlings echoes off the barn roof. Spider weave in the spokes of wheels, and stars circle unsuspecting suns. Little do we know, the world has a talent for making itself at home. Meanwhile, we paint our self- portraits on everything imaginable, then hold them up like mirrors. Our mercurial brushes grow longer, our skills more acute. Dust clouds the vision, tinder to the eye. So we burn trees to save the forests, burn air to fly afar. We do, we say. We can. The time is close at hand. Time was (said a man) you could tell the weather from the moon. That was before another broke   the quicksilver distance and walked all over it. Now you can't tell a thing.

Dog bone, stapler, cribbage board, garlic press because this window is loose—lacks suction, lacks grip. Bungee cord, bootstrap, dog leash, leather belt because this window had sash cords. They frayed. They broke. Feather duster, thatch of straw, empty bottle of Elmer's glue because this window is loud—its hinges clack open, clack shut. Stuffed bear, baby blanket, single crib newel because this window is split. It's dividing in two. Velvet moss, sagebrush, willow branch, robin's wing because this window, it's pane-less. It's only a frame of air.

Ask nothing more of me, sweet; All I can give you I give. Heart of my heart, were it more, More would be laid at your feet— Love that should help you to live, Song that should spur you to soar. All things were nothing to give, Once to have sense of you more, Touch you and taste of you, sweet, Think you and breathe you and live, Swept of your wings as they soar, Trodden by chance of your feet. I that have love and no more Give you but love of you, sweet. He that hath more, let him give; He that hath wings, let him soar; Mine is the heart at your feet Here, that must love you to live.

I poured a whiskey and soda watching the tree outside dissolve: light going backward   pushed to corners to the white sliver of wood around the door. Where was that river seething with light? I recall the banks menaced by wasps swollen on summer sap, a cement hollow stuck with their strange cradles a woozy stench of damp clay the blunt poison of water snakes.

Our falter, whose art is Heavy, Halloween be thy name. Your kingdom’s numb your children dumb on earth moldy bread unleavened. Give us this day our wayward dead. And give us our asses as we forgive those who ass against us. And speed us not into wimp nation nor bequiver us with needles, for thine is the flimflam and the sour, and the same fucking story in leather for never and ever. Ah: gin.

Edwin Hubble “Tall, strong, beautiful, with the shoulders of Hermes of Praxiteles, that is how my wife first fashioned me, I who proved our Milky Way but another galaxy among the Nebelflecken fleeing breakneck with the rest by the law, the constant, the time that bear my name: Hubble, stamped with Newton, Copernicus, Galileo. Not bad for an Ozark farm boy hodded off to Oxford on a Rhodes, who tailored himself to tweeds and speaks the King’s English, as though he’d suckled on shires. Astronomy, I attest, is a history of receding horizons, though mine tend to open to dinners with Stravinsky, the Fairbanks, and coup de maître, my surprise star-turn at the Oscars: spotlights, applause, the whole heavens blue-shifted to me. Still—nothing headier than nights on Mt. Wilson, eye at the lens, my briar pipe glowing, Humason at the spectrascope tracing the light shifts who was my mule driver. His habits—straight poker, panther juice—try the soul, but he’s brilliant at the shot. Odd, too, the little priest who came to visit years ago, that he should account for nebulas’ radial velocities two years before me, though I only trust the data— how he looked calmly pleased at Einstein’s recantation: The most beautiful solution to creation I have ever heard. So clocks reel back with space—camera, action, light.”

Not seeing me, not even looking, K. on her silver cruiser charms her way through the last long moment of   the changing light: snow boots and a Seychelles Warbler’s old blue tights, a rolled-up yoga mat in her basket wobbling like a wild tiller as she pedals. It feels illicit and somewhat right to stand across the intersection without shouting her name, or even waving. According to the internet tutorial, the fact that photons turn into tiny loyal billiard balls as soon as we start watching suggests no error of method or measurement, but rather, as far as anyone can tell, an invisibly unstable world, a shaking everywhere that seeing must pin down and fix. So, that morning I stumbled on you out, alone, bending through the traffic at Orange and Edwards Streets: a someone else then whom I, alone, can never otherwise see — there has to be a kind of   speech beyond naming, or even praise, a discipline that locates light and lets it go.

We knew it would happen, one of the laws. And that it would be this sudden. Words become a chewing action of the jaws and mouth, unheard by the only other citizen there was on earth.

I haven’t remembered anything, only the names and that their dates have been replaced by fees toted up out of mischief: a whopping yellow sun, finesse swallowed hard, a scrapbook in pantyhose dawdling beside some Shreveport-like expanse. But now you see it, she’s supposed to call. Surely neither will converse, they merely tell, succumbing to a disorderly shelf life like Tampax in June. Salute the budding terminus where the East Side was. Can there be a way to redefine the tense behind its jaunts, the pubescent imagery a hand calls forth as, rippling, it is thrust into the brine? The phantom tugboat slips along in depths past Garbo’s awnings and the united glaze which wilts, harnessing dim signatories in the windows’ sarong. Do things go further in need as I could? Or are they immune? How else have I been taught to guess and then been told to know, because matter equals good? A silken light masks the entrance to the market proofs of time.

Ms. Marcus says that an occasional poem is a poem written about something important or special that's gonna happen or already did. Think of a specific occasion, she says — and write about it. Like what?! Lamont asks. He's all slouched down in his seat. I don't feel like writing about no occasion. How about your birthday?